Dora B: a memoir of my mother, by Josiane Behmoiras

My mother, who lives in England, will be 80 next April. She regularly rings me with cheerful news of her bingo friends, her grandchildren, the goings-on of the neighbours in her block of council flats and what she’s growing in her patch of garden. Every time I speak with her I feel an overwhelming thankfulness for her health, her independence, her intellect, her optimism and her enduring love.

Josiane Behmoiras also loved her mother dearly. It’s a testimony to the strength of their love that mother and daughter remained firmly connected through terrible hardship and poverty, prejudice and violence.

Josiane was born in Paris in 1953 and spent her first few years with her mother wandering, scavenging for food, sheltering in hostels and eventually being arrested for vagrancy. Short sections of the book capture poignant moments of childhood memories of rejection and desperation. Dora lived in France for thirty-six years, but being Jewish, she is deported to Israel. Dora struggles to make a living for the two of them in the stark landscape of a migrant camp, but every time she begins to make progress, her difference is identified by a tormentor, and her enterprise is crushed.

At times, Dora appears simply eccentric. But eccentricity develops into full-blown mental illness for which she receives no treatment, and which Josiane manages at great cost to herself. Growing older, Josiane works to support her mother, eventually meets her partner and moves to Melbourne to have children of her own. Dora thwarts every effort to bring her to Australia, and ends her years living rough as a bag lady in Tel Aviv.

The book opens and closes with descriptions of the painful, disconnected phone calls that Dora makes to Josiane.

One question remains unspoken but always present while reading this book - what more could Josiane have done to relieve her mother’s suffering? And the answer is nothing. Josiane navigated the opposing pulls of the need to respect her mother’s choices with the need to force care upon her. In general, protecting her mother’s freedom was the overriding responsibility. Even if that freedom exposed her to personal danger and ill-health.

A beautifully written, brave and very moving book, which I read with a feeling of sorrow for Josiane Behmoiras and a guilty sense of gratefulness for never having to face such pain. I’m going to send it to my mother. No doubt she’ll ring me and tell me how much she enjoyed it.

The Penitent by Isaac Bashevis Singer

A strange choice for me, but here’s why. I’m a vegetarian (that’s no meat and no fish, thank you). I’ve been a vegetarian for 30 years. I don’t have rickets or anaemia or any debilitating diseases. And I am daily amazed at what a blind spot otherwise progressive people have, lesbians and feminists included, about consuming the flesh of dead animals. To me the choice to be vegetarian makes sense in so many compelling ways – producing animals for food damages the environment, wastes resources, fills human bodies with hormones, cholesterol, puss and other undesirable substances, stands as a signifier for patriarchal power, and is downright inhumane to other sentient beings. There that’s my diatribe.

So maybe that’s why I could tolerate Isaac Bashevis Singer’s rant that runs unfettered through this book. I’ve been purposefully seeking out novels where there is a theme of vegetarianism. And there aren’t many of them. Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904 – 1991) was a vegetarian, and many of his books have vegetarian characters.

An orthodox Jewish man, Joseph Shapiro (“The Penitent”) meets the author at the Wailing Wall, and tells his story. Having fled Poland at the Nazi invasion, he ends up in New York, where everything revolves around business and sex. The emptiness of this life drives him to Israel, and traditional Judaism. And vegetarianism; “I had long since come to the conclusion that man’s treatment of God’s creatures makes mockery of all his ideals and of the whole alleged humanism. …I’ve thought more than once that when it comes to animals, every man is a Nazi.”

Despite being published in 1984, there’s a very contemporary feel to Shapiro’s railing against the evils of modern society. He describes lawyers as people whose function is to teach murderers how to avoid punishment so that they can kill more innocent people. And he is particularly scathing when he sees the Jewish community adopting this modern emptiness; “We already publish Hebrew magazines that describe in detail which Hollywood harlot slept with what Hollywood pimp."

Which forces me to admit that while Shapiro may be a good vegetarian, he is also a shocking misogynist, regularly describing women in terms of their projected propensity to draw him into sexual depravity, and referring to them as wenches and whores. And he’s a dreadful homophobe, even if he expresses it in an interesting way: “When a man sleeps with a modern woman, he actually gets into bed with all her lovers. That's why there are so many homosexuals today, because modern man is sleeping spiritually with countless other men. He constantly wants to excel in sex because he knows that his partner is comparing him to the others.”

