Photo by Jared Zimmerman. Image reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic License.

Sometimes the Ocean Falls on You, Even When the Coastlines Are Far Away

Seagulls scattered over granite steps
like hot white ash.

You wanted your body buried.

The sea is coming for me, too
slinking under the sound of traffic,
circling the curb.

Trees breathe ghosts into this air,
dream of powerlines
touching their branch tips.

They reach under the bitumen
trying to entwine their roots.

Sometimes, the pavement sings
with the memory of a forest –
echoes projected like a hologram,
scrawled over glass and cement.

Sometimes ‘so far’ and ‘so close’
are the same thing.

I remember you
cutting your toenails,
brushing your teeth,
sitting in dawn light.

Water Conducts Electricity

We race for the horizon like we could ever reach the end of it, until the shoreline is so far away Marion’s a speck. A long, thin, worried speck – he doesn’t like swimming. The water’s warm and reflects back sun like shards. I scrunch my nose so I don’t sneeze. Somehow, we are holding onto each other in the water and my skin feels like it’s made of bubbles. You swim to shore with me on your back and I try to count the freckles between your white shoulder blades, slicing through the waves. I worry you’ll get sunburnt. You do.

These poems appear in The Lifted Brow #30. Get your print copy here, or get the digital edition here.

Izzy Roberts-Orr is a Melbourne writer, editor, radio producer and hurricane. She is also co-director of the National Young Writers’ Festival and Executive Producer of The ReReaders podcast.

Photo by Andrew Seaman. Image reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic License.

I was talking with Filipino poet Larry Ypil recently, who was agonising over a recent move in his country by president Rodrigo Duterte. Duterte wants to give a hero’s burial to the remains of former, brutal dictator Ferdinand Marcos. It’s not hard to see why my friend was distressed – Marcos’s corrupt government killed thousands, and tortured countless more. Moving his body from its state of open unburial in a glass case in Ilocos Norte to the Heroes’ Cemetery in Manila achieves two things simultaneously: it recasts or at least softens his legacy of turmoil, and, in the act of burial itself, encourages forgetfulness. Neither should be tolerated, but, in the wake of Trump’s presidential win, we especially need to understand that last as dangerous.

I half-joked at the time that the Philippines had already elected its own version of Trump, and that he was every bit as unpredictable and damaging and violent as people fear a Trump presidency would be. The analogy holds up well. Duterte is a maverick candidate with a strong-man approach to foreign policy, who has said horrifying things about women and promised not just to crack down on crime, but to outright murder criminals. He has remarked of an Australian woman who was gang-raped and killed in Davao in 1989 that he, as Davao’s mayor at the time, should have been first to rape her. In the ensuing controversy, when his own daughter revealed she was a rape victim but would still vote for him, he dismissed her claim, saying she was a “drama queen”. He has actively vowed to kill tens of thousands of supposed criminals without trial, and then give himself a presidential pardon afterward. He won in a landslide.

Trump’s comments and actions toward women, including, allegedly, multiple incidents of sexual assault and rape, have been well documented. His racism, his contempt not just for Mexicans and Muslims—epitomised by the plan to build a wall for the former, and to ban the latter—but for foreign countries as a whole, is also well-documented. Endorsed by the KKK and championed by white supremacists everywhere, his election is a direct rejection of non-white citizens, and all non-white, non-straight bodies in America are in direct danger as a result. I will state the obvious in saying that this rejection of non-white citizens existed before he was elected, and that it will now get worse.

People of colour have never been more vocal, with the Black Lives Matter movement reverberating around the world and black artists brilliantly exploring racism in literature, in film, on TV, and in music – and white people have never felt more irrelevant. White supremacy, in all its various forms, inert and overt, is and has been under attack. It follows that this entrenched monstrosity in Western society will not die without a fight, and would in fact respond by throwing its very worst at Americans. White supremacy has similarly fought back here in Australia giving us the election of extreme racists within One Nation and the Coalition, and in the U.K. with the Brexit vote. No matter what these wealthy white politicians tell you after their election, this is in fact business as usual – only now the disguises are gone. With Islamophobia at fever pitch, and xenophobia and misinformation at saturation level, they feel safe in trumpeting their white nationalism today as they once used to in decades past.

There are some who will say that Trump won’t follow through on his various extreme plans to displace and reject coloured bodies, and there are some who are, like Duterte is doing to Marcos’s legacy in the Philippines, already moving to recast or bury his history of awfulness. Who knows how far this revisionism will go? As a queer Muslim man looking at an American Vice President with a history of levelling systemic violence against LGBTQIA people, and a President who wants to ban Muslims and/or put them in camps, I can tell you without hesitation that this revisionism, or extreme normalising of concepts once held as abhorrent, is far and away the biggest danger to us all. It is important to note that, if the parallels to Duterte remain consistent, he will follow through on his promises. Duterte’s killing spree has been well reported, and, what’s more, he remains wildly popular. Which is to say: don’t expect the first act of mass violence to shock you out of your stupor. If you weren’t shocked into acting before now, chances are you never will be.

Violence against Others, who are typically painted as criminals and thugs anyway, is the mandate that America has given to Trump. Don’t expect anything less than bloody consequences as a result. As to why this is happening, I’ll tell you what I told my friend: the strong-man con is as old as time, and still effective. Australia, too, loves brutality and equates cold cruelties with strength. Be afraid, be afraid, be afraid, they say, look at all these refugees/immigrants. We must keep them in cages, in distant prisons, shrouded by secrecy. Behind walls. We must hurt them. This ‘strength’ comes across as reassuring in a ‘time of uncertainty’ – as if any time has ever been anything but uncertain, as if certainty isn’t a lie. But people tolerate this brutality because it is not their bodies being crushed to create comfort, not their histories distorted by lies or outright suppressed, and knowing this is also comforting. To see it happening to others is to think, Well, it can’t happen to me. Look, the grinder is full of meat, and it will be full so long as we keep feeding it other people.

I won’t tell you how to respond to this event, as I barely know how myself. However, Ypil said this, while talking about a candlelit protest of Duterte’s decision: “In dark times, the least I hope for is that it gathers the best into one place, so that people can begin to sing.” So I’ll say this to my queer, black, indigenous, culturally and linguistically diverse family, at home and abroad: I hope to see you in this gathering place, online and in life. I hope, no matter the forces arrayed against us, to hear you sing as we have been singing all this time.

In Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo, he writes of the potential for names to invoke a taboo, particularly for ‘compulsion neurotics’. One patient suffering from this ‘taboo disease’, he writes:

adopted the avoidance of writing down her name for fear that it might get into somebody’s hands who would thus come into possession of a piece of her personality. In her frenzied faithfulness, which she needed to protect herself against the temptations of her phantasy, she had created for herself the commandment, ‘not to give away anything of her personality’. To this belonged first of all her name, then by further application her hand-writing, so that she finally gave up writing.

Referring to this passage of Freud’s in Frantumaglia, Elena Ferrante says:

when I read that story of illness it right away seemed wholly meaningful. What I choose to put outside myself can’t and shouldn’t become a magnet that sucks me up entirely.

Implicit in this neurotic condition, and Ferrante’s relation to it, is an untenable faith in a boundary distinguishing the self and the other. To avoid being possessed by another, conscious and deliberate acts of stratification are required: What I choose to put outside myself; shefinally gave up writing.

But of course the outside and the inside are faces of the same coin. And this coin, to push a metaphor further than it needs to go, is made material in culture. A coin gains value only in its relation to currency; its function precedes the individual but is imposed on the human; the cold object’s provenance bears traces of countless others’ fingers. To attempt to secure a clear line of self-determination from this frantumaglia is a tall order. Yet there it is. The sincere wish for a boundary.

Frantumaglia is the name of Elena Ferrante’s latest book, which has been translated into English by Anne Goldstein. It is not a work of fiction, though it contains a great deal of fiction. Nor is it—considering the recent revelations about Ferrante’s creator’s ‘true identity’—nonfiction precisely, though letters, being documents that exist in the historical sense, are usually understood under the aegis of nonfiction. It is a 374-page collection of the author Elena Ferrante’s letters, interviews, speeches, and reflections; it is a ‘companion text’ for Ferrante readers.

The term frantumaglia, she explains, is a Neapolitan word meaning “a jumble of fragments”. It is more than this, though. To explain the term, and with it the dimensions of this book, I will quote from the text:

The frantumaglia is to perceive with excruciating anguish the heterogeneous crowd from which we, living, raise our voice, and the heterogeneous crowd into which it is fated to vanish. I … represent it to myself mainly as a hum growing louder and a vortex-like fracturing of material living and dead: a swarm of bees approaching above the motionless treetops; the sudden eddy in a slow body of water. But it’s also the right word for what I’m convinced I saw as a child—or, anyway, during that time invented by adults that we call childhood—shortly before language entered me and instilled speech: a bright-colored explosion of sounds, thousands and thousands of butterflies with sonorous wings.

Reading this, I let out a painful sigh. It is clear to me that this passage expresses the core of female consciousness. I say consciousness which is ‘female’ only because it retaliates against the reductions of patriarchal thinking. It may well be human consciousness, but I am not in a position to describe what is human or not. Other terms that might capture it are queer consciousness, intersubjectivity, intertextuality, the primordial, the prenatal. The gooey. The frightening. I say female consciousness and I mean: the sense I hold in my body that every atom of my being is governed by the chaos of matter, a sense which, once acquired, makes it impossible to accept an ordered, reasonable view of things. And still, the wish for a boundary is sincere. Thousands and thousands of butterflies with sonorous wings quickly becomes a nightmare without language.

As this compendium makes very clear, however, Ferrante is not without language, nor is she interested in breaking with it. While she has a priestess-like connection to the other side of reason, Ferrante does not write from a prenatal morass. To the contrary, she is ferociously meticulous, exacting, and direct. Her letters to the director Mario Martone, who in 1994 began adapting the 1992 novel Troubling Love, exhibit an incredible level of care and connection to the subtleties of her text. This care becomes clear, too, in several of the more caustic interviews republished in the volume, where Ferrante makes no secret of her distaste for lazy journalism and a shallow media culture. When one Italian journalist, whose questions are all focussed on the author’s identity asks her whether she finds this phenomenon disturbing, Ferrante responds:

Yes, it disturbs me. But it also seems to me the proof that the media care little or nothing about literature in itself. Let’s take these questions of yours: I’ve published a book, but, despite knowing that I would answer in very general terms, you have focused the whole interview on the theme of my identity.

