Day 14: Joyce Carol Oates, Christina Thompson, Elfie Shiosaki
Story: Joyce Carol Oates - How I Contemplated My Life in Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Over Again
This one was really amazing and very dark, structured in that postmodern style you don't see much any more, the story taking the form of a teenage girl's compiled notes for some kind of essay or story. From the title, we figure this girl must be in some kind of trouble, a petty criminal or whatever, but like a coin swirling round one of those black-hole donation buckets, the narrator slowly circles closer and closer and closer to an unspeakable trauma, the reader being eased into it slowly until they realise they are up to their nose in quicksand thinking, aw shit.
I found this story because I had just finished reading an essay by Terry Smith about Detroit which seems like such a fascinatingly terrible city.
If the narrators of The Virgin Suicides spoke of the city's decline with a detached distance, sheltered safe in the white wealthy suburbs, Oate's character is mired right in the middle of the squallor, writing about the decay in a frenzy:
In Detroit, weather weighs heavily upon everyone. The sky looms large. The horizon shimmers in smoke. Downtown the buildings are imprecise in the haze. Perpetual haze. Perpetual motion inside the haze. Across the choppy river is the city of Windsor, in Canada. Part of the continent has bunched up here and is bulging outward, at the tip of Detroit; a cold hard rain is forever falling on the expressways… Shoppers shop grimly, their cars are not parked in safe places, their windshields may be smashed and graceful ebony hands may drag them out through their shatterproof smashed windshields, crying Revenge for the Indians! Ah, they all fear leaving Hudson's and being dragged to the very tip of the city and thrown off the parking roof of Cobo Hall, that expensive tomb, into the river…
I have not been to Detroit. Perhaps I am getting a stereotypical view of it. Maybe its a nice place, but the events of this story don't fill me with much hope.
Essay: Christina Thompson - A Piece of Savage Mischief (from Art & Text, Issue 25, 1987)
I found a big stack of Art & Text magazines which was Australia's big art and cultural theory publication throughout the 80s and 90s. The few essays I have read in this issue have been really well written and easy to read.
In this essay, Thompson critiques the great patriarchal myths that most men I know will cite with great relish:
- that it is the nature of man to hunt, kill, dominate, and violate, and that it is the nature of women to get bonked on the head with the club and such.
- that Heaven for a man is to wrestle free of this emasculating civilization, get out to the woods or desert or jungle or whichever heart of darkness and just Cut Loose.
These myths (and I use this word to mean ideological belief rather than lie) are so widespread in the West, popularised by our great common-sensemakers: Darwin, Freud, Jung, Neitzsche and half the Great Male American novelists. I sound like I hate men here, and while I am a man without much self regard, I mostly just hate this "back in caveman times" rhetoric that is so dumb and fucking boring.
But this essay is not so much a Feminism 101 as it is a study on Australia - specifically, how writers and film-makers have used this myth to romanticize the Outback as a final frontier- a faraway place where man can be his animal-self, breaking free of all taboos.
She identifies author E. L. Grant Watson as the worst of all the macho romantic writers on Australia; Watson being an Englishman who lived in the outback for two years and then went home to popularise the desert with schlocky novels of sadistic fantasy. Thompson critiques even the effectiveness of the Colonel Kurtz fantasy, writing:
The fantasy of Watson and Lawrence: by leaving civilization and going "beyond good and evil" in the "non-moral bush", the criminal desires they harbour will cease to be criminal. What they fail to acknowledge is that as the context determining criminality - civilisation - disappears (as if it could), so does the pleasure of transgression.
I love the way Thompson writes and constructs an argument. Here is another great paragraph:
People (with the possible exception of the French) do not experience their own countries oceanically, but rather in "realistic" terms, in functional, practical, prosaic terms. The place one actually lives rarely has any symbolic value; it is at once too familiar and too complex. It is ridiculous to expect Australians to love this country with the unmediated desire Dorothy green ascribes to Grant Watson. it is not Australia as such that prompts this love, it is imported by the lacks of Watson. the boundary between ego and object does Indeed disappear but it isn't object that absorbs ego. it's the other way around. Watson and Lawrence don't lose themselves in the Australian bush, the bush disappears in them.
I wonder where a film like Wake in Fright would sit in her critique, (which if you haven't seen, think Deliverance but set in Australia), a film that affirms the myth of the savage outback but is so hostile to any form of romanticism, being a nightmare rather than fantasy. Wake in Fright was apparently banned by the Australian tourist board for over 20 years. If you haven't seen it, you really should, it is one of my favourite films of all time.
As of now this article is nowhere on the web, but I can scan it if anybody wants to read it.
Poem collection: Elfie Shiosaki - Refugia
Today I read this whole collection in one sitting and found it really great. Elfie Shiosaki is a poet of the Whadjuk Noongar nation, the traditional owners of the land where I live.
The poems speak of the tragedies that followed Captain James Stirling's arrival on the Swan River; the massacres, lynchings and destruction of land, water, air, language and lifestyle.
Poems about colonial atrocities often serve as both historical fact-setting (countering official Government narratives), and expressions of communal grief and despair, or pride in survival and resistance. Shiosaki's poems are powerful in these two aspects, but what makes them extra special for me are the occasional science-fiction elements. There are some time travel and alternate-history poems that I love, but my favourite is the title-poem, written in prose... here is the first page:
Aside from Shaun Tan's graphic novels, I have never read a post-apocalyptic story set in my city, much less an environmental-utopian one where the land returns to its state before colonisation and the white people are dispossessed, their houses and roads and train /lines uprooted by thousands of sprouting eucalypts.
It is really so cathartic to read about one's own city being wiped off the map:
Hundreds lined the South Perth forshore to witness the crumbling of the Rio Tinto building as it bent and broke under a towering forest that crushed its torso and lungs. The building expired in a red dust cloud; its lasting breath hung over the city for days, like thick pollution. In the crushing, residents were struck by the / impermanence / of steel and reinforced concrete frameworks, and curtain walls of polished stone.
The pessimism of colonial reality in the first two sections of the book is balanced out by the joyful optimistic vengeance of the last section, and for the title story alone, the collection is worth seeking, especially if you live in Western Australia or are interested in non-Western approaches to sci-fi.