This book is open to many readings, which is what makes it interesting. Is Shapiro’s exploration of faith and religious practice designed to persuade us to turn our back on materialism and reach out for spiritual fulfilment, or does it expose the intolerance of fundamentalism? Does Isaac Bashevis Singer, the author, agree with the moralistic outbursts of his main character? And does this book “work”, when it is so light on plot or narrative, and so grindingly heavy on polemic?

Harold Bloom published an interesting view of The Penitent in the New Yorker

Careless, by Deborah Robertson

Regular readers of this blog will be aware of how much I admired Sylvia Martin’s book about the wonderful Ida Leeson. Ida should be dripping with literary accolades. She should have grabbed all the literary prizes for 2007. But Ida has regularly missed out, and was pipped at the post for the NSW Literary awards by a book by a West Australian writer, Careless. So, to be honest, I opened Deborah Robertson’s book with a teeny bit of resentment.

But Careless is a good book.

Firstly, it gives an excellent account of contemporary Australia. You wouldn’t think that was noteworthy, but historical novels are so pervasive that the description of narrative worlds where the characters live in units, drink Coke and watch flat-screen televisions feels recklessly innovative.

Careless explores the impact of a violent tragedy on a range of vaguely connected characters. Children feature large, or rather the relationships adults have with children, in all their variety. The subtlety of Deborah Robertson’s portrayal of being a parent was striking. She doesn’t romanticise. She describes the everyday love, ambivalence, exasperation, fun and occasional neglect of normal parenting. I enjoyed that very much.

The book is also about grief, and ambition, and creativity, and raises questions about what makes a fitting memorial to the dead. It uses the image of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water in multiple ways to represent, I imagine, the layers of grief and love which can stand strong while a forceful undercurrent seeps below. The hope which emanates from a beautiful building built by a man who had experienced great tragedy. The idea that we can reshape the future but that life flows on. I enjoyed this too.

But in the end there was something unfulfilling in this book, also noted by other bloggers (Lucy’s blog, Tea&Tattered pages ). Which leads me to a perennial speculation about whether writers would be well advised to conduct UAT (User Acceptance Testing – common practice for websites and virtual spaces) with Josephine Blow to get more honest feedback than they get from commercial critics and literatis.

But anyway, perhaps it was the Epilogue which failed. It was far too late to introduce new characters. But ultimately, that let-down feeling is because of the absence of any kind of optimism for the little girl, Pearl, whose strength is impressive, but who is destined to be always held back by her mother and her sense of responsibility.

Careless won the 2007 Kibble Award for women’s life writing, and has been short listed for a swag of other prizes. It’s a good book, but not a patch on Ida. Then again, how healthy is Australian writing when, in one year, we get a range of books to read of this calibre?

El Dorado, by Dorothy Porter

You’ve got to admire Dorothy Porter. She’s dragged Australian poetry out of the mannered and self-indulgent murky backrooms of inner-city pubs, and hauled it from the rollicking rhyming outback sheds to make it robust, a vehicle for suspense and stark realism. And she’s an out lesbian.

Her earlier detective novel in verse, The Monkey’s Mask, was hugely admired, made into a gorgeous film (with Susie Porter) is about to be released as a radio play by the BBC and is still making money for Dorothy Porter.

But somehow it doesn’t work for me.

The main theme of El Dorado is friendship, expressed through the unlikely relationship between a boofhead unreconstructed straight male copper (though a single parent) and a lesbian whose work involves creating Hollywood imaginary worlds. I never found this relationship convincing enough – what would have held them together all those years? Why has Cath come back to Melbourne? And while they are searching for the killer, who they dub El Dorado, how is she supporting herself, for goodness sake?

El Dorado is a serial child murderer who smears his victims’ faces with gold, a detail that remains unexplained.

Now, I know that sparseness is the beauty of poetry. It’s as much about what isn’t said as what’s on the page. But my pedestrian mind strays all the time to these pragmatic unanswered questions – and that intrusion spoils it for me.

The most interesting idea in the book is the connection Porter makes between the killer as a homophobic moralistic saviour of the innocence of children, and the contemporary rise of the religious right. I laughed aloud at this section:

If only El Dorado would abstain
from murdering their children
the sex-mad sex-scared
punters
would probably elect him

As a side story, Cath falls in love with Lily, a snake charmer and former sex worker. Cath’s insecurity about the problems of their comparative age and their different histories is well drawn and enjoyable for its ordinariness.

