‘’Course you can!’ he replies. ‘You don’t have to ask.’
Woolley returns with a tumbler of Golden Oak and ice and sits across from us. He and Don begin again to discuss the problem with the resident junkie, and how they’ll manage him, and the rat and mould problem, over Christmas. They’ve resorted to buying their own baits and laying them throughout the building.
‘The Department of Housing will not respond in a timely manner,’ says Woolley in a deliberately mocking tone. ‘It’s no use putting a bandaid on when the body has already bled out.’ He lets out a loud huff and reaches for his tobacco. ‘It hurts poor people who have been promised help and don’t receive it. It hurts.’
Don mentions that Junkie John keeps leaving the laundry door unlocked, which could result in the theft of the building’s washers and dryers. More worryingly, John has also been spotted trying to enter the units of his neighbours early in the mornings, while they’re still asleep.
‘Just one person can fuck it up for everyone else,’ says Don, wagging his head.
Four days until Christmas
Last night, for the first time in sixteen years, Don locked his front door, afraid of Junkie John and his rumoured light fingers. Over his first coffee of the day, Woolley smokes and broods for a while, and soon decides on a plan of action to deal with John over the holidays.
It’s midmorning and already the heat inside his unit is stifling. Sitting at the table, he lights a rollie and rings an officer at the Department of Housing. After he greets her with the usual niceties, they discuss the problems of the building. Together, they collaborate on a letter for her to type up, photocopy and send to him, so that he can forward them by hand to all of his neighbours.
By composing the letter, rather than making a general complaint, the matter will be dealt with immediately, rather than lingering on into the following year. ‘Dear Residents,’ begins Woolley, ‘Just a reminder … that the laundry door is to be kept closed.’
He goes on to cite the reasons why: safety in the event of a fire. He also reminds residents that they must do their washing between the appointed times of six a.m. and eleven p.m.
As Woolley continues to talk, Leo appears in the open doorway, grinning. ‘Does this mean we’re gonna have a Christmas Party?’ Leo asks.
Woolley waves to him to be quiet. He clears his throat: ‘Finally, it is important that residents … dispose of any unwanted household items … safely.’ He draws on his rollie and shifts in his seat. ‘Under no circumstances is anything to be thrown from the balconies.’
He winds up the phone call and drops his rollie in the ashtray.
‘Does this mean we’re gonna have a Christmas party?’ Leo repeats.
Woolley stands and smooths down his Hawaiian shirt. ‘We’re going to have to write up a shopping list,’ he announces. ‘And a guest list, too.’
‘I’ll throw in a case of beer!’ announces Leo, thrilled with this development. ‘I’ll throw in a case of beer!’
Three days until Christmas
Multiple copies of the letter that Woolley dictated yesterday have arrived at Ponderosa via Express Post. He rips open the envelope and takes them out. I expect him to begin slipping them under the doors of his neighbours immediately, but first he takes a pencil, turns the letters over, and begins numbering them with a tiny scribble in one corner. Once all twenty-three pages are numbered, he walks out into the corridor and begins making his rounds.
An hour later, with a shopping trolley borrowed from Don, Woolley and Leo make the trek up the hill to Coles. They plan to finance the party through the judicious use of vouchers, which they collect year-round from ATMs and supermarkets.
‘Another lurk we’ve got,’ says Woolley, following Leo onto the escalator, ‘is we volunteer for scientific experiments.’ He explains that only just recently he and four other Ponderosa dwellers signed up for medical research into liver function. ‘All we had to do was fill out a questionnaire, have a blood test and a liver scan,’ he says.
We step off the escalator and Leo runs towards the meat section like a kid let loose in a toy shop. ‘And for that, we each get a $20 voucher for Coles,’ continues Woolley. ‘It all adds up, you know.’
We arrive back at Ponderosa, laden with bags of kebabs, bread rolls and frankfurts. As Woolley pulls the shopping trolley along the ground-floor corridor, he spots a balled piece of paper lying in the garden. Shaking his head, he pauses, picks it up and smooths it out. I can see that it has the Housing NSW logo on the upper left-hand side. Woolley turns the piece of paper over and studies the number pencilled in the corner.
