It occurred to me today that I should not take certain things for granted.
The way I should not take for granted that my mother was finally able to share her collection of poems with me yesterday. She had always been hesitant and decidedly insecure about showing them to anyone, let alone her daughter.
I suppose she thought that some part of our relationship as it stands currently, would prepare me for what I was about to read. She did remark later on that she felt we had become more like ‘friends’ to her rather than a mother speaking to her daughter.
The poems were earmarked into sections: ‘Mother’ ‘Wife’, ‘Friend’ and ‘Lover’.
I was unprepared for what I found in the ‘Lover’ section, I can tell you that. Words so full of lust and passion, longing and relief found in bodily union.
But then again, why not? It makes sense! My mother has always been a passionate woman, why should her words not bear testimony to this? And why should she not express this through her body? Through whatever it is we mean when we say, ‘sex’?
She is a woman and so am I. Perhaps the ‘Lover’ poems were only jarring because I did not expect to see a reflection of the waves of lust that I go through, the carnal experience of relationships that I have had and am currently having, the longing that is only sated through inexplicably… satisfying… sex…!
What a selfish assumption to make on my part!
There were poems in the ‘Wife’ collection that felt too close to the bone for me.
Leading up to my parents’ divorce, I remember being a persistently Angry (yes, the capital ‘A’ is deliberate) child/young woman.
At the age of sixteen, I knew that their marriage was doomed. In hindsight, I think this was perhaps unsettling and disorientating for me at the time. It did not help that I had moved from Indonesia to Australia only a few years previously, at thirteen years of age, and was finding it difficult to ‘find my own place’ again.
So, ‘Wife’, left me feeling quite raw.
It is difficult to have to face my own mother’s accounts of how lonely she was with my father. Moreover, there was a clear sense of how she is now able to enjoy ‘being alone without feeling lonely’ in her current marriage. I am glad for her, but this is painful for me to accept, as it is a blessing only made possible by her leaving my father.
But let’s be clear, I do not hold her decision against her.
In fact, it was I who told her, again at the age of sixteen, to not stay together ‘just for your kids’. Why did I say this? Because it was clear that they were not happy together and that this was not doing us (their children) any good either!
After reading her last piece, I told my mother that I was proud of her… and then I started to cry.
I was crying because she had shown how honest one could be: about our feelings, about the ambivalence one feels about the life-changing decisions, about what our body really needs, about how difficult but also how irreplaceable our relationships with our friends, colleagues, partners, ex-partners and finally, our children, can be.
To think that I find it so difficult to leave myself feeling vulnerable, and yet here is my mother doing exactly that, time and time again, poem after poem.
After a few deep breaths, my mother and I shared a hug. Then, she thanked me for being her friend and I thanked her for being my mother.
I hope to never take this for granted.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Friday, December 18, 2009
On Corporal Pain
Today I want to write about pain, pain as I have felt through my body.
Two days ago I spent the day wracked with back pain. When I am suffering back pain, it is as if someone has inserted six knobs into my back, three on either side of the spine, roughly ten centimeters apart. The pain comes when they twist these knobs and my muscles tighten accordingly into whirlpools of intricately fragile and familiar pain.
At one point, a few years ago, the pain was so chronic that I would find it difficult to walk without being in tears. I missed a lot of my university lectures during this time.
One day, I came back after a week or so of being absent and a newly found friend joked, ‘Where have you been, you slacker?’ Through gritted teeth I told him about that awful visitor of mine, good old Mister Pain.
The peculiar thing about Mister Pain is that at times he is like what one would call in Indonesian, a customer of ‘kupu-kupu malam’ or ‘butterflies of the night’: a common term for sex workers. Perhaps the analogy isn’t quite clear? Hah! I mean that Mr. Pain is there one minute and then, once having sated himself with my agonizing body* , gone the next, without a trace.
During a particularly intense day’s worth of searing pain coursing through my flesh, I decided to miss an in-class test for my Social Work degree. The following day, the pain having spent himself with me and then miraculously gone on his way, I turned up to class fresh and beaming.
A classmate who did not know the nature of my back pain asked me where I had been. Not wanting to go into details, I simply said, ‘I was sick yesterday.’ She looked me up and down and remarked quietly, ‘You don’t look sick.’
I felt like I had just been slapped in the face.
I remembered completing a course on Sociology of Health and Illness, in which we had discussed ‘playing the sick role’. By this we meant needing to ‘act sick’, in order for other members of society to believe one to be so and act accordingly, e.g. an employer seeing an employee turn up to work with a runny nose, a haggard face and complaining of a headache, would acquiesce for the employee to take the day off.
I felt as if by her comments, this woman had demanded that I perform my sickness to her, demonstrate and prove it. ‘Give me a valid reason for you having missed that test’: essentially was what had been communicated to me.
I found this outrageous at the time, especially given the kind of pain I had just gone through and the elation I felt at having been rid of it, at least for the time being. And now I felt as if I needed to wallow in that pain just for someone else’s benefit?
Does this mean that I regarded my pain as a private matter? It is true that I tried to be aware of when I spoke of my pain to others or not. I was aware that it could be tiring to have to listen to a friend speak of their pain so constantly and so regularly, even though the reality was that the pain was there constantly and regularly.
Once, when I sighed yet again and commented briefly about my back pain, a friend said somewhat impatiently, ‘You’re always in pain! Go and have it checked!’ Although she meant well, I think she was also communicating that it was starting to become challenging having to listen to me moan and groan everyday.
I suppose in a sense this shows that shared pain does not necessarily mean lessened pain. Or maybe it is an example of how sharing in someone else’s pain can lead to burn-out quite quickly, so there is a need to replenish oneself somehow when one is caring for someone experiencing chronic pain.
I have to say, this past week when the battle reignited, I felt pretty lucky. Having been in the company of my mother, it was she who tended to me when I woke during the night with my back screaming out and making it impossible to sleep. I woke her with a desperate, ‘Ma…!’ She was immediately alert and her voice dripped with worry.
In the middle of the night, my mother tenderly placed strips of ‘koyo’, a menthol-based solvent commonly used in Indonesia to ease muscle tenderness. She also prepared a hot water bottle that she rolled up and down my back whilst massaging me gently.
What was funny was that whilst my mother was preoccupied with the 23-year-old version of the small body that had grown inside her own, I was busy wondering what kind of pain she was going through seeing her daughter in pain.
This was almost enough of a distraction for me to forget the knobs turning within my flesh.
NOTE: *This is not to say that all sex workers find their work ‘agonizing’ at all times, with all of their customers.
Two days ago I spent the day wracked with back pain. When I am suffering back pain, it is as if someone has inserted six knobs into my back, three on either side of the spine, roughly ten centimeters apart. The pain comes when they twist these knobs and my muscles tighten accordingly into whirlpools of intricately fragile and familiar pain.
At one point, a few years ago, the pain was so chronic that I would find it difficult to walk without being in tears. I missed a lot of my university lectures during this time.
One day, I came back after a week or so of being absent and a newly found friend joked, ‘Where have you been, you slacker?’ Through gritted teeth I told him about that awful visitor of mine, good old Mister Pain.
The peculiar thing about Mister Pain is that at times he is like what one would call in Indonesian, a customer of ‘kupu-kupu malam’ or ‘butterflies of the night’: a common term for sex workers. Perhaps the analogy isn’t quite clear? Hah! I mean that Mr. Pain is there one minute and then, once having sated himself with my agonizing body* , gone the next, without a trace.
