Blueberries
Page 18
—But—the narrative convenience of a sad story! Don’t you feel it? Don’t you feel sorry for the dead and all they endured?
—More compelling, right? The misery?
—The terrible things are the things she remembers being told. Behind the elders’ backs.
—Makes the past seem worth leaving behind. Worth forgetting.
—Or worth writing about, silencing the slices of beauty and the slices of in-between.
She had animals, too. The cats, the rabbits. A rooster who liked to sit at the table when she hosted lunch parties. She was, after all, a fabulous hostess. Cooked elaborate dinner parties set in the dining room; lunches in the backyard. Everyone got drunk and screamed at each other.
Their friends were single people, gay people. Not family people. Theirs was not a house for children. An adult house with adult problems. Pieces of fine art and craft, porcelain, a French polish on the formal dining table. Every inch of the house stood frozen in terror of an invasion by children.
And she, far too austere for bacchanalian lunch parties. But she loved men. At least that was the phrase I heard. That was her pleasure.
She was thin and well-dressed even though there was no money to spare. An op-shop master. When someone asked her where her outfit came from, which was often, she’d say, ‘Just a little boutique I know.’ Each new man, each of her husbands, my mother once said, was a way of running from the last one—starting with her father.
She had her church, and later, her mosque. That part of her life is mysterious to me.
The third death. When the last person speaks your name.
All voted Labor.
The generation back are more fun. The words that are remembered. The twelve sisters. Half were beautiful. Half, heavy-set and stern. One was named Daisy. Or was it Eloise? All played the piano. Drank and gambled. Caused their husbands decadent grief. I love this gang of loose women whose genes I share a little in. The words I use to remember them are to me brilliant and pulsing with life, though they might describe a certain misery.
…
Writing in the first person is writing that admits that experience is always truncated. That perspective is necessarily incomplete. That it is not possible, not honest, to pretend otherwise. ‘Point of view offers two possibilities: partial and complete,’ writes Susan Stewart. Though the ‘complete’ view, the omnipotent view, the view that insists it knows everything, strikes me as a fearful perspective. A fear of what silence might reveal.
‘What remains silent is the third and anonymous possibility,’ Stewart says, is ‘blindness, the end of writing’.
During the afternoons that I began to think about the book I was making from my life, I lay on my bed and read Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue. Though reading it made me want to drown my book proposal and dissolve myself. In Ban, Kapil splices the lyric ‘I’, multiplies it, buries key fragments, and then undermines the composition of the very book in its own pages. She writes of:
the limits of the poetic project—its capacity: for embodiment, for figuration, for what happens to bodies when we link them to the time of the event…
These limitations ask, in turn, what kind of body constitutes an ‘I’. It is a good question—what kind of body makes a memoir?
Certainly not the bodies of my grandmothers.
—So what gives you the right?
—Because she wanted to.
—Because I wanted to?
—Because she doesn’t fear dying. Doesn’t fear disappearing in time.
But the sadness the great sadness of everything being forgotten. Not only her moments. Not only her vision. But every image every pop song every name uttered every dense night and every morning the warm skin beside you before the day collapses inward. All of it, every shade of the light, gone. All at once.
—She wanted to expunge herself.
—What kind of body makes a memoir?
—‘Hey! I am going to make up an I that will stick to the pages of a book.’ (Kerry Sherin)
The one who does her homework. The one who cleans her plate. The one who drinks her soymilk. The one who falls face downwards. The one who high and mighty. The one of unspent honour.
The she of what next: action.
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Acknowledgments
In writing this book over several years, I have accrued many debts. Firstly, I owe deep gratitude to Alaina Gougoulis, Daisy Parente, Philip Gwyn Jones, Melinda Harvey, Jean Edelstein, and everyone at Text and Scribe UK, without whom a blueberry would just be a delicious, if costly, fruit. Heartfelt thanks to my friends who read and advised me: Dion Kagan, Maria Tumarkin, Ronnie Scott and Timothy Chandler.
I have referenced (stolen gratuitously from?) conversations, encounters and experiences with friends and strangers in this text. Credit here is due to Daniel Wright (RIP), Zübeyda Ahmed, Nader Ruhayel, Shasta Fisher, Natalie Costanzo, Natalie Briggs, Auntie Annie, Bhakthi Puvanenthiran, André Dao, Cat McInnis, Otto Ivor, Ambika Trasi, Ahmed Awadalla, Yahia Saleh, Sammy Dunstan, Emma McNicol, Gene Flenady, Annabelle Stapleton-Crittenden, Tim Chandler (again), Stevie aka Robyn Delacroix, John Olstad, Detective Cristina Sereña, St Catherine of Bologna (RIP), Marianne Hirsch, Hans Ruin and a few men with names that remind me of ‘Sam’. Others, too, whose names I don’t remember.
