Selected Essays on Canadian, Australian and New Zealand Literatures [1 ed.] 9781443861229, 9781443858977

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Selected Essays on Canadian, Australian and New Zealand Literatures

Selected Essays on Canadian, Australian and New Zealand Literatures

By

Igor Maver

Selected Essays on Canadian, Australian and New Zealand Literatures, by Igor Maver This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Igor Maver All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5897-8, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5897-7

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ....................................................................................................... vii Part I: Canada Chapter One ................................................................................................. 2 Literary Allusions in Margaret Atwood’s Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 10 Diasporic Literature in a Post-Ethnic Canada Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 24 The Literature of the Slovenian Diaspora in Canada Part II: Australia and New Zealand Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 34 Australia in the Habsburg Café: Andrew Riemer’s Writing about Central Europe Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 47 An Antipodean Byron? A. D. Hope’s Vision of Australia vs. Europe Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 57 Christopher Koch’s Literary Works Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 61 Ouyang Yu’s The Kingsbury Tales Chapter Eight ............................................................................................. 65 Slovenian Diasporic Literature in Australia and its Main Achievements Chapter Nine.............................................................................................. 86 Australia and New Zealand through the Eyes of an Early Slovenian Travel Writer

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Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 100 Representations of Slovenia in Mainstream Australian Literature Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 106 Australian Literature and Shakespeare’s Play The Tempest Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 110 Makutu: War and Trauma in C. K. Stead’s Novel Talking about O'Dwyer Part III: Postcolonial Literatures in English Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 120 Perennial Empires: Postcolonial, Transnational, and Literary Perspectives Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 123 Teju Cole’s Transcultural Novel Open City

PREFACE

This book is the result of my long-standing research interest and love for Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and other literatures in English since the early 1990s, often, albeit not always, considered within the postcolonial paradigm. The fourteen essays published here, mostly on some of the most prominent literary authors of the day, have been written during the past decade or so. They discuss primarily modern Canadian, Australian and New Zealand literatures, i.e. texts from the former British dominions, which have to date all fully established themselves internationally in their own right. Putting aside the many (Man) Booker Prizes and other major international awards for literature given to writers writing in English, the Nobel Prize in Literature was first awarded to the Australian writer Patrick White in 1973 and the first Canadian author Alice Munro only received it this year, in 2013. This book of essays is yet another critical homage to the fascinating body of writing in English produced all over the globe nowadays.

PART I: CANADA

CHAPTER ONE LITERARY ALLUSIONS IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S PAYBACK: DEBT AND THE SHADOW SIDE OF WEALTH

In her recent creative non-fiction work Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, Margaret Atwood examines the intellectual history of debt, balance and revenge in history, society and literature, debt as a driving force in (Western) fiction, debt in the realm of law, business, religion, and ultimately environment. She wrote it for the 2008 Massey Lectures and each of the five chapters in the book was delivered as a one-hour lecture in a different Canadian city. These lectures were also broadcast on CBC Radio One in November 2008. Atwood’s book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth was followed by her speculative dystopian novel The Year of the Flood, which continues the trajectory and characters introduced in Oryx and Crake and invites the reader to join its interactive website. Atwood wants to transgress the traditional novel genre into the virtual hypertext reading realm of the growing after-effects of her book, including music, her own blog and donation incentives for all sorts of ecologically-aware projects and organizations. In 2013 she published the final part of her dystopian trilogy, the novel entitled MaddAddam. Payback (2008) certainly is a most provocative and thought-engaging book, which addresses the topical matter of debt at the time of the world economic crisis. Debt is considered as a philosophical, historical, political, economic and religious issue over the centuries: the author truly provides an intellectual history of debt. The book is divided into five chapters, titled “Ancient Balances”, “Debt and Sin”, “Debt as Plot”, “The Shadow Side” and “Payback”. In Chapter One the author clearly defines the subjectmatter of her book: “… it's about debt as a human construct – thus an imaginative construct – and how this constructs mirrors and magnifies both voracious human desire and ferocious human fear” (Payback 2). The writer traces the feminine principle of balance/scale in the concept of justice (Iustitia) from ancient history onwards, including Ma’at, Themis,

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Nemesis, Sekhmet, Astrea, and significantly asks herself why, “with the exception of the Christian and the Muslim ones, the supernatural justice figures … are all female” (34). In relation to the ancient Egyptian goddess Ma’at, she writes that she meant truth, justice, balance, the governing principles of nature and the universe, the stately progression of time – days, months, seasons, years. … Its opposite was physical chaos, selfishness, falsehood, evil behaviour – any sort of upset in the divinely ordained pattern of things. (27)

She maintains that the female Justice figures has persisted to this day, because the period of the Great Goddesses was followed by several thousand years of rigorous misogyny, during which goddesses were replaced by gods and women were downgraded. The ancient balance of the scales was thus broken. In the second chapter Atwood dwells on debt and sin and says that the borrowing and lending process is something of an obscure transaction, partly theft and partly trade, provided that a reasonable and not exaggerated interest is paid and the money eventually returned to the lender. She refers to Christianity in the Western world and claims that in this religious system Christ is called the redeemer. The term is drawn directly from the language of debt and pawning or pledging, scapegoats, “sin-eaters” etc, because the Devil keeps his account books constantly in good order and payback time will surely arrive. … the whole of Christianity rests on the notion of spiritual debts and what must be done to repay them, and how you might get out of paying by having someone else pay instead. And it rests, too, on a long pre-Christian history of scapegoat figures – including human sacrifices – who take your sins away for you. (67)

“…and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us…” (The Lord’s Prayer, the Bible) In the Slovenian translation of the Bible the noun “trespasses” is rendered as “debts” and consequently refers to debtors, who have to be forgiven. Are we justified in reading this Christian attitude of the lender’s forgiving debts as Atwood’s version of an underlying Christian principle of a payback or a bailout (especially as regards spiritual debts, of course), payoff and primarily a generous levelling out of balances on either side in the long run? From the point of view of literary allusiveness, Chapter Three, “Debt as Plot”, is particularly relevant. Here Atwood looks at the protestant Reformation and the introduction of interest on loans. When Henry VIII

