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WORLD

LIA AND ARO RA U ST

CONTENTS

Editorial

Only Women Bleed Rebecca Harkins-Cross

The Critic in the Episode ‘How to Do Things With Words’

Anushka Jasraj

The Pharmaco-Carnist Regime: Some Notes on an Era Hayley Singer

God’s Other Children Nick Taras

How Should a Person Read

48 52 54 59

Swimming in History, If You Can Find the Water

Public Spaces: My Lifted Jumper

Public Spaces: Think of a Dinosaur Chloe Reeson

Common Ground Bruce Pascoe & Kim Mahood

Public Spaces: The Beach Susana Moreira Marques

Sun Drops on Digital Tomatoes Michael Dulaney

Richard M Hanson

Jackpot Ben Walter

Sketch for a Dissociated Child

Sane Nicole McKenzie

Peter Polites

Triptychs in Time Alice Robinson

Stephen Pham, Anne Boyer, Caren Beilin, Elizabeth Flux

Public Spaces: Mind Street Virus

Black Pearls Bastian Fox Phelan

Patricia Smith & Hayan Charara

The Town’s Day Shaun Prescott

Jana Perkovic

Snakes & Ladders

The Wolf’s Wedding Houyem Ferchichi

Simona Castricum

Law School

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SPECIAL THANKS TO all the writers and artists whose work fills this edition of the the writers Brow - without you we’d be nil. And huge plautdits as always must go to our devoted staff, all of whom are unpaid for their time and labour. This edition would not have been possible without the assistance of our overqualified interns: Scout Boxall, Lauren Carta, Angela Glindemann, Christine Joyce Ebbsa, and Edwina Sleigh. Thanks to Louise Buchanan, Alex Griffin, Monique Nair, Adalya Nash Hussein, Jasmine Wang, and Jessica Pethick who helped proofread this issue. Thanks, too, to ongoing support of our attendant housemates, partners, families and friends who constantly give up their time and other resources to assist us in making The Lifted Brow. Much of what we do is thanks to The Australia Council, Creative Victoria, The Copyright Agency, the Melbourne UNESCO City of Literature office, Printgraphics, 29th Street Publishing, and RMIT University. We acknowledge that this magazine was largely made on the traditional lands of the Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. We pay our respects to their elders, past and present. We acknowledge the traditional owners of all the lands from which the stories and artwork in this issue were sourced. Pieces published in The Lifted Brow reflect the opinions of the relevant authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the publisher or editorial team. The Lifted Brow is printed using alcohol-free inks on paper which is FSC Chain of Custody certified and monitored from the paper mill to the end user.

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EDITORIAL ANNABEL BRADY-BROWN & ZOE DZUNKO

ately, we’ve found ourselves asking one another about laughter and in particular, its meaning and its purpose. We’ve been asking because, especially at this present moment, neither of us can fully reconcile why the comic often straddles pleasure as equally as it does absurdity. A joke we consent to may be a source of joy, but a joke might, too, be a travesty. Case in point, one of us - the humourless one - was recently on the phone with a friend. The conversation turned to the ineludible facts of the week, but not before cycling through various pleasantries which - despite genuine love and respect and interest - felt a little like bullshit. Bullshit, in the way that discussions orbiting the ins-and-outs of daily life sometimes do, like cleaning broken windows or sweeping leaves in the wind; that is to say, well intentioned gestures that betray a failure or unwillingness to respond to prevailing conditions. When the discussion reached the latest item in the inventory of maladapted lawmaking and/or outright bigotry promoted by our incumbents as a necessary response to something, this particular act was declared as ‘funny’. Funny, in the bleakly humourless way - like the response to witnessing an individual’s repeated attempts to pull an outwardopening door inwards - that displays of utter intractability can elicit laughter as the fullest form of indignation. What is this ontological disconnect? Whistling past the graveyard or laughing through the pain, as it were. Many adages depict the disparity between thought and action, context and behaviour, though laughter is perhaps the most visceral manifestation. In his essay on the topic, Henri Bergson writes: “What life and society require of each of us is a constantly alert attention that discerns the outlines of the present situation, together with a certain elasticity of mind and body to enable us to adapt ourselves in consequence.” In a world without contradictory action, it’s possible that nothing would be comedic about our

circumstances. Perhaps it is our failure to be supple in the face of this knowledge that gives rise to laughter. As Bergson suggests, it is action without conscious intention, “a kind of automatism that makes us laugh ... rigidity is the comic, and laughter is its corrective.” The ability to interpret and respond to the actualities of our environment is possibly the surest safeguard against extinction, yet, at the apex of our technological age, scientists march in defence of empirical evidence while politicians’ responses often resemble feckless regressions. It has the makings of a very bad joke, were we not living it.

o talk about laughter often means speaking of incongruity, the uncomfortable or the irreconcilable. It is a way of broaching a question we blushingly want to ask, one large and starry-eyed enough to be humorous: what does it mean to change the world for the better? Or, given its contradictions and loaded moral judgements, one that is perhaps better tackled if re-phrased: why do we alter the facts of our existence to support the narratives we wish to promote? What would it take for us to re-order our belief systems in ways that compassionately cohere with the truths we are presented with? The answers to these questions are complex, necessarily so because there is no one perfect solution and too much is lost when simple stories are perpetuated. If anything, this issue of the Brow is an exercise in receiving and responding to the world ripe with its contradictions - and in nurturing a mind to bend our behaviours in time to find the jokes are not made at our expense.

ONLY WOMEN BLEED REBECCA HARKINS-CROSS

bud, sometime in late 2015: I’ve been stranded here a week or two, and the sky is an empty screen of snowy static. An active volcano teeters on the brink of explosion, spurting ash clouds like precum, sullying the sharp blue skies and making it too dangerous to fly. At first, it’s like my neurotic fantasy of going to prison, where decision-making is scaled back to which books to read and which weights to pump. My jailer is a Scottish yogini, who freestyles sermons on Third-World poverty when the class is defenceless in downward dog, a roomful of pert arses saluting the ferny canopy above. Gruel is cutprice Buddha bowls and Ayurveda smoothies that my travel nsurance will reimburse me for anyway. “Oh Ubud, lovely, boring Ubud!” writes Geoff Dyer. “It was so lovely, but we were there too long, far too long.” When the skies clear, I find burst capillaries curling in microscopic fleur-de-lis beneath my skin. It’s as if chaos has moved from the ether to take up residence in the soft flesh of my inner-arms. On a Jetstar flight, somewhere over the Indian Ocean, the fever sets in, and for the next six hours I alternate shivering, sweating, and vomiting this morning’s tropical fruit buffet into a toilet. Each day, a new plague begins. Am I hallucinating when, near the close of another insomniac night, I hear chickens squawking? I rouse my boyfriend who catches a fox in the throes of decapitating our flock. After sleep finally comes, I wake with the arthritic joints of an octogenarian. My eyes start glowing like a demon, which I later learn is the singular pain of lacerated eyeballs. It takes a month and several doctors to confirm that a rabid mosquito has penetrated my skin. This mosquito has transmitted a virus. This virus worms its way through veins and corpuscles, infecting not only my body but also my mind; an “impending sense of doom” is listed amongst more visceral symptoms. I’ve seen enough horror films to know that this virus should bring me to knowledge. Transgress your body’s borders, shed your skin, embrace your monstrous flesh. Freed of the shackles of the vulnerable female body, I will be reborn as a woman who devours. Is the ethereal Sissy Spacek of Brian de Palma’s Carrie (1976) the virgin mother of monstrous women? In the study Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Carol J Clover positions Carrie as the archetype of the “victim-hero”: a figure who emerged post women’s lib to challenge a sadistic male gaze.

Carrie’s bleeding body disrupts the soft-porn fantasy of the opening locker room scene. The reeling naif parts the ocean of steamy nubile flesh, wild-eyed with the terror of her first period. She taints the blonde Beckys with her excess, smearing her heavy flow on their pristine gym ensembles. Her fear is met with an indelible image of teenage cruelty: a shrieking pack of girls pelting her cowering body with tampons. Plug it up! Plug it up! Plug it up! Carrie’s body must be contained, but the tide they seek to stem isn’t just her monthly abjection. The site of her horror is also the site of her power. Deep down, we know Carrie’s monstrous gift isn’t born of trauma. It was lurking inside her all along, waiting to spring forth. Her peers punish her for knowing too little. But her God-fearing mother, with her whips and her chains, punishes her for knowing too much. When Carrie’s classmates douse her virginal body in pig’s blood in the final scene, the cycle is complete and her fury may finally be unleashed. Bored in Ubud, I attend a menstruation class at Yoga Barn with Tina, an Earth Goddess whose encouraging smile cracks at the corners. She lives in a nearby commune where each girl, on the occasion of their first period, is bestowed a ruby bracelet. It signifies that their blood is a gift, Tina says, not a curse. Tina says that when women bleed, it is as if a veil of perception has been lifted. This is why some cultures send us away each month, for fear that we know too much. The women around me nod in fervent agreement, several of whom have quit their corporate jobs to eat, pray, love in search of Elizabeth Gilbert’s big magic. I recall the words of Harper, the mad Mormon bride in Tony Kushner’s AIDS epic Angels in America (1993), as she tells the infected Prior that the sick are soothsayers. This is the very threshold of revelation.

arly in Raw (2016), director Julia Ducournau lets us know that our protagonist Justine (Garance Marillier) is not only an incarnation of her Sadean namesake, a virtuous maiden in a bestial world, but also Carrie’s heir. The latest hazing ritual at veterinary school is to douse the unaware new recruits in animal blood, a spectacle made even more sadistic with the knowledge of Justine’s vegetarianism. With clotted hair and bloodsmeared face, the image’s antecedent is clear. Justine is the model student, the good girl, the virgin -

REBECCA HARKINS-CROSS

she sees herself as “average” - initially refusing the mentality n Ginger Snaps (2000), Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) is of the pack. Both her vocation and her vegetarianism are bitten by a werewolf attracted to her menstruating body, familial inheritances, but her older sister Alex (Ella Rumpf), its virus turning the outsider into a vixen who devours the who’s refashioned herself as a carnivorous badass at jocks who once taunted her. college, subjects her to the rules of the fold. Alex forces a In Teeth (2007), abstinent virgin Dawn (Jess Weixler) only raw rabbit kidney into the lifelong vegetarian’s mouth - a discovers her vagina dentata when her teen crush Tobey grotesque symbolic rape. (Hale Appleman) rapes her. The castrating woman becomes After the object enters Justine’s body, its protest begins: a kind of avenging angel. a painful all-over rash that peels; bent over the toilet bowl, In The Brood (1979), repressed housewife and mother Nola vomiting stringy hairballs as if an animal self lurks within; (Samantha Eggar) is bestowed a somatic language. Through a body writhing with cramps that look decidedly menstrual. experimental treatments in psychoplasmics, she sublimates When Justine shudders under her bedsheets it looks like her excess of feeling into a throbbing, hairy womb, which she’s jerking off, but underneath she’s scratching a more protrudes outside of her body. When she’s angry she gives literal itch. birth to a brood of gremlins who express her rage with their Ducournau aligns Justine with the animal, juxtaposing razor teeth. her transformation with shots of a restrained horse Once the plagues clear, my body refuses to forget its struggling against the bit, or a pregnant cow undergoing suffering. I’m ferried between doctors whose only advice an ultrasound. Her hunger grows wolfish, too, as if one is to rest. When the body has been in severe discomfort taste of flesh were enough to make her insatiable. She can’t for so long, its pain receptors can become overstimulated shovel meat into her maw fast enough. and, as a mode of protection, interpret any external The good girl becomes a whore, making out with her newstimuli as hurt. The world becomes a daily assault. found image in the mirror, libidinous on the dance floor, Each fortnight a kindly Chinese medicine practitioner, and seducing her gay roommate. The choice of a queer Rafaelle, punctures my skin with needles and sends me friend as deflowerer seems like a refusal of the patriarchal away with a jar of pills called ‘Blood Moving Formula’ or pact, but his coldness the next day is het as anything. “What, ‘Blood Cleansing’. I don’t know if it’s working, but I find the I’m too crazy now?” she yells. ritual comforting, as are his homilies on how the world When she gives in to her most primal urge, she lusts after moves too fast. not the sweet flesh of young men but instead that of her My body swells with its sadness. An extra layer of fat sister’s severed finger. This occurs when Alex is trying to makes it alien, protecting the muscles that are atrophying tame Justine’s body, plucking her eyebrows and inflicting in inactivity. Constant pain comes with an exhaustion her first Brazilian. “Beauty is pain!” Alex insists, before of singular depths. At times I wish that it was physically her pointer is amputated by wayward scissors. visible, beyond these signs of disuse and neglect. Justine gnaws on it like a chicken wing, How to trust your body when it radiates with blood dripping down her chin. phantom hurts? On good days, it’s no Now the victim-hero controls the more than a fog of malaise. On the gaze. Where previously she was worst, it is like the brutal machine subjected to the lecherous looks from Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’, of a sleazy trucker or a geriatric which inscribes the prisoner’s It’s no coincidence that women’s patient at the hospital, she is crimes into his skin using monstrosity manifests during times now the one who stares. When needles, working from within. of hormonal flux: menstruation, she’s forced into a cupboard Like its victim, I know for not sexual awakening, pregnancy. On with a stranger in another what I’m being punished. the cusp of teenagerdom, the girl is hazing, she bites off his lip In the wake of theorist Robin thrust into an awareness of her body in an act of dissent and desire. Wood’s ‘American Nightmare: as witnessed by others, becoming Horror films offer a fantasy Horror in the 1970s’, it’s hard to something other to herself. space for women whose bodies dispute that the horror film betray them. When the female provides a space for the return of flesh invariably exceeds its bounds, the repressed. it may become a site of transcendence, Basic repression is required to become even resistance. a subject, allowing the screaming animal It’s no coincidence that women’s monstrosity to become a human being. Surplus repression manifests during times of hormonal flux: menstruation, transforms us into good “monogamous heterosexual sexual awakening, pregnancy. On the cusp of teenagerdom, bourgeois patriarchal capitalist” subjects. What evades the girl is thrust into an awareness of her body as witnessed subconscious repression is tamed by cultural oppression: by others, becoming something other to herself. The sexual energy, queerness, female sexuality (and its monstrous body allows her to disrupt the patriarchal gaze, successful sublimation into creativity) - that which reclaiming its power as her own. threatens patriarchal order. Horror provides a space for the repressed to return yet remain contained, says Wood,