Readers of her novels will recognise this edge; indeed, it is precisely her capacity for cruelty, for helping us locate the violence inert in everyday life (particularly within the bourgeois social strata) that qualifies Ferrante for her readers’ devotion. Through her violence we, her readers, become vital and vigilant creatures.

In a seventy-page response to questions asked by the editors of a journal called Indice, Ferrante tells the story of how she came to understand her capacity for violence in language. Little Elena is seven, and she wants to kill her irritating younger sister. When the girl interrupts her older sisters’ game for the umpteenth time, Elena says: “We need a rope, there’s one in the storeroom.” The little sister makes a dash for the storeroom. “I was the child,” writes Ferrante, “who had been able to find the sentence that would send the little girl to her death without taking her there in person.”

The identification I feel with Ferrante’s texts, and which I share with many hundreds of thousands of women globally, is the cultural phenomenon that enables a book such as Frantumaglia to be published. Without the keynotes, the live-to-air radio interviews, the photographs of the author in her youth, the marital status updates, the path-to-fame narrative, the reader is left with only, and significantly, the pages she has written. But a volume like Frantumaglia insists that there is much, much more to books than their flesh and blood.

Freud’s patient, who cannot write her name for fear her identity will be taken up and consumed by another, forces us to confront that a self exists beyond our fleshy boundaries, over which we have no control. The facts of our material biographies are largely irrelevant when it comes to how others understand and consume us. When we exist in public, we are shadows on the walls of other people’s caves. Similarly, the author’s absence, the absence of the body writing, from the publishing industrial complex allows us to recognise the life that books have beyond being written and read. Ferrante names this life the “third book”: “I didn’t actually write it, my readers haven’t actually read it, but it’s there. It’s the book that is created in the relationship between life, writing, and reading.” This third book’s form, I suspect, is something akin to frantumaglia.

Ellena Savage is a writer from Melbourne. Her essays, stories and poems have been published widely.

If you’ve ever popped onto this, the Brow’s website—or if you follow us on Tumblr, or if you pay attention to our social media—you’ll probably know all about our first foray into book publishing, Briohny Doyle’s The Island Will Sink. You’ll know, for instance, that it has sold out of its first print run, and been featured on Radio National and FBi’s ‘Book Club’ podcast, and garnered a fewratherlovelyreviews. You’re probably all over everything about The Island Will Sink– except, if you’re yet to buy it, the actual contents of the book.

So, if you’re part of this cohort – those people who have heard about The Island Will Sink, and want to read it, but haven’t gotten around to acquiring a copy yet – we’ve got a little sweetener for you. Buy a print copy of the The Island Will Sinkthrough our webstore and you’ll receive a free back issue of our flagship quarterly print publication/attack journal, The Lifted Brow. Which back issue? Your choice! (Any of the ones that are not yet sold out, that is.)

All you need to do to take up this offer is to go to The Island Will Sink’s page on our webstore, add a copy to your cart, and let us know which back issue of our print magazine you’d like by entering it in the ‘special instructions’ field before checking out, like so:

This offer is available until midnight AEST Friday 18th November– get in while the getting’s good, and click, click, click to get your free back issue of the Brow!

Photo by Stephen Wu. Image reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 GenericLicense.

+

They ask me how deeply do you abide by your imperfect alliances
Well, the trouble with my desire is that I approach it infinitely
I’m waiting on the train
I’m waiting on my paycheck
I’m waiting on my itinerary, my package, my money, my tax return, my status to be overturned, my appeal, the rest of my money, my period, my friends to show up, my rejection letter, my test results
When the doors open I’ll be alone with my thoughts of you
That summer we had found our housing no longer secure
Your housing, and because I consider my love the house inside which I dwell and remake with ease: our housing
The books had been cooked without our knowledge, and to this we took offense
A friend said “you just can’t live a life harmoniously with other people”
You didn’t want to fight anyone so we paid your way out
We waited on the return of our lemon tree, our living basil, confiscated at the border
We imagined that contraband items are eventually “re-homed”
A gray drizzle was then detonating inside of us
Dubbed “disaster relief team” on the side of the truck, dead branches cut down for safety takes all morning
And I felt it, the relief washing over me like weather

+

All night after the tribute to her: what is the difference between an empty chair (emphasis: object) and an empty seat?
Which is more possible?
Feeling spiritually related to the dissident’s wife, a parallel vector? A shared point of psychic origin?
When I wake up in the morning my face is already wet with tears
For her and for the dependable chemistry of my dissent, bubbling while I sleep
Or it’s my poor blood
If they tell you she’s free, tell them she’s not free
“and other tragedies,” ongoing dramas we watch unfold from the safety of the audience
Hold your neighbor to the standard of your loved ones

+

I debase myself with the day’s coinage
I feed it slowly into the machine
I was trying to write myself a fine monologue back to health
A beautiful dream where you look at me and see me, end of dream
They snuck a handheld into the home of the dissident’s wife and she reads two poems by lamplight as proof of life
“Could I have been a bird or a tree”
If they tell you she’s free, tell them she’s not
I wanted to write about my happiness for you, but my happiness gets in the way
Anxiety is my condition, not from birth, from what comes after
What other paperwork can you ask me for?
One day you’ll have to tell me about the most alone you’ve ever felt
How you adjusted the lighting in the room as a friend would
How you called him your courage
They paid you per garment and per stitch we’d later unknot from your back
I didn’t want to do any of the classroom activities, I wanted to look at the photo of you and Dad taped inside my locker
When I was still small enough to be lifted, held momentarily
But what I really wanted to say was 这是我的故事
I’ve been waiting so long to tell you, 这是我的爱

+

The lady of the hour wishes she could be her own husband
Practically unenviable, practically DESTROYED
I had felt activated after hearing the story of the four deaths of the greedy husbands
A literal curse upon men without imaginations
Do you imagine that after you die, your loved ones will gather swiftly in your memory’s honor?
How will they cast you in their tributes, their suspension of the dream of you?
Did you exceed their expectations for your dress, your walk, your humility, your language acquisition skills?
Did you ruin them entirely with your genius?

+

The grasses, trees, flowers, rivers, stones, mountains
The pale orange crystal pulled from the rock face
The wayward clots of white and lavender cloud
The luminescent jellyfish, the inlet crisscrossed by birds
The silver sheen of water, children marking it with fists
I show you my naturalism with a heavy sorrow, the crisis of distance and the exile of words
A single external point towards which I project my love for you
Clouds unbound by municipal borders, shelter you tender heartedly
I race my students to class whereby if I arrive first, I’m allowed to keep my post
I feel my sentences tightening and it’s with great effort that I speak with trees instead
To implore a cloud: a state of defeatism?
Nature, you are not the sum of territories
(I remember the scene with the mandarin oranges and watch it as if dissociated from myself. Did it even happen? Was it autumn? What color were the leaves I made into play-things? At the grocery store Mom and Dad choose seven fruits for the week. Poverty was a game? Weplayed it lovingly? I don’t remember the decision to hide beneath the sink. When you found me you lifted me up and laughed, an entire orange in my cheek. I have always wanted more than what I deserved. I have always wanted as much as they would dare to refuse me)

+

I start the day by diligently arriving to be processed
Salted bread in my stomach, a little black coffee
Wanting to devote my efforts to sensory description and the alchemy of words
But when I call the thing: it never comes
It hides from me in a hazy cloud, unwilling to be named so viciously
I do, sometimes, miss the paintings of the dock in impressionist style, the urgent green stroke from sky to water
The articulate passage of colour
Elegant unsymmetry
The neon palm trees of my former life close their doors on me, perhaps leaving a note behind, ‘you are welcome’
Of my two names only the one which follows recognizes the other
Is it psychotic to sit inside a winter and wish for the death of some politicians?
When my airplane parked at the gate I looked out the window to see the airplane of my enemy beside me
Were it that death obeyed you without money
Will it have been worth the planet for the weather in December, I wonder?
The ‘o’ of your life existing between vectors, descriptions of vectors elongating towards the margin
Tragic geometry where two lines meet, not a metaphor, a graphable phenomenon
A wish wished at the airport, a fingernail dipped into the silver bowl
The pleasure of being there in the poem is the pleasure of the poem’s burden
The length of the shadow of the color, it pleases me endlessly

These poems appear in The Lifted Brow #29. Get your copy here, or read the get the digital edition here.

Wendy Xu is the author of Phrasis (Fence, 2017), winner of the 2016 Ottoline Prize, and You Are Not Dead (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2013). The recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Boston Review, Poetry, A Public Space, and widely elsewhere. Born in Shandong, China, she lives in New York City and serves as Poetry Editor for Hyperallergic.

Thank you to Briohny Doyle for putting together this mixtape for The Lifted Brow. Briohny’s debut novel, The Island Will Sink, is the first book published by The Lifted Brow. You can purchase the book here (and if you do so before the end of this week, you’ll get a free back issue of the Brow).

It took me a really long time to finish The Island Will Sink. Almost ten years. In that time people died, my dog died, I finished a PhD, I broke up with someone and got together with someone else, made some new friends, read hundreds of books, grew up. It’s really hard for me to point at some music and say, ‘Here, this is the music that inspired this book.’ So I went back through the decade and picked the two songs that were on high rotation that year. I associate particular times with songs rather than albums. Some of the years were really easy. I listened to that damn Mountain Goats song every day in 2007 and then I just stopped. I guess I did make it through the year. I had ‘Gunslinger’ as my ringtone when you could first do that kind of thing, before anyone realised what a bad idea it is. The first bar makes me really anxious now.