‘Bloody Sharkey,’ he says. ‘He’s taken a notice about not throwing anything over the balcony – and thrown it over the balcony.’
‘Who’s Sharkey?’ I ask.
‘Lives on the third floor,’ says Woolley.
‘He was once a cellmate with Ronald Ryan!’ announces Leo. ‘With Robert Ryan! He was once a cellmate with Robert Ryan!’
Woolley notices the puzzled look on my face, and leans in to explain. ‘Ronald Ryan was the last man to be hanged in Australia.’
One day until Christmas
We walk outside from Woolley’s unit to find someone has tipped white powder all over the trees, the plants, the flowers and the outdoor furniture. Woolley drops to one knee and fingers the coarse, pale granules, lifting a sample to his nose and sniffing expertly, like a forensic scientist analysing a drug sample.
‘You reckon it was Sharkey again?’ I ask.
‘There’s only one person in the building who uses this brand of washing powder.’ He tilts his head back and gazes up at the third floor.
‘Not the junkie again,’ I say.
Woolley rests his hands on his hips. ‘Maybe he thought it was artificial snow?’
Christmas Day
Today, Ponderosa wakes up to more items that have been tossed over the balcony throughout the night: a tube of toothpaste, biscuit wrappers, and what looks like a large puddle of porridge lying on the walkway. ‘But it could be spew,’ observes Woolley, leaning closer.
‘One day, that cunt threw a drawer over the balcony,’ says Don, ‘and it crushed a lime tree that I’d just planted.’ The avid gardener and chef has been up half the night, marinating and preparing kebabs for the Ponderosa Christmas party, and he is not impressed by his neighbour’s attempts to sabotage the celebration.
Meanwhile, I return to Woolley’s unit and inspect the tiny courtyard. Overnight the rats, too, have been hard at work. Three holes the size of basketballs have appeared in the ground, with burrows that curve beneath the paling fence. I glimpse Butch the spotter a few yards down, sitting in the sun, his eyes closed.
While Leo fills recycling bins with bags of ice and beer, Woolley prepares salads and nibblies. A table already sits in the rainforest garden outside, surrounded by empty chairs. At around four p.m., the first of the guests begin to arrive, cradling beers in stubby holders. Leo introduces me to eighty-seven-year-old Theo, a pensioner whose unit is rumoured to be the worst affected by the building’s mould. As Theo leads me to his door, I notice how impeccably he is dressed on this hot and steamy day: a crisp white shirt, a tie, a waistcoat and matching trousers.
When he opens the door, the spore stench hits me before I even cross the threshold. I follow him inside and am shocked to see a thick grey sludge growing across the walls, ceilings and kitchen floor, like some gigantic toxic blob from the set of a horror film.
Almost gagging, I ask, ‘How long has it been like this?’
‘Seven years!’ he replies, exasperated. ‘Seven times they visit to look at the unit. And seven times they do nothing!’
He points to the ceiling of his bathroom, which is sagging so severely it looks as if it’s about to collapse. Theo tells me that it’s due to a faulty toilet upstairs which, despite many complaints, has never been fixed. He then calls my attention to the shower recess. Sixteen years ago, a former tenant removed the tiled barrier along one side of the
recess and so, for the past decade and a half, every time Theo showers, the water runs straight across the floor and into the carpet in the living room.
‘I’m eighty-seven years old!’ cries Theo, shaking a fist. ‘They probably wait until I die before they come to fix the place!’
I take photos of the mould and reassure him that I will try to help in any way I can. I lay a hand on his shoulder and invite him back to the party, but he is too upset to socialise – even on Christmas Day. I leave him standing in his kitchen, arms hanging at his side, bewildered by the conditions in which he is forced to live.
Back outside, someone is strumming a guitar. As I walk along the path, a bar stool comes flying over an upstairs balcony, arcs through the air and crashes onto the paving, barely missing Don. Those who are chatting and drinking pause briefly to look over at the missile and return to their conversations. I pop my head into Woolley’s unit and am met by Leo, who has been charged with delivering plates of food to any resident too ill or too shy to join us. I offer to help and follow him down the corridor.