During a particularly intense day’s worth of searing pain coursing through my flesh, I decided to miss an in-class test for my Social Work degree. The following day, the pain having spent himself with me and then miraculously gone on his way, I turned up to class fresh and beaming.
A classmate who did not know the nature of my back pain asked me where I had been. Not wanting to go into details, I simply said, ‘I was sick yesterday.’ She looked me up and down and remarked quietly, ‘You don’t look sick.’
I felt like I had just been slapped in the face.
I remembered completing a course on Sociology of Health and Illness, in which we had discussed ‘playing the sick role’. By this we meant needing to ‘act sick’, in order for other members of society to believe one to be so and act accordingly, e.g. an employer seeing an employee turn up to work with a runny nose, a haggard face and complaining of a headache, would acquiesce for the employee to take the day off.
I felt as if by her comments, this woman had demanded that I perform my sickness to her, demonstrate and prove it. ‘Give me a valid reason for you having missed that test’: essentially was what had been communicated to me.
I found this outrageous at the time, especially given the kind of pain I had just gone through and the elation I felt at having been rid of it, at least for the time being. And now I felt as if I needed to wallow in that pain just for someone else’s benefit?
Does this mean that I regarded my pain as a private matter? It is true that I tried to be aware of when I spoke of my pain to others or not. I was aware that it could be tiring to have to listen to a friend speak of their pain so constantly and so regularly, even though the reality was that the pain was there constantly and regularly.
Once, when I sighed yet again and commented briefly about my back pain, a friend said somewhat impatiently, ‘You’re always in pain! Go and have it checked!’ Although she meant well, I think she was also communicating that it was starting to become challenging having to listen to me moan and groan everyday.
I suppose in a sense this shows that shared pain does not necessarily mean lessened pain. Or maybe it is an example of how sharing in someone else’s pain can lead to burn-out quite quickly, so there is a need to replenish oneself somehow when one is caring for someone experiencing chronic pain.
I have to say, this past week when the battle reignited, I felt pretty lucky. Having been in the company of my mother, it was she who tended to me when I woke during the night with my back screaming out and making it impossible to sleep. I woke her with a desperate, ‘Ma…!’ She was immediately alert and her voice dripped with worry.
In the middle of the night, my mother tenderly placed strips of ‘koyo’, a menthol-based solvent commonly used in Indonesia to ease muscle tenderness. She also prepared a hot water bottle that she rolled up and down my back whilst massaging me gently.
What was funny was that whilst my mother was preoccupied with the 23-year-old version of the small body that had grown inside her own, I was busy wondering what kind of pain she was going through seeing her daughter in pain.
This was almost enough of a distraction for me to forget the knobs turning within my flesh.
NOTE: *This is not to say that all sex workers find their work ‘agonizing’ at all times, with all of their customers.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Inheriting Anger
I am staying in my mother’s house on the side of a mountain in Sulawesi, Indonesia.
The afternoon thunderstorm is coating the green bamboos and the lush rice paddies in its gray peacefulness.
Yet, for a while I have been sitting here staring blankly at the long snakelike valley with anger beating at my breast.
The wave of anger came as I had just read a particular passage from Naomi Klein’s latest book, The Shock Doctrine. In it, Klein argues that America’s free market policies have come to dominate the world through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.
One of the first countries used as an experiment for the propagation of free-market economic policies by way of a military coup d’etat upon a ‘too-leftist-leaning’ first president was… Indonesia.
The brutal military coup, masterminded by General Suharto (who came to be Indonesia’s second president and ruled for 32 ½ years) combed the countryside for alleged ‘Communists’.
Women associated with Gerwani, a national women’s organization which had until then worked to provide universal childcare and combat illiteracy, were particularly targeted.
In late September 1965, the military fabricated and propagated the story that Gerwani members had brutally mutilated and then murdered army generals in an attempt to overthrow the government. Thousands of women were arbitrarily arrested, jailed, tortured and remain branded as shunned ‘Communists’ to this day.
Some of the women had never heard of ‘Communism’, they were just trying to provide affordable community childcare.
Yet even their children do not believe them, as since 1966, thanks to three decades (and counting) of carefully formulated ‘education’, we were fed the story of how the Gerwani women danced around the army generals naked whilst singing a popular folk song, ‘Genjer-Genjer’ and mutilating their penises.
Klein notes that Suharto ‘had shown that if massive repression was used preemptively, the country would go into a kind of shock and resistance could be wiped out before it even took place. His use of terror was so merciless, so far beyond even the worst expectations, that a people who only weeks earlier had been collectively striving to assert their country’s independence were now sufficiently terrified that they ceded total control to Suharto’. (2007:69)
I then read another statement that only compounded the anguish I feel on behalf of all of us whose nations have been systematically robbed of our natural resources; all of us who have been reduced to being nothing more but cheap, dumb and alienated labour on our own lands (actually most of the lands don’t belong to us anymore, they belong to multinational corporations), all of us whose bodies were considered expendable enough to be experimented upon for the state’s terror-spreading purposes, all of us, all of us, all of us…
The statement goes: ‘The success of that [operation] meant that it would be repeated, again and again.’ (2007:69)
In Chile (September 11,1973), in China (June 3, 1989), in South Africa, Poland, the list goes on…
And I think my renewed outrage comes from being reminded that all of this suffering, all of this, as Klein would put it, ‘shock therapy’, employed at both the macro level of economic policies and political coup d’etats, as well as at the micro level of people's bodies… all of this suffering, all of this ignorance, all of this pain, all of these lies… all of this was for the propagation of free-market policies?
Let us have a moment here.
We need to realize that my mother’s memories of the Solo river in 1965-1966 Java, being clogged with bodies of the anonymously assassinated... only happened in order to open up our country’s economy to foreign control and exploitation.
Let us commemorate the ‘Gerwani’ women who still find their identification cards marked ‘communist affiliated’ to this day… and acknowledge that their on-going suffering was imposed upon them in order to make us, in neo-liberal speak: ‘internationally competitive’.
In order to become ‘internationally competitive’, we have been told that we ‘need’ to get rid of the minimum wage, we ‘need’ to get rid of unionism… otherwise we will scare Foreign Direct Investment away.
Wonderful! All of this brutality came to pass so that we may become slaves to Foreign Direct Investment and systematically be made to fail in protecting our farmers, our primary producers, our industry sector, our women, our political and historical awareness… our people.
How can one not be angry?
The afternoon thunderstorm is coating the green bamboos and the lush rice paddies in its gray peacefulness.
Yet, for a while I have been sitting here staring blankly at the long snakelike valley with anger beating at my breast.
The wave of anger came as I had just read a particular passage from Naomi Klein’s latest book, The Shock Doctrine. In it, Klein argues that America’s free market policies have come to dominate the world through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.
One of the first countries used as an experiment for the propagation of free-market economic policies by way of a military coup d’etat upon a ‘too-leftist-leaning’ first president was… Indonesia.
The brutal military coup, masterminded by General Suharto (who came to be Indonesia’s second president and ruled for 32 ½ years) combed the countryside for alleged ‘Communists’.
Women associated with Gerwani, a national women’s organization which had until then worked to provide universal childcare and combat illiteracy, were particularly targeted.
In late September 1965, the military fabricated and propagated the story that Gerwani members had brutally mutilated and then murdered army generals in an attempt to overthrow the government. Thousands of women were arbitrarily arrested, jailed, tortured and remain branded as shunned ‘Communists’ to this day.
Some of the women had never heard of ‘Communism’, they were just trying to provide affordable community childcare.