Some of these songs are road trip songs, and remind me of particular adventures. In 2010 I listened to ‘Pirouette’ constantly as I jogged along the banks of the Ota River in Hiroshima and thought about the end of the world. No surprise that Donna Fargo had her airtime on a USA trip but there is something about that song that is both joyous and totally deluded, like the singer is on the verge of a nervous breakdown all the way through. It really does capture how I felt in my thirtieth year. 2008 and 2014 were the big redraft years, so it is no surprise that the songs I was obsessed with were a little more sombre. Some of the songs on here are from movies that blew my mind (‘Modern Love’ is in Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang and ‘Under My Spell’ is in Drive). It was movies, and not music, that influenced the aesthetic universe of The Island Will Sink. I suppose I could have made a mixtape full of Angelo Badalementi, Cliff Martinez, Ry Cooder and Vangelis but that seemed hard, and would anyone actually want to listen? Actually, in the world of the novel, Max is constantly listening to a ‘Viennese dub quartet’ called Schwerbut, which I made up, and which sounds utterly dreadful to me, like just the worst music. 2015 and 2016 have been strange years – my book came out, I got some other nice breaks but lots of my loved ones were having a really hard time so it makes sense that the songs are all kind of gritted teeth celebrations of human frailty. Which is what my book is too.

2007:

1. The Mountain Goats – This Year

2. Shellac – Prayer to God

2008:

3. The Kill Devil Hills – Gunslinger

4. The Shangri-Las – Remember (Walking In The Sand)

2009:

5. Lady Gaga – Bad Romance

6. Royal Trux – Ray O Vac

2010:

7. The Jesus and Mary Chain – April Skies

8. Tall Dwarfs – Pirouette

2011:

9. Sonic Youth – Quest for the Cup

10. Desire – Under Your Spell

2012:

11. Lana Del Ray – Video Games

12. David Bowie – Modern Love

2013:

13. Loretta Lynn – High on a Mountain Top

14. Donna Fargo – Happiest Girl in the Whole USA

2014:

15. Evan Dando – Hard Drive

16. Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan – We Die and See Beauty Reign

2015:

17. X – The World’s a Mess; It’s in My Kiss

18. L7 – Broomstick

2016:

19. Kanye West – Hold My Liquor

20. Sparks – Angst in My Pants

Briohny Doyle is a Melbourne-based writer and academic. Her debut novel, The Island Will Sink, is the first book published by The Lifted Brow, and will be available from August 2016. Briohny’s work has appeared in publications like The Lifted Brow, The Age, Overland, Going Down Swinging and Meanjin, among others, and she has performed her work at the Sydney Festival and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.

Photo by belpo. Image reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic License.

This excerpt comes from ‘Trash-Man ♥︎s Maree’ by W<J>P Newnham, which won the second The Lifted Brow & RMIT non/fictionLab Prize for Experimental Non-Fiction. The full version is published in The Lifted Brow #31.

We forget what we are capable of in our youth

We forget with age until a sudden reminder

A smell, a look, a familiar tag

Spray-painted on the back alley Dumpster that reads:

TRASH-MAN WOZ ‘ERE!

I was transported:

Back in the day: Darwin, 1987

Back in the day………

Could it really be him?

I hadn’t seen either of them

In years and had just assumed the default of

Either dead or in prison but here,

Here was fresh paint and a tag that looked

Just like it did back in the day…

I am transported:

Back in the day: Darwin, 1987

Back in the day………

……………….

….

>Upstairs at the Vic

‘Weit-Im-Bat Tumaj Wak-Wak!’¹

I wasn’t even sure that Maree had spoken out loud at all—it was as if the words were only in my head as I looked at her to see if her lips had moved and then around and over my shoulder as the black-clad bouncer gave us the sneering once over and then continued his patrol. We weren’t allowed inside where the old school punkahs circu- late the tepid humidity; well Trash-Man and Me were but Maree, being Larakia Mob, had to stay out on the veranda or in the public bar or risk being eighty-sixed out into the street.

We were on the lookout for a mark, tourists specifically, to run the old dip and rip on: we were short on funds and it was looking like rain. We needed shelter, and that took dollars, unless we Submitted To The Salvos and the lock-in segregated dorms where the indignant are tossed and turned in a poverty of dreams-

Trash-Man Said: “Fuck that Bro; let’s go skin a lizard.”

Maree said: “Naaaaahhhhh Weit-Im…….

Sabi That Mob? Tourist…….”

She indicated with her chin towards a group of young backpackers moving to the veranda, laden with Cheap-Happy-Hour Drinks. They looked the sort: dreadlocks, tribal tattoos, T-shirts emblazoned with reggae flags and five-pointed foliage like handprints in green. Eyes up she indicated go and we took our positions; the prey clearly identified, we stalked unseen until suddenly-

We were amongst them-

>>Posam²

We roamed the park, a ragtag collective black white and brindle et al; Hungry Gutted Mob Too Ey? Too much goon and no food as the Salvos won’t feed you if you are drunk. The Shops in town are shut, and with no money anyway we would have only got kicked out or worse, locked up, if we hung at Uncle Sam’s³ looking to humbug a feed.

We roamed the park.

Maree [finger to lip and palm upright]

Trash-Man and I frozeStopped at the fig trees and after

Stooping and gripping

A yonnie⁴ held

Pistol gripped she

Stopped

Listened

Looked aimed and;

The stone wizzes in the dark.

THUD!

Posam⁵: A large Northern brushtail possum laid stunned and senseless at the foot of the Fig tree. We moved in for the kill. There was a shrill call echoing in the trees as the other possums warned each other as to danger; a kittenish mewl answered:

Maree [finger to lip and palm upright]

Trash-Man and I frozeStopped at the

fig trees and

Answered the mewl with a chittering

To which a joey

Detached itself from its stunned mother

And moved, all the while chittering

Towards Maree who scooped it up

She held it to her breast and

With her free hand, she wiped the sweat

From both armpits onto the Joeys’

Head and snout.

She made a pouch in her shirt:

Joey nestled at her breast.

“Babai Belang Me Oredi:

Naja-Wan Mami Dere?

Bi-Ni-Jim-Up!”⁶

I wasn’t even sure that Maree had spoken out loud at all—Trash-Man euthanises dinner with his blade. We transported ourselves back to Lameroo Beach where Trash- Man and I built a fire in the lee of our boulder and Maree cooked dinner, first searing and singeing the fur away before roasting the meat on a bed of embers. The meat is sweetened by the possum’s diet in the fig trees. Maree shared it amongst us according to need and kinship:

Posam nestled at her breast.

W<J>P Newnham has been published in numerous national and international magazines. Three of his short stories—Merry-crack-mass, Gr-easter and El-greco—have been traditionally published (one chapbook, two ebooks). He lives in Brisbane with his partner and two Blue Heelers.

^{1. Waiting because of crow – Kriol-English Dictionary [KED]↩}

^{2. possum [KED]↩}

^{3. www.truelocal.com.au› Takeaways › Darwin↩}

^{4. Stone for throwing↩}

^{5. Vulpecular arnhemensis↩}

^{6. “Baby belongs to me. That other mother there? End it!” [KED]↩}

Before the great sanitisation of Sydney’s centre for sale to developers, I was in a dealer’s apartment in King’s Cross, smoking ice. He had a set of flimsy white IKEA drawers. The same ones I had at home. Something about that stuck with me. In an unfamiliar context, meaning spills out of things. They underlined our similarities, deflated the conceit of difference: we were both young, with no concrete ties to place, and more concerned with function than form. Unlike me, however, he could have afforded mid-century furniture if he wanted.

In The Promise of Things, Ruth Quibell proposes that, beyond the innumerable words devoted to our culture’s messy relationship with consumption, it is “possible to seek out and be deeply attached to things, to attend to and appreciate them, without necessarily engaging in destructive materialism.” She opens with an anecdote about an ornate armchair purchased by an ailing Matisse. It was not useful, but it was beautiful. He didn’t need it, but it wasn’t purchased out of senseless greed. The armchair influenced Matisse’s life in an unquantifiable way; its aesthetic qualities leaked into some of his final works. She’s showing us that sometimes we’re not wrong in our “implicit belief that the goods we own will improve us and our lives, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.”

The ideas Quibell examines are more interesting than the objects she uses to make her point. You extrapolate her ideas and apply them to your own stuff, and this is where the work that goes with reading The Promise of Things occurs. Why is this object valuable to me? Who or what does it symbolise? Am I part of the IKEA-buying class if I’m getting it second-hand and weirdly stained?

She argues that the self is both reflected in and constructed by our material environments. She considers an Edwardian wardrobe that’s survived a number of moves, even though it’s bulky and impractical, and writes of household furniture: “Through familiarity their existence becomes an unthought extension of ourselves in intimate space.” In The System of Objects, Baudrillard talks about how “the object is always transforming or mediating our relationships to the world.” I believe the inverse is true, too. A change in the narrative that goes with an object transforms our idea of the object itself. Some treasured gifts become trash when your relationship with the giver sours.

To illustrate the gap between our ideas of objects, and the deflation that follows their acquisition, Quibell uses her dream jacket, found in an op shop. After years of searching, this find doesn’t change her life. It robs her of a pastime. No longer will she habitually sift through op shops. The jacket does not transform her into the ideal self she’d imagined years ago, into the kind of bohemian who’d have a fitted brown velvet coat. The idea of a thing is always more evocative than the thing itself.

The Promise of Things prioritises the personal, and appraises the attachment of emotion to physical objects. When Quibell was seriously ill in hospital, a stone from a family trip that her husband brought her “satisfied [her] basic need to touch and to feel, and in doing so cut through this utter desperation.” There’s nothing like feeling the weight and texture of an object in your hand. A world of feeling encapsulated in the well-known shape of a thing. A thing that, without its story, would be just another rock on a beach.

Another cause for emotional investment in things is the evidence of labour. Quibell’s example is rabbit soft toys she makes for her children, though it would be cheaper and faster to buy toys. They’re unique and imperfect, and warrant sentimental attachment. This is not the same as, but it is related to, the weird fetishisation of the artisanal and handmade in our culture.

At my local Kmart, there are mason jars with candy-striped straws in them. They’re probably just as hand-made as the ones on Etsy, but the woman who sells her wares in an online shop has ownership of what she’s produced. A face, a name. She profits directly. The worker who put the straws in the Kmart jars is anonymous. Mass-produced objects aren’t necessarily machine-made, but their uniformity allows us to believe that no human hands were involved in their production. Quibell observes that it’s this “anonymity of labour” that “helps to disburden us” of responsibility when we buy goods of unknown origin.

The cheapness and uniformity of mass-produced objects allow us to throw out things like furniture that formerly were supposed to last a lifetime. Contrary to Baudrillard’s assertion that “form and function are the only values that matter”, form doesn’t matter when your material circumstances provide you with few options. Function is supreme: as soon as those IKEA drawers cease to fulfil their function, into hard rubbish they go. The obsession with workers’ agility and flexibility means that there’s an appeal to being able to assemble the same kind of environment wherever we are. A kind of stability through sameness.

There’s something fishy about the moralising language of the purge, and its perpetuation of cycles of consumption. Free. Clear. Clean. As Quibell puts it, “we have to be ready to throw away if we are to consume more.” You get to feel good about all the stuff you’ve binned, then the pleasure of anticipating some online purchase. For this to work, she says, “we have to believe that the litter of commodities melts into the air”; that the bag of charity bin clothes, once out of our sight, ceases to exist.

Some objects don’t disappear so easily. Quibell talks of “active dispossession”, a term devised by gerontologists. When people begin to anticipate their own death, they find pleasure in rehoming objects with worthy candidates. It’s your grandmother giving you a fur you’ll never wear, but you do it to make her happy. We’re attempting to curate our memory, and hoping our stuff holds onto its value independent of us. Things we don’t feel are connected to our memory fall by the wayside. My grandmother probably didn’t want to be remembered by her stockpile of adult nappies, and so did not seek to pass them down.

The anxiety of things reads belongings like this: Quibell’s book is a physical object. Does it justify its existence if it somehow produces a net loss in consumption? But it’s not Quibell’s aim to end, or lessen, our acquisition of things. She’s exploring our relationship to material goods, beyond vague hand-wringing or quick-fix solutions. She wants us to think harder about them, and to value things that can’t be replicated. Ownership entails work, whether we like it or not.

We should allow our possessions an intrinsic emotional value, beyond the vague guilt of consumption. We’re doing “ourselves and our possessions a disservice when we extend the problems of consumer culture and materialism uncritically to all the things we possess.” But I can’t get past the complicity in all of capitalism’s wrongs that I feel is inherent in every one of my belongings, can’t approach the healthy relationship with objects that Quibell believes is possible. It is instead the anxiety of things that governs my relationship with my belongings, because I am responsible for them.

Alex Gerrans is a writer from Brisbane who lives in Melbourne. She writes about women, the body and illness.

What we want from comedy usually depends on who we want to see suffer – and student journalists, unsurprisingly, wish suffering upon the creators and beneficiaries of Australia’s conservative media. Honi Soit, the University of Sydney’s student-run newspaper, has doubled down on this proposition: for the final week of semester two, 2016, Honi abandoned its magazine-style format and printed a complete broadsheet parody of The Australian with such astonishing verisimilitude that a fairly long glance reveals no obvious differences. It even elicited a caveated compliment from the national paper’s CEO. The front page is almost indistinguishable from that of The Australian, but examination reveals that the masthead actually reads “THE AUSRTAILAN”. There is also the strikingly Oedipal front-page headline, which declares “RUPERT MURDOCH DEAD AT 85” only to concede late in the article that it was, in fact, “some other old geezer called Rupert. I’m so sorry.”

It’s an Honi tradition for the year’s final issue to be satirical, but it is unlikely that the paper, established in 1929, has ever attempted a satire so comprehensive. There is the occasional typo and awkwardly constructed sentence. But it’s not about minutiae; it’s a long, loud, mocking laugh. Many of the jokes are the obvious jokes, though some are not. Many are funny, though many are not. Given the time available and effort required to put this together, it’s an impressive piece of satire: amusing, clever, and pointed. It’s also cloistered and vicious.

Honi is funniest in the small absurdities. An “Apology” section at the foot of page two regrets “all previous editions of The Australian”; an article about “metadata insecurity” wonders “What if your data just wants to talk about its feelings?” Another has ISIS assaulting the wine-producing region of Mosel in order to “stake a claim to the lucrative German Riesling market.” For the most part, the best writing here is the least political. Honi is sharpest in its matter-of-fact, Onion-like twists and turns of logic that typify how the pragmatic tone and structure of traditional newspaper journalism is so often unmoored from the nature of its own content.

The exhaustiveness of the parody is novel and fun, and that can be enough. But it is worth wondering what satire of this sort does, and who is listening. What happens when satire is vicious and what happens when it is genuinely funny? Honi is both. So is it rousing those who already agree, shaming its targets, or some combination of the two?

The Australian is the target both because its hysterical boomer self-righteousness lends itself to satire and because the newspaper is the mouthpiece of those who have bequeathed an increasingly unlivable world to the generation who writes and edits Honi. The Australian has led the charge against what it characterises as the insidious evils of housing affordability, identity politics, and political correctness. In 2016 it has waged some notably absurd campaigns. The paper’s attitude is typified by an article published earlier in the year penned by the ABC’s political editor, Chris Uhlmann. Uhlmann responded to journalists condemning Tony Abbott’s decision to address a far-right American Christian group by claiming they were failing to “back free speech”. He attempted to trace the birth of these “tolerance police” to a 1930s plot hatched by Frankfurt School academics who aimed to destroy Western values. It is unlikely Uhlmann was aware that he was employing the language of a wildly anti-semitic conspiracy theory; such thinking passes as common sense in The Australian’s editorial pages. It believes that to accuse someone of implicitly endorsing bigotry—whether because of their language, or their decision to address a reactionary organisation that uses its vast resources to block access to same-sex marriage and abortion—is to violate their freedom.

This confusion reflects the conflation of the desire to insult with the right to free speech, which allows for the continued employment of resident cartoonist Bill Leak. Leak has been defended in the pages of The Australian—and, recently, by our Prime Minister—as a kind of witty champion of the politically incorrect, those who would courageously defend our right to wear blackface or be misogynists. This is despite Leak relentlessly sketching characters that resemble keynote speakers at a xenophobic caricature conference. There are reasonable criticisms to be made of identity politics, but “I refuse to hear from those who tell me I am perpetuating structures that cause their oppression” is one of the less convincing takes.

And recently, of course, we have the Bernard Salt smashed avocado debacle. Honi prints a faux-Salt response on their front page, aping and ridiculing the columnist’s claim that oversensitive millennials simply failed to recognise that his original, controversial column was actually a nuanced satire of boomer conservatism. Returning to that column, it is clear that it is indeed satire of some sort, but Salt is mostly lampooning the perception of boomers, and is doing it poorly. He mistakes hyperbole and clumsy linguistic pretention (using “malicious aforethought” where he means “malice aforethought”, “despoiling” where he means “ruining”, and “mere ephemera” where he means “trivial”) for comedy. The column caused a backlash because it reads as blunted, unfunny, and unclear. The premise of Salt’s article is that he is speaking exclusively to a secret society of fellow boomers, baffled at the impenetrable hipster café society (where the only consistent definition of “hipster” is “that sleek someone who makes you socially uneasy”). The clichéd half-joke here is that young people are irredeemably alien. It’s only a half-joke because no effort is made to suggest that actually they aren’t.

Salt’s muddled spoof and Honi’s “Ausrtailan” issue serve as reminders of how these two self-assured interlocutors (the left and right, millennials and boomers, scrappy student journalists and overpaid newspaper columnists) prefer to talk past each other. Each basks in the glow of rhetorical victory when the other is riled up, and, reasonably, neither expects to convert their foe. Neither wants mutually constructive conversation, because neither can imagine what such a conversation would look like.

This issue of Honi is least funny where it is most vicious, but this is not so much a failure of comedy as it is a disclosure of anxiety and fury. It’s telling that Honi contains grimly unfunny headlines announcing both Rupert Murdoch and Bill Leak to be deceased. For those who will never own a home unless they inherit one, constructive conversation is only available when the homeowners are dead. Honi readers can find solace in the mortality of those who belittle them.

If we cannot reach those we’re satirising—and publically imagining their death probably precludes us from meaningfully doing so—then what do we want from satire? It’s difficult to analyse comedy without being painfully humourless. Deconstructing it is like pulling apart a watch in order to understand why the year went by so fast. This is because it is never entirely clear what comedy is meant to achieve, aside from reinforcing our connections with some people and endorsing disconnections from others. The rhetoric might clear the way for recognition or illumination, but any good joke must have nonsense at its core. This is why the idea of ISIS descending on the Mosel is funny, and why Rupert dying is not. Prioritise audience consensus over aimless nonsense and political satire becomes unfunny and lame, even when that audience approves: the jokes become hollowed out by the desire for effective polemic. (The Daily Showchasing applause lines before laugh lines is a good example of this.)

Satire is most often meaningful in its capacity to unite and reassure the like-minded. This is not a bad thing. While partisan skewering can occasionally effect a degree of change, or increase awareness of some topic, it cannot reliably do so. A dedicated subscriber to our country’s national broadsheet will not mistakenly pick up the latest copy of Honi and lose their monocle due to its extraordinarily thorough trolling. Yet satire of this sort remains worthwhile. It’s a pretty funny salvo in the ongoing attempt of various outlets to draw attention to the ideologically narrow-minded inanity in which our national newspaper so frequently traffics. Readers of Honi’s “Ausrtailan” edition will see what they expect: an unsophisticated whine or a righteous shredding. But this is not because the satire is insufficient; it’s because nobody likes being wrong.

Dan Dixon is completing a PhD in English at the University of Sydney.

You might recall that, a few months ago, we posted one very sparkly Marx .gif on this website and asked you for your clever words about ‘Capital’. Well – we took the best of those words you sent through, and edited them and bound them in the thirty-second edition of our quarterly attack journal, and that edition will be available very, very soon.

TLB32 features writing and visual art that reflects on commerce, economics, and cultural capital: a diverse variety of words and visual art dissects the relationship between capital and the current state of the world. TLB32 directly attacks Simon Birmingham’s statement about creative fields as a “lifestyle choice”. There will be additional surprises with how it will be published, distributed, and sold.