He knocks on Butch’s door; the door opens a little and Leo passes the plate to a gnarled hand that quickly disappears before the door is slammed shut. ‘Butch is too pissed to come to the party,’ explains Leo. ‘But he told me he wanted something to eat.’
Our next visit is to eighty-nine-year-old Albert, who opens his door and receives his Christmas meal with gratitude, thanking Leo repeatedly in a soft, strangled voice, before erupting into a coughing fit. For sixteen years, Leo, Woolley and Don have always ensured that Albert has a good, solid meal on Christmas Day.
We climb the stairs to the third floor and stroll along until we come to Sharkey’s unit. Leo bangs on the door and suddenly we see the peephole darken.
‘Merry Christmas, Sharkey!’ cries Leo. He holds up the plate of food.
We can hear Sharkey snorting for a moment, but the eye remains glued to the other side of the peephole.
‘Fuck off, Leo!’ he shouts.
Leo picks up the last hot dog, flashes his manic grin, leans in close to the peephole and takes a huge bite.
‘Merry Christmas!’ he announces, laughing. ‘Merry Christmas, Sharkey!’
Bad Writer
Michael Mohammed Ahmad
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Two years ago the British Centre for Literary Translation invited me to Anhui Province in China to participate as a guest author in its annual translation program. I was asked to facilitate a creative writing workshop with the English-speaking participants in the program, which would follow on from a workshop run by Vietnamese-Australian author of The Boat, Nam Le. For two hours I watched patiently and quietly as Nam worked with twenty aspirational writers and translators who had come to China from all over the (Western) world, including Australia, the United States, Ireland, Scotland and England. Nam wrote six random words up on a chalkboard, ‘shoes’, ‘man’, ‘mountain’, ‘love’, ‘fear’ and ‘fingers’, and then he told the participants to each write a short story or poem using these six words. I was disappointed to hear the writers in the group read back the stories they wrote, which all followed the same thread: A man wandered a mountain in a pair of shoes, searching for love and afraid he would find it. It did not occur to even one of them that a mountain could be in love with a man or a shoe could be afraid of a finger, or more importantly, that the mountain, the man, the shoes and the finger could all have a specific identity. After all, we were in view of China’s Sacred Yellow Mountain, and with so much diversity in the room, participants had dirt on their shoes and under their fingernails from places no-one else in the group could have imagined. It was at this point that I realised the universality of bad writing: the bad writing that this international collective of writers produced was no different from the bad writing I had dealt with as a writer, editor, publisher and teacher in Western Sydney for over fifteen years.
Although this essay deals specifically with the bad writing I have encountered in Western Sydney, my argument is that bad writing can never actually be distinctive of one place. Any distinction writing makes for itself is inherently good, which is why there has always been so much potential for good writing to be from and about Western Sydney. What makes bad writing universal is that it lacks detail, originality, specificity and a sense of character and place, it depends on generalisations and clichés (both in terms of language and story), and it only reproduces common tropes and ideas which are propagated in mainstream literature, film, television, music and radio, making it so unremarkable that it could have been written anywhere by anyone at any time. Therefore, while bad writing in Western Sydney has everything in common with bad writing everywhere else, good writing in Western Sydney, and good writing everywhere else, has nothing in common with good writing anywhere else – it is good as an unhappy family is unhappy, in its own way.