Yet even their children do not believe them, as since 1966, thanks to three decades (and counting) of carefully formulated ‘education’, we were fed the story of how the Gerwani women danced around the army generals naked whilst singing a popular folk song, ‘Genjer-Genjer’ and mutilating their penises.
Klein notes that Suharto ‘had shown that if massive repression was used preemptively, the country would go into a kind of shock and resistance could be wiped out before it even took place. His use of terror was so merciless, so far beyond even the worst expectations, that a people who only weeks earlier had been collectively striving to assert their country’s independence were now sufficiently terrified that they ceded total control to Suharto’. (2007:69)
I then read another statement that only compounded the anguish I feel on behalf of all of us whose nations have been systematically robbed of our natural resources; all of us who have been reduced to being nothing more but cheap, dumb and alienated labour on our own lands (actually most of the lands don’t belong to us anymore, they belong to multinational corporations), all of us whose bodies were considered expendable enough to be experimented upon for the state’s terror-spreading purposes, all of us, all of us, all of us…
The statement goes: ‘The success of that [operation] meant that it would be repeated, again and again.’ (2007:69)
In Chile (September 11,1973), in China (June 3, 1989), in South Africa, Poland, the list goes on…
And I think my renewed outrage comes from being reminded that all of this suffering, all of this, as Klein would put it, ‘shock therapy’, employed at both the macro level of economic policies and political coup d’etats, as well as at the micro level of people's bodies… all of this suffering, all of this ignorance, all of this pain, all of these lies… all of this was for the propagation of free-market policies?
Let us have a moment here.
We need to realize that my mother’s memories of the Solo river in 1965-1966 Java, being clogged with bodies of the anonymously assassinated... only happened in order to open up our country’s economy to foreign control and exploitation.
Let us commemorate the ‘Gerwani’ women who still find their identification cards marked ‘communist affiliated’ to this day… and acknowledge that their on-going suffering was imposed upon them in order to make us, in neo-liberal speak: ‘internationally competitive’.
In order to become ‘internationally competitive’, we have been told that we ‘need’ to get rid of the minimum wage, we ‘need’ to get rid of unionism… otherwise we will scare Foreign Direct Investment away.
Wonderful! All of this brutality came to pass so that we may become slaves to Foreign Direct Investment and systematically be made to fail in protecting our farmers, our primary producers, our industry sector, our women, our political and historical awareness… our people.
How can one not be angry?
Friday, November 20, 2009
Expanding my horizons whilst standing still
An old high school friend came to visit me after having traveled all across 'New South Wales', here in 'Australia'.* She shared with me some of the relationships she had formed, the banal towns she had come across, the inspiring Greek couple whose love of good healthy wholesome foods had inspired her so...
I sighed and told her how I had for a long time, held an image of myself as one of those 'wandering vagabonds'. But that lately, I'm coming to see how amongst my class and social circles, the people who come to 'travel' (more often than not in the 'overseas' sense), are the ones who are able to afford to do so, in a certain fashion.
Let's stop 'beating around the bush', I mean of course, that the ones who travel are the ones who are middle-class and able to save on whatever menial job they had landed, as they lived off their parents as much as they could in the meantime.
I started to wonder then whether the idea of myself as a 'wandering vagabond' served as a thin veil of denial of my own class origins, not that far off from the middle-class-funded adventures that my friends were having.
As a child in Indonesia, my parents often took me on trips to islands far from any capital cities or towns. With my mother, I visited the Badui (also spelled 'Baduy') people, whose people are divided into two tiers, as far as my basic understanding goes.
There are the inner Badui people, who dress in white and abhor any outside 'technologies' or way of living. For instance, they weave their own cloth and refuse to wear shoes. The outer Badui are more lax, although traveling everywhere barefoot, they still traveled and saw how so-called 'modern' 'civilisation' had come to encroach upon their relatively secluded community.
One of the most vivid of my memories included the wonder I felt as a child, crossing a bright green bamboo bridge leading into the Badui village, surrounded by iridescent bamboo leaves glittering and shimmering down through the air.
Thanks to my mother's sense of 'adventure' and her connection with a local painter, my brother and I had the privilege of sleeping next to an open fire in a thatched hut with some of the inner Baduy.
It was images and memories such as these that so solidly constructed this idea I had/have of myself as a 'wandering vagabond'. Certainly I was no Badui, but I was no Mary-Jane-with-her-white-picket-fence neither!
What I refused to remember until very recently, was that after 'roughing it' with (insert derogatory or at the very least exoticising label here: e.g. peasant/ natives) I would then return to our 6-bedroom mansion in an affluent and closed-off suburb of Jakarta where I was doted upon by three (occasionally four) maids, a gardener and a chauffeur (who drove at different times: a Mercedes, Lexus, BMW, etc).
So where did this 'need' to selectively recollect my childhood come from? Is it another case of deep-seated upper-class guilt, fostered by an awareness of the poverty that is so overwhelmingly present in my country of birth?
Did I need to see myself as being not only aware of the existence of peoples outside of my own cultural, class and social comforts but also highly skilled and adept at forming relationships across such diverse origins?
Did I want to be the neo-colonialist, able to foster 'friendships' (no matter how unequal) across the wide surface of the globe?
Did I want to use my economic and social means to fashion myself to be one of Socrates' 'citizens of the world'? (without admitting that it was my means that permitted me to be thus)
I sighed and told her how I had for a long time, held an image of myself as one of those 'wandering vagabonds'. But that lately, I'm coming to see how amongst my class and social circles, the people who come to 'travel' (more often than not in the 'overseas' sense), are the ones who are able to afford to do so, in a certain fashion.
Let's stop 'beating around the bush', I mean of course, that the ones who travel are the ones who are middle-class and able to save on whatever menial job they had landed, as they lived off their parents as much as they could in the meantime.
I started to wonder then whether the idea of myself as a 'wandering vagabond' served as a thin veil of denial of my own class origins, not that far off from the middle-class-funded adventures that my friends were having.
As a child in Indonesia, my parents often took me on trips to islands far from any capital cities or towns. With my mother, I visited the Badui (also spelled 'Baduy') people, whose people are divided into two tiers, as far as my basic understanding goes.
There are the inner Badui people, who dress in white and abhor any outside 'technologies' or way of living. For instance, they weave their own cloth and refuse to wear shoes. The outer Badui are more lax, although traveling everywhere barefoot, they still traveled and saw how so-called 'modern' 'civilisation' had come to encroach upon their relatively secluded community.
One of the most vivid of my memories included the wonder I felt as a child, crossing a bright green bamboo bridge leading into the Badui village, surrounded by iridescent bamboo leaves glittering and shimmering down through the air.
Thanks to my mother's sense of 'adventure' and her connection with a local painter, my brother and I had the privilege of sleeping next to an open fire in a thatched hut with some of the inner Baduy.
It was images and memories such as these that so solidly constructed this idea I had/have of myself as a 'wandering vagabond'. Certainly I was no Badui, but I was no Mary-Jane-with-her-white-picket-fence neither!
What I refused to remember until very recently, was that after 'roughing it' with (insert derogatory or at the very least exoticising label here: e.g. peasant/ natives) I would then return to our 6-bedroom mansion in an affluent and closed-off suburb of Jakarta where I was doted upon by three (occasionally four) maids, a gardener and a chauffeur (who drove at different times: a Mercedes, Lexus, BMW, etc).
So where did this 'need' to selectively recollect my childhood come from? Is it another case of deep-seated upper-class guilt, fostered by an awareness of the poverty that is so overwhelmingly present in my country of birth?