ONLY WOMEN BLEED explaining the popular genre’s attraction/repulsion. What makes the The Love Witch (2016) genius is that director Anna Biller reveals the real terror that lurks in the hearts of men. Horror is as much emotional as corporeal, laying bare the attraction/repulsion of heterosexual romance. In interviews she grins like a Stepford Wife, declaring the film an autobiography. After Elaine’s (Samantha Robinson) husband leaves her, she sets off to California to refashion herself as the ultimate woman, somewhere between a raven-haired Russ Meyer pinup, a fucked-up starlet from Valley of the Dolls (1967), and Samantha from Bewitched. To be a love witch is to recast yourself as an impossible figure of male fantasy. “According to the experts, men are very fragile,” explains Elaine. “They can get crushed down if you assert yourself in any way.” A love witch knows she should be beautiful but obtainable, desirable but yielding, sexy but not slutty, loving but not needy, smart but not too smart. A love witch makes a man feel like a man. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English’s 1973 study Witches, Midwives and Nurses showed that witches across history have been burned, hung, beheaded for knowing too much. Witches were women charged as sexual, accused of trysts with the devil. Witches were women who consorted with other women, trading herbal remedies and providing obstetric guidance. “They burned us at the stake because they feared the erotic feelings we elicited in them,” says Elaine’s mentor. To be a love witch is to reclaim this power for yourself, and do with it what you will. She’ll cook you dinner and begin stripping before your steak has cooled. She’ll wax lyrical on eighteenth-century libertine literature, if that’s your kink. She’ll nurse your wounded ego and purr, “Poor baby. Poor, poor baby.” She can destroy you with her gaze, hypnotic and annihilating. She’s a masochist, taking pleasure in her hurt. When Elaine touches herself, the voice of her ex-husband and her father echo in her head: “Are you crazy or are you stupid?” She rewrites their rebukes - on her weight and loss of weight, her deficiency in caring for hearth and home, her lack or excess of desire - as erotica. The cop, the figure of masculine authority, is ready with a diagnosis: “What you call love is a borderline personality disorder.” Biller, who served as set and costume designer too, also revels in witty excess. Sexual energy explodes in an aesthetic of pure nostalgia: the saturated colours and hard lighting of sixties melodrama evoke a time when women were simpler. Elaine’s Victorian apartment is a tarot card made flesh, bedecked in occult paintings, velvet furnishings, and bubbling cauldrons spurting love magic. Each man upon whom she bestows his fantasy is undone by his desires. They become indistinguishable once they start crying and moaning, growing desperate, libido drowned in a pool of sentiment. The man in love is a woman, and it literally destroys them. “He was just being really obsessive and gross, and his aura became really... murky,” says Elaine, with nose upturned. She buries the dead in shallow graves, returning men

to the earth with a witch bottle (filled with piss, a bloody tampon and sprigs of rosemary) to guide them to nirvana. Elaine in divine voiceover: “Tampons aren’t gross. Women bleed, and that’s a beautiful thing.” As natural as the seasons. As natural as romance, which the love witch refuses to give up on.

he doctors quash my reveries of returning to the healing bosoms of Bex and Tina in Ubud. If I am infected again, I will begin haemorrhaging beneath my skin. At least the blood will stay on the inside, I think. This sleepy limbo is better than the raw months when, in the gloaming, I wondered how it might feel to draw the sharpest knife, gifted by my boyfriend’s mother, across the soft flesh of my inner-arms and unleash the chaos. Now I am too tired to hunger for that, or anything much at all. The sick mind grows narcissistic, obsessed by the contours of its woe; the emotions of others repulse me. Plug it up! Plug it up! Plug it up! I stay home, pouring over studies of masochism, trying to find new languages for pain. Freud says that masochism is the feminine condition. To be a masochist, says Kristeva, is to abject the self. Perhaps it’s the feelings of impending doom, but I find myself searching for signs of prophecy. After dreaming of Emily Dickinson, I buy a collection in the hope of divining some message from the patron saint of sad girls. Pain has an element of blank; / It cannot recollect / When it began, or if there were / A day when it was not. Maybe she is telling me that pain was sort of lurking inside my body all along, natural. Mother Nature. Gaia, Dione, Virgin Carrie, when shall I be reborn?

HE CRITIC IN THE EPISODE ’HOW TO DO T THINGS WITH WORDS’ JANA PERKOVIC

in which we meet at La Mama It was April, the first week of windy rains that year. It was that limbo time between an acknowledged and unacknowledged autumn, when the rain drips from the uneven seventies timberwork in the courtyard but the staff are yet to start setting fires in the iron barrels. Chi Vu, a Vietnamese-Australian playwright who had made quite a name for herself in the independent theatre with funny plays about race, had a new play on for the Comedy Festival. Coloured Aliens was about Vietnamese playwright Mai Nguyen, who tries to make it in the Australian theatre without being pigeonholed as ethnic playwright, while her Anglo boyfriend Kevin is too consumed with his own anxieties to help. Everyone was there, in that vague atmosphere of queuing for the showers to wash off white guilt. Liz was there, being a member of the theatre community and white person. The Critic had brought Cecile, who was visiting from Brussels, and this would not turn out to be a good idea. “Have you seen the review that Chi Vu got?” Liz asked, in the spirit of camaraderie and outrage. “I know! Just can’t believe it!” thundered another arts community member, another white person and all that. “What does it say?” the Critic asked. “Augh ... !” Liz rolled her eyes. Silence followed. “Who is the reviewer anyway? Anonymous!” asked another member of the theatre community, another white person and all that. “Who writes anonymous reviews?” “I know, right!” added an Asian-Australian woman who did not seem like a member of the theatre community, partly because she was not well acquainted with Liz and the others and partly from the way she chose her words. “Who published the review?” asked the Critic, not least because all this outraged, obfuscating camaraderie was excluding Cecile from participating in the conversation. “Oh, Richard posted it on his Wall ... ” Liz conceded, pulling out her phone. There, pasted above a long thread of outraged comments, was an anonymous review from some website no one had ever before associated with serious arts criticism. And it said: Mai, the main character was narcissistic, self absorbed, irritating and difficult to like - the kind of character that has a chip on their shoulder, who holds onto the sins of forefathers past and thus cripples themselves with blinkers, unable to embrace the positive around them.

This, thankfully was balanced with Kevin’s sweeter, more simplistic nature. And it said: “Though the intelligent insights, cleverly disguised as witty banter between two lovers were aimed to re-educate western audience members, we felt a little uncomfortable and guilty, for no reason which made the experience a little wearing.” And it said: “Colored Aliens is meant to be a light hearted look at casual and reverse racism in Australian society, but as an entertainment piece, perhaps went just a little too far.” This, dear reader, would be their starting point.

in which overseas visitors make impolite comments, and the honour of the theatre community is defended “It’s so white,” said Cecile, a few weeks earlier. “I had no idea how diverse Belgium was before coming here. It’s so white here.” “It’s not,” said the Critic. “It’s not white, it’s actually a very diverse country. But it’s very segregated. Theatre people are white.” “What are Theatre People?” Cecile asked. “People who go to see theatre. People who make theatre. The theatre community. People who tweet about theatre and get worked up about small theatre things.” “So even they are segregated?” Cecile asked, confused. “I go to theatre.” “Liz is a theatre person. June is not. You are not. I am. It’s about belonging. It’s about being accepted as part of a community.” Cecile snorted. “I am always sceptical when people talk about arts communities. In my experience, most artists are cold-bloodedly out there for themselves.” “It’s a little bit different in the performing arts,” said the Critic. “You need collaborators, a network, to get almost anything done. And since very often you cannot pay people, you need to offer them other things, emotional gifts. It’s not quite friendship, it’s emotional barter.” “That’s not community,” Cecile said, matter-of-factly. “It sounds more like mafia. I mean, the way mafia actually works in practice, a lot of people cold-bloodedly out there for themselves, using pre-existing social ties and semiacknowledged financial debts.” “Do you have mafia in Belgium?” “No. I watch films.”

in which we first encounter the concept of a or on righteous enjoyment? Why do we approach a work Theatre Person of art as ethical consumers, showing off our good choices Everyone was congratulating everyone at La Mama after as if they were completed slots in the relay race of good Coloured Aliens finished: the artists for making, the citizenship? That race is always already a white race: the audience for seeing, themselves for courage and good values. guilt is white, so is its atonement. Take, for example, Maxine The Caucasian actor who played the Vietnamese playwright Beneba Clarke’s The Hate Race, a memoir of growing up Mai came out to hugs and shouts of approval. “So good!” black in Australia, which was read widely, yet always they said, shaking heads in emphasis. “So important!” “And spoken about in the hushed toned of penitence: I have read so funny!” Liz said: “Oh, I’m so glad I managed to catch this!” it, it was a harrowing and necessary read, I am a better before running off to another show, because it was Comedy person now. The Critic found The Hate Race a traumatic Festival and she was seeing five shows that night. Other read, an iterative narration of incidents she and her friends voices continued: “I didn’t think it was uncomfortable at encountered daily and tried to push through without all!” And then added: “So what if it did make anyone turning into bitter, paranoid people. There was nothing uncomfortable? That was the point!” The Asian-Australian celebratory to this reading experience, only a weariness, woman and her friends were not exclaiming loudly, this and to so many who told her that the book was good and way or the other. They sat in a group to the side, greeted reading it important, she wanted to ask: is it possible that the Asian-Australian actor who played the Aussie boyfriend you have never talked to your friends? These same people Kevin, and left soon after. The Critic offered Cecile white had gone, over the years, from a total disavowal of racism wine served in a latte glass. It was La Mama, after all. in Australia, which was thickly lathered wherever one The Critic wanted to say so many things. She wanted to bothered to look, to celebratory showering away of white talk about the history of this theatre, a tiny shack so close guilt. The question of race is not in good hands when it is in to the heart of Melbourne, the seventies, about Betty Burstall the hands of white people. They are too anxious, too volatile and Liz Jones, about co-op theatre so different from the between anger and guilt, their hands shake too much to hold well-funded national theatres of Germany or the six-tierit carefully. government support for the Flemish independent arts. in which the homosexuals have a say She wanted to talk about the campaign to save La Mama in Chi Vu’s approach to playwrighting is to make that 2008, when the 1883 printer workshop that had housed the inappropriate joke that everyone knows, despite being the theatre since 1967 was put on sale. She wanted to talk Vietnamese woman in the room, and to stretch it again and about the donations that poured in, spanning philanthropic again and again until it turns in on itself, and the white foundations and independent artists alike, local restaurants person feels permission to laugh. It is the approach of a and wealthy donors, raising $1.8 million within the nerveperson highly literate in the white Australian discourse. rackingly short deadline. She remembered the final For here is something we like to forget about fundraiser and the last-minute donation racism: racism is not exclusionary. It is no from the Victorian state government. more exclusionary of non-white people The Critic wanted to talk about the than rape culture is exclusionary of La Mama courtyard, the bonfires, women. Everyone has a role to the wine in latte glasses, and play. The purpose of racism is how it was all part of rarely to form separatist something bigger, when Why is so much art assessed communities, but rather to create Cecile said: through the prism of the political hierarchies where some groups “I didn’t like it. I thought I role it plays within its own narrow are excluded from power but would like it a lot more, after community? Why do we fall back, included as an underpaid that review. But it just seemed so readily, on guilt and expiation, workforce, as comic relief, as so insular. It was a play about or on righteous enjoyment? the makers of pho, as nannies, as a tiny group of people in the housemaids, as the ‘ethnically Melbourne arts, and the irracial diverse’ playwright who will write prejudice. It has no relevance to the play that we want them to write. anyone else.” Australian racism, casual or overt, “It is an important part of the political or personal, has always been Chi conversation that the theatre community Vu’s to know, to repeat, even to laugh at, even needs to have with itself,” said the Critic. to rebel against. The only thing a Vietnamese-Australian “But I don’t think it would stand up to scrutiny in other playwright is not allowed to do with racism is ignore it, cultural contexts,” said Cecile, who wasn’t a Theatre Person. which is why Mai Nguyen’s cardinal sin, according to the in which the question of race is like a porcelain bowl review, is to be “narcissistic, self-absorbed, irritating”: Mai Why is so much art assessed through the prism of Nguyen just wants to be a playwright without epithets, and the political role it plays within its own narrow community? that, that is unforgivable. Neither the reviewer, nor the Why do we fall back, so readily, on guilt and expiation, audience, nor the theatre community, will let her have it.

JANA PERKOVIC Declan Greene has done something similar over the years, The Critic wanted to talk about how Sisters Grimm were with Sisters Grimm, repeating and twisting the founding making tiny shows for their friends when theatre bloggers legends of colonial Australia until they are revealed to be discovered them in that quest for good theatre, how Declan offensive, exclusionary, and laughable. Greene’s perspective and Ash went on to Sydney Theatre Company, and how this is a young queer man, which lets him rip into Australian play, The Homosexuals, or Faggots, would never have been masculinity rituals, femininity rituals, rituals of middleincluded in the main stage program with that title had it class respectability, myths of the noble coloniser. The not been for the invisible work of all these people she had casting in Sisters Grimm shows is always burlesquely known for close to a decade,when Cecile pensively said: inappropriate: Islander men play young white women; lithe “So much barely concealed anger. In this place. Everyone Chinese woman plays an Aboriginal boy; Ash Flanders shouting at everyone.” plays the heroine; a procession of faces and bodies invisible in which we return to the traditional telling of to the mainstream arts shows up to play the stock-standard plot and the assessing of quality in order to complete characters of Australia’s monotonous middlebrow. The our theatre criticism challenge for this issue of TLB lineage of Chi Vu’s work would appear to come from here, The clever conceit at the heart of The Homosexuals, or from this joyous appropriation of the vastly problematic Faggots, is to translate the mechanics of a traditional farce cultural heritage of Australia into an outsiders’ in-joke. into contemporary gay culture. Farce starts off with a Greene had a play on at the Malthouse while Cecile was recognisably ordinary situation that needs to be defended, visiting, and it seemed like safe territory. with its high stakes of social respectability, against a “I don’t get it,” Cecile said as the lights went up again. “Is trivial complication. Quickly, improbable complications this a joke? Was it offensive? Was it meant to multiply, until the respectable facade implodes. be serious theatre? I have to deal with The moral of the story vacillates between misogynist gay men every day of my ‘aren’t we all imperfect?’ and ‘let’s life. Was this a gay play for straight pretend nothing happened.’ In people? Was it a gay play for gay Greene’s play, Kim and Warren are people? What did I just see?” the respectable, middle-aged, “Eh ... ” affluent, monogamous face of “Is this what you do for a There is so much in it, subtle things contemporary gay Australia; living?” Cecile’s nose that we know from experience. Kim a university lecturer in scrunched up. “Not fun. I The skinsuit narcissism of a white gender studies, Warren the don’t know, Australia has a man not knowing whether he editor of an LGBT magazine. reputation for being a wants to fuck his talented ethnic Warren is going to a ‘politically country of racist hicks, but girlfriend, or be her. The way he incorrect’ themed Mardi Gras I thought that was wrong... invades her. costume party with his friend before coming here...” Diana, an old-school ‘tranny’ (her “Let’s just get a drink.” choice of words) already in her Bill The Malthouse bar served Cosby blackface costume, when they artisanal cider and good Australian discover that Bae Bae, a radical trans wines in nice glasses. The forecourt had Twitter activist, is on their way to their millionbeen renovated a few years earlier, and now dollar Darlinghurst apartment for an interview. there were tables and chairs, red sand, lights and Kim, who has recently been attacked on social media for music, beautiful Theatre People. The Critic wanted to say a minor transgression in trans terminology, is terrified so many things. She wanted to talk about 2005, when Michael of Bae Bae’s propensity to lead witch hunts against those Kantor and Steven Armstrong took over the dusty old who offend their politics. Warren, meanwhile, is more Playbox and staged Patrick White, brought in Barrie Kosky concerned that the boy he has been grooming for a sexy and Paul Capsis, Aboriginal theatre and a whole swathe of photo shoot, unbeknownst to Kim, is also on his way. independent theatre productions rescued from the tiny Their carefully designed and amply moneyed cis-privilege upstairs rooms in pubs and galleries, where they would is suddenly threatened by a whirlwind situation that never be seen, never become Culture. She wanted to talk involves un-PC costumes falling out of cupboards, about this rupture from the silo. She wanted to talk about misplaced baggies of cocaine, clueless twinks, revolving Alison Croggon, theatre blogs, about that time when the doors, mistaken identities, and one begrudgingly complicit Malthouse printed all the theatre blog URLs in their program, friend whose patience is running out. Bae Bae is non-op about drinking till late in the Malthouse forecourt with trans, and Greene uses LGBT communities’ convention of Steven Armstrong keeping the bar open for everyone, separating self-determined gender from biological sex to about the sense of a shared mission amongst the artists to indulge in identity confusion much less improbable than make a new theatre for a progressive, open-minded in most farces. There is more than a tiny speck of suspended Australia, and for the critics to articulate why this theatre disbelief required when pronouns are chosen and gender was better than the interminable white, straight, genderis a spectrum: words create powerful realities in this world. coded stories of a stale old Australia that refused to die.

