Author: Sue Hall Pyke

This:

‘Gama yarga

why you keep me awake

is to teach me I am not alone

Guwany

why you keep me awake

is the night like day to you

Gibam garandalehn

why you keep me awake

what am I still to do’

(101)

Cara Romera is perfectly flawed. ‘Look, I committed some errors.’ (!85). Her voice rings clear as a bell, and her heart is just as strong. Fills out government forms as they deserve. Dream neighbour if you’re not possessive of your loved ones.

A tight-woven ‘unruly load’ (286). Life as data, written here through different prismatic perspectives that cohere into masculinist power. Quantifiable memory, packaged into commodities to suit a market that never stops reinventing. What gets forgotten, what gets remembered in the ‘memorevolution’ (281).

A cool refreshing entry up and down the black lines into the cruel forgetting times. A toe dip then a drowning for writers with mothers they love, mothers who love to talk the past. ’You broke her heart. And you wrote’ (213).

This is nothing but the story of how it is, the work of ‘meat-speak’ (18). This is must-speak to the atrocity of the acceptable, laid out in ‘tiny pieces of glass’ (81) splat, in the face of such violent lack of outrage.

Grasses as invasive as rabbits, blackberries (246). Victoria’s southwest coast, held down. Paris, uprisings. A poetic engineer wracking the ‘violence of excessive infrastructure’ (263). The truth: ‘as we attempt to rectify our old mistakes we are destined to make new ones’ (299).

This writer. The writer’s writer. Who better to write of the ‘amoral’ soul of an artist, laid bare to hear ‘the call of truth when it comes’ (109)?  But it’s Cusk. Art is a ‘serpent’, a cold lonely yen for belonging (107).

No wonder it’s a classic, this pilgrimage of learning to see differently, deeply. A wonder it took the ‘flesh-flake’ (145) of me so long to be spun into this web of spy-like stalking with its dream of a ‘prayer tunnel’ cell (261).

The heartbreak, power and music in these carefully shaped essays of class oppression layered with the barbs of racism and spiked with a fraught mother-daughter relationship. Tender humour and sometimes just perfect oneliners. Yes, beer is the ‘missionary position of beverages’ (68).