Did I need to see myself as being not only aware of the existence of peoples outside of my own cultural, class and social comforts but also highly skilled and adept at forming relationships across such diverse origins?
Did I want to be the neo-colonialist, able to foster 'friendships' (no matter how unequal) across the wide surface of the globe?
Did I want to use my economic and social means to fashion myself to be one of Socrates' 'citizens of the world'? (without admitting that it was my means that permitted me to be thus)
*********************************************************************
After I had sighed wistfully and communicated that I envied her, this friend of mine remarked, 'I don't know if you will ever be able to 'just drift'. You have too much focus and you invest so much in all the places you go to.'
It was here that I had a moment to see the 'wandering vagabond' in a new light. In what ways am I coming to 'travel' in a more honest way?
In my experience, this has been happening more and more by 'staying put' in the one city: 'Sydney'.*
An example that comes to mind is an experience I had during my recent Social Work placement in 'Western Sydney'*. Through my attempts to act as a supportive counselor for a woman who has had twenty-years of personal insight into 'schizophrenia', my horizons expanded by miles. I needed to imagine what it would be like to see things that other people were not able to see, to smell things that seem to come from nowhere, to be so fearful and have that fear dismissed and mocked.
When would you have the opportunity to engage in such wild imaginations whilst backpacking with drunken Poms through South East Asia?
Oh, right, marijuana.
Seriously though (God, I sound like a Yankee stand-up comedian) I am endeavouring to nurture relationships that mean something, that don't just come in a non-reciprocal-exoticising 'travel adventure' packages and I hope to write more on this soon.
___________________________________________________
*I note these names with quotation marks to highlight that these labels should not be taken for granted, as older names have been applied to these places. Names that held different meanings and different experiences for Indigenous peoples of different nations and kinships. 'Sydney's first people were the Eora of the Gadigal band. The word Eora simply means "here" or "from this place".
See http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/barani/themes/theme1.htm
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Dream of the night of the 3rd of October 2009
A woman, saffron red hair, was the partner of a man with a violent temper.
When his temper flares,
his skin tears open
his teeth grow longer
and his eyes turn red
He was a werewolf.
A werewolf waiting
to growl
to bleed
and be bled.
I was present, but fearful. So when he asked for it, I did not give him my real name.'Melissa', I said. He didn't believe me.
Sensing this, I ran outside and clung to the underside of a stairway, upside down like a bat.
'Ohhh..., you scared Rani away.' The woman moaned.
For I had seen the hatchlings of his fury, and for me that was enough. He tore her head off and her neck open. Red gaping hole. Red gaping wound, which she denied. Saffron lady clung to him just as fear clung onto me.
The last dredges of the dream saw me flying laboriously towards the blue sky.
Of what use is the bluest of skies when a werewolf waits to tear at you from underneath?
When his temper flares,
his skin tears open
his teeth grow longer
and his eyes turn red
He was a werewolf.
A werewolf waiting
to growl
to bleed
and be bled.
I was present, but fearful. So when he asked for it, I did not give him my real name.'Melissa', I said. He didn't believe me.
Sensing this, I ran outside and clung to the underside of a stairway, upside down like a bat.
'Ohhh..., you scared Rani away.' The woman moaned.
For I had seen the hatchlings of his fury, and for me that was enough. He tore her head off and her neck open. Red gaping hole. Red gaping wound, which she denied. Saffron lady clung to him just as fear clung onto me.
The last dredges of the dream saw me flying laboriously towards the blue sky.
Of what use is the bluest of skies when a werewolf waits to tear at you from underneath?
Saturday, October 3, 2009
I am woman. I know my pelvis.
I spent today in a workshop, for women only, on the pelvis.
I had met Alice Cummins, the woman running the workshop, during a weekend of improvised theater. We had begun a conversation about my qualms to engage in theater and performance practice, being all too familiar with the stereotype of actors: self-obsessed-navel-gazing-fame-chasing-anorexic-twats.
I said to Alice, who is well respected in the world of body-work, dance and improvised performance, ‘I need to know that the benefits of engaging in performance does not stop at me.’ She had promised to think about my queries.
And so we met again. Different city. Different context.
The day started with all twenty five of us introducing ourselves by name. Alice encouraged us to take our time, so that we may ‘get a feel’ for the person.
Of course, it took several tries before people became more comfortable with a slower pace. We met everyone’s eyes as our names were spoken and allowed the syllables to hang in the air, like freshly washed underpants that you were eager to take away from prying eyes.
We then broke off into smaller groups of five to discuss why we had chosen to come to the workshop and what insights, if any, we were hoping to gain from being there. What the women shared astounded me.
One woman in her seventies, spoke of giving up dancing ten years prior and needing to reconnect with her body. She spoke barely above a whisper- a whisper was enough to entice my curiousity.
Another woman revealed that she had always felt disconnected from her pelvis. There lay a wounding tale behind this. Her first baby died following a caesarean, a procedure she undertook because she could not reconcile herself to the idea of a baby making its way through her pelvis. A fair fear, I would say. ‘I want to know’, she said, ‘what is this?’ Her hands expressed a fear of the unknown. A fear towards our own bodies.
As for myself, I wanted to be present within my own body, without judgment.
We regrouped.
Alice had placed a pelvis shaped cast in the middle of the floor. Unfamiliar terms spilled from her lips as our fingers collectively traced the curves and loopholes of the sculpture. From the hills of the ‘iliac crest’, to the shallow caverns of the ‘ilium’. We appreciated the palm-like shape of one’s ‘sacrum’, stroked the ‘coccyx’ and marveled at the hip joint, taking in the finality of the ‘pubic symphysis’.
What was all this? Is it possible for one’s pelvis to be so spacious? So flowing in its design! How is it that I have not been aware of these spaces, these fluctuating surfaces, prior to today?
Just as Alice had promised, we leaped into exploring our own pelvises. There was a humorous moment or two, how could there not be? A roomful of women feeling their pubic bones, mine was an ant’s breath away from my clitoris, it was no wonder that the room looked to be filled with women masturbating!
Our worlds were about to expand that much more. A woman approached me from across the room and offered to be my partner for the next exercise. We were to trace the contours of each other’s pelvis, lying face flat on the ground.
Recognising that I had only just introduced myself to my partner, I lay a gentle hand on her back. I let a moment pass, to introduce my touch to her body.
Then, the coaxing began. My thumbs seeking out the most obvious bone: the hip joint. It presented itself to me, this prehistoric creation that has been handed down generations of women. I wondered how many of my mothers’ mothers had been aware the spaces within. The spaces that held a baby’s head, that allowed for it to fall through and out! These spaces that bring agony as well as ecstasy. How many of the women of my family had explored these cavities?
And yet there I was, exploring the bones and sliding surfaces of a woman I did not know at all, yet knew so well after only five minutes.
A dance followed. A dance initiated first by the sacrum, the sliding plates of the sacrum. You lead your body from the back. ‘Shift!’ Alice’s voice was a leading compass, ‘Now lead it from the front. Dance with your pubic bone!’ Change partners! The third dance, a dance of the ‘acetabulum’, the cavern where your leg meets your pelvis.
Of course, the women were shy. I was shy. I held back. Sometimes. Other times, there was a clear vision of a space that I had just become aware of. A clear sensation of sinking deeper. Deeper into my womanhood. Yes, well. This is about being a woman. How can you own your womanhood without owning your body? W-O-M-A-N.
Two women left. It was obvious that this irked Alice. When you embark on such an exploration, it defeats the purpose if you do not maintain a connection through the parts that make you uncomfortable. The sensation of needing to flee, leads to the best of learning opportunities.