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ascended to the throne, interest-charging was legalized for Christians in England, which gave rise to the expansion of the market and in the nineteenth century and the explosion of capitalism in the West. In this light, Atwood alludes to the work of Charles Dickens, Christopher Marlowe, Washington Irving, W. M. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and even the novel Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. Atwood’s debtreading of the all-time classic Wuthering Heights (1847) is very much to the point here: Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights loves Cathy passionately and hates his rival, Linton, but the weapon with which he is able to act out his love and his hate is money, and the screw he twists is debt: he becomes the owner of the estate called Wuthering Heights by putting its owner in debt to him. (Payback 100)

The Victorian novel Vanity Fair (1847-48) is especially about goods, material and spiritual, and, as Atwood observes, we watch the grim business of Amelia Sedley’s family bankruptcy. But we also follow the brilliant but socially inferior gold-digger, Becky Sharp, climb her way up the social ladder. Everything that can be bought and sold, rent or lent is vanitas, Thackeray teaches us. Flaubert’s bored provincial wife Emma Bovary, too, is eventually punished for her “shopaholicism” rather than extramarital sex, because her overspending and consequent debt catches up and exposes her secret life. Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s novel House of Mirth (1905) is not versed in debt-managing, which brings her down. She should have known better that “if a man lends you money and charges no interest, he’s going to want payment of some other kind” (106). Millers are often rendered in folklore as thieves and cheats who supposedly steal from peasants by weighing short and using some of their flour to their own benefit. If you are a miller’s daughter like Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss (1860) you are likely to suffer the consequences of the miller’s misdeeds. Mr. Tulliver, however, is an honest miller who finds himself in financial difficulties. Because of that his adversary buys his mill: he loses his final lawsuit and runs his family into debt. Margaret Atwood turns the established “proto-feminist” readings of the novel, with Maggie as a clever independent but thwarted woman born before her time, upside down and asks herself: But what if we read it as the story of Mr. Tulliver’s debt? For it’s this debt that’s the engine of the novel: it shoves the plot along, changes the mental states of the characters, and determines their scope of action. (116)

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Tom and Maggie suffer the consequences of their father’s deeds greatly and eventually drown in a flood, reconciled at the very end. Tulliver’s adversary Wakem is saved in the end, which Atwood rightly sees as the turning-point and the proof of the emerging Victorian materialism constituted in Law: “Power has moved from those who process material goods to those who process the contracts that govern them. Hermes – god of commerce, thieves, lies, contrivances, tricks, and mechanisms – has switched allegiances” (119). The novels alluded to by Atwood are thus essentially about money, debt and payback, albeit not exclusively of course, with payback not always achieved in full. The allusions to nineteenth and early twentieth-century novels she draws upon lend a totally new dimension to the notion of debt Atwood deals with in Payback. Atwood may have borrowed the ideas related to the “transactional analysis” from the bestselling Canadian psychiatrist Eric Berne (19101970), whom she refers to in her book in several instances. In his groundbreaking book Games People Play (1864), Berne postulates that games are in fact ritualistic transactions or behaviour patterns between individuals that can indicate hidden feelings or emotions, in her case the spiritual twinship of debtors and lenders. According to this neo-Freudian interpretation of human behaviour, a game is a series of reciprocal transactions and leads to a predictable outcome; by extension this includes the “game” between the lender and the debtor. Games are often characterized by a switch in the roles of players towards the end. Each game has a payoff (cf. Atwood idea of payback) on either side, for those playing it, for example the aim of earning sympathy, satisfaction, vindication, something that reinforces their lives. Atwood refers to Berne’s concept of life games, “patterns of behaviour that can occupy an individual’s entire lifespan, often destructively, but with hidden psychological benefits or payoffs that keep the games going” (83). And then there is also the question of gift-giving within the context of the “life games” people play. The constant give-and-take process, which is the essence of social life, cannot be aborted by either party: “Gifts are rendered, received and repaid both obligatorily and in one’s own interest, in magnanimity, for repayment of services, or as challenges or pledges” (Mauss 27, qtd. in Zabus 123). In a post-colonial context, however, the concept of gift may be just the opposite of hospitality, help and generosity. It may have the meaning of “poison” (cf. the German Gift), for the debtor is expected to pay back with subordination. The main literary work of Atwood”s brilliant allusions in Payback is Charles Dickens’s extremely popular book A Christmas Carol (1843), an open nineteenth-century criticism of the emerging Victorian materialistic

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self-satisfaction and containment, which helped to establish the Western non-religious concept of Christmas. The loan-sharking lender Ebenezer Scrooge is transformed into a beneficent forgiving character, who is taken directly from the London Stock Exchange and whose main concern and value in life is business. During Christmas he is visited by a ghost and three spirits and utterly changed thereafter. The tale is generally seen as an indictment of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism and Dickens got the idea form his own humiliating experience of debt in his childhood. When his father John Dickens was arrested for debt and put in prison, he had to leave school, sell all of his books and take up a job in a blacking factory. At the beginning of the tale Ebenezer (cf. Squeezer) Scrooge’s nephew reminds him that “Merry Christmas” time has come, Scrooge is very cross: “What else can I be,’' returned the uncle, “when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What a Christmas–time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer, a time for balancing your books, and having every item in’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you?” (Dickens 19)

At the end of the book Scrooge-the miser is much changed, ready to share money with others especially on Christmas, but also helping people for a change. In Atwood’s terms, this could qualify as writing off debts: this will only make him happy and redeem him. He shouts his newfound happiness from the rooftops: “I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A Merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world! Hallo here!” (201)

Margaret Atwood claims that Dickens deliberately created a reverse Faustus from Christopher Marlowe’s figure. Scrooge had symbolically made a pact with the devil, this malevolent creditor who tempts people with material benefits in exchange for their spiritual health and moral integrity, and Scrooge is such an extreme miser that he does not spend any money even on himself. When at the beginning Scrooge sees the ghost of his former business partner Marley, it warns him that his soul will be in fetters for eternity unless he changes his greedy behaviour and announces other ghosts to visit him that very Christmas night. This symbolizes Scrooge’s forced transformation that is ultimately seen, even today, as a blessing and more broadly the restoration of social harmony and Victorian order. Dickens’s book redefined and reintroduced the spirit of Christmas

