Deeply unsettling five years post-publication. Epidemics. Yep. Bangladesh in flood? An aid-worker friend has the pictures. The, the inwardness of childhood: ‘how much of their time is spent engaged with whatever it is that they’re doing, trying things out, becoming themselves’ (184).
Place, person, place as person, unplaced person, all opening in the line: ‘You were a girl, thin and young, with veins that showed blue’ (1). My/your/our past/place/person all ‘slipping and falling’ (304). Truth elides you/me/us all, ‘we can’t get to it’ (305).
to read zong in white skin is to have no words to have to zong is to read no no zong to read to white to skin to have no zong no words skin in ‘w w w w a wa’ (3).
Saw it coming before I saw the epidemic coming. Iso. Can’t wait for the hardcopy. Deferred gratification? Not when there’s audio downloads. The reading as good as the writing. I lecture on fiction that works ethically with more-than-human representations, talk it up.
For those whose hearing is poor, those who do the strenuous work of passing or social absconding, this raw story is manual as much as memoir and critical history. The older story within the personal story makes clear these politics of hearing.
To start with the heart of George Eliot’s squirrel, a good call for those who ‘read novels’ to escape the mind’s ‘unrelenting monologue’ (96). Chapters break. The ‘adverbs or prepositions’, those ‘odd pieces of grammar’ (208). ‘Throughout’ (132). ‘Notwithstanding’ (122). ‘Instead’ (67).
A rare creature, this book. I don’t want to let it go, can’t wait to pass it on to friends, those creatures around me who respect and appreciate the personhood of dogs and who see writing and reading as acts of devotion.
This is not tricky to read when read to you with quiet Irish fury. The male surveillance of the seventies all too familiar even if the troubles are not bombstrewn. And reading while walking, a crime then, everywhere on the streets now.
Back off, she writes, not backing off. Too well-placed to reveal this well-researched axiom. Settler-Australians seeking Indigenous justice need to take as many steps as are needed to get out of the way. My wordy readerly teacherly efforts reduced to self-privileging gestures.