THE CRITIC IN THE EPISODE 'HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS' Diana, however, has lived through the HIV epidemic, for which there was no safe word. The ruthlessly brutal mores of an older gay culture - one that knew the consequential difference between rhetoric and law, and made macabre jokes while throwing pavers at the police-clashes with a contemporary facet of LGBT culture that stretches queer theory to an improbable extreme. Between them, there is (legally unrecognised) marriage of two people and an old friendship. Diana’s final poignant monologue re-anchors the farce. And it is here that the Malthouse production fully falls apart. The Homosexuals is a play for an audience that both understands and empathises with the subtleties of LGBT culture. It needs to grasp the terror of using the wrong pronoun, the strive for respectability that has made marriage equality a political talisman, and how dreams of picket-fenced families can co-exist with a penchant for cruising in saunas. The very heart of the play hinges on understanding why a quintessential jock like Warren would have an old friend who is a post-op ‘tranny’ and how a friendship forged in ome skanky club on Oxford St in the nineties would gradually strain as one individual has accrued the social respectability that remains, for the other, out of reach. It was the drag queens that led the Stonewall riots, as Nico always reminded the Critic, and the drag queens have not reaped the benefits of Stonewall. Among the glaring mistakes in Lee Lewis’ direction of the play - mistimed choreography of entrances and exits, performances that veered towards stereotypes - none was more glaring than the decision to cast the show entirely naturalistically, but have a female actor play Diana. The immense and specific meaning of Diana vanished in casting. It had nothing to do with Genevieve Lemon’s capable performance and everything to do with the biological reality of her body, which was not post-op trans. We can do things with words, but the world doesn’t always listen and the play about words needs a stigmatised body to point that out. Cecile, who was unceremoniously thrown out of home when she came out, but who nonetheless regularly had Sunday lunches with her parents, knew a thing or two about politeness. “It was played for a straight audience,” she said, wearily. “It was played for unknowing laughs.”

in which we return to the beginning, armed with new insights “You have told me everything,” said June over brunch, “but you haven’t told me what actually happens in Chi Vu’s play.” “Well,” the Critic said. “Mai Nguyen is a VietnameseAustralian playwright whose play about a pho restaurant put her on the map of contemporary Australian theatre. Her boyfriend Kevin, a security guard, fetishises Mai in all those subtle, cannibalistic ways in which Anglo-Australian men fetishise ethnic women. He schmoozes in her stead at a fancy party, and promises she will deliver a playscript for a major company. When Mai goes on a meditation retreat, Kevin writes a play in her name, a sci-fi story in

which the Asian woman is a sexy alien for the white male protagonist to conquer. This is particularly outrageous since Chinese-Australians were legally termed “coloured aliens” by the government during World War II, as Mai points out. There is a scene in which Kevin complains that there’s no ham and cheese in the fridge, only tempeh.” “And ... ?” “The casting is racially reversed, upending stereotypes. Mai is a lot funnier as a white woman: we assign intent to her choice of words and gestures that we wouldn’t if she were played by an Asian-Australian actor. When she performs Asian stereotypes, we are in no danger of reading them as normal. Kevin’s invasive use of space and language appears less legitimate in the body of an Asian man. When he patronised her, I cringed. I hope everybody cringed.” “Is it good, though?” asked June, who was an ethnic woman, but wasn’t a theatre critic. “There is so much in it, subtle things that you and I know from experience. The skinsuit narcissism of a white man not knowing whether he wants to fuck his talented ethnic girlfriend, or be her. The way he invades her. The way he uses her as an object in his identity. When Mai gets angry that Kevin appropriated her name, this is his apology: “I’m not perfect. I’m still growing, I’m trying my best. I just get really depressed when you go away...” I had a boyfriend say to me those same words, in that same order. The way her struggle not to be a projection of someone else’s exotic fantasy is read as narcissism, when it’s not: it’s those projections that are narcissistic. Lacan writes about it: how we are always trying to turn ‘the Other’ into some version of us, idealised or debased, so that the whole world is just Me, multiplied. The entire play is her wrestling with this toxic racialised culture that is the only language Australia has for understanding itself. Kevin doesn’t understand why she doesn’t capitalise on her ethnic cachet. She just wants to be a person, and she doesn’t get to be one.” “So it’s good?” The Critic took a very considered pause. “In a country in which blatant racism is printed as arts criticism on some website, what would a play like this one need to do to be good? I can appreciate Chi Vu drawing out the complexity of an inter-racial couple trying to tease each other about stereotypes as equals, but then Kevin tries to devour Mai’s identity, and some... reviewer... then accuses Chi Vu of making the audience uncomfortable, an audience he automatically assumes is white and emotionally overwrought, and which unfortunately is white and emotionally overwrought. And then everyone makes it a political act to see and like this play, with all these subtleties flying over their heads.” Cecile, who had spent most of the brunch trying to figure out how to eat a poached egg on avocado toast, sighed. The Critic remembered: “I liked its hysterical realism, the way it turned the volume up on interpersonal relationships. It is a very un-Australian thing to me. Australian writing is always full of poignant silences, like life is one neverending Pinter. It’s nice to see people shout at each other.” Cecile interrupted: “Did I ever tell you about my first Pride,

JANA PERKOVIC

at eighteen, when a neighbour threw a brick at my head?” “No ... ?” “All you have done, for weeks, is talk to me about community. Theatre People this, Theatre People that. It looks to me like a white, privileged bunch. It’s not a community for minorities. It will never be. They can’t laugh with you, if they’re not in on the joke, and they cannot be in on the joke as long as they are marking you with a big O for ‘Other.’ Language fails.” “Sorry, brick? At your head?” “What I’ve always liked about the LGBT community - which is a real community - is that they know what to say on the inside, and what on the outside. On the inside, marriage is hotly debated as monogamous hegemony and so on. On the outside, it’s a united front: give us our rights. My dad wanted me to be a respectable straight girl for so long, but when he flipped, he wanted me to quickly forget about his homophobia and be a respectable lesbian whom he can respectably support. I no longer try to talk to him about his hypocrisy. I don’t expect him to really listen, too much of his ego is caught up in not hearing me. But I mention that brick all the time.”

THE PHARMACO-CARNIST REGIME: SOME NOTES ON AN ERA HAYLEY SINGER

n The History of Animals, Aristotle described a common farming technique that would continue to be practiced through the Middle Ages, and was kept in use until the late nineteenth century. The procedure involved cutting the ovaries out of a sow to ‘quench’ her sexual appetite, while stimulating her growth in size and fatness. Aristotle provides a prescientific articulation of connections between the control of sex, sexuality, gender and the transformation of an individual into a devitalised object: meat. These connections became significant for the development of the animal-industrial complex throughout the twentieth century, and they remain so today. At the turn of the 1900s in the United States, emerging research into sex hormones and reproductive biology utilised massive amounts of biological materials such as ovaries, testes, uteri and urine for experimental studies. Physiologists mined slaughterhouses and farms for sources of live or freshly dead research material. Harvesting organs (and other bodily materials) from animals would become a significant part of the ritual reiterations that produced certain species as raw materials for human use, their bodies bound and penetrated by exchange value; taken as tools for pharmaceutical investigation; used as metaphors for cis-centred, heterosexual ideals of gender, sex and sexuality. When I turn to look back at the twentieth century, I see it convulse under the image of a physiologist sorting through the entrails of freshly slaughtered pigs looking for embryos. From this point of view, I come to a new understanding as to why, towards the end of the twentieth century, vegan-activist Carol Adams would theorise the sexual politics of meat. The twentieth century is the era in which the term ‘gender’ was first coined by controversial psychiatrist John Money. Differentiating gender from ‘sex’ opened up the possibility for defining individuals according to the psychologically and culturally recognised groups ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine.’ Use of such categorisation flourished at a time when the synthetic production of estrogen was exploding onto the scientific, industrial and consumer scene. Over the last twenty years, French philosopher Paul B. Preciado has tracked radical changes in the political management of human bodies from the twentieth to twentyfirst century. For him, sex, sexuality and gender identity have been transformed into objects used for the political management of life. From the beginning of the forties, he writes, biopolitical ideals of masculinity and femininity

were created under laboratory conditions. Such highly mediated gender production has created a regime, which he calls ‘pharmacopornographic’. This term references the molecular (pharmaco) and semiotic-technical (pornographic) government of sexual subjectivity, of which the Pill and Playboy are the model offspring. In Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, Preciado writes that the most significant business of the pharmaco-pornographic era is the production of gender as a techno-political ecology, a program and a body technique. Extending the thinking of Michael Foucault and Judith Butler, Preciado reiterates that heterosexual, cis-centred dualisms are not natural or unmediated occurrences. They are a political arrangement, writes Preciado (p. 113): “bio-technological extensions [ ... ] whose objective is production, reproduction and colonial expansion of heterosexual human life on the planet”. There is a minor theme that runs through Preciado’s work and it acknowledges that the bodies of myriad species have been foundational to the development of scientific and cultural understandings of sex hormones. The crossroads where animal bodies meet human sex hormones and reproductive biology is, by now, an extremely important material juncture to consider. To do so is to discover how conceptions of gender, sex and sexuality have been historically constructed, and continue to be maintained, via the mutilated bodies of mice, rats, whales, monkeys, horses, cats, dogs, pigs and cows. In foregrounding the importance of this historic thread in relation to species other than humans, I begin with an act of outright piracy: I filch Preciado’s term, pharmacopornograpic, and reconstruct it. I cut together the terms Pharmaco - the transformation of social behaviours or bodily conditions into ailments that require pharmaceutical treatment or enhancement (3); bio-molecular surveillance and control of bodies (1) - and carnism, an ideology organised around maintaining (by rendering invisible) extensive forms of physical violence against animals. Theorised by social psychologist Melanie Joy (4), carnism is a psychological framework and defence mechanism individuals use to deny, justify and rationalise industries, habits of thought and practices that turn animals into objects who experience life as a form of grinding pain up until the point of death. With this re-made term, ‘pharmaco-carnism’, I plan to take on two vital and interrelated issues: 1) the use of animals

as the raw research materials in the production and and Romans would use preparations made from goat or development of conceptual categories of human gender, wolf testes as sexual stimulants. In the 1600s, the pharmasex and sexuality; and, 2) how this situation has the effect copoeia of the London College of Physicians gave directions of further reinforcing a homogeneous human identity as to extract animal reproductive organs to treat numerous one which relies on, but takes every possible means to illnesses and, again, as sexual stimulants. avoid acknowledging, the fact that the worst kinds of Later, in 1767, castration and transplantation of sexual violence are committed against other species in order to organs led to the discovery of the relationship between the maintain the somato-political fiction that humanity is opposed, testicles and masculinity. One hundred years after these and superior, to other animals. trials, a German physiologist, Arnold Adolf Berthold, would The pharmaco-carnist regime is a bio-techno-ecopolitical experiment by removing a rooster’s testicles and transarrangement that emerges from the material planting them onto another part of the rooster’s overlap of animal agriculture and the body. This was done in order to test the way pharmaceutical industry. Its transmission of information from the first task is the construction testicles moved around the body. and imprisonment of animals During this era, heterosexuality and in a domain of physical labour homosexuality were being made that they cannot leave alive. as clinical concepts. With these Later, in 1767, castration and An important part of this rooster experiments Berthold transplantation of sexual organs corporeal construction is was among the first to resort to - grafting gonads onto castrated to market the bodies of heterosexual rhetoric of male rats, inserting cocks’ testicles animals as vital ‘fuel’ for superiority and complementarity into the abdominal cavities of humanised bodies, and as of the sexes. Roosters with hens - led to the discovery of the an indispensable requiretesticles were described as relationship between the testicles ment for experimentation. “warriors sent out in pursuit of and masculinity. This construction takes place hens,” and their virility symbolised across a number of interconnected by the stature of their comb, “a flag sites: the science lab, the concentrated that is hoisted to announce the animal feeding operation (CAFOs), the presence of his testis to the hens”[1] (p. 49) slaughterhouse, the pet food and meat (7). Castrated capons, on the other hand, aisles of supermarkets, in cosmetic shops, were “languid and peace loving”[2] (p. 155) (1). butchers, Meat and Livestock Australia ad campaigns, It wasn’t long until such hormone experiments previously in restaurants, cooking shows, cafes and private kitchens, only conducted on animals were trialled for their effects in pharmacies, hospitals and nutritionist consulting rooms. upon human bodies. In 1889, a midwife in Paris was attempting to remedy a range of ailments (from hysteria he pharmaco-carnist regime functions as a global wet to uterine complaints and debility due to age) by giving market characterised by the incessant trafficking of women the filtered juice of guinea pig ovaries. At the same body parts and fluids extracted from animals: semen, ovaries, time, a Parisian neurophysiologist, Charles Edouard Brownfaeces, blood, eggs, milk and muscle. Its most significant Sequard, reported feeling renewed vigour and mental work is in the endless reproduction of animal bodies clarity after injecting himself with the crushed testicles through the strategic excitation of male animals as well as of guinea pigs and dogs. With these studies, Brown-Sequard the control of maternal instincts and heat cycles in chickens, was suggesting that the testicles produced a kind of pigs and cows to ensure continued and profitable production secretion that controlled the development of the male of meat, eggs and dairy. Within the pharmaco-carnist regime, organism. While the scientific community reacted to his animal subjects are constructed as sex laboratories, experiments with hostility, his advocacy for the use of sex nutrient laboratories and - as Claude Levi-Strauss writes organs in the treatment of certain diseases did give rise to in ‘A Lesson in Wisdom from Mad Cows’ (5) - death a renewed interest in ‘organotherapy’: the utilisation of laboratories. Their heavy, lesioned, fevered, dehydrated, animal organ extracts for therapeutic purposes. disease- ridden, swollen, debeaked, tail-docked, starved, blood-drained bodies remain one of the most substantial load bearers of bodily fictions that make up contemporary 1. In her book, Beyond the Natural Body: an archeology on sex hormones (1994), medical gendered and species ideals. With this in mind, I want to historian Nelly Oudshoorn shows that in order to understand the function and meaning assemble a brief chronology to contextualise the of sex hormones scientists drew on familiar cultural ideas of what constituted men and emergence of the pharmaco-carnist regime. I do this because women. In the laboratory, these cultural ideals were linked to discoveries in the new science of sex endocrinology, thus providing material authority to highly dualistic I want to push against the codes of invisibility that allow conceptions of sex and gender. carnism - dependency on the brutal organisation of animal 2. Preciado quotes Berthold to illustrated oneof the ways inwhich, from the beginning life - to remain a neutral, normalised and naturalised practice. of the twentieth century, gender models emerged from experiments on human and nonIn Aristotle’s times, testes and ovaries were understood human animal bodies. See Chapter 8 ‘Pharmacopower’ in Testo Junkie: sex, drugs and biopolitics in the pharmacopornographic era. as the seats of masculinity and femininity. Ancient Greeks