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as a seasonal merriment after the Puritan authorities in seventeenthcentury England and America suppressed pre-Christian rituals associated with it. The religious and social implications of the book helped significantly to reinvent Christmas with emphasis on family, goodwill, and compassion. In her book Atwood traces the roots of Dickens’s Scrooge in Goethe’s and Marlowe’s versions of Dr Faustus, where Marlowe’s character is a bon-vivant, a big-spender, who shares his wealth around very much like the reformed Scrooge at the end of Dickens’s book. Atwood likewise insightfully traces the Faustian figure who is prepared to do everything for money in Washington Irving’s story “The Devil and Tom Walker”, where Walker represents utter stinginess, ruthlessly grinding the people in need to the ground. Scrooge in Dickens, however, after being visited by Marley’s ghost and the three spirits of Christmas, is a changed man, he is set free from his own heavy chain of cash-boxes at the end of the book, when, instead of sitting on his pile of money, he begins to spend it. …: the post-ghost Scrooge, for instance, doesn’t give up his business, though whether it remained in part a moneylending business we aren’t told. No, it’s what you do with your riches that really counts. (98)

Atwood’s latter-day literary character Scrooge Nouveau in a modernized Dickens’s book A Christmas Carol appears in the fifth chapter of the book and he is like humanity today, at the time of global warming and ruthless depletion of natural resources. He is faced with two options: an ecofriendly world or a typically Atwoodian dystopian future with all kinds of disasters befalling the natural environment. It is pay-up time for humanity as a whole, Atwood warns us. As always, the author knows just how to provide the right amount of humour on the most serious of issues such as debt, sin and payback, whether we see Payback as, “smart, funny and clever” (Liss) or “by no means the highlight of the book” (Ashenburg). John Gray in The New York Review of Books typically reads the book against the current US recession and writes that it “can be read as a defence of traditional beliefs about the hazards of debt” (Gray). He is right in surmising that in Atwood’s book there is an implicit notion that we may now have to return to older and simpler practices of thrift and saving. However, Atwood is no economist and the solution to the problem of debt is not provided, and when it is, it seems somewhat naive. Her vast knowledge and erudition is, however, always formidable: she convincingly shows in a cultural materialist vein how debt as a leitmotif and literary figures concerned with money predominate in Western fiction, “no matter how much the virtues of love

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may be waved idealistically aloft” (100) and how in her youth she thought the nineteenth-century novel was driven by love, but now that she is older she sees that it was essentially driven by money. Margaret Atwood shows clearly the perils of debt and hints at the (im)possibility of a utopian future without greed. She demonstrates how debt has indeed been a driving force in Western/Anglo-American fiction. She is perhaps a more successful writer of fiction than non-fiction, as some reviewers suggest, but she certainly is always very timely in her views and captures extremely well the spirit of the period. Louis Bayard, among others, complains in his review article of the book that Atwood never really distinguishes between “bad debt” (credit cards) and “good debt” (college loans, mortgages). The niceties of Keynesian economics, of microfinancing ventures, of the ways in which financial entities act as both borrowers and lenders … these are either beneath or beyond her. (Bayard, cf. also Massie)

The writer’s conclusion is far from being truly conclusive. She is nonetheless able to introduce the theme of eco-politics and global bailout which only can ensure our physical survival on Earth, which some critics have found contrived and banal at the end of the book. As Atwood declares, all wealth comes from Nature and the only “serious” debts are those humanity owes to Mother Earth, i.e. ecological debts. Consequently the planet Earth will reclaim the payback that humanity owes it or else “Nature would be a lifeless desert… and the resulting debt to Nature would be infinite” (202). This urgent and timely eco-political statement is perhaps Atwood’s strongest point in this creative non-fiction work, where especially the multiple and well-chosen literary allusions and references are most engaging. To conclude on a light Canadian note, in the last chapter of Payback Margaret Atwood mentions a Canadian saying about the weather. She notes, however, that some people believe it is simply Presbyterian, one that shows the allegedly Canadian belief that the enjoyable things in life are only on loan or acquired on credit, and sooner or later they will have to be paid for in one way or another: “First person: ‘Lovely weather we’re having’. Second person: ‘We’ll pay for it later’” (165).

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Works Cited Ashenburg, Katherine. “What Atwood Knows”. Toronto Life 43/2 (2009): 54-60. Atwood, Margaret. 2008. Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. London: Bloomsbury, 2009. Bayard, Louis. “Payback’s a Bitch” http://www.salon.com/books/review/2008/10/28/payback/. Accessed 28 March 2010. Dickens, Charles. 1843. A Christmas Carol. New York: Pocket Books, 1958. Gray, John. “The Way of All Debt”. The New York Review of Books, Vol. 56/6, April 2009. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22556. Accessed 26 March 2010. Liss, David. “Getting Even: Civilization is Built on Credits and Debits”. Washington Post, November 23, 2008, T5. Mauss, Marcel. 1925. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. I. Cunnison. London: Cohen and West, 1954. Massie, Allan. “Book Review: Payback”. The Scotsman, October 25, 2008. 22. Zabus, Chantal. “Two Colonial Encounters and the Philosophy of the Gift”. Colonies, Missions, Cultures, ed. G. Stilz. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 2001, 123-134.