Since 2006 I have been running a literacy movement in Western Sydney now called Sweatshop, which is devoted to empowering people from socio-economically challenged and culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds through reading, writing, critical thinking, creative expression and creative outcomes. The principles of Sweatshop are built on the ideas of African-American feminist, scholar and activist bell hooks, who in an interview with the Media Education Foundation in 1997 argued that all steps towards freedom and justice in any culture depend on mass-based literacy movements because degrees of literacy determine how we see what we see. I have always found this to be a significant alternative to the usual way that Australian parents, carers, teachers and politicians discuss the importance of literacy to young people – in the romantic sense that it is important simply because it is a good in itself or the capitalist sense that it is important because it will give you access to a good job. For hooks, degrees of literacy define our ability to be critical of social systems (which may be racist, sexist, homophobic and/or classist) and to create alternatives to these systems, specifically through critical consciousness, critical discussion and artistic self-representation. Unfortunately, while I’ve used this model over the years to witness the development of many bad writers who want to become good writers, my general experience is that most aspirational writers I’ve had to work with are no good, do not know it, do not want to find out, and are not interested in improving.
*
But creative writing is subjective! This is the most obvious and common response that bad writers throw at me when I tell them that their work needs revision. Ironically, my issue with bad writing is always the same: it is not subjective. What these people are writing is consumed with clichés, vague images (or no images), no detail and no specificity, no sense of place, no sense of character and no distinction of voice. Take, for example, Christopher, a thirty-nine-year-old bad writer from Yagoona who sent me a piece of writing that started like this: The following story is about love, the love between a man and his bitch.
I agreed to meet Christopher to discuss his story at the reading garden of the new Bankstown library, a building with so much glass that you can see right through it to the old library across the road, which is by contrast a concrete slab with no visible windows at all. Christopher sat in front of a statue of the Lebanese writer Kahlil Gibran that was erected to celebrate the contributions of the Lebanese community to the Bankstown area, and stared at me with an unsettling blue-eyed gaze as he awaited my response to his work. I told him that he could delete the first line, because the story he wanted to tell hadn’t actually started yet, but that even if he wanted to keep the line, I had heard other writers attempt to produce this exact same effect with this exact same wording many times before. He raised his eyebrows at me and responded, ‘But how would you know if you’ve heard these words before, English isn’t even your first language.’ Aside from the fact that English is my first language, my concern here is the White belief that bilingual writers and editors from non-English-speaking backgro
unds are less capable of identifying subjectivity in English writing than White writers. I told Christopher that being multilingual enhances the ability to imagine, create and critically engage with works of literature because it diversifies modes of thinking, which according to Noam Chomsky is the primary purpose of language, but that the problems with his piece were so fundamental, even a literary critic who did not speak a word of English would probably recognise them. As I spoke, Christopher had a smug smile on his shabby Ed Sheeran face as if all he could hear was, Ah durka durka Allahu-akbar.
While some bad writers use ‘subjectivity’ to argue that I am underqualified to assess their work, there are those who use ‘subjectivity’ to argue that I am over-qualified to assess their work. I was invited to facilitate a workshop for a multicultural writers’ group that regularly meets on the second level of a kebab shop in Auburn. The room was dim and on one wall there was a picture of Hassan Nasrallah standing in front of a microphone with his mouth wide open and his fingers making the A-OK hand gesture and on the other side was a picture of the Ayatollah Khomeini with a deep-set frown and his hands out in front of him as though he were holding a Qur’an. This seemed like the perfect environment to wrest some kind of Auburn-esque literature from a group of twelve ethnic writers who were so mixed they looked like a bag of Skittles. The first person to share her writing with the group was a Maltese woman named Tanika. She wore a beret and, I swear on Allah, was holding a feather pen. In a tight bogan accent she read out a story that started like this: ‘Fuck you!’ the boy roars, spitting venom. A look of disbelief washed over my face, an illusion of compassion that really wasn’t there.
I told Tanika that this sentence was simply a compilation of common images. She was imposing them on us rather than revealing anything through sensory experiences, descriptions of the setting or characters, or anything that is literally or figuratively happening in the scene. Bad writers use this type of exposition after a quotation to elaborate the offensiveness of a comment – but either comments like ‘fuck you’ are sufficiently offensive that a writer/narrator does not need to stress how offensive they are by saying they are ‘roars’ or ‘spits of venom’, or the comments are simply not offensive and the writer is just forcing the idea that they are offensive on us because the comment and the reaction to the comment don’t carry their own weight.
The Best Australian Essays 2017 Page 17