Contributors include César Aira, Fiona Wright, Lawrence Lacambra Ypil, Sam Wallman, Ellena Savage, Matthew Hickey, Scott Esposito, Benjamin Law, and Alí Calderón.

Issue 32 also features detailed information from each and every contributor, editor, and person involved in the making of this issue. Information disclosed includes the hours of labour spent on the piece by various people, the fees paid, and much more.

Issue 32 of The Lifted Brow features:

• cover art by Sam Wallman, with feature art inside also by Wallman;
• nonfiction from Fiona Wright, Scott Esposito, Ellena Savage, Daniel Schoonebeek, Briohny Doyle, Matthew Hickey, Sam West, Carolyn D'Cruz, Daniel Levin Becker, Angela Serrano, Lech Blaine, and Rhea Bhagat;
• fiction by César Aira and Allee Richards;
• poetry by Lawrence Lacambra Ypil, Alí Calderón, and Safia Elhillo;
• comics and artwork from Merv Heers, Rudy Loewe, Amanda Baeza, Sasha Velour, Emma Davidson, Michelle Baginski, Eloise Grills, Michael Fikaris, Melissa Mendes, Keith McDougall, Roxane Lumeret, Tommi PG, and Leonie Brialey;
• and, as always, Benjamin Law and his mum Jenny’s sex and relationships advice column.

As ever, subscribers will receive their copies of the magazine directly, and first. If you don’t subscribe (why not?), you can find out more about how to get your copy here.

We will also run a special week of ‘Capital’-themed content on this, our website, from December 5th onwards – featuring excellent words that didn’t quite suit the print issue, as well as content especially commissioned for the website.

Want to help us launch this wonderful issue into the world? Come to our launch event at Melbourne’s Donkey Wheel House on December 9th.

Photo by Alex E. Proimos. Image reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 GenericLicense.

“So you didn’t bring any antimalarials?”

His face went pale. “What do you mean?”

I tried to downplay it but he was already hunched over his phone, waiting for the crappy hotel wifi to load. We were at an academic conference in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and I was over-prepared for everything. My new friend was not. I’d come from far away in the southern oceans and the preparation was part of imagining myself away: getting the shots and the insect repellent, checking and re-checking my passport, researching the city. He’d come from close by—the Northern Hemisphere, I mean—and had packed like the trip was Sydney to Canberra. Travel was, in more than one sense, what had brought us there. The conference theme was ‘Caribbean Global Movements’, attracting academics from diverse fields and far-flung places to consider what movement and mixing meant for the Caribbean. A huge number flew in from the United States and Britain. Inter-Caribbean travel, I learned, was not as common or accessible as I had previously assumed.

The map that came up on my friend’s phone, a pixellated strip-tease, confirmed the worst. In the idyllic blue of the Caribbean sea Haiti throbbed an angry scarlet, like an allergic reaction already spreading. Malaria: high risk zone. My friend smacked at his leg nervously.

Then he said, “Look.”

His finger traced the line that carved the island of Hispaniola in two. Haiti’s neighbour—the larger, whiter, richer Dominican Republic—sat like a cat purring next to the red, a benign beige. The line between the two nations, both squeezed into the same island, was crisp.

“How can the malaria stop right there, so cleanly?” I wondered.

“Maybe the mosquitoes have to go through border patrol.”

A week later I stood at border patrol, on that line. Through the soles of my shoes I could feel stones and grit. A hot, relentless wind blew dust in the faces of those waiting. After a week at an academic conference talking in abstract about borders—as imagined spaces, as nation-building projects—it was a shock to be able to plant feet on the actual point where Haiti gave way to the Dominican Republic.

Two groups of people at the border were clearly distinguished, not by uniforms or language, as I expected, but by their level of agitation. A Dominican army officer stood chatting to the border officials and other armed guards. Gun. Boots. Combat gear. But his body language read like he was at a poolside bar. Under umbrellas women sold drinks from cool boxes covered in towels and swatted lazily at the flies and children hassling them for something cold and free. A group of men stood in the shade, waiting and watching, picking over the crowds with their eyes. For all these people—drinks vendor, soldier, waiting men—the rhythm of the border was the rhythm of the everyday.

All those who were passing through, on the other hand, were anxious. In the hands of our bus conductor my passport was swept up and bobbed away above a sea of faces all scowling, sweating, sighing, scalping SIM cards and currency. Even though I’d been warned this would happen I was gripped by fear that my passport would not be returned. So when the conductor brought back a fistful of maroon and blue passports and mine was not among them, my heart sunk. I hung around the conductor, pestering her with my mosquito whine in French, Spanish, and English, until she sent me to a border official’s office.

The building was a demountable, which struck me as curious given it should have been the one thing not going anywhere. There was a problem. How had I come to be there on the border, but not on the official list lodged with border patrol by the bus company? Present in flesh but not in document; my body had not been accounted for. Very politely the official attempted to discern what the hell I was doing there.

“Name? Nationality?”

“Not Austrian,” I interjected as he wrote down my answer, rolling our extra syllable around like a marble. “Austr-ay-lian.”

“Occupation?”

“Student.”

“Of?”

I faltered.

Of? Of the literature of his island’s diaspora: writers who claimed no homeland but language itself, and even this they blew apart, not obeying the margins of the page or the borders between one language and another; slicing, splicing and detonating that same material that they used and that tried to contain them; bobbing alone, unmoored, in a sea of words and paper.

So I said, “Doctorado. Doctorate.”

Relief wiped his face clear now that he had something to work with.

“Doctor,” he beamed, and jotted, “Medicine.”

Again I hurried to correct him. I wanted to make it clear—nothing I did could save a body from malaria or Zika, from a machete or a gunshot wound, from the attrition of imprisonment.

In her essay ‘What is a Caribbean Writer?’ the author Maryse Condé, Guadeloupean by birth and now living in New York, suggests that the very term ‘nationality’ is today meaningless. “We now know,” writes Condé,

that its only purpose is, in fact, to obtain green, blue, red or orange biometric passports, depending on the country, that allow the holders to cross borders and work in peace in a given place.

With so many of the Caribbean’s people living outside its official geographical limits, pushing its boundaries and working under different passports, Condé’s interrogation of Caribbeanness is a serious pursuit. For writers, nationality should not matter, she argues, as long as they sustain creativity.

Hearts and creative thoughts attach little importance to the lines at Immigration. They settle everywhere and flourish anywhere they please. For them, continents drift and tropical forests can thrive in the very middle of a sidewalk in Manhattan.

This thinking engages with the formidable tradition of Caribbean intellectuals, such as Stuart Hall and Édouard Glissant, who have pointed out that immigration and diaspora have always defined the region’s history—and who like Condé see the creative potential in these experiences. Hall envisions the diaspora as a process rather than a place, where possibility and mixing thrive through—not despite—difference. Glissant, meanwhile, declares that the only answer to the hidden violence of “intolerant exclusions” is the “manifest and integrating violence of contaminations,” precisely the kind which flourish in the hybridizing cultures and creoles of the Caribbean.

Although Glissant here refers mainly to the way language moves, his words also evoke the movements of people: who the nation lets in and who the nation excludes. I particularly like his use of the word “contaminations,” because this bodily metaphor evokes both mixing and revulsion and returns our consciousness to the physical, to our bodies and our fear of others’. By identifying contemporary passports as “biometric,” Condé also underlines the connection between bodies and the written word, especially the ways the state controls these bodies via official documentation. For this very reason, then, her vision of unbounded creativity seems overly utopian when she says that “Hearts and creative thoughts attach little importance to the lines at Immigration.” Creative minds and hearts, of course, also inhabit a body. Reading Condé, I can’t help but wonder how many writer-bodies have been stopped and silenced at those immigration lines and how many words we have lost as a result. How many unofficial documents, never written, might have contested the violence of the state’s exclusions.

To say that borders are contentious is to say nothing new. Still, the division between Haiti and the Dominican Republic is an old scar that is carved fresh with frequency. The river between the two nations is called the Massacre, and the fact that many people confuse the origins of this name, swapping one genocide for an earlier colonial one, should be some indication of history’s bloody course in this place.

During the so-called Parsley Massacre of 1937, the Dominican dictator Trujillo ordered the slaughter of an unknown number of Haitians—or more correctly and significantly, those deemed to be Haitian—living along the border. The test to distinguish Haitians from Dominicans was linguistic, based on whether the victim spoke the Spanish word for parsley, perejil, with a French- or Krèyol-tinged “r” that would betray their otherness and effectively mark them for death, a kind of screening for contamination. Soldiers slaughtered tens of thousands of men, women and children and threw their bodies into the river. This killing has captured the imagination of writers like Haitian-American Edwidge Danticat, whose fiction, especially her novel The Farming of Bones, grapples with the impossibility of documenting an annihilation on such a monstrous individual and collective scale that nevertheless slid under the surface of the water, never properly accounted for.

At the time of this massacre and under Trujillo’s regime it was common to talk about the “Pacific Invasion” of Haitians into Dominican territory. These words tap into a collective fear that the island will again be ruled by Haiti, as it was when the island was seized by the black leaders of the Haitian Revolution from white French and Spanish colonial powers. Haitians may look like domestic workers and cane-cutters, the logic goes, but the threat is the same as always. Haitians may look like Dominicans, even—they may speak unimpeachable Spanish, their mothers and grandmothers may have been born under a Dominican sun—but their presence in the Dominican Republic is fraught.

Despite international condemnation, since 2013 the Dominican Republic has continued to enact a court ruling, la sentencia, that has stripped citizenship from thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent. In contrast to the problematically under-documented Parsley Massacre, this time the violence is all about papers: who has them and who does not. An abundance of documentation to drown in, to drown out. Yet much of the narrative is the same. Haitians who come to the Dominican Republic are an anonymous stream of ants marching into the Dominican imaginary; either a troubling if minor itch, or a full-blown red alert. Dominicans who are deemed to be Haitian in a sense can never stop moving. Not mobility as freedom, but movement as a restless threat: of being deported, swept under and away or, as in the chilling news from one province this year, rigged up to a tree and lynched.