CHAPTER TWO DIASPORIC LITERATURE IN A POST-ETHNIC CANADA

The processes of globalization, cross-fertilization and transculturation make diasporic literature and culture particularly important today, in Canada and elsewhere. Diaspora, the dispersal of various peoples around the world (Cohen 1997), often caused by major historical and political changes, carries with it the collective cultural memory and capital of the past, overseas or across borders, as well as the acknowledgement of the old country as a concept deeply embedded in an individual language, religion, customs and folklore. Diasporic writing connects the past and the present and forges new notions of fluid and transnational identities; it opens up spaces for new expressions of a transnational global culture. Thus it seriously challenges the centre-periphery positioning central to ‘traditional’ post-colonial studies. Contemporary Canadian diasporic authors have increasingly come to be seen as transcultural and transnational authors, the writers of two homelands, figuring in the global cross-border English-speaking cultural collage space and in the Canadian multi-ethnic, post-ethnic society. In Canada, the so-called minority literature is now part of the mainstream and no longer merely a veneer of the much coveted and publicly proclaimed, albeit not always practically effectual, multiculturalism. Also, one has to consider Canadian diasporic writing with all of its constitutive ethnic identities within the context of a new inter-American transnationalism and integration. This substantially changes the field of identity politics, the very concept of ethnicity and the need for its redefinition, as well as the various cultural/literary practices of a collective and individual dynamic identity construction in Canada today. Canada has developed substantially from the 1970s model of the Canadian cultural mosaic, a cliché used to express the much sought unity through diversity, and it is today quite proud of its self-image as a multicultural country. While some writers and critics are clearly supportive of the policy of multiculturalism, others find it has reached its limits in

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fostering some sort of self-imposed ghettoization. They call this phenomenon the multicultural fallacy, which may, in fact, fragment Canadian society rather than create a Canadian nation in the global world. There is also the question of the exotic ethnic Other which, according to some critics, emerges when the marginalized minority ethnic writers emphasize exoticism to create a certain ethnic stereotype. Native Canadian authors (e.g. Thomas King in Medicine River, 1987; Lee Maracle in Ravesong, 1993; Eden Robinson in Monkey Beach, 2000), on the other hand, have revisioned the multiculturalism issue critically from their own standpoint of native representation and have written against exotic stereotyping, or have written on rather than just back to and against the white-settler mainstream. One example of the literary developments of the recent ethnic Canadians since the 1960s are the Caribbean expatriate writers. They have, among many others, also helped to reshape Canadian literary landscape(s) and other scapes, while drawing on their place of origin for inspiration or simply dealing with quintessentially Canadian (=ethnic?) themes and locales. Prominent in this process have been the writer Austin Clarke from Barbados (The Polished Hoe, 2003), Neil Bissoondath from Trinidad (Doing the Heart Good (2002), The Unyielding Clamour of the Night (2005), Dionne Brand with her poetry and novels from Trinidad (Land to Light On, 1997), Olive Senior with her poetry and short stories, Dany Laferrière from Haiti (How to Make Love to a Negro, 1987), Nalo Hopkinson originally from Jamaica (Skinfolk, 2001; Midnight Robber, 2000) and many more. These Canadian authors of Caribbean descent mostly object to a single label to categorize them, so as to avoid literary and cultural ghettoization, and they would also distance themselves from a hyphenated identity (Canadian-and something). The same holds true of some of the Canadian authors of Indian, generally South Asian, South American and even Slovenian and other writers of Central European descent: e.g. John Krizanc who has made it into the mainstream with his plays Tamara (1981) and Prague (1983), for the latter of which he has been given the Governor-General Award for Drama, Tom Ložar that has contributed regularly to eminent Canadian literary journals, and Ted Kramolc, who lives in Canada but writes in Slovenian, and was awarded one of the most prestigious prizes for Slovenian literature for his novel written in Slovenian Tango in Silk Wooden Shoes (Tango v svilenih coklah, 2002). The innovative and groundbreaking analyses of Chicano/a intellectuals in the U.S.A. (Gutiérrez-Jones) gave rise to the theorists of the border with Gloria Anzaldúa at the forefront. In her seminal book Borderlands/La

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frontera: The New Mestiza (Anzaldúa 1987) she examined the suppressed and often violent aspects of the Texas and Mexico border and introduced the spatial metaphor of the frontera or borderlands. Frontera is thus in her view the border(land) space which enables one to essentially accept the various contradictions per se and to refuse the impossible attempt to unify and synthesize them, hence it turns all the existing social, racial, ethnic and gender contradictions into a source of strength and unity. This concept of the frontera has since enabled many writers, in Canada as well, to see their own culture not as a dominant narrative but rather from the point of view of heterogeneity and messiness, subalternity and hybridity. It has enabled them to focus on the various conceptual possibilities and consequences related to borders, border-crossings, and borderlands, frequently not even a geographical but an imaginary space of contact. A major contemporary Canadian author representative for diasporic/ borderland subjectivity, originally from Argentina, who came to Canada as a small child, is Guillermo Verdecchia. His most significant work in this respect, albeit not the only one, is his monodrama Fronteras Americanas/ American Borders, which won a Chalmers Award and the 1993 Governor General’s Award for Drama. In the play a displaced diasporic subject struggles to de- and re-construct a home between two cultures, while reexamining with great humour the images and renegotiating clichés of Latinos and Latin America not only in Canada but the USA as well. This essay addresses Verdecchia’s usage of Latino images and the unmistakable all-pervading colour of Latino music through the entire play. The protagonist is split in two personas, ‘Wideload’ McKennah/Verdecchia, ‘Anglo’ vs. ‘Latino’. He wittily ponders ‘Saxonian’ attitudes as well as the cultural shock he experiences upon his return to South America, crossing the frontera yet again, only to come to the paradoxical conclusion in his poetic imagination that it is really the border within himself that must be crossed and embraced, for maps are really always just metaphors and not the territory: “And you? Did you change your name somewhere along the way? Does a part of you live hundreds or thousands of kilometres away? Do you have two countries, two memories? Do you have a border zone?” (Verdecchia 78). Verdecchia uses stereotyping in order to reduce cultural differences and even resorts to a simplistic caricature of the Canadian Latino identity, which he subsequently tries to deconstruct. This instance of border-zone Canadian literature and his innovative use of ‘Hispanish’, as a language of resistance, reveals the fact that he is lost, which began […] in France, Paris, France, the Moveable Feast, the City of light, where I lived for a couple of years. En France ou mes étudiants me disaient que je parlais le français comme une vache Catalan(e)-. En France ou j’étais