Other such pearls of wisdom followed. Not just from Alice. No, what was most refreshing about Alice as a teacher was that she recognized the wisdom in all of us, and stated it as such. She encouraged an articulation of our ‘collective intelligence’ in making this 3-day workshop what it is. So, the women shared.
I sat back and marveled, this woman was remarkable in her generosity, in her attentiveness to us. Through her dedication to her craft, in sensitizing herself to her own body and teaching us to do the same, she was sharing her wisdom and letting us share our wisdom.
Tonight, I began to understand how one’s performance practice, one’s absolute dedication to a practice, can be an act of wondrous generosity.
I had met Alice Cummins, the woman running the workshop, during a weekend of improvised theater. We had begun a conversation about my qualms to engage in theater and performance practice, being all too familiar with the stereotype of actors: self-obsessed-navel-gazing-fame-chasing-anorexic-twats.
I said to Alice, who is well respected in the world of body-work, dance and improvised performance, ‘I need to know that the benefits of engaging in performance does not stop at me.’ She had promised to think about my queries.
And so we met again. Different city. Different context.
The day started with all twenty five of us introducing ourselves by name. Alice encouraged us to take our time, so that we may ‘get a feel’ for the person.
Of course, it took several tries before people became more comfortable with a slower pace. We met everyone’s eyes as our names were spoken and allowed the syllables to hang in the air, like freshly washed underpants that you were eager to take away from prying eyes.
We then broke off into smaller groups of five to discuss why we had chosen to come to the workshop and what insights, if any, we were hoping to gain from being there. What the women shared astounded me.
One woman in her seventies, spoke of giving up dancing ten years prior and needing to reconnect with her body. She spoke barely above a whisper- a whisper was enough to entice my curiousity.
Another woman revealed that she had always felt disconnected from her pelvis. There lay a wounding tale behind this. Her first baby died following a caesarean, a procedure she undertook because she could not reconcile herself to the idea of a baby making its way through her pelvis. A fair fear, I would say. ‘I want to know’, she said, ‘what is this?’ Her hands expressed a fear of the unknown. A fear towards our own bodies.
As for myself, I wanted to be present within my own body, without judgment.
We regrouped.
Alice had placed a pelvis shaped cast in the middle of the floor. Unfamiliar terms spilled from her lips as our fingers collectively traced the curves and loopholes of the sculpture. From the hills of the ‘iliac crest’, to the shallow caverns of the ‘ilium’. We appreciated the palm-like shape of one’s ‘sacrum’, stroked the ‘coccyx’ and marveled at the hip joint, taking in the finality of the ‘pubic symphysis’.
What was all this? Is it possible for one’s pelvis to be so spacious? So flowing in its design! How is it that I have not been aware of these spaces, these fluctuating surfaces, prior to today?
Just as Alice had promised, we leaped into exploring our own pelvises. There was a humorous moment or two, how could there not be? A roomful of women feeling their pubic bones, mine was an ant’s breath away from my clitoris, it was no wonder that the room looked to be filled with women masturbating!
Our worlds were about to expand that much more. A woman approached me from across the room and offered to be my partner for the next exercise. We were to trace the contours of each other’s pelvis, lying face flat on the ground.
Recognising that I had only just introduced myself to my partner, I lay a gentle hand on her back. I let a moment pass, to introduce my touch to her body.
Then, the coaxing began. My thumbs seeking out the most obvious bone: the hip joint. It presented itself to me, this prehistoric creation that has been handed down generations of women. I wondered how many of my mothers’ mothers had been aware the spaces within. The spaces that held a baby’s head, that allowed for it to fall through and out! These spaces that bring agony as well as ecstasy. How many of the women of my family had explored these cavities?
And yet there I was, exploring the bones and sliding surfaces of a woman I did not know at all, yet knew so well after only five minutes.
A dance followed. A dance initiated first by the sacrum, the sliding plates of the sacrum. You lead your body from the back. ‘Shift!’ Alice’s voice was a leading compass, ‘Now lead it from the front. Dance with your pubic bone!’ Change partners! The third dance, a dance of the ‘acetabulum’, the cavern where your leg meets your pelvis.
Of course, the women were shy. I was shy. I held back. Sometimes. Other times, there was a clear vision of a space that I had just become aware of. A clear sensation of sinking deeper. Deeper into my womanhood. Yes, well. This is about being a woman. How can you own your womanhood without owning your body? W-O-M-A-N.
Two women left. It was obvious that this irked Alice. When you embark on such an exploration, it defeats the purpose if you do not maintain a connection through the parts that make you uncomfortable. The sensation of needing to flee, leads to the best of learning opportunities.
Other such pearls of wisdom followed. Not just from Alice. No, what was most refreshing about Alice as a teacher was that she recognized the wisdom in all of us, and stated it as such. She encouraged an articulation of our ‘collective intelligence’ in making this 3-day workshop what it is. So, the women shared.
I sat back and marveled, this woman was remarkable in her generosity, in her attentiveness to us. Through her dedication to her craft, in sensitizing herself to her own body and teaching us to do the same, she was sharing her wisdom and letting us share our wisdom.
Tonight, I began to understand how one’s performance practice, one’s absolute dedication to a practice, can be an act of wondrous generosity.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Scandal? Who cares?
There was a man. He was your average middle-class white Australian man. Shortly cropped hair. Workman's boots. A navy pullover. Khaki pants. Skin that would burn in under five minutes. Lips that have never known lip-balm, 'That's for fags'.
At least, that's how I saw him.
This man was very preoccupied. For the entire three and a half hour flight across the Australian continent, as I traced my gaze to his seat, his fingers were locked in the same circular motions. They had found the magnetic pull of their moon: the wedding ring of the woman next to him.
Of course, I surreptitiously participate in popular media and its obsession with all relationships, involving bonkings and otherwise, of the rich and famous. By 'surreptitiously', I mean that none of my expenses include purposefully purchasing a magazine with Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston bleeding each other to death on the cover. However, two minutes at a supermarket line is enough to inform you that:
YOU ARE COMMANDED TO BE INTERESTED IN THE EXTRAMARITAL AFFAIRS OF THE RICH AND FAMOUS
This is further reflected by painfully similar tales involving my own dear and infinitely-extended family of Chinese-Javanese, Chinese-Sundanese, Torajanese, Chinese-American, Chinese-Spanish, Chinese-Canadian family.
Estranged fathers and daughters. Publicly administered retributions, both physical and verbal in nature. Brothers scrambling for cursed and rapidly depleting family fortunes. Painfully complicated marriage proposals lassoing its noose over two or more continents. Inter-racial marriages. God Forbid! And of course, living and sexing together out of wedlock (that would be me).
It is as if my relatives are compelled to have a life that is as interesting as those of 'The Pitts' and 'The Jolies'. Otherwise, well, what would be the point of having a family? To shame and be shamed. To shame and let live. To be shamed and survive.
Meanwhile, this quiet white man who shared the same fart-congested air with me for three and a half hours, continued to trace the woman's bezoar of a ring. And my brain shamelessly wondered where this man and this woman belonged, thereby declaring myself a consumer of scandal.
At least, that's how I saw him.
This man was very preoccupied. For the entire three and a half hour flight across the Australian continent, as I traced my gaze to his seat, his fingers were locked in the same circular motions. They had found the magnetic pull of their moon: the wedding ring of the woman next to him.