HAYLEY SINGER By the turn of the twentieth century, Brown-Sequard’s how much estrogen a man would excrete from his body. acknowledgement that the ovaries and testes secreted Interestingly, no such tests were carried out to discover hormones was taken up by physicians and began to function how testosterone came to be found in women’s bodies. as a paradigm for conceiving of masculinity and femininity. hen, in 1928, American President Herbert Hoover This triggered castration and transplantation as a new pledged to put a chicken in every pot and a car in experimental approach inlaboratory science. Although every garage, he was further solidifying the Fordist alliance similar experiments had taken place centuries earlier, between automobile production and the mass slaughter scientists were now searching for chemical substances in of animals, which remains of major importance to the sex glands by surgically removing ovaries and testes from development of the pharmaco-carnist regime today. As rabbits and guinea pigs, cutting them into fragments and historian Nancy Langston notes (8), in the 1920s engineers, reimplanting them into the bodies of castrated individuals agricultural economists and government agencies urged at locations other than their normal positions. Physiologists farmers to industrialise, standardise and mechanise their attached to universities had begun to lobby their instioperations (p. 62). Changing this industrialised vision into tutions for money to set up vivariums (facilities for housing a reality required the pharmaceuticalisation of factorylive animals for research) and university funds were put farmed animals. In coming decades, synthetic hormones towards buying live animals to slaughter, so that their fresh would be critical to the rapid expansion of American cadavers could be used for experimentation. feedlots (8) and estrogen, the most significant synthetic At this time, the straight forward idea that there existed hormone put to use in the animal agricultural industry of two kinds of sex hormones - one per sex - meant the concept the twentieth century. In fact, synthetic estrogen has become of sex as promoted by scientific establishments in Europe the most used pharmaceutical molecule in the whole of and America was a dualistic notion. This kind of thinking human history (2). was further exploited by British physiologist and reproIn 1938, a year before war broke out, diethylstilbestrol (DES), ductive biologist, Walter Heape, whose 1913 book Sex a synthetic estrogen, was first created. It wasn’t long Antagonism claimed that women’s biological destiny was before a professor of poultry husbandry at the University the opposite to men’s. Heape used this anthropological of California started injecting DES into male chickens in study to refute feminist claims to equal rights, and while order to chemically castrate them. The result, in which his arguments for biological determinism were refuted, male chickens developed plump breasts, offered medical historian Nelly Oudshoorn (7) points the meat industry what it needed to increase out that Heape’s colleagues subscribed production. Yet in a World War II world, to, and re-enforced, his views of the when meat held important symbolic relations between sexes. Oudshoorn power for masculinity and the white, encapsulates the hostile sexual middle-class American identity, politics within science at the America’s Food and Drug time when she writes, “Some Foregrounding this history allows Administration feared that scientists - anticipating the us to ask, anew, how the production selling chickens laced with women’s liberation moveof pharmaceuticalised-animalisedestrogen for human consumption ment at the turn of the meatified bodies is linked to the would somehow contaminate century - had advocated the production of cis-centred, heterothe masculinity of their fighting idea of sex antagonism” (p. caricatures of gendered bodies in men. Here the eighteenth-century 23). Heape made himself the contemporary era. rhetoric of male virility, and its instrumental to this argument particular relation to roosters, by using his study on the reprowas reignited. Would soldiers turn ductive bodies of sheep to make into girls? Would men who ate stilbestrol claims about women’s so-called chickens become more interested in biological destiny. knitting than killing? Would men, like roosters, Challenges to the idea of sexual antagonism become fat and clucky? Would they be unintercame in 1921 when Viennese gynaecologist Otfried ested in the pretty hens that passed them by? Fellner published the results of his experiments on rabbits, from which he determined that the testis of male rabbits eterosexual gender caricatures were produced (and clearly contained female sex hormones. In 1938, German undone) in the nets of the bio-techno-eco organisation gynaecologist Bernhard Zondek discovered that the urine of CAFOs and slaughterhouses. As farmed animal bodies of stallions contained massive amounts of estrogen - a were exposed to pharmacological enhancement, dualistic revelation that sent researchers into a panic to explain how conceptions of sex hormones transferred to the gendered sex hormones believed to belong exclusively to one or the language that characterised meat. Gender identities were other sex could be present in the bodies of ‘normal’ and made alongside meat and came to be constructed around ‘healthy’ men and women. Researchers engaged in a series the roles of who (in highly dualistic, heterosexual scenarios) of tests to consider whether the wide occurrence of estrogen ate and who prepared meat. Such parochial gendered in foods and ‘the natural world’ would have a bearing on

THE PHARMACO-CARNIST REGIME: SOME NOTES ON AN ERA

References: 1. Preciado PB. Testo junkie: sex, drugs, and biopolitics in the pharmacopornographic era. Trans. Bruce Benderson. New York: The Feminist Press; 2013.

5. Levi-Strauss C. We are all cannibals: and other essays. Columbia: Columbia University Press; 2016. Chapter 13, A lesson in wisdom from mad cows.

2. Preciado PB. Pharmaco-pornographic politics: towards a new gender ecology. Parallax 2008; 14(1):105-17.

6. Heape W. Sex antagonism. New York: G. P. Putnam’s sons; 1913. 7. Oudshoorn N. Beyond the natural body: an archeology of sex hormones. New York: Routledge; 1994.

3. Abraham J. Pharmaceuticalization of society in context: theoretical, empirical and health dimensions. Sociology 2010; 44.4: 603-22.

7. Langston N. Toxic bodies: hormone disruptors and the legacy of DES. New Haven: Yale University Press; 2010. Chapter 5, Modern meat: hormones in livestock.

4. Joy M. Why we love dogs, eat pigs and wear cows: an introduction to carnism. San Francisco: Conari press; 2010.

thinking came loaded with a reasoning that tracked along racialised and classist lines of exclusion and denial. In 1945, when the feed company Wick and Fry urged the FDA to approve the use of DES implants in the necks of chickens destined for human consumption, they argued that DES could not possibly come to contaminate consumers as white, middle-class housewives did not like to cook with chicken necks. By 1947, as wartime meat rations were lifted, and as doctors and researchers had been treating pregnant women with large doses of DES (and no deaths had yet resulted), the FDA allowed small doses of the hormone to be used on chickens and turkeys produced for human consumption. A decade later, DES was implanted in more than thirty million chickens a year and over half of America’s cattle feed was laced with the hormone. As DES was found to disturb women’s menstrual cycles (such as producing excessive bleeding), it was also found to be turning male workers, farmers, butchers and consumers infertile. In addition, there were increasing reports of male consumers, meat and restaurant workers growing breasts. FDA concerns remained with the devirilising and feminising effects of DES on male gender, sex and sexuality. Driven by the belief that it would prevent miscarriages, DES was commonly used on pregnant women. However, in 1953 tests showed that not only was DES ineffective at preventing miscarriages, but that it actually increased the chances of a woman experiencing a miscarriage. Finally, in 1966, use of DES for the production of chicken and turkey meat was banned. This did not stop members of the poultry industry from continuing to use DES illegally until the seventies.

Astonishingly, this drug would not be outlawed for use in human women until 1971. Throughout the seventies across Europe, America and Australia, researchers discovered that the effects of DES produced significant abnormalities in the reproductive organs of women prescribed the drugs, as well as their daughters and sons exposed to DES in utero. The effects of these drugs are still resonating across sexes, species and generations today. Meat is now a widely available prosthetic used to announce and legitimate a wide range of identities, including femininity and masculinity. Foregrounding this history allows us to ask, anew, how the production of pharmaceuticalised-animalised-meatified bodies is linked to the production of cis-centred, heterocaricatures of gendered bodies in the contemporary era. This skeletal chronology shows yet another way in which human-animals are enmeshed in networks of legitimated and invisibilised violence. Within these networks, built out of strange infrastructural alliances, bodily harms are treated as ‘procedural’ harms, as if they are somehow different from abuse. This history lives as an ongoing presence in the pharmaco-carnist regime; its violence diffracts through time and place, diffracts through our bodies, and works on all who pass through it. Ignoring it will not make it go away.

GOD’S OTHER CHILDREN: WOULD DISCOVERING ALIENS CHALLENGE HUMANITY’S RELIGIONS? NICK TARAS

ebruary 22nd 2017 - NASA reveals the stunning discovery of seven Earth-like planets orbiting a nearby ultra-cool dwarf star. Three of these worlds reside in the Goldilocks Zone, where the distance from their star is just right for these planets to host liquid water. The nerds responsible name this solar system TRAPPIST-1. It’s in the constellation Aquarius, only forty light years away, which means that if we invent light speed travel, it’d take forty years to get there. It’s unlikely we’ll develop spacecraft able to transport humans at this speed in our lifetime, although my Greek uncle told me he can make it happen, pointing to his modified Commodore as proof. The very first sign of alien life, if we ever get it, will probably come instead from looking at the planets’ atmospheres. If we can photograph the sun’s light as it passes through a planet’s atmosphere, we can analyse its make-up and draw conclusions based on what we know about life on Earth. Finding high amounts of oxygen mixed in with methane in a planet’s atmosphere is a strong hint of life. Other clues to search for include the existence of water vapour, and ozone. Soon after TRAPPIST-1’s discovery, a NASA scientist called it, “the best target yet for studying the atmospheres of potentially habitable, Earth-size worlds.” Let’s say we detect oxygen and methane on one of these planets. And not only that, but we confirm - undoubtedly - that intelligent life exists on this planet, perhaps through intercepted radio waves carrying clearly distinguishable language. While scientists cheer, historians tremble, and Trump turns the wall blueprints into a dome, my burning question is this: what then happens to our relationship with God? Would contact with extraterrestrial intelligence contradict the tenets of humanity’s prominent religions? Would our religions collapse? And if the answer to these questions were yes, but people still desperately cling to their faith, what does that reveal about the power of religion over the mind? These are some of the questions I asked in interviews with theologians, astronomers and the Vatican in the months following TRAPPIST-1’s discovery. Thought experiments on the theological implications ofextraterrestrial life form the basis of ‘exotheology’, a term that’s only a few decades old, but a field that’s challenged thinkers for centuries. Thomas Aquinas reasoned in the thirteenth century that there’s probably only one world of living creatures. Then, both the Bishop of Paris Etienne Tempier and the French priest Jean Buridan argued God could make several worlds.

The debate has continued, and evolved. Of course, scientific discoveries have confronted religious beliefs before. As seemingly oppositional means of finding truth, they’ve sparred throughout history: Galileo’s heliocentric view of the Solar System versus the Catholic Church’s geocentric one; Charles Darwin versus Genesis. But any Christian theologian worth their cross today can incorporate the Big Bang and Darwinian evolution into their understanding of God’s creation. Even if you’re not a theologian, asking yourself if there’s an almighty creator - and if there’s extraterrestrial life - is a thought-provoking exercise. These questions have implications for our place in the universe, and why you’re conscious and reading this essay right now.

hemiya Nanayakkara just finished his PhD at Swinburne University looking into how galaxies formed after the Big Bang. He’s not extremely religious, but he grew up in the Buddhist faith. “Through the scripture, it always says there are aliens of different levels of beings,” he explains. “Any being can become a Buddha. There are multiple Buddhas, even in the same time in different worlds around us.” The Mahayana branch of Buddhism is seemingly more astronomically accurate than that of any religion in the West. (There’s no clear reason why - it could be they were more imaginative, though Buddhists might argue it’s simply because the sacred writings are true...) Until Galileo, most people falsely believed the universe was just a sun and seven planets revolving around Earth. In Religion East & West, the Buddhist scholar Professor Ron Epstein explains that scripture written by one of Buddha’s disciples, Mahamaudgalyayana, “shows that 2,500 years ago, Buddhists were aware of a vast cosmos filled with suns and planets and sentient life ... [In the Maharatnakuta-sutra] we are presented with a cosmology that seems much closer [to our current scientific view of the physical universe] than the Western pre-Galilean view.” Themiya says that many cutting-edge scientific theories of our universe are found in Buddhist scripture: “When I was growing up, I was interested in aliens, but as a Buddhist you’re expected to be. Especially in Mahayana traditions, you have the concept of parallel universes.” Wait, what? Parallel universes? What’s next - you can be reincarnated as an alien? “Yeah,” Themiya laughs. “We expect that anyway.” He

NICK TARAS

explains the only things that would challenge his religious egardless, Davies entertains the idea that aliens might beliefs would be if aliens could prove that there’s one have discarded religious belief as primitive superstition supreme being who created the world, or disprove entirely or “if they practiced anything remotely like a reincarnation. So it’s not the discovery of aliens on religion, we should surely soon wish to abandon our own TRAPPIST-1 that troubles his relationship with Buddhism, and be converted to theirs.” but what scientifically superior aliens might enlighten us Lutheran theologian Ted Peters has argued with Davies about the origins of our universe. over many years. He’s written twenty-one books on religion Islam, too, is comfortable with the discovery of aliens. and science, and has taught theology and ethics for three Maybe not comfortable, as Islam specifically emphasises decades at Berkeley. human beings, but it’ll at least tolerate the idea. David “In the nineties, I started interacting with Paul Davies,” he Weintrauben, in his book Religions and Extraterrestrial Life, tells me. “And he kept saying, ‘Oh my goodness when we argues that Islam has the least to worry about. The Quran discover extraterrestrial creatures, all the religions are says, “Among His signs is the creation of the heavens and just gonna crash and burn.’ I intuitively thought this wasn’t the earth, and the living creatures that He has scattered correct. I conducted the Peters ETI Religious Crisis Survey, through them: and He has power to gather them which showed that people who self-identify as together when He wills.” According to religious, by and large, not only will they Professor Shahul Hameed, the phrase accept space creatures as their neighbours, ‘living creatures’ is actually a but in some cases will embrace them.” reference to creatures on planets Peters concludes his landmark other than earth. “So one day, if survey by saying that not only is scientists come forward with it unreasonable to forecast the Of all the world’s religions, solid proof for the existence collapse of Earth’s major religions, Christianity is the most speciesof extraterrestrial beings,” but that contact with extraspecific. Jesus was humanity’s he writes, “it should not be a terrestrial intelligence “will saviour and redeemer. He did surprise for Muslims.” expand the existing religious not die for the dolphins or the Christianity is particularly vision that all of creation is the gorillas, and certainly not for messy because there are many gift of a loving and gracious God.” the proverbial little green men. interpretations of original sin, I ask him why Christians say incarnation, and salvation, so their religiosity won’t be underthere’s no ‘Christian’ response mined by the discovery of alien life. to extraterrestrial life. But there Peters suggests it might be a simple is something they need to answer for, answer: we’ve been culturally aware of according to British physicist and bestaliens through television and film for decades. selling author Paul Davies, who’s contributed Adding to this, Father Paul Mueller from the to many popular debates about science and religion Vatican - who we’ll talk with later - told me, “If we encounter including two debates with the Dalai Lama. aliens someday, that’s going to rock our world, but it’s going “Suppose, then, that E.T. is ahead of us scientifically, to be less of a shock to us than it was for the Europeans to technologically and spiritually, too,” he writes in E.T. and encounter people of the New World. For them, they had God. “Where does that leave mankind’s presumed never conceived of ‘the Other’ in that way. We’ve at least relationship with God? This conundrum poses a difficulty been through that. We’ve got a historical memory of what for Christians, because of the unique nature of the it’s like to encounter a new world, and what it’s like to Incarnation. Of all the world’s religions, Christianity is the screw up that encounter.” most species-specific. Jesus Christ was humanity’s saviour While Christians in the survey say they won’t abandon and redeemer. He did not die for the dolphins or the gorillas, their religion when confronted with extraterrestrial life, and certainly not for the proverbial little green men. I wonder what type of alien revelation it would take for “But what of deeply spiritual aliens? Are they not to be Peters to abandon his. This feels like a limitation of the saved? Can we contemplate a universe that contains perhaps survey: it doesn’t ask what it would take for people to lose a trillion worlds of saintly beings, but in which the only their faith. beings eligible for salvation inhabit a planet where murder, “It’s important to have hypotheses about what could disprove rape, and other evils remain rife?” my own convictions,” he explains. “I would have to be openThis question about Christianity not catering for the minded enough to listen very carefully to what an alien salvation for aliens, however, is addressed in a few ways. might be communicating about his or her understanding Some theologians argue that the salvation applies through of the nature of physical reality. From a Christian’s point all creation, not just human beings. Another answer, as of view, the natural world needs to be redeemable. If I were Davies points out, is quite comical (and inherently to learn something about the natural world from someone problematic): the belief in multiple incarnations and who knows more about it than we do here on Earth, yeah, crucifixions taking place across many worlds. it might disprove things that I assume or I’m committed to. Can I come up with an example? No I can’t.”