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étranger, un anglais, un Argentin-Canadien, un faux touriste. Paris, France where I lived and worked illegally, where I would produce my transit pass whenever policemen asked for my papers. In France, where I was undocumented, extra-legal, marginal and where for some reason, known perhaps only by Carlos Gardel and Julio Cortázar, I felt almost at home. (Ibid., 28)

When the speaker in the play eventually comes back to Calgary in Canada, [… ] this Noah’s ark of a nation» from his one-time home, South America, the Other America, as he calls it, it suddenly revealingly strikes him as in an epiphany: «I am not in Canada; I am not in Argentina. I am on the Border. I am Home. Mais zoot alors, je comprends maintenant, mais oui, merde! Je suis Argentin-Canadien! I am a post-Porteño neo-Latino Canadian! I am the Pan-American highway! (Ibid., 75)

Act Two of the monodrama Fronteras Americanas/American Borders significantly addresses tango and its music as the quintessential South American/Argentinian contribution to the world that crossed the borders of the Americas as well. Throughout the whole play an important source of auditory imagery is music, an integral part of his diasporic identity, which is perceived by the sense of hearing rather than sight. Music for Verdecchia comes from a host of South American authors and performers (Mano Negra, Los Mariachi, Los Lobos, Atahualpa Yupanquí, Astor Piazzolla and Kronos Quartet, Ramiro’s Latin Orchestra, Carlos Santana, Steve Jordan, Milladoiro, Placido Domingo, Dino Saluzzi, Anibal Troilo). Tango, however, perhaps born of the gaucho’s crude attempts to waltz, is to him [… ] music for exile, for the preparations, the significations of departure, for the symptoms of migration. It is the languishing music of picking through your belongings and deciding what to take. Music for men and women thin as bones. Music for your invisibility.… Music for a day in the fall when you buy a new coat and think perhaps you will live here for the rest of your life, perhaps it will be possible, you have changed so much, would they recognize you? Would you recognize your country? Would you recognize yourself? Wideload: Basically, tango is music for fucked-up people. (Ibid., 59-60)

The author concludes that the tango was only reluctantly accepted in Europe, but that it has not been entirely domesticated outside of Argentina,

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since it is impossible to shop or aerobicize to tango “porque el tango es un sentimiento que se baila” (Ibid.). Verdecchia’s monodrama ends on a prophetic note (somos todos Americanos), directly addressing the audience, his fellow Canadians, who all live in the border zone of the Americas, where the border line between Canada and the U.S. is not perceived as so radical as the one with Latin America that begins at the Mexican border: Every North American, before this century is over, will find that he or she has a personal frontier with Latin America. This is a living frontier, which can be nourished by information but, above all, by knowledge, by understanding, by the pursuit of enlightened self-interest on both parts. Or it can be starved by suspicion, ghost stories, arrogance, ignorance, scorn and violence. (Fuentes, 7)

The movement forward is no longer a movement towards the centre, but rather a future trajectory towards the border, which has in fact become the centre overnight, so that in this case it is the border that ‘strikes back’: “Ladies and gentlemen, please reset your watches. It is now almost ten o’clock on a Friday night – we still have time. We can go forward. Towards the centre, towards the border” (Verdecchia, 78). Crossing borders (people, capital, information) challenges the notion that a national community is necessarily bound by its geographic borders. This of course also applies to its culture and literature discussed here, for some people’s lives unfold in essentially diasporic settings, where class, race and citizenship play an extremely important role. Borders have acquired an increased mobility and multiplicity and there has been their continual dislocation, one that is closely linked with a differential regulation of migration and citizenship. The recent migratory spaces that the new diasporic Canadians inhabit and lend them their distinctive voice mark deterritorialization and increasingly also reterritorialization, which blurs the borders of nations and nation-states, as it can be seen in Fronteras Americanas. At the same time these reterritorializations (somos todos Americanos) and transnational/borderland diasporic movements seem dangerously close to and are indeed inextricable from the (neocolonialist) reterritorializations of global capital, division of labour, production and profit. Only a few years after the success of his play Fronteras Americanas/American Borders, Guillermo Verdecchia, a Canadian of Argentinian provenance, tried his hand at short stories for the first time. They came out under the title Citizen Suárez (1998). Like his early play, the stories are essentially about people lost between countries and

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languages, in their complex citizenship, caught between desire to run away and to belong. He wrote and starred in a short film adaptation of Fronteras Americanas called Crucero/Crossroads, which was shown at international film festivals and received several awards: the omnipresent colour of Latino music appears again as the linking and identifying element. Displacement and the fluid transnational and borderland post-ethnic diasporic identity – identity being at the very heart of the concept of Home – show a dynamic global view of some of the best new Canadian diasporic authors. This includes the literary Latino frontera world of Guillermo Verdecchia, where his pronounced auditory sound colouring of South and Central American music serves as a linking element on his spiritual journey and identity search between his two ‘homes’, Argentina and Canada, respectively, from “La Bamba” to Placido Domingo, with music serving as one of the audible characters in the play. Canada has been searching for its own national identity for a long time and this ongoing search was compared to “a dog chasing its own tail” (Atwood 8). The concept of the ethnic mosaic within the multicultural paradigm in Canada has resulted in artists of various ethnic backgrounds promoting their own í and thus Canadian culture of the country í as in a kind of Grand Hotel Canada. This includes such internationally renowned authors and Man Booker Prize winners as Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood and Yann Martel. In a recent interview recorded at the launching of the translation of his novel Life of Pi into Slovenian, Martel said something that seems an interesting description of the complexity of Canadian literature and its “chameleon-like quality”. To him, Canada and its collective flux identity can be perceived as a state of mind: A Canadian novel does not necessarily take place in Canada. So maybe it is the chameleon-like quality of Canadian literature that makes it typical. Canadian literature is the chameleon. […] There is something polymorphous about Canadian literature. […] Canada is a state of mind. Canadian is whoever says that he or she is Canadian. (Furlan n.p.)