Of course, I surreptitiously participate in popular media and its obsession with all relationships, involving bonkings and otherwise, of the rich and famous. By 'surreptitiously', I mean that none of my expenses include purposefully purchasing a magazine with Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston bleeding each other to death on the cover. However, two minutes at a supermarket line is enough to inform you that:
YOU ARE COMMANDED TO BE INTERESTED IN THE EXTRAMARITAL AFFAIRS OF THE RICH AND FAMOUS
This is further reflected by painfully similar tales involving my own dear and infinitely-extended family of Chinese-Javanese, Chinese-Sundanese, Torajanese, Chinese-American, Chinese-Spanish, Chinese-Canadian family.
Estranged fathers and daughters. Publicly administered retributions, both physical and verbal in nature. Brothers scrambling for cursed and rapidly depleting family fortunes. Painfully complicated marriage proposals lassoing its noose over two or more continents. Inter-racial marriages. God Forbid! And of course, living and sexing together out of wedlock (that would be me).
It is as if my relatives are compelled to have a life that is as interesting as those of 'The Pitts' and 'The Jolies'. Otherwise, well, what would be the point of having a family? To shame and be shamed. To shame and let live. To be shamed and survive.
Meanwhile, this quiet white man who shared the same fart-congested air with me for three and a half hours, continued to trace the woman's bezoar of a ring. And my brain shamelessly wondered where this man and this woman belonged, thereby declaring myself a consumer of scandal.
Blessings
My wrists grow sore
bearing my weight
everyday
a bicycle wheel
spun into motion
A woman of the Greeks
a prominent nose
an uncompromising chin
the blacks of a widow
She straddles the footpath
with her waddling footsteps
As I stop to let her through
she lifts her hand
drags a cross
in the air
in my face
And I am left
to wonder:
do I feel
blessed
or oppressed?
bearing my weight
everyday
a bicycle wheel
spun into motion
A woman of the Greeks
a prominent nose
an uncompromising chin
the blacks of a widow
She straddles the footpath
with her waddling footsteps
As I stop to let her through
she lifts her hand
drags a cross
in the air
in my face
And I am left
to wonder:
do I feel
blessed
or oppressed?
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Sad urban creatures
These sad urban creatures
sucking on a pipe of dawn
Their lives and mine
sworn to loyalty
To calculated tickings
These sad urban creatures
don't have the time to
notice their hairs blanching
white
dust
white
dust
These sad urban creatures
In monochromatic mood swings
They read myths of heroes
spun for glamor's sake
spun for profit's sake
and they driiiiiiink it all in
These sad urban creatures
who have their lives
manufactured for them
Their leisure timetabled
for us (?)
These sad urban creatures
They make my tongue
turn blue
and I watch
how
new ones are grown
shielded from
true growth
Weeding out
the weeds
Easier to do
when they are young
'Be free!'
but only to an extent
'Be brave!'
but only if you're secure
'Be proud!'
but not of being different
These sad urban creatures
take photos of themselves
and smile
to hide
what they don't understand
the most:
themselves.
sucking on a pipe of dawn
Their lives and mine
sworn to loyalty
To calculated tickings
These sad urban creatures
don't have the time to
notice their hairs blanching
white
dust
white
dust
These sad urban creatures
In monochromatic mood swings
They read myths of heroes
spun for glamor's sake
spun for profit's sake
and they driiiiiiink it all in
These sad urban creatures
who have their lives
manufactured for them
Their leisure timetabled
for us (?)
These sad urban creatures
They make my tongue
turn blue
and I watch
how
new ones are grown
shielded from
true growth
Weeding out
the weeds
Easier to do
when they are young
'Be free!'
but only to an extent
'Be brave!'
but only if you're secure
'Be proud!'
but not of being different
These sad urban creatures
take photos of themselves
and smile
to hide
what they don't understand
the most:
themselves.
There was a woman who had come to our weekly art therapy group. She had just come out of hospital. She was that depressed.
'Long-term abusive relationship.' What does that even mean? You see the impact it has had on her. A face full of creases. Don't mistake them for smiling lines because creases like these don't come from smiling.
For a while I sat there, glancing shy little parakeet glances her way.
She was concentrating on her drawing. Her whole body leaning so intently onto the paper, like she wanted to disappear into it.
Everyone else finished and waited for her pencils to stop their frantic scribbling.
We went around in a circle. Exhibiting. Occasionally explaining.
She lifted her page up for everyone to see. A glow of colours swung their way into the room. I gasped. The paper was aswirl with golden pinks, shining oranges and washes of sunlight. The shapes were round and full. Two figures, embracing each other, their faces a picture of Leunig's bliss.
'This is my son.'
Her voice cracked.
'I just saw him on the weekend.'
A shuddering intake of breath.
'I wish I didn't have to leave.'
I broke inside.
And she hid the paper from sight.
'Long-term abusive relationship.' What does that even mean? You see the impact it has had on her. A face full of creases. Don't mistake them for smiling lines because creases like these don't come from smiling.
For a while I sat there, glancing shy little parakeet glances her way.
She was concentrating on her drawing. Her whole body leaning so intently onto the paper, like she wanted to disappear into it.
Everyone else finished and waited for her pencils to stop their frantic scribbling.
We went around in a circle. Exhibiting. Occasionally explaining.
She lifted her page up for everyone to see. A glow of colours swung their way into the room. I gasped. The paper was aswirl with golden pinks, shining oranges and washes of sunlight. The shapes were round and full. Two figures, embracing each other, their faces a picture of Leunig's bliss.
'This is my son.'
Her voice cracked.
'I just saw him on the weekend.'
A shuddering intake of breath.
'I wish I didn't have to leave.'
I broke inside.
And she hid the paper from sight.
If ever there was a house that was held together by books, it would be Mr. and Mrs. Willoughby's house. The walls are endless factory lines of words.
Just as books find their strength in their tightly strapped shoulders, the walls find their strength in their tightly stacked ribs.
Asked if they had read all of the books, they exclaimed, 'Heavens, no! It would take lifetimes!'
Still, if you had ever wanted to live in a library, Mr. and Mrs. Willoughby had realised that particular dream.
The books spoke of aging. Their covers faded or yellowed with sun spots. Much of this is reflected in the old couple's faces.
Blotches.
Hair fading white.
Eyes fading white.
Fingers of sunspots.
Like sun for paper, like age for people.
We had come to visit their son. A man who had acquired the HIV virus by way of clockwork intravenous drug use. He was known to the local hospital's mental health ward.
He invited us in.
A face, so gaunt. Was it from the drug-induced-happiness?
'I'm sorry I wasn't very friendly to you the last time we met.'
The vacant gaze.
'I was very depressed.'
Slight tremors of lips.
Slight tremors of fingers.
Stillness of the eyes.
His hands moved up towards his neck. 'I promise I won't try to hurt myself anymore.'
His body quickly regained its memory. At this gesture, his face blanched and the hands rapidly descended, back to their harmless nest on knees nervously clasped together.
There is the rustling of movement from the next room. Mr. Willoughby was playing chess with an invisible opponent. Mrs. Willoughby deftly manipulated a pair of knitting needles.
They grow just a little bit older with each breath. The threads of their precious books unwind just a little bit more each year. Their son struggles to stay in place for just that little bit longer each day.
Just as books find their strength in their tightly strapped shoulders, the walls find their strength in their tightly stacked ribs.
Asked if they had read all of the books, they exclaimed, 'Heavens, no! It would take lifetimes!'
Still, if you had ever wanted to live in a library, Mr. and Mrs. Willoughby had realised that particular dream.
The books spoke of aging. Their covers faded or yellowed with sun spots. Much of this is reflected in the old couple's faces.
Blotches.
Hair fading white.