Friends, colleagues and reference-letter writers who assisted this work in kind and sometimes abstract ways are Stephanie Van Schilt, Becky Harkins-Cross, Elena Gomez, Sam Cooney, Amy Gray, Eloise Grills, Oliver Reeson, Leah Jing, Adam Curley, Bronte Coates, Chris Somerville, Laura McPhee-Browne, Jen Nguyen, Rita Bullwinkel, Jessie Cole, Kate Callingham, Helen Garner, Robert Watkins, readers and subscribers of Little Throbs, and supporters of Synthetic Heat. Big thanks to Annabel Brady-Brown and Zoe Dzunko at the Lifted Brow, Sophie Allan at Chart Collective, Natalie Eilbert and Emily Raw at the Atlas Review, and Louise Swinn, editor of Choice Words.
My life and curiosity are the products of love and labour freely given by Mum, Dad, Jim, Rob, Sue and Emi. I composed parts of this text on unceded Wurundjeri land and I pay my respects to its rightful, traditional owners. I consumed groceries and paid bills while writing this with the material assistance of, variously, Australia Council for the Arts, Creative Victoria and an Australian Postgraduate Award. Romance and domestic collaboration was provided by Dominic Amerena, to whom I dedicate this book.
Ellena Savage is an author and academic. Her work has been published widely in anthologies and literary journals including, recently, the Paris Review Daily, Sydney Review of Books, Choice Words and the Lifted Brow, of which she is a former editor. Ellena is the recipient of several grants and prizes, including the 2019–21 Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship. She lives in Athens, Greece. Blueberries is her first collection.
ellenasavage.com
‘Blueberries feels like lying down on the train tracks and looking up at the sky—a reverie, shot through by a feeling of acceleration, of something vast coming at you. Ellena Savage’s essays are heartstopping epics of self-enquiry and world-inquiry.’ MARIA TUMARKIN, author of Axiomatic
‘Reading Ellena Savage’s Blueberries engaged me completely. Savage’s sparkling writing is bold, witty, insightful, fearless and funny. It emerges from an astute mind at odds with itself, with culture and society. Savage wrestles and plays with received ideas of all kinds, and with what has and hasn’t shaped her. Savage’s fierce essays and stories are true to a lived life, and fascinating and irresistible.’ LYNNE TILLMAN, author of American Genius, A Comedy
‘Ellena Savage is a rare kind of true intellectual, a voice that rises above the cacophony with remarkable insight. In Blueberries, she cuts fearless swathes through the ways that we write and think and live now and leaves us far better for it: the book is unsettling, life-affirming and essential.’ JEAN EDELSTEIN, author of This Really Isn’t About You
‘Once I started reading Blueberries, I found it almost impossible to put down. It’s fascinating to watch Ellena Savage’s mind at work in this book—her essays unfurl, expand and dance in unexpected and satisfying ways. This is a masterful, fearless book in which strength and vulnerability collide.’ CHELSEA HODSON, author of Tonight I’m Someone Else
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‘Ellena Savage, in Blueberries, confronts the past convulsively, compulsively. In dialogic language and form, the author, facing memory’s traumas and perplexities, and also its delights, is constantly aware that it’s all about the translation of experience from the private to the public realm. In extremis, which is where Savage shines especially, it’s as if she saying to the “repressed”: go ahead and return; make my day.’ DAVID LAZAR, author of Occasional Desire
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Some of these essays have appeared elsewhere, in slightly or very different form: ‘Yellow City’ in Paris Review Daily, November 2018; ‘Satellite’ in Chart Collective: Legend, 2017; ‘Allen Ginsberg’ in Scum Magazine, October 2017; ‘Unwed Teen Mum Mary’ in Choice Words, Allen & Unwin, 2019; ‘You Dirty Phony Saint and Martyr’ in the Lifted Brow No. 32, December 2016 (and shortly afterwards republished online in Literary Hub); ‘Friendship Between Women’ in Cosmonaut’s Avenue, August 2018; ‘The Literature of Sadness’ in the Lifted Brow No. 33, March 2017; ‘Turning Thirty’ in the Lifted Brow Online, December 2017. The titles ‘Holidays with Men’ and ‘Antimemoir, as in, Fuck You (as in, Fuck Me)’ are taken from pieces previously published in, respectively, the Suburban Review Vol. 1, 2013, and the Lifted Brow No. 35, September 2017. Some lines and observations in this book have appeared, unedited, in the self-published, closed-circuit weekly email newsletter Little Throbs.
Published by The Text Publishing Company, 2020
Book design by Jessica Horrocks
; Cover images by Simone Anne /Stocksy & iStock
Typeset by Jessica Horrocks & Duncan Blachford
ISBN: 9781922268563 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781925923179 (ebook)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia