By Lyn McCredden
POETRY
Gawimarra Gathering
Jeanine Leane
UQP, $24.99
The Flirtation of Girls
Sara M Saleh
UQP, $24.99
The academic dean in the School of Indigenous Studies at the Australian University of Divinity, Garry Deverell, provides one context in which to read the poetry of Jeanine Leane and Sara M Saleh. On a recent ABC Soul Search episode, Deverell, a Trawloolway man and an Anglican priest, argues that colonial history can’t be undone, that the genie can’t be put back into the bottle. In his new theological work, Contemplating Country, he argues further that we are all bound together by colonial history in different ways, and that what we (Australians of all kinds) need to be asking is how will we be bound together. What conversations of good faith can emerge from this fact, this seeing of all of us bound to and by colonial history?
Jeanine Leane’s most persuasive and moving poems are not manifestos, but provocations.Credit:
Deverell does not pretend that the power positions have been equal, but he does claim that we need to recognise that all of us – Indigenous, white settler, immigrant and refugee, religious and secular – have been colonised, in our bodies, minds and imagination. This fact propels us to recognise the need for constant, open-minded, justice-oriented translation.
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This is exactly what the poetries of Jeanine Leane and Sara M Saleh are engaged in: translation between languages, values and selves. In Leane’s work, the most persuasive and moving poems are not manifestos, but provocations that make us see, understand, feel, why Indigenous Australia wants and needs to reclaim its languages, its sacred practices, its understandings of country.
As a reader, you might believe you already know why. How many times have you listened to acknowledgments of country, heard the slogans (“Always was, always will be”)? But poetry offers, at its best, something more startling than slogans. It constructs through language powerful, resonant, piercing images, sounds, characters.
For example, in Entanglement, Leane recognises, like Deverell, “invaded and invader knotted in unbreakable grip”. In her prose poem to Aunty Lomas: Your Smile is a River, she introduces us to Aunty, who “says learning language is like pouring honey from a jar into a glass bowl/ watching every drop ooze from jar to bowl/ knows when the bowl is full – she is that bowl…” . And in Forced into images (a poem to my colonisers), Leane, in more polemic mode, writes: “Australia is a violent translation. It’s not my myth. It’s yours. Countries invaded for a nation.”
Sara Saleh’s book is wonderful and poetically sumptuous.Credit: Nick Moir
Leane’s powerful rage against the injustices of colonisation is most effective when it undresses the rhetorics of racism, making a poetic weapon with which to resist and rewrite what “forces me into its image”.
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This struggle – for language, and for ways to resist racism and cultural engulfment – is also, differently, Saleh’s struggle.
The Flirtation of Girls is a wonderful, poetically sumptuous book. It evokes the frustrations, the pleasures and the power of cultural witnessing experienced by an astute and witty poetic mind-shaping experience, in ghazals, aubades, elegies, odes, tributes, memorialising, meditations, prayers, palindromes.
It sounds exhausting, this poetic discipline, and in some ways it is, as it embraces multiple poetic forms, honouring the intellectual mentors (Darwish, Nizzar Qabbani, Mohja Kahf) of Arabic poetry. But what Saleh also produces is vibrant, candid and fresh understandings for the narrator and the reader. Her poetry opens eyes and ears, giving narrative shape to what is traditional, but also endangered, piercingly haunting.
Positioned painfully between cultural homes, and ragged, shifting values and beliefs, Saleh, whose first novel was published last year, meditates, poetically and ideologically, on what she expects of herself in Australia: “To be an Arab-Muslim woman settler living on stolen land is to try to reassemble fragments, to find meaning in them, to strive for a semblance of ‘justice’ and search for little joys and small loves in the disjoints of Diaspora.”
The narrator longs for “past glories”, the hope that “... our beloved Lebanon will rise again”; but undergirding this longing is an alternative knowledge that “country is a broken headstone”.
As poet (translator between worlds), Saleh is constantly experiencing the ways in which languages refuse, fail, imprison, release, negotiate diasporic life. “Does a comma slow the chaos, or expand it?” (Punctuation as Organized Violence). As readers, we are privileged to follow the raw, ecstatic, abject wanderings of this diasporic girl, as “They came to your beloved Beirut and forced all the wrong/ languages into your mouth./ you separated yourself into two piles of neither here nor there” (Here, There: a Ghazal). But one immense and moving realisation of this poetry is that “the poets have ways of teaching us that we are much bigger than here and there”.
This review has not even begun to ask: how does Jeanine Leane’s “always was, always will be” speak with Sara Saleh’s “we are much bigger than here and there”. That conversation is our future.
Lyn McCredden is a professor of Australian literature and literary studies at Deakin University.
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