Location, location, location

I'm simply musing here today on what location means to writers and to writing. This from Ron Silliman at http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/
>Thus, finally, I’m reminded that in poetry & politics, as well as in real estate, so much comes down to “location, location, location.” <

So I was with Sunil Govinnage, a Sri Lankan poet, the other day. He is either caught between two cultures, or straddling two cultures, and in the course of conversation about all things poetic - mainly his and mine! - it became apparent that his homeland and his adopted land are forever figuring in his poetry as a kind of frisson or tension that keeps his words taut. Occasionally he will write a Sinhala word into an English poem ... or 'a poem in English' would be more accurate because they are nearly all about Australia. Yet when he recited his poems in the original language (Sinhala), they were so close to singing as to be inseparable to Western ears. The blurb on the back of his first book - 'White Mask: A collection of New Australian Poetry' (iUniverse at www.iuniverse.com)- ends with this paragraph:

'In Govinnage's poetry, we find not only a nostalgic presence of a rich culture, but the ability to recollect and narrate an interesting interplay between home and exile.'

A small quote:

My Sinhala poems sleep in a back room
Lamenting their exile
Like children forbidden from play.
(from his poem 'My English Verse')

Such a rich singing language! & yet in the English it is diminished and 'flat' - straightforward. Just as you can't be in two places at once, you can't be in two languages at once - hence, the exile of his language.

Sunil pointed out to me what an effect an early story of mine had on him: The Presley Girls (pub. Summer Shorts Two anthology, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1994) was a story set on Rottnest Island where two teenage boys chat up two young girls - who are saving their lips for Elvis! It is set in the late Fifties when the resort island was still fairly rough and ready. Now it is a glorified monster, with airconditioned holiday homes, etc. With progress, you lose some, you win some. That story is very Australian - not only Australian, but very regional to this corner of Oz.

Do you have to know a lot about Rotto (as locals call it) to understand the story? Not a bit. There are such holiday camps all around the world. (Unfortunately at this time in history, too many camps are refugee camps.) But the regional flavour gives my story character. If I'd scrubbed it clean of regional references it would have been plain and dry, a dull background to an earthy story of young lust.

As Sunil spoke, I grandiloquently thought of Joyce and his settings - regional again. And the American grain that William Carlos Williams wrote in - a regional syntax and often a regional diction (one of the many englishes that exist on this planet at any one time ...)

Samuel Beckett is a rare case for 'the opposition'. He consciously took out the specifically historical references and geographic locations from Waiting For Godot to make it more universal and 'timeless'. To me it is a powerful anti-war play - showing nobody wins a war. Even those left standing after a war are severely diminished by it. Perhaps only the makers of war weapons and machinery benefit - and they live only in the sterile region of Greed.

I've often thought that in Perth, this city perched on the edge of the Indian Ocean on one side and deserts on the other, a rich anthology could sprout, even a grand poetic, from all the streams of Greek and Italian, Chinese, Vietnamese and Malay poets who must be living 'in exile' in our neighbourhood, but are too shy or frightened to bring their poems forward in this monolingual society. They suffer dislocation within location: not location within location in location.

Hearing Sunil read in Sinhala was enchanting - imagine such song being multiplied and amplified a hundredfold in our midst. I see some day there being a distinctly West Coast Oz literature - maybe with its ancestors being Gavin Casey, Mary Durack, Katharine Sussannah Prichard, et al, but its vibrancy and point-of-difference being the mixture of dislocated language writers brought into location ... a Vietnamese Tim Winton or a Sinhalese John Kinsella ... maybe Miriam Wei Wei Lo and Sunil Govinnage are paving the way.

I have neglected to mention indigenous writers in this post. I am not being dismissive when I say their voice too will influence Oz lit - In fact, today there is a kind of subterranean indigenous voicing beneath Oz culture, much of it unfortunately trivialised for cultural tourism, but still there. Perhaps contemporary writers like Kim Scott and singer/songwriters like Yothu Yindi and Archie Roach and artists like Mary McLean are planting the seeds. Sadly, their original culture (the song cycles, the rock paintings, etc) seems destined for cademic books and research sectors of the library.