For me, unsurprisingly, there was nothing to worry about on the border. Soon I was out of the demountable and into the dust, wearily climbing back onto the bus with my blue emu-and-kangaroo-emblazoned passport secured in my bag. Crossing the border was not a calming experience. But in the history of that place—a real place in time and space where (black) bodies are blocked from coming or going, where (black) bodies have been hacked to pieces, thrown into the river and disappeared—it was a peaceful crossing with minor bureaucratic hiccups.

I had papers. But my body was also my passport: white, female, and small.

This became clear before we even left the bus station in Port-au-Prince. Striding across the waiting room to meet me, the avuncular owner of the bus company advised that I was in his personal care, and assigned the security guard to my watch.

None of the other passengers, all black and brown, were offered this attention, not even the unaccompanied teenager next to me who looked all of fourteen, clutching her purse with her sandwich and juice for the eight hours.

At the border check it was the same. Todas las australianas tienen ojos bonitos, a guard flirted as he snapped my bloodshot eyes staring back at his immigration cam. All Australian women have beautiful eyes. On cue I batted them—to get the dust out, I told myself. To get myself out with passport in hand.

As I waited for the photo to come out I noticed, flapping on the office window, a weathered print-out pleading in Krèyol for information on a missing boy. He was last seen playing near the border, it explained, and now he has vanished into thin air. All that was left of him was this unblinking black-and-white portrait in faded printer ink. I thought about how that paper might flap away at any moment, and could almost feel the impatience of the small boy’s body wriggling to get free from his mother’s hands to play. With a shame I couldn’t place, I looked at my feet. The desperation in the unpunctuated Krèyol was unbearable, knowing that his mother will probably never find where he is, or even what happened to his body.

As I left the demountable, five Indian men were still trying to explain their travel situation to the guards. I was too far away to see if they batted their eyelashes but knew, anyway, what little difference it would make.

If insects do not respect your personal privacy, they certainly do not respect the nation-state’s. So I am suspicious about these clean cut lines on the Haitian-Dominican malaria map. In fact, later, I found that if you search ‘malaria’ and ‘Dominican Republic,’ the map comes up in reverse, with the Dominican side throbbing the red alarm and Haiti quietly beige. In either case there is a violence to the border’s crisp definition; you can never look at the island as a whole. Whoever drew it sure mastered the art of not colouring outside the lines. But borders, bodies and bugs don’t work that way.

I remember watching a boyfriend once, crouched down, intently squishing a line of ants in the kitchen.

“You’ve got to kill them and then leave the bodies there as a warning to the others. They pick up the pheromone signals or something. Then they don’t come back.”

On the other side of the kitchen I stood with my arms folded watching him. I realised then I didn’t feel close to him at all. There was coldness in the way he killed that advancing line of ants, but more than that; futility. Ants had arrived in my house long before he had. I knew they’d keep coming after he’d left.

At the gate of the luxury hotel where the conference took place, armed guards controlled the flow of people through a metal gate. Inside the hotel courtyard, however, no guards or guns could stop the mosquito bites, which not even the most thorough dousing of tropical strength repellent seemed able to prevent. The mosquito that bit the poor black girl walking to school outside the gate landed on the arm of the rich white university student sitting inside it. Our skin, black and white, was riddled with small itchy reminders of our own mortality. But perhaps in the hotel courtyard we are merely reminded–—because how likely was malaria or Zika for me, really?—where the borders of our own patience lie, the threshold of inconvenience.

“Can we move inside?” One of the conference group would eventually crack. And the thing is, we always could.

Ruth McHugh-Dillon reads, writes, and researches language and literature in Melbourne. She is currently working on a PhD looking at the relationship between language and violence in Junot Díaz’s fiction. Ruth has been published in Kill Your Darlings.

Photo by Stuart Childs. Image reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic License.

First, only. TDK, D90.
I Feel LiKe A DicK ! Label golden
brown as heroin/es. Twenty years on
I taste Tank Girl and Jaffas, sticky
fingers purling mine, walking knitted,
dry-mouthed to that South Hobart flat, three
favourite songs (‘Disco 2000’,
'Roads’, 'The 2 of Us’), score the clever
and the lonely double entendre.

This poem appears in The Lifted Brow #29. Get your copy here, or read the get the digital edition here.

Stuart Barnes was born in Hobart, Tasmania, and educated at Monash University. Since 2013 he has lived in Central Queensland and been poetry editor for Tincture Journal. His debut collection Glasshouses (UQP) won the 2015 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you are about to embark on an odyssey.

— Jeffrey Dahmer’s attorney Gerard Boyle in his opening statement to the court.

Who’s Alan Moore again? Well, he writes comics. He was probably most famous in the eighties, when he was part of a wave of writers—along with right-wing ranter Frank Miller, who turned Batman into a vigilante psychopath, and The Hernandez Brothers, who gave the world Love and Rockets—who re-invented the form and made it okay to read comics that didn’t have people wearing capes in them. Moore had a moment: his series Watchmen became the only comic listed in Time’s ‘All-Time One Hundred Greatest Novels’ and a number of movies were made of his work: V for Vendetta, which gave the world the masks Anonymous use as a logo, From Hell, a botched take on Jack the Ripper that featured Johnny Depp at his most confused, and Watchmen, which was nearly good but proved that Zack Schneider is best used as a fight scene choreographer rather than a film director. Moore himself moved on and became weirder, declaring himself to be an actual magician.

In 1996 he produced his first novel, Voice of the Fire, a book that may be seen as a precursor to the new work in its experiments with language and multiple characters. Now we have Jerusalem: a massive, 1200-plus page work of psychogeography that maps and explores a single suburb of Moore’s home city of Northampton.

The word ‘Jerusalem’ implies much in western culture: it is an idea, a contested religious space, a geographical location, a hymn by William Blake, and a vision of the end times. In Moore’s book, Jerusalem is a concept rather than a place. Geographically, much of what happens in this monstrously long work is set in the very old city of Northampton, the settlement of which is said to date back to the Bronze Age. Moore has lived there his whole life and the novel may be seen in part as an expression of his love of the city, and in particular The Boroughs, the now-vanished area where Moore was born and grew up.

The first book of three in Jerusalem maps the geography of The Boroughs, the teeming, busy home of Northampton’s working class, by following the meanderings of people who drift not just through a physical region but through that region’s history. Time is malleable as characters from the past and the future interact, if sometimes very briefly. The epic begins with Alma Warren, an artist, who is possibly Moore in literary drag (there are a number of clues that point to this: their first names are similar, they both have brothers with the same name, they dress similarly, they both smoke) and who is planning a new exhibition. From there the narrative expands outwards introducing a wide array of characters, each vividly explored in their own chapter. There’s Marla, a heroin-addicted sex worker with a fascination for Princess Diana who has a vision of ghosts having sex. Those ghosts are Freddy Allen and Patsy Clarke who lived in The Boroughs and in death repeat moments of their lives over and over. Then there’s Peter, a pilgrim, in the year 810 AD, and Benedict, a lauded but penniless poet, in 2006. Their stories and many others fold together to invoke The Boroughs as a place: for Moore, humanity is what makes a location.

Complex as it is, the first book simply sets the stage by invoking The Boroughs and introducing the Warren family and the various lives within that family’s orbit. The second book is where things get going: we are thrown into the strange tale of Michael Warren, who chokes on a sweet and dies for a little while, and has a most marvellous adventure outside and above time while he is dead, which might be the most fun part of the book, and is certainly the most linear section. Young Michael is rescued from a monstrous demon by a gang of juvenile ghosts, The Dead Dead Gang, who are Fagin’s pickpockets mixed with The Goonies. These cheeky orphan ghosts and their adventures in a plane above life as we know it are a glorious high point of Jerusalem and show Moore at his most inventive.

The third book, almost amazingly, is odder still. Each new chapter takes a radically different form. One chapter is a play where visionary pastoral poet John Clare converses with Samuel Beckett on the steps of an insane asylum; another is written in an invented language that is barely readable yet held in place by rhythm and an internal logic; another is written as a strictly metered verse poem; and yet another in Joycean stream of consciousness.

The variation is jarring at times, but also welcome as the behemoth lumbers towards its denouement, in which all is explained, nothing ends, and we arrive, exhausted, at Alma Warren’s art exhibition. Her show is a celebration of The Boroughs, and it contains an excellent, unexpected device that pulls everything together, providing the reader with a classic Moore finale: a satisfying conclusion that is left entirely open.

Class is critical to Jerusalem. As a celebration of a vanished working class it could be read as a call to arms. Moore sees how over hundreds of years the poor have been diminished, assaulted, and disenfranchised, developing into a problematic underclass, and into dehumanised and ridiculed figures, ‘chavs’, who are the British equivalent to Australia’s ‘bogan’.

Beyond this polemical concern, Moore spends a lot of Jerusalem playing with the concept of time, seeming to suggest that the conventional view of time is not the full picture: that time has dimension, or is a dimension. Well, it’s complicated. Moore explores this notion with great elegance but it’s one of the many things that makes Jerusalem challenging: you need to take notes, or draw a small map. The cast of characters is vast, their stories intertwine in complex ways, and while the prose is filled with supple metaphors and glowing witticisms, there is a lot of it. There is a reason for this. Due to bad experiences working with publishers in the past, which resulted in the loss of control of much of his early work, Moore wouldn’t allow anyone to edit Jerusalem. While I take the point, the novel’s sheer size is going to feel prohibitive to some.

That aside, there are points where it coalesces and it all feels necessary. His characters are filled with pumping blood and the constantly changing perspective works surprisingly well – largely because of the way Moore links disparate characters across time and space. Everyone has something to do with everyone else, no matter how far apart in time and space they are.

Jerusalem is many things: a supernatural sit-com, a magic realist narrative, a shaggy dog story, and something that might be a religious text if found it in jar halfway up a cliff in four hundred years. It is too long, but it is as long as it’s author needed it to be, and while I got tired and fell asleep and dropped it on the cat at one point, and reading it has eaten into my life and delayed everything, including writing this, Jerusalem is like nothing else I’ve ever read. It might not be for everyone, but anyone could enjoy it, and in an era of tl;dr and a creeping new age dedication to minimalism, this is a prog-rock box set retrospective of the magical music of a long-haired warlock who really does care about the meek and sees even the smallest detail in life as filled with significance and wonder.