Neil Bissoondath, who arrived in Canada from Trinidad only in the early 1970s, has in his own words always struggled against the label of a Trinidadian (-Indian) writer. His views on multiculturalism in Canada are much debated; in his literary work he examines the (multi)ethnic landscape of Canada today, straddling the emitive and receptive worlds of the protagonists. In his essays he claims that the policy of multiculturalism (the mosaic theory) has been downright disastrous for the country and for immigrants themselves and that it has now reached a point when it has to be seriously re-examined. Some degree of integration is today necessary

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and legitimate to expect, he claims, for ethnic/migrant groups have tended to isolate themselves, one way or another, too much from the majority population in the midst of which they live. Bissoondath writes that Canadians encounter each other's multicultural mosaic tiles mainly at festivals, which are reduced to “the simplest theatre” at the level of “a folkloric Disneyland”. In most of the multicultural literature, he continues, ethnic stereotypes are only reinforced: There are those who find pleasure in playing to the theme, those whose ethnicity ripens with the years. Yet to play the ethnic, deracinated and costumed, is to play the stereotype. It is to abdicate one's full humanity in one of its exotic features. To accept the role of ethnic is also to accept a gentle marginalization. It is to accept that one will never be just a part of the landscape but always a little apart from it, not quite belonging. In exoticizing and trivializing cultures, often thousands of years old, by sanctifying the mentality of the mosaic-tile, we have succeeded in creating mental ghettos for the various communities. (Bissoondath 2006)

Bissoondath feels that such a situation only resulted in an identity crisis for Canadians of a different ethnic descent that it emphasized (cultural) difference. In so doing it allegedly delayed the integration of immigrants into the Canadian mainstream and thus unwillingly damaged Canada's national sense of a (unified) collective self. The immigrants' reintegration and (re)construction of identity and cultural adjustment after the initial trauma caused by their sudden displacement from their original cultural and linguistic setting (Sapir) is facilitated through communication, primarily through the language (and literature), but also other means of creative self-expression, such as art and even science or other forms of knowledge that enable communication and hence integration into the new milieu. Some ten years ago the American critic Stanley Fish tried to distinguish between two versions of multiculturalism. The first one of these is similar to Bissoondath's understanding, namely boutique multiculturalism, exemplified “in a celebratory but only cosmetic way as ethnic restaurants /and/ weekend festivals, and /by/ high profile flirtations with the other in the manner satirized by Tom Wolfe under the rubric of radical chic” (Fish 378). The other type, the so-called strong multiculturalism, in his view, really has “a deep respect to all cultures at their core, for he believes that each has the right to form its own identity” (Fish 378). Fish concludes by quoting Taylor, however, that paradoxically neither of these multiculturalisms does in fact come to terms with the cultural differences they wish to maintain., This does not mean that multiculturalism does not exist, for “all

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societies are becoming increasingly multicultural in a rapidly evolving global process” (Taylor in Fish 385). The institutionalized multiculturalism in Canada, whether perceived as a boutique or a strong type of multiculturalism has, at least so far, represented a relatively viable mechanism and model for civic tolerance, even if, as Graham Huggan rightly points out, [it] continues to operate as a form of willfully aestheticising exoticist discourse which inadvertently serves to disguise persistent racial tensions within the nation; and one which, in affecting a respect for the other as a reified object of cultural difference, deflects attention away from social issues – discrimination, unequal access, hierarchies of ethnic privilege – that are very far from being resolved. (Huggan 126)

In Neil Bissoondath's 1994 book on Canadian multiculturalism, Selling Illusions: the Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada, the author, as in the earlier mentioned essays, defines ethnic stereotypes akin to boutique multiculturalism in the form of Canadian multiculturalism, where ethnicity is seen as a commodity in which “ethnic groups will preserve their distinctiveness in a gentle and insidious form of cultural apartheid” (Bissoondath 89). He brings the supposed multicultural fallacy in close connection with exoticism in a highly theatrical and mostly manipulative way, during which process he paradoxically advertises himself with the aid of the very concepts he originally sets out to criticize. Regardless of how one sees multiculturalism in terms of the perception of the value of non-mainstream literatures of the ethnicized body, today it is clearly a hybrid between the actual practice and policy and the idealized view of a tolerant ethnic plurality within a national framework, thus “a discourse of desire” (Huggan 154). Multiculturalism, clearly some kind of shibboleth in Canada, should perhaps not be dismissed as an entirely unworkable, utopian concept. However, today it is a greatly problematic issue in need of some not only cosmetic revision with a view of transculturalism, “but one which offers the only plausible and workable alternative to the ‘two solitudes’ monoculturalism that cramped so much creative energy in Canada before 1970s” (Kulyk Keefer 1996: 249-50). In describing the position of racial minority Canadian writers, some critical voices have denounced multiculturalism as not being adequate enough to “address the diverse contexts of historical and current racial inequalities and injustices” (Miki in Kulyk Keefer 1996: 250). Multiculturalism should and has become more all-inclusive as regards the Native, Black and Asian peoples in Canada and in the recent years it has come a long way. As early as 1996, the critic and author Janice Kulyk Keefer pleaded for a transcultural writing which goes beyond immigrant or ethnic production, because “it is