GOD'S OTHER CHILDREN

I wondered if another Christian could think of examples that might disprove their dogma. I come across a book by two members of the Vatican Observatory called Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial? My repeated requests for an interview are denied. Luckily, I’m as much a zealot about my bible, The Lifted Brow, as they are about theirs; I’m finally granted permission to speak to co-author Father Paul Mueller, who is a theologian and scientist at the Vatican Observatory. Pope Leo XIII founded the VO in 1891 to demonstrate that Rome was not “the enemy of science and progress.” And today, the Vatican still sponsors its own group of astronomers. “Living here at the Vatican Observatory, the two most popular questions are always, ‘Why does the Vatican have an astronomical observatory?’ Sort of presupposing some kind of conflict. My semi-snarky response to that is always, ‘Well, it has an observatory because it doesn’t have enough money for an accelerator.’ Of course we’re doing science here. As we live and work here, we don’t feel any conflict with science and religion. We’re doing both and it’s not an issue for us. “And people are always curious about aliens,” he says. “What would it mean for faith? For human beings? For life? I don’t think we have any particular insight in that over anyone else. It’s a human being question more than a science question. But this question has been on the table for hundreds and hundreds of years.” Where the existence of aliens challenges Christianity, Father Mueller says, might be found what Pope John Paul II called the “unity of truth.” “My way of spelling it out would be to say, ‘Look, a way to think about science and religion - at least in the Catholic perspective - is that you can think of God having written two books. A book of nature, and a book of scripture. So there’s stuff we can know on our own through the power of human reason and observation (book of nature) and there’s stuff that God has shown us through special events and witnesses (Jesus Christ, etc.). “You’ve got these two books, and the worry is what if they don’t agree with each other? What if we meet aliens that aren’t in the Bible? The bottom line faith - and this might sound like simplistic dumb shit - is that since both books are written by the same author, they cannot disagree in the end. Truth does not disagree with truth. God is not a liar. And if they seem to disagree with us, it means we have not yet understood one or the other adequately. So it calls for a stance of patience.”

One line here got me thinking: “Truth does not disagree with truth”. It seems like humanity’s religions can cope with the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. But what if their truths disagree with our truths? We seem to put limits on the scientific advancement of aliens, simply because we can’t imagine the magnitude of their knowledge.

eters has his hypothesis: discovering extraterrestrial intelligence will expand on our existing religious understanding and guide us to appreciate our familiar God further. Here’s mine: discovering alien life will raise questions for the devout among us, but for most, it won’t destroy their faith for two reasons: 1) they won’t give up their source of existential meaning so easily, and 2) theologians have always found ways to reinterpret theology in light of scientific discovery. But there is one discovery that would obliterate their doctrines and their gods: a new revelation. One where extraterrestrial intelligence opens our eyes to the indisputable truths behind the origins of the universe and our species. This is what religion posits to do - albeit through ancient texts. Imagine if we were to learn definitively about our universe and species not through scripture, but through an all-knowing species, who are millennia ahead of us scientifically, who have decoded the mysteries of the universe before the Big Bang, who can show us evidence of the origins of life, and the creation of consciousness, and reveal what happens after life. This is what Buddhists, Muslims, Christians and other religions have to worry about. Because if this happens, both the religious and non-religious on Earth may say goodbye to our gods and hello to a new one.

HOW SHOULD A PERSON READ? KHALID WARSAME

ANNE BOYER

INTRODUCTION By Khalid Warsame

o a few weeks ago I was having lunch with two friends of mine, who are really good and smart even though they are writers, and we were fretting about the usual things writers fret about: grants we missed out on, the price of rent in this city, Rihanna, and why no poet ever seems to be able to drive a car. Eventually we got around to talking about books we were reading. Now, I hadn’t read a novel in almost a year at this point. Actually, now that I think of it, I had read Catherine Lacey’s Nobody is Ever Missing some months ago but that was only because my friend Stella, who reads more widely and has better taste than perhaps anyone I know, pressed the novel into my hands and said, “You should read this,” and I couldn’t find it in me to refuse her. It was a bad summer for reading all around, I think. Our very own publisher at this journal - who I shall not name declared one day in the office that we should all only read Jack Reacher novels. He’d read thirty-seven of them in about ten days or something like that, which is a feat no one emerges from completely intact. Another friend of mine was reading Goosebumps novels, and another was ankle-deep in the Star Wars expanded universe. We were all trying to avoid Donald Trump, I think, which is a fine excuse to dive into into schlock. Back at the lunch, we were debating whether or not it was schlock. What was so bad about these books? I’ve read too many literary novels to believe that inherent goodness actually exists in this world. We all have. We read white men, and then reject them, and then read against them, and then move on to the retrenchment. Where does this take us? Is there even an ethic to reading fiction, the way there’s an ethic to writing fiction? To be honest, I don’t know: I’m a writer, not a reader. And ethic to my writing is an abjectly digestive one: I need money for food! I’ve got to get paid! But Adam Gopnik over at The New Yorker thinks is the only ethic worth a damn in fiction, and I guess he’s right, even though he’s a writer. But still, what of reading? So here’s what I did: I found four writers who are better at this thinking stuff than I am and asked them this very question. What is the deal with reading? How should a person read?

CAREN BEILIN

ELIZABETH FLUX

GOOD READER By Stephen Pham

ll the red flags were on the Facebook page for Hell’s Lettres, a reading event: the most Third Worldsounding surname on the venue was ’Ferrari’; the venue was a shipping continer in the front yard of a dilapidated mansion near Macdonaldtown station; and the event was titled ‘Fuck Off, We’re Fully Sick’. So I can’t say I was shocked when I rocked up and Ferrari, standing under a naked light bulb hanging from a cord wrapped around a chain, turned out to be a guy with mouldy dreadlocks I could smell at the back of the cramped container. He said, “Wrote this while I was stoned, so, like, yeah,” and recited a poem that ended with the lines: “Gentrifiers fuck off, you’ll never succeed, Newtown’s for weirdos, and we’ll never cede.” He then lowered the microphone to the ground. The audience applauded. Someone whistled through fingers. The next reader was a brown cheekbones wearing a bootlegged Aaliyah t-shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “This is a poeam about being mixed,” she said, tilting her head, tilting her head down, “and trauma.” She read what sounded like journal entries on scrap paper. The writing itself, while intensely personal, wasn’t good: she used metaphors for no particular purpose; she was deliberately vague about the subject matter; and there was little movement within the poem, whether in narrative, structure, or language. She finished to the audience clapping and someone yelling, “GO SAM!” There were, no kidding, another three poems read by whites with safety scissor ‘Fuck You, Dad’ haircuts insisting Newtown belonged to them, all met with wild applause. Then the event was over. I headed out of the container, where Sam and Ferrari stood in a tight circle with Cool Ethnics in black drapes and Alternative Whites in ski jackets, joint rotating between them. I said hi to a few people I’d seen on Twitter and went back to Macdonaldtown station alone. Everything about Hell’s Lettres was super white, from the university-educated crowd LARPing poverty, to the intentionally shitty venue, to the hints of possession in writing about place, to the pervasive irony that was a disclaimer for casual racism. Still, everyone there was friendly enough, and it was nice to experience this kind of space. This community formed around sharing writing stands in contrast to my experiences at SWEATSHOP where, even

after five years, my hands still shake when I read. Hell’s Lettres values reading and writing as inherently good; SWEATSHOP, on the other hand, seeks to turn writing into iterature, an exclusive subset of writing. As Michael Mohammed Ahmed argues in and demonstrates through his essay ‘Bad Writer’ in Sydney Review of Books, good writing is specific, unique, and memorable - all the better to convey its author’s subjectivity writing produced by SWEATSHOP is literature, regardless of whether or not it fits in the Western canon. I don’t consider all of the writing showcased in Hell’s Lettres to be literature. In a sense, that’s its success: it appears to reject literary gatekeeping. I’ll go further in saying that creating literature is incidental to its goal of sharing writing: Ferrari prefaced his poem with an excuse for its terrible quality, while Sam’s earnestness drowned out any judgements of value. In either case, the physical presence of the writers demanded validation, making the very thought of literary merit gauche. In this sense, Hell’s Lettres doesn’t aim to create literature, instead celebrating radical vulnerability and sincerity. Writing that is not literature can be as valuable as therapy, record keeping, or entertainment. The point, however, is that Hell’s Lettres and SWEATSHOP present different environments where audiences encounter writing, affecting the ways that the former receive and value the latter. At Hell’s Lettres, then, the imperative is on the audience to empathise with the author. Perhaps this serves as an important reminder that all writing comes from human sources, and is always valid regardless of its quality, an anti-literariness predicated on radical community building. Considering the homogeneity of its audience (young, tertiary educated, and craving the authenticity of a life lived in poverty), however, I’d argue against any form of radicalism. If anything, writers at Hell’s Lettres are rewarded neither for their merit nor for their humanity but for their cultural capital accrued within this alternative space, where white mediocrity and tokenism are as rampant as they are in the mainstream. I’ve been using the word ‘read’ loosely, referring both to the ways in which writing is shared and consumed. Empathy is a requirement in either case. Perhaps Hell’s Lettres is right in demanding audience empathy - how else could one withstand Sam’s earnestness? But Sam is the exception in a line-up of writers like Ferrari, who make a show of apathy to hide their desire for unconditional validation. What results is the writer’s entitlement to empathy without putting anything at stake, an entitlement better described as narcissism. Good reading, in the sense of sharing writing, meets the audience halfway in terms of empathy: occupying space respectfully by being either entertaining or genuine. In any context outside of Hell’s Lettres, I know what I’d say to Ferrari and his ilk: Fuck off, you’re full of shit.

TAKE UP AND READ By Anne Boyer

ost books contain at least one terrible thing, though they usually hold many, and some carry inside of them previously unthinkable tragedies, holocausts, decimations, and heartbreaks. To read a book is to acquire the manifest of a ship full of trouble. Books hold perversions and prejudices and are as ample as the law as containers for murder, heresy, and lust. Books do worse than contain the worst - they expose it in themselves. They unravel. They self-defeat. They disappoint, like when as a child I read the Bible straight through and concluded that I could not believe in a religion whose god had such inconsistent literary taste. Books are lurid and private and heavy. They devour time, disrupt space, distort chronologies. The good ones haunt more than ghosts, and decades after reading a book, I might still recall its events in a fugue as if I had married Jo March’s German philosopher or drowned with my brother in the flooding River Floss. Books ruined my life, and I love them. I love the absorption that comes with reading, the selfannihilative surrender to the dead or far away, the luring and the transporting and the cathecting, but like a lot that I love, none of these things are all that edifying. If a book is promising, I read it in a bathtub full of hot water and soak for as long as possible. This is as if introducing amniotic fluid to a library; reading in the bath I am revising my fetal ignorance, because in the beginning I knew nothing. I was born woefully under-read. I have no honey-laced feelings about that. We were all once babies and small and though we were not stupid, we behaved stupidly, unaware of all that governs human life. I trusted my senses and, with them, the world for when I had not yet learned to read - the first year, and the second, and well into the third - I knew nothing about the contents of books firsthand except their surface phenomena and alphabets. Eventually I learned enough to know that to be a child was a condition that required a remedy. I studied letters until they became words. I learned to read, learned the species disaster: literacy was the remedy for childhood. I read too much - everyone agreed - and in this too much of library books, newspapers, and product packaging, I learned that reading could make a person (me) isolated, abstract, and subject to ridicule. I learned more, too, like how a person reading around other people can make them feel lonely and slightly terrified, I understand, too, that a person who is reading - particularly if they are a woman is most often a person neglecting someone or something, all of us like the readers in Courbet’s paintings whose chemises fall off their shoulders, whose shoes fall off their feet, whose hands touch their faces absently and cease, for a time, all work. But as bad as reading has been for me, reading is not merely the private amplification of the human worst. Reading is not only escapism and militant solitude and everything shirked - that is, reading is not an act exclusive to words and books - and a person can also read the patterns of

HOW SHOULD A PERSON READ migrating birds or the lines in a soon-to-be-lover’s palm or the buds of oak trees or the damaged look in an eye or the danger headed this way or the people amassed in the streets. The world existed before books, and it always exists outside of them: that is, how a person should read is how a person must read, which is at least in duplicate, both always in this world and looking for another.

I SHOULD READ LIZARD-NOVELLAS By Caren Beilin

am sitting on a log in the sun-to-come sun of March, at the end of a short park by my place. I can see the skyline and a few men are spotted about and walking by. My nerves are on the fritz, from men. I like this sun; it’s from a time I remember living in Seattle, in the straining sun at the end of a summer. I wanted to be (sitting outside of a cupcake cafe) a hyper-desirable colander for all of it to strain right into. I did not think as poorly about men at that time. But now I live in the paranoid regime of hating men - when I say “man” I am speaking of him in his domination against conventional woman, as a universal historical subject, artefact, and as a living fossil. Something happens in the park. A man comes up and says, “I thought, from over there, you were a man.” I read the man, trying to figure out what’s wrong with him, economically and mentally. I think I look struck, reading him like this, so spiritedly. He says to me: “Please don’t curse me out,” and ambles off. Now I’m so spiritually reading the park, for any more men. The approaching gender. The veterans who live in their house half a block there. The man on the bench with his dogs, howling with them lovingly. “I thought you were a man” - past tense, thought, because I did flip in the mind into woman, then I was come up to. My eyes are loping everywhere, scouring glimpses of any other women, some witnesses. I read any place like that, like a woman but I’m not a woman. I read how I’m being read, at a bar called Writer’s Block Henry Millers out at tilts on some of the tables, these terrible, terrible coasters. Overblown. Over- written. Sexus coaster, and other tomes: My Struggle coaster. Infinite Jest like a horrible dais for a cocktail. The manager of this place says, as I sit there alone waiting for someone (a man), “Seriously you seem like a nice girl; sit down.” What will it mean for me, to be read Girl spontaneously everywhere like this? What a mess. And nice? You experience this - language a prick on experience.A little prick on what you were, and now it’s just gone. I feel like a lizard. I have felt like one. I want to transition to my lizard-genitality, through clothing. I eye a marigold sheath and a violet vinyl hood. But I would also want the procedures. To get the scale hormone and start living. Coldblood infusions and start living as myself, with a more honest, more obvious, more exclusive and more sexual interest in the desert. At last, but where is the science? I wasn’t trained in school to read for meaning, because of postmodernism. But all I do is speculate threats. I read men all day. Paranoid reader, a necessitated woman. I need to

read men. A man walks with aimlessness too close to my writing log in the park, with his little dog, and I read him defensively, seepingly. I seethe into his whole face. I plunge in his brain and bite him there badly. I’m sad. Is he walking or approaching? Which? I need to know if I need to go and I read to know if this park works. Can I work in a park? I need to read for meaning and ready myself for an actual plot. A man follows behind on a bike. A book (a lot of the time) is like a man on a slow-behind-me-bike. I have to watch out for the slow behind way it’s all going, the bike in relation and distinction from the moon! Like the Belgian writer Jean-Philippe Toussaint, who pushes women off of the stage of international literature, and forces them to be waitresses, songstresses, students, strippers, and avid readers in a world of male professors, administrators, and literary writers, in his novella Self-Portrait Abroad. You have to read what’s wheeling behind you in the putrid eggplant anti-light of any time on earth, it’s the reading I’ve done most. All through school, and now. But I come across a little gasp. A lizard-novella, written in the desert. There is no park. Unica Zurn’s The Trumpets of Jericho, Ananda Devi’s Eve Out of Her Ruins. Desperate. A gasp. A novella, no villa at all. Unluxurious anti-time, no home on earth. A ferocious and brief tactic. Short knife. Clarice Lispector. Stream of Life. Steven Dunn, his Potted Meat - to say it - quick before the manager commands. Sit down. You’re nice. I thought you were a man, but you are not. It has to be so quick, a wristness, to write before you read. Then it’s over. Marguerite Duras’s The Lover.