Andrew Harper is based in Hobart. He does occasional stand up, tells ghost stories to children, makes art about money and housing, writes about art for The Mercury and other publications, sometimes makes noise music in an act called Evil Goat and spends more time than he would like doing laundry.

Please join us in saying a huge+fond farewell to Marc Pearson, who has been our Art Editor for the past couple of years.

Marc says: “after 2 years and 8 issues of helping co-art edit and art edit The Lifted Brow, this is my last issue. it’s been fun and everyone there is v nice and you should check out this issue number 32 cause it’s a real good one I think. :0 <3″

What we do know: Marc is a tireless, warm, gentle, funny, intelligent, talented, patient and inclusively-minded human being, and our magazine, our organisation, and the world we all live in has been markedly improved as a direct result of his labour and care. Flick through any of the past eight issues and see just how broad and deep Marc’s curation has been – it’s a huge feat.

So, make sure you grab a copy of TLB32 when it comes out on December 1st—or subscribe now so we can post you a copy—to see Marc’s final contribution to the magazine as Art Editor.

Also: we excitedly (and officially) welcome our new Art Editors, Bailey Sharp and Ben Juers, and can’t wait to see what they do in the role. Bailey and Ben have been longtime contributors to our magazine as comics artists and illustrators, and their impassioned involvement in the Australian and international comics/visual art community is legendary.

Photo by Piers Mussared, courtesy of ACMI.

“The spirit of my gods rising up to speak with me. And the water holes boiled.” –Nyarri Nyarri Morgan.

In the 1950s in the Pilbara desert, ash rained down along with the bodies of kangaroos. Only twenty years later did he hear the words ‘atomic bomb’. It was not the gods, rather a British weapon tested as part of the extremely secret operations called Buffalo and Antler, which detonated seven nuclear bombs in Australia’s centre between 1956 and 1963, leaving lasting radioactivity.

In Australian artist Lynette Wallworth’s 17-minute virtual reality documentary Collisions, a mushroom cloud rises, angled high above us. “I saw the spirit had made all the kangaroos lie down on the ground,” continues Nyarri. “As a gift to us of easy hunting. So we took those kangaroos and we ate them. And people were sick.“ Everything was poisoned: the air, the water, the blood of the people themselves.

I swivel around in my chair as a flake of black ash flutters toward me. I follow the arc of a roo’s corpse, black as hell, as it comes towards me and falls behind, and I feel like I’m seeing the bomb through Nyarri’s eyes.

Wallworth first heard about Nyarri, an elder of the Martu nation, four years ago, having just visited the bomb site of Maralinga in South Australia, 2000 kilometres north-east of Perth.

“Nyarri was walking around in the desert when Britain was testing nuclear bombs, before he had any contact with any other culture but his own,” says Wallworth in a short film about Collisions. “This complete collision with Western technology and one of the oldest cultures in the world. What he saw and how that impacted him, I think he’d been waiting his whole life to tell the story.”

“We took the [virtual reality] camera there [to Nyarri], he looked at it and said, ‘It’s got sixteen eyes.’ And it’s got four ears,” adds Wallworth. This means that the audio cues sync with the visual cues: my ears heard what my eyes saw, regardless of where I turned in my swivel chair.

“Fundamentally, we’ve used the newest technology to talk about something ancient in this country,” Wallworth continues. “The Martu’s sense of stewardship, how you look after something for a hundred generations. That’s what Nyarri wants to share.”

Spherical shots encircle both the starry sky and the orange ground. Collisions’ visual imagination enlivens that stewardship and the notion of an entire ecosystem. I had the sense that every blade of desert grass, every leaf, every drop of ash: all of these things were alive and moving and enlivened further by the spaces of air between them. All is active within the film. To speak of Aboriginal land after seeing this film is limiting and false: Collisions makes you realise that even the stars form an essential part of Nyarri’s worldview. In terms of aesthetics and mindset, virtual reality is the perfect form for expressing this holistic Indigenous worldview. Wallworth’s sixteen-eyed camera is 360 degrees, all-encompassing in a way that cinematic experience—limited to one-point perspective in a single visual frame—could never be. When Nyarri restores the nuked lands to sustainability by control-burning spinifex, we can arch our necks and trace the arc of the smoke from his fires, rising from earth to sky.

From training cadets in the US armed forces to providing ramped-up gaming experiences, VR has been enthusiastically adopted for commercial and military applications, But Collisions offers proof of VR’s capacity for art in the form of narrative non-fiction film-making. Wallworth has also brought out the technology’s capacity for building empathy through immersion: “To place the viewer in relation to this community, to this man who wants to tell the story, and give a sense of place, not just what it looks like in the desert but what it feels like under that huge sky. The camera allows you to feel like you’re in his home.”

The opening scenes are exemplary of this: by sending the VR camera up with a drone and taking us over Nyarri’s country, I was immediately reminded of the paintings of Paddy Bedford and Emily Kame Kngwarreye, who both seem to bring a birds-eye view of the land: abstract shapes recall rivers and geographical contours and outlines of harbours – Gods-eye without God, with a sense of aerial spirituality instead. The overhead visuals of drone-enabled VR seem compatible with the abstractions of much Indigenous art.

The name ‘collisions’ brings up something deeper, too: what Wallworth has called an “extreme cultural interruption” is a collision that is still unfurling, not a lapsed aspect of past history. The film made me think of the eminent American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates’ question of whether you can reform a political system of governance based on plunder– in Australia’s case, a colonial settler society and the lie of Terra Nullius, a found myth that has never been fully retracted in the mainstream Australian imagination. The myth is so huge, so uncorrected and so downreaching, but Wallworth is striking back against colonial narrativisation and the still-dominant idea that Indigenous stories and systems are quaint native traditions that belong in the past.

Collisions’ portrayal of nuclear testing in Aboriginal spaces made me realise the great contradiction of this myth and its lingering colonialist view of Australia as a dead-hearted, empty land: that the wealth of Aboriginal ecology is what makes that land so desirable and exploitable to colonisers and capitalists. Collisions shows how the resources of the Indigenous nations—the iron, the ore, the gold, the copper, the opals, the trees to fell, the spring water to bottle, the barramundi to farm, the space in which to grow wheat and corn and rice and slaughter cattle and cut into real estate and build houses and test weapons—are integrated and essential parts of an Aboriginal worldview that extends from beneath the ground into the air and up to the stars, with unquantifiable spiritual value. But to free-marketeers, and those who permitted the nuclear testing, this abundance has a dollar value that is both tangible and constantly renegotiated. Maralinga’s expansiveness was what made it so attractive for testing.

If a land is truly empty, then why is it worth occupying? You cannot say a continent is worth nothing and worth taking from. The wealth of contemporary Australia, and the mad unsharedness of that wealth, is the evidence of that central lie. Through personalising the story of nuclear testing in the Pilbara desert via Nyarri’s recollections and survival, through uniting and mediating his memories with the right approach to story, sound and vision, Collisions is a vital exposure of this cross-eyed view of Australia’s centre as both valuable and expendable.

Collisions is also significant for its departure from much of Australian cinema’s Anglo-centric representations of blackness. It is not about white people’s encounters with blackness, rather, it is about one Indigenous man’s experience of colliding with a society that is essentially hostile to him and his people, country and spirit. Collisions does not use natural elements, like water, as a metaphorical critique of disturbed Aboriginal-white relations, for instance, the drowning of an Indigenous woman in Jindabyne (Ray Lawrence, 2006). It is not about an enlightening white encounter with blackness, for instance, Walkabout (Nicholas Roeg, 1970). It is not a white portrayal of Aboriginal mysticism as in Dead Heart (Nick Parsons, 1996). More akin to Rolf de Heer’s Ten Canoes (2006) and Charlie’s Country (2013), Collisions is a film in which a non-Aboriginal artist has collaboratively given over their resources and skills to give an Indigenous person a chance to author their own story, to discuss in their own voice the conservation of the memories and spirit of a place and, in this case, of Martu knowledge. In other words, it is not about the descendants of settlers and convicts moving towards Indigenous people, but enabling Indigenous worldviews and stories to reach beyond Aboriginal people to a wider public. It enables an ecological dialogue about the relationship between a place and the restoration of a peoples’ spirit, as it makes visible yet another absence in Australia’s history books.

Nyarri experienced something profound in the fifties: a violent clash between old nature and new weaponry— the weaponry of an imposed society—and he and his people will always carry that story with them. Although the film is upbeat about Nyarri’s peoples’ commitment to conserving their spirit and their place, the central collision the film speaks to remains active. Cameco and Mitsubishi are now planning a uranium mine called Kintyre in the ranges between two branches of a creek called Yantikutji, in the heart of Martu country. Preservation and home, care and place, are at the heart of Wallworth’s beautiful film, and those values are at odds with the political and financial system of today, which is itself the poison. By exploring new cinematic expressions for Indigeneity, Collisions suggests another way we can live in this country, which is stewarded so carefully by Indigenous nations, and always has been.

Collisions can be seen for free at Melbourne’s ACMI until January 2017, or by downloading the Jaunt TV virtual reality app. More information about the Martu people’s efforts to protect their home are available at http://www.wanfa.org.au.

Lauren Carroll Harris is a writer, researcher and artist, published in such outlets as Guardian Australia, Meanjin, Overland, Kill Your Darlings, The Lifted Brow, Indiewire and The Toast. She is a contributing editor to Metro and the author of ‘Not at a Cinema Near You: Australia’s Film Distribution Problem’ (Platform Papers, 2013).

Photos by Alan Weedon.

Issue number thirty-two of The Lifted Brow—the Capital Issue—goes on sale today.

TLB32 features writing and visual art that reflects on commerce, economics, and cultural capital: a diverse variety of words and visual art dissects the relationship between capital and the current state of the world. TLB32 directly attacks Simon Birmingham’s statement about creative fields as a “lifestyle choice”. There will be additional surprises with how it will be published, distributed, and sold.