Covers of books are very important to me in setting the tone. This one is very uninspiring, being a photograph of trees and water by Christian Carollo, who, according to the website, works mostly for American organisations on projects called Handbook for Campus Crusade for Christ and Brand my Church. A strange choice. Very likely Dorothy Porter had no influence at all over the cover design.

El Dorado has been on the market for several weeks, and while Dorothy Porter has been extensively interviewed about it (on the ABC Arts show, at Gleebooks) and there are a myriad of published descriptive pieces, there are no critical reviews. Why?
Perhaps because we all admire the project. We all admire the writer. But is that enough?

Ida Leeson: a life; not a blue-stocking lady by Sylvia Martin

Librarians get bad press everywhere. No matter how much we re-invent ourselves as information architects, or cybrarians, we still get lumbered with the cardigans and sensible shoes. It’s always been of interest to me that the stereotype of a librarian is very close to the stereotype of a lesbian.

Any biographer of Ida Leeson would be vulnerable to promoting the stereotypes of a librarian who was also a lesbian. But this is a truly inspiring, engaging and admirable book, written in a most sensitive and respectful way.

For the past ten years or so, Sylvia Martin has been writing and researching about women in Australian history who, today, we would describe as lesbians. It’s a project which has brought back into focus women who have been neglected in the construction of Australia’s literary and cultural history.

Ida Leeson is a worthy subject. She was born and grew up in working-class Leichhardt, blessed with a fine intellect and the capacity to work very hard, and became the first female Mitchell Librarian for New South Wales. On the way she overcame blatant discrimination against her as a woman, and a great deal of wheeling and dealing in the acquisition of material for the impressive library. Her relationship with Florence Birch, another very accomplished woman, was known by everyone. But, as Martin points out; “…a person’s sexuality was not considered to be the core aspect of their identity in the 1920s and 1930s in the way it is today.”

Nevertheless, while Sylvia Martin has avoided typecasting, the reviews of her book haven’t. Bruce Elder’s review in the Sydney Morning Herald is titled “Is it possible to make the life and work of a librarian interesting?” Even the Gleebooks review begins with the notion that; “Ida Leeson was no ordinary librarian,” suggesting that, thankfully, she wasn’t a conservative crashing bookish bore like all the rest of them (us).

Ida Leeson’s examined life throws up challenges. I particularly enjoyed Sylvia Martin’s exploration of Ida’s mannish dress and manners, and her relationship with men; “Androgynous women like Ida are unsettling and create unconscious gender anxiety, particularly among heterosexual men…”

Ida’s heroic sense of herself as a librarian is nothing short of thrilling for those of us who clack away all day online in a contemporary atmosphere where library users are constructed as customers and all contact is noted, measured, collected and somehow valued in a set of numerical KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Ida catalogued meticulously, building her own knowledge by reading copiously. She followed obscure leads and tracked down material to build the collection. She edited research papers. And she found time to promote other women librarians.

Sylvia Martin is open about the problems of biographical research. Much of the evidence of Ida’s personal life has been lost, but where a writer reveals their personal interests in a subject’s life, does it matter? What matters is the re-instatement of Ida Leeson as central to the preservation of the history of Sydney, New South Wales and Australia, and its continued accessibility. The book’s almost incidental history of Sydney in the twenties and thirties just adds to the pleasure.

Shortlisted for the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction 2007, I’m hoping it will be pronounced the winner on 31st May.

Available from the Feminist Bookshop, who tell me it’s a best-seller!

Sylvia Martin’s next project is a biography of the left-wing Melbourne literary figure, Aileen Palmer (1915-1988) All power to her.

Bad dreaming: Aboriginal men's violence against women and children, by Louis Nowra

Last December, when the Queensland DPP announced that no charges would be laid against Sergeant Chris Hurley for the horrific murder of Eric Doomadgee, a 36 year old healthy Indigenous man from Palm Island, I remember feeling sick to the stomach. (That decision was later overturned and Hurley is now charged with manslaughter). In my ignorance, and indignation, I overlooked the fact that women and children have been battered, raped and violated on Palm Island every single day, for year and years. Hurley’s crime was inexcusable, but so equally, is the perpetual assault on Aboriginal women and children.

Why does it take the intervention of a white man to expose the awful reality of the lives of black women? It’s a frustrating fact, but that’s how it is in an increasingly patriarchal Australia. Should we feminists stand up and say we don’t need or want men to speak for us? We can speak for ourselves? Maybe, in an ideal world, but in my observation contemporary feminists are enormously reluctant to speak about gender-based oppression within non-mainstream communities, for fear of buying into racism or going against the notion of (equal but different) multiculturalism.