HOW SHOULD A PERSON READ? By Elizabeth Flux

ne time I was reading American Psycho on a tram and had just gotten to a scene of breathtaking violence. I had the cover angled down, so no one could see the title, but was still paranoid that someone might look over my shoulder, see the graphic murder being committed on the page and judge me. The tram stopped and a kind-looking lady got on and made straight for the empty seat next to mine. I immediately slipped the book into my bag and spent the rest of the trip looking out of the window aimlessly, the picture of wholesome nonchalance. For what is supposedly a solitary activity, reading seems to come with a large invisible audience. The amount you read, who you read, and how much of it you can plough through in a year seems to say something about you - more so than any other pastime. As a result it is hard to figure out if you are reading for yourself or for other people. Reading is encouraged and venerated in a way that few hobbies are. My TV hours were closely monitored as I grew up, and films were equally rationed. Books, however, were mine to consume at as fast a rate as I was able to. I was allowed to read at restaurants, in the car, at the breakfast table. During Princess Diana’s funeral, as the neighbourhood gathered around our TV, I sat in the corner and read five Goosebumps books. Parents are proud to call their children

HOW SHOULD A PERSON READ

avid readers, but no one pats you on the head and says “I hear you’re keen on TV - your mum told me you even watched last week’s Dawson’s Creek twice!” It’s odd when you think about it. Reading is seen as an ‘intelligent’ activity, in a way that TV isn’t, even though arguably both are about storytelling and learning. Perhaps it is because reading has an element of initiative, while even smart TV shows are viewed as choosing a travelator instead of walking. Reading is a slog, and so finishing a book, fairly or unfairly, is seen as more of an accomplishment than spending the same amount of time staring at a screen or playing a tape. From the outset, reading was set up as a competitive activity for me. My school did every read-a-thon, and each year we had a reading chart which I was determined to ‘win’. It always came down to me and one other girl, and, though we never said it aloud, we both wanted to be crowned Best Reader so badly that we read books we didn’t actually want to, as well as furtively reading an extra paragraph or two whenever we opened our desks during other classes. Then, even after I’d established myself as a ‘fast’ reader, teachers, family and friends were then concerned with what I was reading. At one point I was actually banned from the Babysitters Club shelf in the junior school library because it was deemed that I could ‘do better’. There was no further explanation beyond that; just that the series was somehow less worthy than other books I could be reading despite these being specifically written with my age group in mind. Perhaps they spent too much time describing everyone’s outfits, maybe the plots were too simple. Perhaps it was just too American. It’s strange how we can ‘know’ that some books are ‘lesser’ but when it comes to trying to explain why, we end up just like Stacey trying to chat up a hunky, tanned lifeguard a few grades older: stumbling over our words and embarrassing ourselves. It only got more complex from there. Reading purely for yourself would, in theory, mean reading anything and everything that appeals to you with no outside input - but could such a pure state ever truly exist? What would a somehow-literate person raised in a society-free vacuum choose to read, if anything, if they were suddenly presented with every book in the world? Do we owe it to the world to read more widely than comes naturally to us in order to become better people? Or should we just accept it as another hedonistic pursuit with no goal other than entertainment of the individual? Either way most people seem to have a foot in each camp - there are the books we want to be seen

reading, and then there is everything else. Any time I pick up a book it comes with a side order of shame. Don’t get me wrong - I love reading - but to choose any one book is to reject another, and with that comes decision paralysis. Is this the book I should be reading right now? Is it making me more intelligent or teaching me new things? Should something else be at the top of my reading stack? Is the book ‘trash’? Am I judgemental for mentally filtering books into ‘highbrow’ and ‘merely time passing’? Does it matter that I read from both ‘categories’ equally? Am I terrible for borrowing from the library instead of buying a copy? Am I reading in a bubble? Am I reading abroad enough cross section of authors? It got to the point where choosing a book became so difficult that I’d end up starting about five and finishing none. Then, following yet another reading failure, I’d pick up either a Harry Potter or an Agatha Christie novel, read that, then start the whole process again. This went on for years and boy did the invisible audience which may or may not actually exist get judgemental about it. The only way I managed to escape from the literary sinkhole of my own creation was to institute an ever-growing and flawed list of rules that I regularly break. How do I support the local industry without running entirely out of money? Buy books by Australian authors, borrow everything else from the library. How do I use reading to challenge myself? Then, beyond that, how can I avoid getting trapped in the cycle of reading the same kinds of books all the time? Take up recommendations, and always finish every book started, no matter how much it might feel like crawling through maple syrup. How to make sure I finish books I don’t want to finish? Harness stress constructively by borrowing them from the library; angry emails about due dates are very motivational and the shame of walking in to pay a 70c fine is enough to fuel at least thirty minutes of speed-reading. There is still a part of me that wants to be crowned Best Reader. I now know that this is an ever-moving goalpost. It’s not a case of reading the most books, the longest books, or the most complex books. It’s just a case of trying to ignore the invisible audience and reading any books at all - while reconciling myself to the fact that, even if it’s of old age, I’ll probably die with unread novels on my shelf.

SWIMMING IN HISTORY, IF YOU CAN FIND THE WATER PATRICIA SMITH & HAYAN CHARARA

ayan Charara and Patricia Smith meet in the rapids of an email exchange.

Hayan Charara: We’ve got a friend in common, the poet Diana Goetsch, whose poem ‘Black People Can’t Swim’ is a favourite of mine. It opens: When I told Patricia how much I loved the pool at the Y, she said, “Oh, black people can’t swim,” which made me grateful to be let in on this, not the information, but the intimacy the fact that she could let fly with such a piece of black-on-black attitude without the slightest bit of shame or self-consciousness. Are you the Patricia in this poem? Do you want to talk about this?

Patricia Smith: I am indeed the exalted Patricia. The incident in question took place when Diana was Doug - she was a former student who was a better writer than I was from the very beginning. I’d see her once or twice a year, and the meeting was always more of a messy collision-updates, jealousy, measured flirtation, misty recollection, competition. I had no idea that the ‘he’ was considering ‘she’, but that’s beside the point. We were with a gaggle of gals, one of who had designs on our Goetsch - we were strolling the streets as a group, leaving or approaching something to eat, dawdling in store windows. I remember how utterly foreign chitchat about “hanging out at the pool” was to me, and the God-honest truth was the best way I knew to shut down that line of convo. Sorry, kiddo. We don’t swim. I remember Doug/Diana (I’m all over the place, I know, with names and gender assignments, but what are the rules? I’m speaking of a time when someone who is now a woman was a man but is now such a kickass woman that the old ‘he’ seems an insult. Oh, well.) I remember Double-D (I think she’ll like that) probing me as her nosy self so enjoyed doing, scribbling those mental notes, turning me into eventual poem fodder. We. don’t. swim. I attempted to introduce her to the early sixties on the west side of Chicago. Where would we find the pools, honey?

I have been immortalized in a Goetsch masterwork, but I still don’t swim. Pools are now abundant, and it no longer seems to be a problem if a black person sticks a toe (or a torso) in. But I never trusted the water. Shimmering on top, dark beneath. I don’t trust rivers, so I don’t trust pools. I think my mama drilled in that lesson. Something about disappeared people. Something about Emmett Till. The Tallahatchie was wet too, right?

Hayan Charara: I’ve known the Goetsch poem for years, known Diana for longer, but I never asked if it was you, even though I wondered all along. I’m glad I finally asked. So, I grew up in Detroit, and at least in my neighborhood, no one owned a pool. As an Arab kid, I didn’t have the ghost of Emmett Till haunting me, but most of my friends must have. Their parents would have been kids the summer of 1955, when they found Emmett Till’s body. For me, something like that - a tragedy that would’ve prompted my parents to keep me from something they wouldn’t have otherwise - was not keeping me from a body of water, but from an entire country. I wasn’t even three years old when the Lebanese Civil War began, and I was finishing high school when the war ended. In all that time, my parents never took me or my sister to Lebanon, which was where they were born, a place I knew well, at least in my imagination, because my parent stalked about it all my life. But except for a trip taken there when I was an infant, I never again set foot in Lebanon. In this way, Detroit is more than just my hometown; it’s my homeland. And if you know any thing about Detroit in the seventies and eighties, you realize how depressing a statement this is. But not nearly as much as saying the same thing about Lebanon during the same time period. Anyhow, I still managed to learn how to swim - the hard way: I was thrown in a lake and then told to swim or drown. I took a very different approach with my own kids. I saw on Facebook that you’re going to be headed to Tuscany sometime soon, to write. What are you going to work on there? Or what are you working on now?

Patricia Smith: Ah, we are more alike than you know. You didn’t know Lebanon. I didn’t know the South.

PATRICIA SMITH & HAYAN CHARARA When my mother came up from Alabama to Chicago during the Great Migration, she fully had no intention at all of being a transplant. She wanted her life to begin the moment she stepped off that Greyhound. She was ashamed of her homemade clothes, ashamed of the twang in her speech, ashamed of what she was sure white folks would consider a shabby upbringing. So she struggled to reinvent herself, and she sure as hell wasn’t gonna have “no country child.” The only way I would make it in life, she thought, was to convince me to be as white as possible. And being white meant never admitting to that dirty South in my history. She never talked about it, and as she snapped those links to my Southern lineage, she cut me off from my own history. She didn’t regale me with stories about the sprawling hamlet of Aliceville, Alabama, and she kept me away from relatives who were still living down South. So I knew I had a history, I even knew where it was, but for all my life she’s held it at arm’s length, frustrated by my determination to know more about “nasty ol’ Alabama stuff.” Emmett died in the south, in that horrible horrible way. So that’s not a place you want to care about, chile. Nothing good for you there. The first time I saw a pool, I was twelve years old, and I was at camp. On the first day, to decide your swimming level, they asked us, one by one, to get from one end of the pool to the other. They figured that the ones who could swim would swim, and the ones who couldn’t swim would walk (it wasn’t very deep). But wise ol’ Patty Ann decided that swimming couldn’t be that hard. I’d seen swimming. It involved floating, and how hard could that be? My name was called, I jumped in, and I did that hilarious scoop-clutch-flail thing for about ten feet before sinking quite dramatically. Really cemented my rep for that camp session, as you might imagine. City girl didn’t like bugs, got scraped up easily, was definitely at odds with the outdoors, but hey, I had provided a year’s worth of entertainment. I still don’t swim. Detroit. You like Motown? You MUST like Motown, or we will cease this conversation. Do you dance? I’m going to write fiction in Italy. Short stories starring the mothers of the murdered. Right now I’m working on a book of dramatic monologues to accompanying ninteenth century photos of African-Americans. My husband and I have a huge collection. It’s the project I proposed for the Guggenheim, and I feel guilty that I haven’t made a move on it yet.

Hayan Charara: Yes, I like Motown. For a while, when I was young, I would go with my father to his regular doctor visits and they were more regular than not - that’s another story - anyhow, the doctor’s office was on Grand Boulevard, close to Hitsville. My parents also had Motown and Motown era 8-tracks at home. They listened mostly to singers from the Arab world,

greats like Oum Kalthoum and Fairuz, Wadih el Safi, and Mohammed Abdel Wahab (to most Arabs, at least my parents’ age, names like these ring bells the way Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, or Frank Sinatra do for Americans). Anyhow, the singer I loved most from the Motown era - and still do - is Aretha Franklin, who Berry Gordy tried but failed to sign onto his record label. I still love Aretha. And even before my boys knew how to walk, I would play them Aretha’s songs, and they would hold onto something, a table, a chair, and shake and dance. I don’t dance, not really. Unless it’s for my kids, or my wife. I’m too self-conscious, and I am the last person I want to see dancing. A lot of my friends in Detroit share the migration story you told. Their mothers and fathers or grandparents came up to Detroit, for work. That’s why most of my family made it to Detroit, in the sixties, from Lebanon - to work in the factories. We experienced something different, though, in terms of identification with our ‘lineage.’ My parents worried so much that we’d lose our heritage - language, customs, practices, or even the sense of community they tried hard to foster, despite living several thousand miles from their homeland. The reason for this, I think, has to do with the fact that my parents were not among the first wave of immigrants. Others had come before them; that generation worked hard to assimilate - changing their names (Americanizing them) and doing many of the things you describe about your upbringing: trying to be ‘white’ in whatever ways they could. There’s a famous court case, from 1915, that attests to this: a man named George Dow sued the United States, which twice denied his naturalization application; long story short, Dow argued that his application should be approved on the basis of the racial schema used at the time, and according to Dow, he - and people from parts of Asia, including Syria and the Middle East generally - should be considered ‘white.’ My parents weren’t part of that generation. They were a part of that second wave of immigrants, informed, in part, by the larger cultural and social movements of the late sixties, and the revolutionary ideas sweeping the globe at the time. They were proud of their difference. They definitely didn’t think of themselves as white, and nobody else did either. My parents, and the parents of all the Arab kids I knew, instilled in us every kind of ‘Arabness’ they could muster. I had a cousin whose father would not allow us to speak English in his house. He was stern, too, so we didn’t dare break his rules. Despite all this, my parents worried more about our physical safety than our cultural heritage. My parents both came from a village in southern Lebanon, BintJbeil, which is just a little over a mile north of the Israeli border. The civil war was horrific, and even though other families went overseas and back, safely, I know that my father, at least, didn’t feel he could go back so soon - he was too politically active, and this may have meant he was risking too much

SWIMMING IN HISTORY, IF YOU CAN FIND THE WATER by returning. He did eventually return, though, permanently (my mother died before she could do the same). In 2003, he went back, and three years later, war broke out again, this time with Israel. Israeli bombardment in this war - the Lebanese call it the July War - destroyed so many cities and towns. My father’s house was spared only because it’s situated at the top of a hill - the Israelis could see, plainly, there was nothing going on at the house; tactically speaking, on the Lebanese side, it was useless because it was an open target. It got riddled with bullet holes, but otherwise, it survived the war unscathed. The village, though - schools, pharmacies, hospitals, and a lot of people did not survive. I have a poem about this, called ‘Animals.’ It’s up at the Poetry Foundation, and in my new book, Something Sinister. We have one more thing in common, at least, and that’s a children’s book-both of our books are published by Lee & Low, in fact. My book is actually based on the war between Israel and Lebanon. From a kid’s perspective. With cats. And with a lot more hope in it than in the poem ‘Animals.’ The book is called The Three Lucys. I’ll tell you a little about my book if you tell me about yours.