Contributors include César Aira, Fiona Wright, Lawrence Lacambra Ypil, Sam Wallman, Ellena Savage, Matthew Hickey, Scott Esposito, Benjamin Law, and Alí Calderón.

Issue 32 also features detailed information from each and every contributor, editor, and person involved in the making of this issue. Information disclosed includes the hours of labour spent on the piece by various people, the fees paid, and much more.

Issue 32 of The Lifted Brow features:

• cover art by Sam Wallman, with bonus fore-edge art also by Wallman;
• nonfiction from Fiona Wright, Scott Esposito, Ellena Savage, Daniel Schoonebeek, Briohny Doyle, Matthew Hickey, Sam West, Carolyn D'Cruz, Daniel Levin Becker, Angela Serrano, Lech Blaine, and Rhea Bhagat;
• fiction by César Aira and Allee Richards;
• poetry by Lawrence Lacambra Ypil, Alí Calderón, and Safia Elhillo;
• comics and artwork from Merv Heers, Rudy Loewe, Amanda Baeza, Sasha Velour, Emma Davidson, Michelle Baginski, Eloise Grills, Michael Fikaris, Melissa Mendes, Keith McDougall, Roxane Lumeret, Tommi PG, and Leonie Brialey;
• and, as always, Benjamin Law and his mum Jenny’s sex and relationships advice column.

As ever, subscribers—no matter where they live in the world—are the first to receive their copies of the magazine. If you don’t subscribe (why don’t you?), you can find out more about how to get your copy here.

To celebrate this issue, we will run a special week of ‘Capital’-themed content on this, our website, from December 5th onwards – featuring excellent words that didn’t quite suit the print issue, as well as content especially commissioned for the website.

Finally – if you’re in or around Melbourne, Australia, on the night of December 9th, we’d love to see you at our launch event for this issue.

If much of the modern geopolitical landscape is defined in its earliest inflections by Iraq—Bush’s decision to invade, Obama’s decision to oppose, and all the ramifications that followed (Syria, Russia’s myriad interventions there and elsewhere – with China providing humanitarian support to Assad’s regime, too)—then a collection of science fiction imagining a gasp of fresh air in the form of an Iraq one hundred years into the future is potential light flooding into our vision after history bursts through its escape hatch. (If history can do such a thing.) It’s why the anthology Iraq +100: Stories from a Century after the Invasion published by Comma Press caught my attention.

And what is offered here by way of an escape hatch? In ‘The Gardens of Babylon’, a tiger-droid is hacked and circles “pointlessly in the air, above everyone’s heads.” In ‘The Day By Day Mosque’, the Tigris River has disappeared, which “some theologians”—per Mortada Gzar, the author—“have speculated never existed and was in fact dreamed up by sinners, rakes and watermelon-juice drinkers.” In ‘Baghdad Syndrome’, “Old names and surnames became dangerous things to hold onto.”

At the level of line, there are numerous instances that attract the attention: “Faint moustache,” reads one, “like a sparrow’s tail feathers.” “The Americans would give me back the ear that fell into my pocket,” reads another. “They’d fix my ribs and intestines, they’d remove the shrapnel still lodged in my body, and they’d tell me, ‘You’re just great, Mister Sobhan.’”

While these stories are well written—often pleasantly written, even—and I’m glad that the book exists and that the authors took the time to contribute to the anthology, something struck me while reading it: it wasn’t the fact that the stories were blunt warnings hovering over outright precision, editorials clamouring for human space in the middle of a growing digital landscape where the reading habits don’t seem as well tuned to the idea of human space as they otherwise could be (where is the ‘Mr. Rogers of the Internet’ for instance?). It wasn’t the fact that fear of loss of memory rang out through story after story (let alone the love of memory) or the fear of the past being unable to carry its own into the future (whether it took the form of someone being crushed into a diamond for singing a song, the memory of the past itself being reclassified as a ‘syndrome’, or a student showing up for class dressed up as Gilgamesh.) It was the fact that each author looking into the future left me with the impulse to urge them further, in the hopes that they could wrest a jangle of ideas out of the future and drag them back to the present.

And I’m feeling that for obvious reasons.

On November 8th, I went off to vote in a small snow-globe of a town singing Woody Guthrie’s ‘All You Fascists Are Bound to Lose’ with ironic playfulness. The sun was out, and—finally sensing the end of the worst Presidential campaign I could ever recall, not only for what was being implicitly proposed, but for its complete lack of substance, too—I was starting to enjoy myself. We were so close to being rid of the nonsense. I voted and called my mother on point of principle: the day was just as much hers as it was anyone else’s.

Hours later, I was walking down a dark, nearly deserted road. A woman in her pyjamas with a cigarette in her mouth swung an American flag she was carrying, letting it hit the top of the Clinton-Kaine yard sign. “Damn it!” she said, quietly. A few minutes down the road, a car sped by and someone shouted, “Make America Great Again!” I would later joke to friends that it felt like the entire country had entered The Black Lodge from Twin Peaks, and we could still see the door hanging open, the outside still visible.

As an American who cares about his country, the world order, and the future of the planet; as someone who had a friend in high school head off to the war in Iraq and tell my grandfather who was a POW in World War II with great enthusiasm about the prospect of it; as someone who watched his grandfather tilt his head and face down a bit with a fraction of “Oh, I see” disappointment; as someone who has been mistaken for being Jewish and Arabic more than once in the aftermath of September 11; as someone who’s friend was in Tahrir Square during the throes of Egypt’s first hopeful flush, and who once knew a stateless poet who came to this country from Kuwait; and finally, as someone who has heard time and time again of the effects multiple tours of duty have had on soldiers, even at the level of those tellingly dark, small, sarcastic comments, I wonder about their future and whether or not they’ll be okay. I wonder how Iraqis will feel in thirty or forty years, and whether or not they’ll still be okay, as well as what feelings art like this must by dint of necessity hide. I wonder how many Americans thought like this in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War, and I wonder how well a country tilting itself towards the idea of ‘good’ can account for itself to a future iteration of Iraq given what could happen with the incoming administration.

It’s yet to be seen whether or not this moment and this election will be a geopolitical inflection point the size of Iraq, or whether or not it will be able to be contained or transformed for the better. It’s yet to be seen whether or not we follow the path outlined in ‘The Corporal’, the third story in the anthology, where a dead Iraq soldier returns to earth 100 years into the future only to ask, “What has this man said, about Iraq saving the American people from dictatorship, and bringing them back their freedom … and then the whole thing about American refugees in Iraq, could that be right?” It’s yet to be seen who will march, who will sing, and who will Rainbow Coalition themselves over the hills up ahead like a pack of Hannibal elephants coming to the rescue.

Evan Fleischer is a writer-at-large. In addition to The Lifted Brow, his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and numerous other publications.

I don’t fuck like your lover fucks—tired from a day of work, pausing to ask if you turned the heater off in the loungeroom, stopping to switch their phone to silent or to kick the cat off the bed. You know how I fuck now. You know it in the split of your hips. Deep in the bone of you. I don’t need to tell you, but I will.

The Lifted Brow are excited to announce a new project for 2017: Stranger in the Dark, a serialised erotic fiction written by well-known Australian author and longtime Brow contributor Krissy Kneen. Here’s how Krissy describes it:

Stranger in the Dark is an affair. It is an affair that you will have with me. You will need to relax, to let me take control. You will need to breathe steady and deep, and try to stop your heart from beating too fast.

Twelve months, twelve emails, twelve parts of a complicated puzzle. You will assemble it, month by month. The story will take shape, through dream, through nightmare, through sex. What takes place is between me and you. What takes place is definitely not safe for work.

Write back to me if you dare, you never know where our tryst will take us. You won’t know where this will end.

All I know is I need to fuck you. I need to do it in words. I need to do it at a distance. Are you ready? You look ready. Feel me now. I’m ready.

I am waiting for you.

To start receiving emails from Krissy, sign up here. She’ll be in touch once a month, starting in January.

We write this editorial on the morning after Donald Trump took the stage as president-elect, promising to “bind the wounds of division.” That division, borne from disparity and dissenting opinion, is the fire his populism has at once inflamed and utterly dissuaded. Difference, informed opinion and discussion, the vast and complex spectra of human experience, these are the tools of progress.

Ours is a moment lived between the poles of nativism and radical tolerance; we awoke this morning to find ourselves hurtled catastrophically towards the former, while the majority of the world faces a daily fight for freedom, safety and equality. Confronted by this situation, it’s difficult to shake the feeling that what we’re doing here, making a magazine, is a frivolous if not feeble act.

In these moments, we return to what we know. That the tyranny of solipsism and self-interest can only be toppled by an empathy which liberates the mind of its prejudices. We return to our visionaries, our incisive and expansive thinkers, like the great Carl Sagan who reminds us, “Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.” Diversity, debate, critique of ourselves and the systems which put us here: these are our tools.

The Brow stakes its claim for existence upon a collective form of resistance via nurturing. In the face of the nihilism diagnosed by the likes of Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, “the pure destruction of useful things for the aim of increasing financial capital,” we create and we pour invisible money into a beautiful hole.

This Capital-themed issue advocates for kindness, for language, for art that rages, while it acknowledges its complicity in what feels like an increasingly awful world. Everything will not be fine. But from grief, from shame, tender visions can sprout and their “wealth” may trickle out.

Through its muralist approach, the contents of this issue locate the anxieties produced by the logic of capital on external bodies, structures and the through lines of our lives. Not only do we hope to interrogate ideas of value, economic and immaterial both, but by enumerating those expenses in the ledger at the centre of this issue, we seek to make transparent the social relations that produced this object in your hands; “the majestic and murderous stupidity of that organisation of time and space and fuel and labor” (Ben Lerner).

In negotiating this magazine’s legitimacy, we acknowledge the many hours that disappear into its production; the often below-minimum-wage-all-the-way-down-to-zilch payment that accompanies a life in the creative industries; the blood on our hands. Consider it an internal memo made public, an exploration of the potential autonomy of labour from capital. Hold these pages close, but be sure to ask how they got there.