So, I’m glad that the playwrite, Louis Nowra (Cosi, Radiance) took personal responsibility to write an essay which condemns the appalling levels of male violence in the Aboriginal community, and which sheets the blame straight home to men; “I have been driven to write about this because, as a man, I know that at its dark unwholesome core, it is a man’s problem.”

While we shuffle our feet, Aboriginal women are living daily with hideous levels of violence. And dying. Audrey Bolger, in her 1990 report, Aboriginal Women and Violence points out that the number of murdered Aboriginal women exceeds the number of Indigenous men who have died in custody. Why aren’t we marching in the streets?

Nowra’s essay is carefully crafted. He begins with his personal experience of domestic violence and his response to confronting the horrific evidence of Aboriginal men’s violence during a stint in Alice Springs hospital. He goes on to explore the traditional roots of violence in Aboriginal communities, the impact of invasion, the issue of “promised wives”, homosexuality and the use of customary law as a defence in the judicial system. Some of his examples of violence against women and children, including toddlers and babies, are profoundly distressing. And yet again, I was pulled up short by my own silly assumptions. Nowra writes: “Women remain victims of men’s versions of indigenous customs and culture.” Yes, it’s obvious – human rights must always come before cultural rights.

But Aboriginal women aren’t always victims. Nowra tells the story of several strong women who have fought back. But again, it’s women who are doing the work. Sometime soon, individual Aboriginal men, in large numbers, are going to have to stand up and pledge never to hit, rape or abuse another woman or child.

Nowra has been predictably accused of appropriating Aboriginal culture (in the title), racism in his generalisations, and even of using this issue as a money-making tool! (By publishing an essay in Australia – I think not!) He has also been criticised for not presenting concrete solutions. At the Gleebooks forum, an Aboriginal man who described himself as a health policy worker from NSW Health, made an angry attack on the validity of Nowra’s statistics, asserting that the problem was caused by failed government policy, and condemned the book as “unscholarly”. I just wish he could feel equivalent anger about the injustice Aboriginal women and children suffer.

Nowra mentioned to me afterwards that he has seen young Aboriginal men who stand up against this behaviour effectively ostracised from family and community. It's a risky business for men to stand against men too. But it's got to be done.

My only criticism of Nowra’s book is that it doesn’t even bother to question “why?” Why do men rape and attack women and children? What do they get out of it? He writes from the premise that if they can get away with it, they will. that an idle man is a dangerous man. That is deeply, deeply depressing.

Read this book and get angry.

Published as part of the NOW series by Pluto Press and available from Gleebooks

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Purple Hibiscus won the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Best First Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for 2004. Set in a sweltering and politically explosive Nigeria, the novel exposes the cold, calculated domestic violence of a patriarchal father towards his wife, his son, and the main character of the novel, his fifteen-year-old daughter Kambili. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie delivers a tremendously confident narrative drive by revealing the extent of everyday brutality bit-by-bit, violent act after violent act, until it is unbearable. The writing is at times almost clinical in description of barbaric, heartbreaking acts, and rich in its use of Nigerian words peppered through the English. The perpetrator is complex – like many perpetrators he has a shining public persona that hides a penchant for domestic tyranny. Papa Eugene is a fundamentalist Catholic, admired for his unstinting faith, adoring of God the father and Jesus the son, while he ostracises his own earthly father, Papa-Nnukwu, for holding on to traditional spiritual beliefs, and physically abuses his earthly son, Jaja, leaving permanent impairments. He makes ostentatious charitable donations, but allows his father and sister to live in poverty. Through the passage of the novel, with the help of her Aunty Ifeoma, Kambili awakens to the extent of her own terror, to the ways in which her every action, every spoken word, are measured against her father’s judgements, to the absence of happiness and laughter in her life. It’s a brilliant rendering of the magnetism of abusive power. Even when she is released from the overbearing oppression of her father, she wants to see him in her dreams, longs to hug him again. This enduring, irresistible, commonplace attraction victims feels for perpetrators is always a conundrum for me – why do these women keep looking for the approval of men who batter them? Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie doesn’t offer any simplistic, binary models to explain domestic violence, fundamentalist religion or the struggle of post-colonial societies, just insight into their complexity. More power to her. This is a stunning novel.

Available from the Feminist Bookshop