Patricia Smith: Motown was, is, and will always be my soundtrack. After my mother and father separated (I was ten - for the life of me, I don’t know how he stood living with her for that long), I was stuck living with a pretty non-communicative parent. I had questions. No answers were forthcoming. So I got all my ideas about life, love and romance from Motown lyrics. You can imagine how that impossibly rosy mindset screwed me when adulthood loomed - I grew up with the mistaken notion that I was born to be begged for by some silverthroated crooner. It didn’t matter that I lived in a neighborhood populated by single-parent families, that storybook romance was not in residence. All it took was a beautiful anguished “please, please” from one of the lookers in Berry Gordy’s stable. Smokey Robinson was a particular favorite, thanks to the muddled directives on race coming from my mother. If only my broad nose wasn’t so broad. If only my skin didn’t remind her of mud. Smokey’s skin was light and his hair silky, which was as close to white as any black man was ever gonna get. Since nothing could be done about my regrettable hue, I could at least crush on someone who didn’t have to try so hard. His voice was like pouring cream. That sly little crooner broke my heart several times over but I still love him. Checked him out live in concert a couple of years ago, and my innards are still shivering. I’m intrigued by the fact that your parents mixed Motown with Arab favorites. Would love to hear a musical mashup. So, who do you think I’d like best - Oum Kalthoum and Fairuz, Wadih el Safi or Mohammed Abdel Wahab? (I’ve forced myself not to listen to any of them in advance.) I love Ella, and am one of the few black folks who’s memorised

many of Sinatra’s hits (my favorite is ‘The Tender Trap’). I’m surprised that you loved and love Aretha. Her level of soul can be disturbing - as my father used to say, “best fitted for a dark blue room when you’re sipping a deep brown drink.” You ever had the blues? When? And why? (BTW, I have made a solemn vow to see you dance. It may be difficult, but I’m determined. My guess is AWP.) Meanwhile what an odd story of parallel migration - my parents running away from their past, yours struggling to resurrect it in their new home. Like I said before, links to my history were ruled by shame. White, white, white was the only answer to overcoming that shame - replacing it with an almost laughable denial. (For some strange reason, the sordid tale of Rachel Dolezal just flashed into my head. She’s the white woman who’s struggling to convince the world that she’s a bonafide African American. How - sigh - far we’ve come.) All I can say is that all my mother’s parental instruction ended with the same three words: • Don’t be saying ‘ain’t’ ’round white people. • You’ve got to wear good clothes ’round white people. • You best to learn how to say ‘Yes, ma’am’ and ‘Yessir’ if you’re gonna be ’round white people • And my favorite: “Don’t act colored when you’re ’round white people.” As if color was something I could control. The social and cultural crusades of the sixites passed right over my parents’ heads. According to my mother, it was all “white people bizness” - and though she constantly nudged me to make white people business my business (“Pinch your nose while you’re watchin’ TV so it won’t be so wide”), that didn’t apply to any form of revolution. “Black power” was something white people said. My physical safety was a concern too, but in a different way. Chicago was and is WAY more segregated than my folks expected it to be, so my mother’s way of introducing me to that brave new world was to keep me away from it. Don’t ride the bus because it might cross over into a neighborhood where they don’t like black folks. Come home when the streetlights come on, because that’s when all the shiftless colored folks come out. Don’t go to that store, because I don’t think they like when black folks come in there. Don’t live too loud and call attention to yourself. I feel like I grew up on the wrong side of a window. There was a real war going on - Vietnam. I remember being plopped down in front of the television, with no explanation of what I was going to see, and watching battle footage. I remember that little crawler at the bottom of the screen this many dead yesterday, this many dead today, this many dying right now. I’m still ashamed to say that that war might as well have been on the moon. I wonder if my parents ever considered that they had a home to go back to. Instead, our war was in Chicago, right after Martin Luther King’s assassination, when our west side neighborhood was burned to its bones by rioters. It was the first time I realized that, as far as the larger city

PATRICIA SMITH & HAYAN CHARARA

was concerned, Chicago’s new migrants were expendable. It was years before the community was rebuilt. Grudgingly. I wrote a lot about the migration, the community and the experience of being “first generation up north” in my book Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah. I haven’t really written the truth about my mother, though. I suppose that’s coming. Your poem knocked all the air out of my day. I went looking for more of you. Wow. Can’t understand why I didn’t already know your work. So, we’re Lee & Low brethren! And we’re both New Voices Award winners. My book Janna and the Kings came from my experience of joining my dad at the neighborhood barbershop when I was a kid. It’s where I learned to love elderly black men - they let me in on their gossip, taught me to play cards, told me corny jokes and whirled me around on that little leather throne. The book imagines a young girl, very much like me, who hangs with her grandfather and his friends at the barbershop, then wonders if there’s still a place for her there after her grandfather dies. I moved that Lee & Low Award call around my desk for months - when I finally addressed it, the manuscript was due the next day. I didn’t realize how much I loved that story, how much I had internalized it. And like a fool, after the award I thought I could just crank out a kid’s book whenever I wanted. It’s hard work - everything’s been written about already! Did you ever think about writing another one?

Hayan Charara:

I just saw some of the Lee & Low people in San Antonio, at a conference for librarians. I talked to Jason Low, and he said wonderful things about Janna and The Kings. Years ago, when I lived in New York City, I tried writing a children’s book, and I did, but it ended up not a children’s book. A decade later, Naomi Shihab Nye urged me to try again, and she told me about Lee & Low. The Three Lucys is a war story, a true story (based on my little brother’s experiences during the war - the July War, as the Lebanese call it - between Lebanon and Israel.) Obviously, kids lived through that war, as they’ve lived through every other war on the earth. But too many war stories focus on the men fighting them, not the children and hardly ever the animals, either, that get caught up in the violence. And most of the stories written about war, or during war, aren’t meant for children to read. I don’t see why not. Not if it’s done right - which is the case for any work of literature. With The Three Lucys, when war breaks out, the main character and his family take shelter away from their home, but all the while the boy, Luli, worries about his three pet cats, who are left behind, and they all happen to be named Lucy: Lucy the Skinny, Lucy the Fat, and Lucy Lucy. Every kid who has a pet, at some point, deals with the loss of that pet. That’s what the boy in this story learns to deal with. Every kid, at some point, is frightened, too, and the book shows us how this amily works through fear as well. In the end, the book ends on a sad note, yes, but it’s hopeful, and along the way there’s humor, there’s laughter, there

SWIMMING IN HISTORY, IF YOU CAN FIND THE WATER

are good times - life goes on, even in wartime, but especially in times like these, people (children and adults) need ways to heal, to grow, and the book allows kids a way into healing and growth. I’m sure I’ll write something else for children. Right now, though, I’m working on a novel that is definitely not for kids, not ever, though kids play a major role in the story. I’m glad you got to read ‘Animals.’ Glad it knocked the air out of you. That was the intention. Khaled Mattawa told me once that the poem, to him, felt like getting stabbed in the stomach, and then the knife getting twisted. That’s what the events described in the poem felt like in actuality. I think your father got it right about Aretha Franklin: “best fitted for a dark room when you’re sipping a deep brown drink” - at least the songs I listen to over and over. ‘Ain’t No Way, for example, or ‘Say A Little Prayer.’ Doesn’t everyone have the blues? They should. I’m a happy person, mostly, but horrible stuff has happened to people I know, and love, and people who look like me, and people who don’t look like me who I don’t know, and it’s unacceptable for people to go around not wondering whether life on earth is worthwhile. The answer, some of the time, is no. I’m not advocating that people bail on life, or the earth (though that’s a thought), but that people do something. And the first step is getting informed. But that’s only a first step. After that, maybe the second step is a good song and a good drink. After that, people need to do something more, and by ‘something’ I don’t mean post about it on Facebook or Twitter or ‘like’ a picture or post about people getting

fucked over. I mean donating money to an organization, or volunteering, or supporting people who do more than these things. I’m ranting ... again. Forgive me. But I needed to. I know you know what I’m talking about. Anyhow, even if the world could be beautiful all the time, everywhere, there’s the usual sadness that comes with being human. My mother died when I was young. There’s that. My father could have been a nicer man without demons. There’s that. Thank goodness for music. And drinks. And food and all the things that make us forget until we have to remember. I still don’t know about dancing. If you can pull that off, people should keep an eye out for flying pigs and the like. So, when it comes to great Arab singers, I think people will lose their shit if I don’t tell you to start with Oum Kalthoum. For me, she was an acquired taste. I began with Fairuz, but maybe you could YouTube both, in one sitting. Once you’ve listened to Fairuz and Oum Khalthoum you should check out the vocals-only versions of your favorite songs - it’s a thing, apparently. There are all these audio tracks of original studio recordings of popular songs but with only the vocal tracks. The best one I’ve heard so far is Queen’s ‘Somebody to Love.’ You can hear every breath Freddie Mercury takes; you can hear him running out of breath. I’m probably wrong about this, but I don’t know how anyone can’t think it’s amazing. I just got goosebumps remembering it. I think that’s my cue to stop talking.

PUBLIC SPACES: MIND STREET VIRUS PETER POLITES

Public Spaces are contested sites, places that are inscribed and then re-inscribed by history, experience, memory, power. For this issue, the Brow asked four writers to tell us about a space that, for whatever reason, is meaningful to them as a site of resistance or empowerment.

ou entered the street at witching hour and there was a sign with big nostalgic lettering that said ‘Welcome to Whatever!’ The sign grew out of blue-green buffalo grass and underneath it a cursive font announced that this place was the ‘Home of the Kerbside Landfill and Kidnapped Shopping Trolley’. On either side of the street were some high-density apartments filled with low income apparatchiks. They conglomerated in committees on balconies of redbrick flats that were three storeys high. Was barbecue city that day and smoke rose like clumps of plastic bags from the balconies. Might have made you think that there was a lonesomeness amongst rock cliffs that were nobody’s business. This was never your home, your land, but when you parked your arse on a three foot-high fence next to mail boxes (that go up to the same number as your age) you saw it. It was a Painted Firetail, a variety of Australian Finch-Emblem a Picta and it was tethered by masticated saliva to an awning. And because once you were the Goody Two Shoes type, you climbed up to free it. You placed the delicate thing between your index finger and thumb and dislodged it. The protected species flew off. She flew away. She navigated those clumpsof-plastic-bag smoke that came from the barbecues, and from binocular eyes you saw all up the street of your mind. And it wasn’t witching hour. It was dinnertime. Those balcony apparatchiks had endangered avian species on the barbecues. Coals burned, filling your nostrils with burning feathers and scorched beaks. My oh my - the humanity of it.

SKETCH FOR A DISSOCIATED CHILD RICHARD M HANSON

“I began to mourn for my spirit and the spirits of all people who cast a shadow a long way beyond what they are” Nightwood

All felt important, and so it was good. His parents didn’t like seeing him leave. At the gate he was mournful, and it was cold, just like it would be when he arrived. On the 5th of December 2015, Richard Hanson, having saved a small sum of money from high school tutoring to purchase board, food, travel, and a little fun along the way, caught a plane from Melbourne to Frankfurt for a planned two months across Europe. It was his first trip travelling alone. After two uneasy flights, made bearable by the sedation of Stilnox and Valium, he arrived in Germany, and from there caught the shuttle to a central railway station before boarding a pre-booked train to the Czech Republic. It was a long trip to Prague, and he grew weary on the way. It was an effort co-ordinating platforms, luggage, the tired wrestling of his brain and that raw and anxious edge that comes with long flights, changing time zones. The drugs had helped him get to sleep, but once an inspector, or the woman who couldn’t stop sneezing, woke him he often stayed awake, growing gradually uneasy. At midnight he arrived in Prague, hungry and unwashed. His phone had no signal. He spent an hour chain-smoking and marching about the city, his heart beating hard. Prague is not like Melbourne; it sprawls and curves, its street names are foreign. Sweat dripped dry in the cold on his skin. The hostel was reached, his dormitory confirmed. A Canadian receptionist gave him a free beer, for which he was thankful. It was less than two euros for beer or cider. Sleepless and jittery, Richard dropped his bags on the thin frame of his mattress. It was an otherwise plain dormitory with psychedelic mushrooms for wallpaper. Someone was sleeping nearby. He walked down sawdust stairs and into the alley for a cigarette in the cold. When he returned to the foyer the guests were having dinner. He joined them and drank, eating little. The cider was strong and refreshing. At about nine they all tumbled out of the hostel and into the street, walking as one towards a packed bar a kilometre away. That you could smoke inside was what Richard liked most. Pounding, blaring, sultry. Words to describe the place. A lot of stroking chests and smooth talk. The guests were mostly Westerners. They drank a lot. Richard kept his eyes open for drugs but there weren’t any. As the travellers flirted

and grinned around him, waves of tiredness, irritation, and adrenaline passed through him at odd angles. Afterwards they made their way to Chapeau Rouge, a Prague staple. There were a few drunks about but the crowd was thin. An empty, smoky place before it started buzzing. For several minutes Richard listened to a girl explain how unfair it was that she hadn’t been given a scholarship to ANU. The hostellers were all kissing each other and dancing with eyes wide open. It made him scowl and want to sleep. He smoked some weed and drank a mojito, tried his tired luck on the dancefloor, then stumbled outside. It took him a long time to get back to the hostel. He ate KFC on the way because he was high. It was good to fall into bed but he was unhappy with the night. There had been no art or real fun. Still, he knew he would find drugs in the coming days, and some interesting people and artists too. That grand independent European adventure had begun. He awoke before midday and walked around the city for a few hours. A strange guilt came over him occasionally. A hangover’s guilt, for the blank spots in memory - what did I do wrong? It was almost masochistic. At a taverna away from the city centre he ate fried bread and drank mulled wine. As the drink filled him up, he read his book and wrote letters to his family. In between cigarettes and sharp clove wine he made notes on the night before. Organic writing, he hoped, flung from immersion and experience. Later, Richard made his way north of the city to a latenight taverna. The afternoon brought darkness, though it was bright and warm and loud inside. Everyone spoke Czech. A lot of students were supposed to hang about in the cafe, and sure enough several laptop, coffee, headphone and book wielding twentysomethings quietly inhabited the place, which was decorated with music paraphernalia. Richard felt alive. For several hours he drank beer, smoked, nibbled at bread, and read and wrote. It was good to read as a drunkard, enthralled in the mirth and sentiment of Flann’s gentle faux-philosophy. His vision first grew molten, hazy, and finally blurry and waterlike. A few minutes before ten he staggered outside, having footed the bill and smiled sweetly at the waitress. After a few confused turns he reached the hostel to find the other guests had already left for the night’s fun. He had wanted to go out but he was slightly ill and very drunk. Just past eleven, after drinking a beer in the hope of perking himself up, he sank into his mattress, dressed in jeans and jacket.

He awoke, once more, a short time before midday, confused and dazed and guilty again. This pattern - rising, walking, smoking, sitting and reading and writing, walking, smoking, drinking and reading again - continued for four days; four sweet small days, before it all collapsed.

detached and doubtful, disconcerted and disproportionately frightened, eager for daylight to arrive. Which it did, bringing with it its own brand of fear.

III.