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not written exclusively for or read exclusively by the members of a given ‘minority’ community in Canada” (1996: 254). Such writing crosses the borders between different ethno-racial groups, where Kulyk Keefer sees transculturalism as a defining aesthetic of strong multiculturalism. The concept of multiculturalism, of course, greatly varies regarding its deployment in individual national contexts. If in countries like Canada and Australia (since the 1970s) it refers to government programmes designed to equalize and empower minority ethnicities, in Mexico it means the official encouragement of the identities of individual indigenous groups in the country, while in Brazil it is still treated with suspicion and an ambivalent attitude. In France social critics attack it as either “a recycling of 1960s third worldist radicalism”. For the Centre/Right and for the left it represents “a cunningly disguised form of American imperialism” (Stam and Shohat 296). The young woman writer Nalo Hopkinson from the Caribbean is just one of the new vibrant voices in Canadian literature, who brings into her writing a new awareness of race and culture, but also gender and sexuality. Her science fiction novels can be described as postcolonial fantasy writing set in the Caribbean region (Midnight Robber, 2000). The up-and-coming Canadian writing originally from the region recently saw the publication of a successful and resounding anthology of Caribbean writing produced in Canada, Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction (2000) which shows a rich literary tradition and creative output. These short stories heavily rely on folklore and local Caribbean history. Apart from Hopkinson and other younger writers featured in the book (e.g. Pamela Mordecai), they also make references to such well-known literary figures as Jamaica Kincaid, Kamau Brathwaite and Wilson Harris. In an essay Hopkinson describes her use of Creole in narrative and its hybridity, for example as used in her novel Midnight Robber. In addition to that she claims that a diasporic Caribbean culture is based on both the West African deities and Taino values (the Taino are the indigenous people who were living in the Caribbean when Columbus arrived there), rather than taking references from Greek and Roman mythology. In contrast to some other Caribbean writers in Canada she openly acknowledges and embraces her hybridity. Hybridity was a strategy for survival and resistance amongst the enslaved and indentured people. They all came from different cultures with different languages and then had an alien culture and speech imposed on them. They had to find ways to use elements of all the cultures in order to continue to exist. That hybridity is reflected in the languaging we've created. I've tried to reflect that in Midnight Robber, largely in the way the characters use

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language when they speak, but also in the language of the narrative. (Hopkinson, n. p.)

What is particularly striking in her sci-fi writing is that she is trying to break an imposed language by remixing it to create a special kind of language of resistance. Not only using an accent or Creole, but also saying these words out loud is in her view “an act of referencing history and claiming space” (Hopkinson n. p.). This idiosyncratic linguistic codesliding makes her works clearly not an easy reading, using alternatively a relatively standard English, French, Spanish or a deep Creole. The Caribbean language is something that Hopkinson sees as a possible evolution of co-existing cultures. As regards the question of the post-coloniality of Canadian contemporary fiction, one should first ask oneself whether one can at all extend the term's usage to countries which became independent nation states relatively early after colonial rule, like Australia, Canada and even the USA. In her recent book Laura Moss questions, for example, if and how post-colonialism can be applied to Canadian literature. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, she argues, have a different status, because of the same ‘imperial’ English language and original source of European culture. NonEnglish speaking cultures in these countries, for that matter, are postcolonial in quite a different way. One of the doyens of post-colonial literary theory, Helen Tiffin, in a review article of the book, writes that the term has been used and abused and signals the “sheer impossibility” of answering the question of whether Canada is post-colonial or not, for the question itself and the book are “quintessentially Canadian and paradigmatically post-colonial” (Tiffin in Maver 2006b: 15.) The term post-colonial can in extremis also be regarded as an oversimplified, albeit most convenient theoretical tool needing to be redefined. In its hyphenated form, post-colonialism can be seen, and used, in the original narrow sense to signify a particular historical post-colonial production, that is, largely but not exclusively, post-independence writing. On the other hand, in its non-hyphenated form it can and should be seen in a broader ahistorical sense relating to a set of very different post-colonial, deconstructive, antiimperial, and anti-Eurocentric methods and discursive practices, as well as political and social struggles. Recently there has emerged a shift of scholarly interest away from the original historical post-colonial seen as largely post-independence writing, toward a very different kind of post-colonial, understood as a set of deconstructive discursive practices, and post-colonial cultural studies as an academic discipline as well as a form of political activism. (Maver 2006a: 3)

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Post-colonialism has produced a number of very different literary responses, which is why the overgeneralizingly used term post-colonial calls for a detailed rethinking and revisioning now more than ever, especially as regards its future development. Take Canada as an example of contemporary post-colonial writing in English: just as the individual post-colonial (national) literatures written in English today are clearly not homogeneous, although they have been shaped by several common experiences and their shared sociopolitical circumstances as part of the former Pax Britannica or today's Commonwealth, they are really extremely diverse. Put aside for a moment the possibility that like post-colonialism, multiculturalism is as problematic, contentious, and multifaceted a term as one's likely to meet anywhere; consider only the literary practice of writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry, Anita Rau Badami and Ven Begamudre, Kerri Sakamoto and Wayson Choy, to name just a few prominent Canadian writers, some of then with international reputations. To treat these writers as post-colonial in Ashcroft's terms would be to etiolate both their achievement and their primary concerns as writers. For they are all functioning as Canadian writers who are either immigrants themselves or from families recently dislocated by the fact of exile or expatriation. (Kulyk Keefer 2006: 40)

This is precisely why in recent theoretical debates the concept of diaspora has become increasingly connected with the constructed and transnational nature of identity formation, including Canada, diaspora referring to both the voluntary and involuntary migrations and movements in the past and the present alike. Diasporic literary studies, regional studies, and especially trans/national/cultural studies now face globalization and may represent a viable alternative for the future. Comparing multiculturalism and post-colonialism, it is safe to say that both these two much debated concepts essentially critique Eurocentrism, racism, and colonial discourse. Given its various interpretations, multiculturalism (similarly to post-colonialism) represents a constellation of discourses, which is why it is misleading to make sweeping generalizations about it as holding some kind of “multiculturalism promises” or “multiculturalism claims” (Stam and Shohat 296). Newly introduced critical concepts in addition to the already well established and much debated freedoms of multiculturalism, are polyvocality, hybridity and also (post-colonial) mimicry. Homi Bhabha argues that the concept of hybridity as a form of cultural difference, while sometimes regarded as manipulative, allows the voices of the Other/migrant, the marginalized and the dominated, to exist within the