Eyes fading white.
Fingers of sunspots.
Like sun for paper, like age for people.
We had come to visit their son. A man who had acquired the HIV virus by way of clockwork intravenous drug use. He was known to the local hospital's mental health ward.
He invited us in.
A face, so gaunt. Was it from the drug-induced-happiness?
'I'm sorry I wasn't very friendly to you the last time we met.'
The vacant gaze.
'I was very depressed.'
Slight tremors of lips.
Slight tremors of fingers.
Stillness of the eyes.
His hands moved up towards his neck. 'I promise I won't try to hurt myself anymore.'
His body quickly regained its memory. At this gesture, his face blanched and the hands rapidly descended, back to their harmless nest on knees nervously clasped together.
There is the rustling of movement from the next room. Mr. Willoughby was playing chess with an invisible opponent. Mrs. Willoughby deftly manipulated a pair of knitting needles.
They grow just a little bit older with each breath. The threads of their precious books unwind just a little bit more each year. Their son struggles to stay in place for just that little bit longer each day.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
I find it ironic that I just spent the day in a series of talks and presentations about suicide, when as recent as one month ago, I was fantasising about this very act.
The day's sessions felt quite removed from the experience of despair and fatigue that I have recently gone through. There was nothing of the cadaver-bound longings to escape.
This did not arise for me, as the group of NSW Health professionals discussed their experiences of clients/patients/people 'suiciding' at their workplace.
I think if one tries to be sensitive, you can come to notice the general energy of an enclosed space. As soon as one person began to recount how they had a patient kill themselves on one of their first shifts as a graduate nurse, the air became heavy as steel and guilt glued us together in a cloudy sombreness.
Guilt is insidious
like dead skin on scalp
the more you scratch
the more it spreads
Until you are marked
by white spores
and you are certain
that everyone knows
But really it's just you
scratching away
obsessed
at
being rid
of it
A memorable moment for me today was when the notion of 'attention-seeking-behaviour' was raised repeatedly. The presenter then asked us point-blank: 'Whoever is not manipulative, raise your hand.'
Not a soul. Not a soul. And I chuckled.
''Manipulative' has negative connotations but it does not mean that we don't all do things to have our way', he continued.
In the past three months or so, I can recall at least three occassions when I've disclosed my fantasising of suicide to my partner, more as a way of crying out: 'HELP ME!!!' than as an expression of potent desire to kill myself.
That said, when the painful incidents of the first half of the year were more fresh, like an unbearably cold slap of water on my body, leaving me burning with the cold... I really did want to die.
At my worst moment, following an attempt at dry-wretching the grief out into a toilet bowl, my body seized up and became like neglected clay, whereas my mind simply left. It walked out and left me: a gray hunk of clay, drying to the elements in the absence of mindful fingers to mold and move me.
My partner had to help me into bed, where I lay, paralysed.
The first thought which announced itself clearly was: 'I want to die. I am so tired. I want to die.'
A day later, I began my Social Work placement in Mental Health.
The day's sessions felt quite removed from the experience of despair and fatigue that I have recently gone through. There was nothing of the cadaver-bound longings to escape.
This did not arise for me, as the group of NSW Health professionals discussed their experiences of clients/patients/people 'suiciding' at their workplace.
I think if one tries to be sensitive, you can come to notice the general energy of an enclosed space. As soon as one person began to recount how they had a patient kill themselves on one of their first shifts as a graduate nurse, the air became heavy as steel and guilt glued us together in a cloudy sombreness.
Guilt is insidious
like dead skin on scalp
the more you scratch
the more it spreads
Until you are marked
by white spores
and you are certain
that everyone knows
But really it's just you
scratching away
obsessed
at
being rid
of it
A memorable moment for me today was when the notion of 'attention-seeking-behaviour' was raised repeatedly. The presenter then asked us point-blank: 'Whoever is not manipulative, raise your hand.'
Not a soul. Not a soul. And I chuckled.
''Manipulative' has negative connotations but it does not mean that we don't all do things to have our way', he continued.
In the past three months or so, I can recall at least three occassions when I've disclosed my fantasising of suicide to my partner, more as a way of crying out: 'HELP ME!!!' than as an expression of potent desire to kill myself.
That said, when the painful incidents of the first half of the year were more fresh, like an unbearably cold slap of water on my body, leaving me burning with the cold... I really did want to die.
At my worst moment, following an attempt at dry-wretching the grief out into a toilet bowl, my body seized up and became like neglected clay, whereas my mind simply left. It walked out and left me: a gray hunk of clay, drying to the elements in the absence of mindful fingers to mold and move me.
My partner had to help me into bed, where I lay, paralysed.
The first thought which announced itself clearly was: 'I want to die. I am so tired. I want to die.'
A day later, I began my Social Work placement in Mental Health.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
le 15 fevrier 09
Ties
It’s incredible how I feel this connection
grow
inside me
between me and this land
I can actually feel it extending
like an umbilical chord
Inching its way out of me
Not to be removed
Because I give birth to it
the same way
one gave birth to me
I migrated to Australia at the age of thirteen, to the sleepy city of Perth. As a teenager, having come from an Indonesia gripped by the excitement of a recent youth-led political revolution, Western Australia did nothing but breed the restlessness inside of me.
I experienced a brief stint in France, which was the haven I had designated in order to run away from Australia. On my last day there, as I watched the sun rise over a derelict Bordeaux, I had my first venture towards understanding the saying: 'Peace comes from within', as my father had once told me in a failed attempt to curtail the restlessness.
In 2004, I returned to Sydney and now find myself unexpectedly re-imagining my connection to place.
It’s incredible how I feel this connection
grow
inside me
between me and this land
I can actually feel it extending
like an umbilical chord
Inching its way out of me
Not to be removed
Because I give birth to it
the same way
one gave birth to me
I migrated to Australia at the age of thirteen, to the sleepy city of Perth. As a teenager, having come from an Indonesia gripped by the excitement of a recent youth-led political revolution, Western Australia did nothing but breed the restlessness inside of me.
I experienced a brief stint in France, which was the haven I had designated in order to run away from Australia. On my last day there, as I watched the sun rise over a derelict Bordeaux, I had my first venture towards understanding the saying: 'Peace comes from within', as my father had once told me in a failed attempt to curtail the restlessness.
In 2004, I returned to Sydney and now find myself unexpectedly re-imagining my connection to place.
Crooning ladies
Crooning ladies
of the night
keep me company
in my solitude
Amidst unfinished projects
commitments made in haste
crooning ladies
comfort me
Worries over
impending treachery
kept at bay
as crooning ladies
do what they do best
Crooning ladies
send me letters
write me poems
express-post
to my heart
‘You are loved’
‘Don’t you worry, hun’
‘You are loved’
Crooning ladies
cradle me
Crooning ladies
comfort me
le 28 mars 09, 08:33 pm
of the night
keep me company
in my solitude
Amidst unfinished projects
commitments made in haste
crooning ladies
comfort me
Worries over
impending treachery
kept at bay
as crooning ladies
do what they do best
Crooning ladies
send me letters
write me poems
express-post
to my heart
‘You are loved’
‘Don’t you worry, hun’
‘You are loved’
Crooning ladies
cradle me
Crooning ladies
comfort me
le 28 mars 09, 08:33 pm
Listening to my dragons
There is a dragon of jealousy
that will not recognize reasoning
It whispers things in my ear
about tongues in places where
I don’t want them to be
It convinces me that dicks
have gone into cunts
and if I’d known
I would have put a brutal
end to all these slip slaps
Illegal in my head
Don’t wanna know
Don’t wanna know
Don’t wanna know
There is a dragon of ecstasy
that does not need to recognize reasoning
She is the mother of all intuition
She is the one that nudges my fingers
towards that palette of paint
She is the one that pushes my voice
out from beneath
rags of shame
dust off the microphone
and place herself at my feet
as I speak
There is a dragon of rage
that has a right to not recognize reasoning
People!
There is no need to shy away from your anger!
I see some of my friends,
give them a glimpse of the dragon-
fire in my belly
And just like that-
they dispense me some advice:
‘You’ll feel much better once you’ve accepted things’
‘Why you so angry all the time?’
‘Just let it go, just let it be’
And the dragon roooaaarrrsss!
I am angry,
because I left my country
in the wake of racism
that killed,
ignorance
that tossed women
who-look-like-me
dead and violated on the streets
I am angry
because I came to this country
and got slurs on the streets
been called a dog
been accused of taking someone else’s job-
when I was (and still am)
obviously
unemployed
I am angry
because it often SUCKS
to be a woman
when you speak your mind,
all kinds of men get defensive
all kinds of men-
my own brother
my own father
suddenly
hollering up and down
about how you’re intimidating them,
you’re oppressing them,
cos you speak your mind
Let me tell you something,
BOYS
There is a difference
between the discomfort
of having
your fucked up ideas of
women, gender, and the world
challenged-
and
the pain
of
actually
being victimized
actually
being marginalized
actually
being underrepresented
So the dragon speaks.
There is a dragon of jealousy
that will not recognize reasoning
There is a dragon of ecstasy
that does not need to recognize reasoning
There is a dragon of rage
that has a right to not recognize reasoning
Which dragon are you?
Rani P Lukita 13th March 09
I mean to perform this one live, I'd appreciate some feedback on how it reads on the page.
that will not recognize reasoning
It whispers things in my ear
about tongues in places where
I don’t want them to be
It convinces me that dicks
have gone into cunts
and if I’d known
I would have put a brutal
end to all these slip slaps
Illegal in my head
Don’t wanna know
Don’t wanna know
Don’t wanna know
There is a dragon of ecstasy
that does not need to recognize reasoning
She is the mother of all intuition
She is the one that nudges my fingers
towards that palette of paint
She is the one that pushes my voice
out from beneath
rags of shame
dust off the microphone
and place herself at my feet
as I speak
There is a dragon of rage
that has a right to not recognize reasoning
People!
There is no need to shy away from your anger!
I see some of my friends,
give them a glimpse of the dragon-
fire in my belly
And just like that-
they dispense me some advice:
‘You’ll feel much better once you’ve accepted things’
‘Why you so angry all the time?’
‘Just let it go, just let it be’
And the dragon roooaaarrrsss!
I am angry,
because I left my country
in the wake of racism
that killed,
ignorance
that tossed women
who-look-like-me
dead and violated on the streets
I am angry
because I came to this country
and got slurs on the streets
been called a dog
been accused of taking someone else’s job-
when I was (and still am)
obviously
unemployed
I am angry
because it often SUCKS
to be a woman
when you speak your mind,
all kinds of men get defensive
all kinds of men-
my own brother
my own father
suddenly
hollering up and down
about how you’re intimidating them,
you’re oppressing them,
cos you speak your mind
Let me tell you something,
BOYS
There is a difference
between the discomfort
of having
your fucked up ideas of
women, gender, and the world
challenged-
and
the pain
of
actually
being victimized
actually
being marginalized
actually
being underrepresented
So the dragon speaks.
There is a dragon of jealousy
that will not recognize reasoning
There is a dragon of ecstasy
that does not need to recognize reasoning
There is a dragon of rage
that has a right to not recognize reasoning
Which dragon are you?
Rani P Lukita 13th March 09
I mean to perform this one live, I'd appreciate some feedback on how it reads on the page.
Trans-generational, Trans-racial Ruminations
I am coming to the end of the autobiography of Langston Hughes, a Negro poet and writer born in 1902, who was a pivotal artist of the Harlem Renaissance. His memoire, 'I wonder as I wander', takes us from the Caribbean, to the racially divided American South, to the USSR, to the remotest parts of central Asia (remote- depending on where one considers the center of one's world, of course!), back to the calmer waters of San Francisco by way of Japan and China, then on to Spain in the midst of Franco's fascist advancement upon the land.
There have been many passages throughout this memoir that have left me stunned or moved in a most organic way. There I would be- sitting in Cafe Ellas in the inner suburbs of Sydney- more than 70 years since Hughes' travels came to pass, and yet, somehow, his observations on the absurdity or inspirational quality of human behaviour, would grind me to a standstill.
On Theater and War
Langston Hughes writes of some of the Spanish artists of the 1930s, who were continuing to resist the fascist onslaught upon their land:
'Miguel Prieto had established a satirical puppet theater, La Tarumba, touring the trenches right up to the front lines. But most male members of the Alianza were soldiers and so able to work at art only when in Madrid on leave.'
I compare this to the realities facing many artists that I have come to meet, even briefly, since I have come to live in Sydney in 2004. Let's be frank, most of them are middle-class white students, who when desperate have been known to call on their parents for emergency funds.
That said, I am not about to belittle the efforts that many of them go through to (barely) sustain a diet whilst working to realise their most recent artistic vision. One of them, a friend that I came to know whilst training at PACT Youth Theater in Erskineville, has been on meagre Centrelink(1) unemployment benefits for nearly one year and yet always finds the time, energy and commitment to involve themselves in various theater projects. I would guess that these artistic endeavours sustain him much more effectively than the Centrelink benefits do.
To each, their own sacrifices. To each, their own privileges.
GLOSS-ARY! (1) Australian welfare benefits, obtainable only after deciphering complex bureaucracies and usually barely enough to live on anyway!
Please stay tuned for more ruminations on Langston Hughes, what African-American literature means to a young Chinese-Indonesian woman residing in Sydney... and more!
There have been many passages throughout this memoir that have left me stunned or moved in a most organic way. There I would be- sitting in Cafe Ellas in the inner suburbs of Sydney- more than 70 years since Hughes' travels came to pass, and yet, somehow, his observations on the absurdity or inspirational quality of human behaviour, would grind me to a standstill.
On Theater and War
Langston Hughes writes of some of the Spanish artists of the 1930s, who were continuing to resist the fascist onslaught upon their land:
'Miguel Prieto had established a satirical puppet theater, La Tarumba, touring the trenches right up to the front lines. But most male members of the Alianza were soldiers and so able to work at art only when in Madrid on leave.'
I compare this to the realities facing many artists that I have come to meet, even briefly, since I have come to live in Sydney in 2004. Let's be frank, most of them are middle-class white students, who when desperate have been known to call on their parents for emergency funds.
That said, I am not about to belittle the efforts that many of them go through to (barely) sustain a diet whilst working to realise their most recent artistic vision. One of them, a friend that I came to know whilst training at PACT Youth Theater in Erskineville, has been on meagre Centrelink(1) unemployment benefits for nearly one year and yet always finds the time, energy and commitment to involve themselves in various theater projects. I would guess that these artistic endeavours sustain him much more effectively than the Centrelink benefits do.
To each, their own sacrifices. To each, their own privileges.
GLOSS-ARY! (1) Australian welfare benefits, obtainable only after deciphering complex bureaucracies and usually barely enough to live on anyway!
Please stay tuned for more ruminations on Langston Hughes, what African-American literature means to a young Chinese-Indonesian woman residing in Sydney... and more!
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