Anxiety is bad; it tears you out of life and back to the thud of your heart, the unreal-real catastrophe. It’s a primitive beast. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder ruptures the plain of day; it promises and savagely retracts. It’s a In the years before his twentieth year, Richard had force that correlates precisely with the word compulsion been identified as depressed, anxious, obsessive-compulsive, - it insists upon autonomy. Depression nullifies life within disordered in his eating, self-destructive in his habits, prone life. If there are things that make life worth living, the to paranoia, hallucinations, and, perhaps most importantly, energy needed to engage with and appreciate those things possessing a wild - and burgeoning - propensity for is smudged and inverted, turned hideously against itself. cramming up his nostrils, beneath his tongue, and between But those things are still there; they’ve merely become a his teeth whatever substances he could find that would confused mess of emotion, sadness, and motivation. You make his subjective experience, coloured so potently by the might not be able to get out of bed, but there’s still one more aforementioned symptoms, bearable. Diagnoses were prostitute to lie with, a sunset to watch, a newborn to give clinically thin. He had always avoided medical professionals, thanks for. Even if you think of those things and feel nothing, and even avoided admitting that the drugs were anything they still exist as points of meaning. No matter how emptied but a romantic love for adventure, life. But when he couldn’t of significance they are, a carcase remains. It’s a small leave the house without fondling the tap three, eight, twentydifference, almost necessarily, escapes comprehension four times, and when he couldn’t face the day without an unless, that is, one has experienced it. Derealisation ever increasing bump, and eventual line of ketamine, and Depersonalisation Disorder is a useless label. It is logged when he hadn’t slept sober in close to a year without sex or and recorded in the paradigm of mental illness, the DSM. drugs or sleep deprivation, it seemed fair to assume that Symptoms, signs, affects, confusions, treatments. It’s all apart from his psychiatrist’s contemporary recommendations there. But for those who have experienced it, it’s somehow of antidepressants, benzos, and even a smirk at the mention different, a stranger to the words that are used of the more benign option of cannabis, some to skirt around it. When he got up the next serious things were wrong. morning, Richard was afraid. From the Less than two years before his trip strange, scratching light in his room to Europe, Richard had seen a to the fog outside, everything felt certain phenomenon, one that unfamiliar. His tactile, olfactory, would remain - in silence or auditory, and visual senses were strength - in his mind for the Derealisation Depersonalisation keen, yet somehow dulled; the following years. It began Disorder is a useless label ... senses learnt and recorded, yet on an innocuous day in an Symptoms, signs, confusions, it seemed as if none of the innocuous place: his home, treatments, affects. It’s all there. stimuli were really there, as if about ten weeks into his But for those who have it, it’s all the things around him had final year of high school. somehow different, a stranger been dispossessed of an energy. Richard was volatile, but to the words that are used to When he faced his mother and intelligent. On this Sunday, skirt around it. father it was the same. “They’re he’d completed his homework real,” he told himself. “They’re real, and receded into an evening of they’re thinking, they love you.” internet link hopping, a sort of Imagine waking up and having to tell perpetually disinterested scrolling yourself that your mother isn’t a lie. Her through related - and eventually entirely presence, her warmth, her words and maternal unrelated - events, theories and things. It was affection. All of it suddenly not only false, but sinister. It conspiracies he settled on, geoglyphs and mind control and didn’t work. He hugged them and kissed them and, apart brains on brains on brains in vats. Lipsmacking bullshit, from a few glances, he was sure he imagined they didn’t mostly. His brain was sarcastic and dispassionate. A girl seem to think anything was wrong. But hell, above all things he’d kissed two days before had turned cold on him. He tapped he felt wrong. His skin had goosebumps that he knew felt away at the computer long after his parents had retired, like pinpricks. So he could see. But he was feeling less. occasionally checking the blank screen of his phone. Dad drove him to school and spoke with him as usual, but Nothing drastic happened that night. There were no sudden Richard couldn’t keep up the madness that talking seemed. fits, no face-melting realisations. But as the evening dripped There was a chill out, though the fog had cleared, and the away into morning, Richard Hanson witnessed, in its windscreen was icy. The leather beneath him was stiff. infantile stages, a drive that would work against his entire There was glass before him. He couldn’t describe it but a conception of meaning. By the end of the night he was curled haze had descended, an impenetrable barrier between in a tight cold ball, unsure as to why he was feeling so

II.

RICHARD M HANSON himself and the world. His father was physically and psychically the same as ever - his mannerisms and words identical to the days and years preceding - yet the doubt had solidified. ‘Semantic detachment’, the more one thinks of it, is an apt way of describing what Richard experienced. Definitions do not correlate quite so well. Although he was unusually quiet that day, Richard sat through his classes without panicking. At recess and lunchtime he retreated to a corner of the library. A practice English exam in the final period was completed shoddily. He apologised to his teacher for the paper, though he was unable to look her in the eye. At home he kept to himself. By this time he’d vaguely identified what was happening. It was derealisation, in some form or another. He couldn’t remember having come across the term before, but he found a lot of forums and pages dedicated to it on the internet. Most cases seemed tortured and remained uncured. Later he would find out that the ones who were cured generally didn’t go back online to post about their recovery. It’s a shame - many people could use the encouragement. Richard made up his mind to go to the psychologist the following day. That evening, waiting for the hours to fall, he felt very small and very alone. Richard hadn’t thought about suicide in a long time. But as his comprehension worsened and the haze grew thicker, something which words resisted, which the stability and homeliness of words entirely escaped, pushed him towards the inevitable thought. If this continues, and I am left without access to any of the meaning in my life, I will have no choice. Because in those moments, his family, his past, his life and his hope and his aspirations, all of them were reduced to lies - not heard or spoken, but felt. The psychologist’s receptionist - a cheerful thing - informed him that the earliest available appointment was on the following morning. Richard nodded, feeling disheartened and on the verge of tears but still hopeful, then turned to find the block-headed face of the school officer, Mister Lynch, wobbling towards him from the office corridor. He asked Richard to come into his office, then turned and himself marched in. Inside he accused Richard of selling drugs. Richard denied it. He’d known the accusation was coming but he couldn’t help shaking. Now. All things coming to a head: now. He felt as if his life was imploding. The officer said he thought Richard had good friends and that he wasn’t a bad kid. But he was on probation now. Someone had called up to say he’d been selling things. There’d be no more chances if evidence was found. Richard denied it, respectfully. The meeting ended and he crept to an empty bathroom nearby. If this continues, and I am left without access to any of the meaning in my life, I will have no choice but to kill myself. There, he wept. His head turned from side to side in slow motion, and he sank down into base and pathetic human sentiments, an unadorned desire for warmth and for safety. The following day he confided his experience to the psychologist, Simon.

One of the things Simon asked him, with a voice that was feminine in its gentleness, was whether or not he was a drug user. Yes, Richard told him. Homeostasis, Simon said, was really the only thing. There were no cures, at least not through him; no explanations, just a rupture in brain chemistry, a downward spiral, and hopefully recovery. A return to stasis - to normal. Richard tried to grapple with the thought, though it immediately felt as if his life really would be over soon.

IV.

Later, though, and it was well and truly rising. After four days of drinking, walking and smoking, so on and so forth, imagining the adventure that lay ahead of him, Richard found himself at a glitzy, expensive club in Prague, accompanied by an older gay couple and a broke Danish musician. It was here that he first took MDMA in Europe, on 10th December 2015. He bought two white Mercedes pills off a boorish Czech in the toilets. When he asked if they were strong the seller snorted and laughed, not bothering to answer. But yes, they were strong. He might have taken all the drugs in the world, but these were strong. His vision swum. The metallic cubicle, popping and crackling with piss, swerved. His body was struck by pins and needles; the chatter and hooting of Czech; the pills growing better and better, his body feeling more and more animated. Eyes dilated, he watched his pee come out in bursts, washed his hands, and staggered out to the lights. It was useless trying to locate himself; all he could do was dance and smoke and enjoy the enormous place. He lost the others and found them, sometimes together and sometimes apart. They seemed to be having fun. Enchanted by the mystery of them, Richard bought the Dane two pills and himself several more. By the time they left the club, just after 2am, he’d swallowed five and snorted a line of MDMA. He had a train to catch at eight in the morning, less than six hours later, but whenever he remembered he just reminded himself that he would catch it, eventually, and all would be fine. A train to Poland no less. Recounting the totality of that night would be pointless. They made their way across the bridge to Zizkov, where they entered an after-hours club filled with narcotics and enormous Czech men. Men seemed to dominate everything. A gay couple tried to buy ketamine outside and were robbed by gypsies. Richard lost fifty euros he didn’t care about. By 5:30am he was oozing sweat. The music was heavy and hurt his ears. He couldn’t think or string a sentence together and everything around him was a blur. The dry waves of euphoria, heaven’s lights and vision that gorged them, the bursting pride of adventure, all exploding so deliciously as one. Tasted, senseless, lust for the heights ... Hedonism | Zeal for adventure. It was then, on 10th December 2015, that Richard made a decision that was against life. The senseless abandon that gushes with MDMA was not at all the cruxofit. To absolve him of responsibility would be to underestimate the work of the unconscious. Because the factor most crucial in this particular instance relates to that quirk of comment - a

SKETCH FOR A DISSOCIATED CHILD

‘romantic’ defence of adventure, life. He made this decision in Prague not so tragically because he underestimated the strain on his mind and body, but because he knew, intuitively and rationally, that the time was wrong. When Richard took his ninth pill in Prague, he wasn’t gambling only with his life, but with the metaphysical, physical, emotional and spiritual presence of everything that stopped him from committing suicide.

you aren’t. You’re dead to yourself and the world, that’s how it feels. Resisting explanation and any semblance of logic. It just is, and the feeling is so overwhelming that it necessarily comes first. It overrides, it nullifies any conception of meaning. It makes feeling - feeling gratitude, deflation, contempt, love - the sweetest thing on earth, so long as it is earnest, and real. So long that it feels real, it is. Until it isn’t.

VI.

Both depression and derealisation consist of a nullified version of experience. One leaves the self broken, desisting. The other simply destroys it. Where depression sets like clay about the soul, and anorexia instils paralysing fear that dissent is more terrifying than obsession, dissociation tears you away from life. Or life away from you. DPD does exactly that; pleads for an answer, yet ruins your chance of obtaining it. Its sands can be fatal, and they are always quick. When you recover from derealisation, you tend to understand that nothing is more important than the motion of living. All of the projects that look towards the creation and acquisition of meaning, be it through love, success, friendship, power, or more abstract contentment, all are within life. And that’s all that the person who has experienced derealisation wants: the chance to fight the fight again. Richard understood there was a correlation between the unstable chemicals that floated about his brain, his drug abuse, and his episodes of derealisation; there had been that connection from the beginning. And the only real force that had brought him to his knees was dissociation. It had lit up ‘suicide’ in bright green lights on shit-brown coal. And yet he persisted. It had been sweet for homeostasis to return. It had been a really thankful moment when Simon’s prophecy had come true. He had hugged his parents tight that evening, four days after that terrifying episode had begun. But all that does no justice; the feeling of returning to one’s rightful body and mind cannot be comprehended unless the gore of leaving it is understood. It means escaping suicide, and not wanting to return. “Wouldn’t wish it on anybody I’m close to / Wouldn’t wish it on anyone I’m opposed to.” So Vinnie Paz grinds over drums and a juvenile piano in ‘Is Happiness Just a Word?’ It’s a song about living with derealisation. If you were to wish the illness on an enemy, you would be within life. But

LSD, Methoxamine, Xanax, Alcohol, Cannabis, MDMA, Nitrous Oxide. Those are the substances Richard ingested over a period of twenty-eight hours, between 6th and 7th May 2016.

VII.

To feel so unflinchingly the desire to live, and yet return to the danger of an aborted life. Scarcely a day goes by wherein Richard doesn’t think of that fear, and yet almost constantly he puts himself in harm’s way. Because somewhere along the way, things haven’t added up. There is only confusion, and no longer answers. The same neurochemicals that conspire to bring about hazy detachment, conspire to achieve a subliminal state of longing and misery, conspire to release it, conspire to be thankful for a life to be lived, and conspire - finally - to perpetuate the cycle, and to ignore gratitude. Perhaps it will be like his friends and family say: until he finds something in which to sink his aching jaw, he will return to the bottle, and pursue that path to a well-known, but no less fascinating end. Now: he is only thankful that his jaw is unbroken. For now.

VIII.

“Yes, we who are full to the gorge with misery, should look well around, doubting everything seen, done, spoken, precisely because we have a word for it, and not its alchemy.” Matthew O’Connor, Nightwood.

PUBLIC SPACES: MY LIFTED JUMPER SIMONA CASTRICUM

“T

hank you, Ms Castricum. On the left, aisle thirty-four.” My flight attendant directs me through entry of the plane, and we exchange winning smiles. Great, my trip’s off to a great start - she gendered me correctly. My bag in my right hand, my lips pressed together - fresh with a layer of matte red lipstick - and my fuck the patriarchy tattoo jumping off my bicep, I advance though the aircraft. I look up for a free bag locker, avoiding eye contact with everybody. There is always someone looking at me with fear written over their face, as if to say, “I really hope that transwoman isn’t sitting next to me.” When I catch those eyes - as I do on every flight, up through first class into economy - my resting bitch face is saying, “It’s okay. I don’t want to sit next to you either.” Really, we’re all just hoping to get an aisle entirely to ourselves, right? On this flight to Abu Dhabi most of us will. As the cabin door shuts, I smile at the empty two seats next to me, post a quick selfie on Instagram, drop a couple of Temazepam over lunch. At last I can kick back and get excited about meeting some mates in Berlin and performing my show in Stockholm. I think of how cold it’s going to be there. And the snow - it’s as close to the Arctic as I’ve ever been. The next thing I know it’s time for breakfast, above the Arabian Sea. The comfort of this long-haul flight is interrupted by caution: I’m off this plane in ninety minutes and I’ve got a small window of opportunity to prepare myself so that I can move through the airport in safety. How’s my look coming off this flight? How am I ‘passing’? The toilet becomes available: I shave, reapply my make-up and tuck my penis down into my gaff as tight as I possibly can. I’m wearing black jodhpurs and a bomber jacket; everything is where it needs to be. I get up from my seat, and feel my penis move from where it’s tucked. I immediately start to fear it retracting further up and showing as I walk from the plane. I walk with my jacket over my groin with as much apparent competence

as I can find. At the end of the concourse, I see a toilet: I let my hair out of my bun and let it fall across my shoulders and neck, slip into the female bathroom, and take a cubicle. I tuck myself in again; the anxiety and fear running through my body makes tucking impossible - by now I’m so scared that my penis has retracted up into my body, though the front of my pants remains flat. I walk out of the toilet and catch up to the passengers at the security checkpoint. I wait my turn to be ushered through, drop my bag in a tray, remove my laptop. A guard directs me through a body scanner. Two male guards come up to me; one asks for my passport. He opens it. “Ms ... Simona?” The other directs me, “Please lift up your jumper.” Nervously, I oblige, looking down at myself, knowing that I’m tucked in but hoping I don’t contract again. My heart is pounding; now there are four men studying my groin - searching for something down there - and they turn to look at each other. They look over to a woman in a pat-down booth and yell something at her. She yells back, stares at me and shakes her head. The security guard shakes his head and gives me my passport back. I drop my jumper, grab my bag and get the fuck out of that checkpoint. I drift in shock, terror and humiliation, and find myself in the airport food court. I sit, look up and become fixated on a huge and beautiful mosaic dome that is the architectural centrepiece of the space. I disassociate and start to cry from what just happened, only to quickly become aware of my surroundings. As I lower my eyes I see two men sitting opposite me, laughing at me. Annoyed, I move, look up at the mosaic again, and see a McDonald’s sign. I order a cheeseburger, sit back down, and demolish it in disbelief at the last twenty minutes. The familiarity of the burger puts me somewhere I can at least deal with the chaos, fear and loneliness, to find some kind of centreas sad as it is, at a Maccas in Abu Dhabi. What I’d give to enjoy a moment with a mosaic dome.