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language of the dominant group whose voice is never fully in control (Bhabha 1994). In recent theoretical debates diaspora and its writing has been frequently connected with the constructed and transnational nature of identity formation, since the concept refers to both voluntary and involuntary migrations and movements. In the future diasporic writing should also be examined for how it represents (diasporic/ethnic/exotic) otherness in a text and how it brings this otherness to bear on the actual experience of reading. In a significant way the notion of the ‘new’ diasporas and their literature also challenges the contested formulation of margin vs. centre by post-colonial studies. Contemporary Canadian writing by diasporic authors from a wide variety of diasporic communities traces the connections to various locales in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, South America or Eastern Europe etc. and perceives Home as several locales, liberated of the spatial concept of location, which is, however, at the same time deeply embedded in the collective cultural memory of a migrant and her/his own personal biography (or that of their parents or grand-parents). Indeed, contemporary Canadian diasporic literary production is becoming pluralized and globalized by transcending individual traditional categories of Canadianness especially as regards the Canadian locale as well as the volatility of cultural memory. There has recently emerged a pronounced shift of emphasis in contemporary Canadian diasporic writing, for many new texts are set outside Canada and feature reversed migration back to a home place by a Westernized/Canadianized protagonist, who does not so much want to return home as to write back home (e.g. Anita Rau Badami, The Hero’s Walk; Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost; Janice Kulyk Keefer, Honey and Ashes: A Story of Family; Rohinton Mistry, M. G. Vassanji, etc). This points to the fact that there is no unitary national narrative tradition in Canadian fiction and that Canada today as a culture-in-process, as another diasporic switching-point (Appadurai 171) largely expresses itself today in literary texts as an imagined community. Perhaps this is its current paramount function as an emerging indicator of the significance of place and a translational cultural identity (Weiss) in the global context, one that undergoes consistent transformation in the processes of interpretation and expression. The fluid transnational post-ethnic diasporic identity, where identity is at the very heart of the concept of Home, as well as the changing position of the (transnational) subject in the globalized transnational culture, show a dynamic and shifting global view of some of the best new Canadian diasporic authors. Their increasingly empowered voice and vision have pluralized and globalized contemporary Canadian literary production. This suggests all the variegated pluralist diversity of

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Canada today and offers new conceptions of global(ized) identities. The spaces they have created in their diasporic writings are fully open to a constant deconstruction, construction and reconstruction.

Works Cited Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987; rev. ed., New York: Aunt Lute Books, 1999. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989. Atwood, Margaret. Strange Things. London: Clarendon Press,1995. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge,1994. Bissoondath, Neil. Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada. Markham, Ont.: Penguin, 1994. —. “No Place like Home”. 18 October 2006. http://www.newint.orgissue305/ multiculturalism.html. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998. Fish, Stanley. “Boutique Multiculturalism, or Why Liberals Are Incapable of Thinking about Hate Speech”. Critical Inquiry, 23 (1997) 2: 378-95. Fuentes, Carlos. 1985. Latin America: At War with the Past. Toronto: CBC Massey Lectures, CBC Enterprises. Furlan, Aleksandra. “Interview with Yann Martel”. Recording kept by the interviewer. Ljubljana, 2004. Hopkinson, Nalo. “Code Sliding”. 10 October 2006. http://www.sff.net/ nalo/people/writing/slide.html. Huggan, Graham. The Post-Colonial Exotic. London: Routledge, 2001. Keefer, Janice Kulyk. “Who's Afraid of Josef Skvorecky? The 'Reactionary' Immigrant Writer in a Multicultural Canada”. Igor Maver (ed.). Ethnic Literature and Culture in the U.S.A., Canada, and Australia. Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, New York, Paris, Wien: Peter Lang, 1996, 249-261. —. “Proteus, Gertrude, and the Post Colonial Rag”. Igor Maver (ed.). Critics and Writers Speak: Revisioning Post-Colonial Studies. Lanham, Boulder, New York, Toronto, Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers-Lexington Books, 2006, 34-47. Maver, Igor. “Introduction”. Igor Maver (ed.). Critics and Writers Speak: Revisioning Post-

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Colonial Studies. Lanham, Boulder, New York, Toronto, Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers-Lexington Books, 2006a, 1-7. —. “Post-Colonial Literatures in English ab origine ad futurum”. Igor Maver (ed.). Critics and Writers Speak: Revisioning Post-Colonial Studies. Lanham, Boulder, New York, Toronto, Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers-Lexington Books, 2006b, 11-33. Moss, Laura (ed.). Is Canada Postcolonial?: Unsettling Canadian Literature. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2003. Rooke, Constance. “Interview with Thomas King”. World Literature Written in English 30.2 (1990): 62-76. Sapir, Edward. The Psychology of Culture: a Course of Lectures. Hawthorn, NY: Mouton de Gruyter, 1993. Stam, Robert and Ella Shohat. “Traveling Multiculturalism: A Trinational Debate in Translation”. Ania Loomba et. al (eds). Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. Durham NC and London: Duke University Press, 2005, 293-316. Verdecchia, Guillermo. Fronteras Americanas/American Borders. Vancouver: Talon Books, 1997. Weiss, Timothy. Translating Orients: Between Ideology and Utopia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

CHAPTER THREE THE LITERATURE OF THE SLOVENIAN DIASPORA IN CANADA

In memory of Božidar Ted Kramolc (1922-2013), a writer, painter, Canadian, Slovenian

I. This chapter focuses on four prominent contemporary writers of Slovenian descent in Canada (Ted Kramolc, Cvetka Kocjanþiþ, Ivan Dolenc and Irma Ožbalt) and is by no means exhaustive. The most comprehensive study of Slovenian literary creativity in Canada was carried out by Mirko Jurak (Jurak 1999; 2005). Much has been written about Slovenian migration to Canada, the social, religious and cultural activities of the Slovenian diaspora and their descendants in Canada and their press. Since 1996 especially The Slovenian: Glasilo Magazine (edited by Cvetka Kocjanþiþ) "has provided news, literature and commentary for and about Canadians of Slovenian heritage" (www.theslovenian.com). Diasporic writing simultaneously asserts a sense of belonging to the locality in which the transplaced people have grown up, and, at the same time, expresses the specificity of the actual historical experience of being 'ethnic' in a particular immigration society. Diasporic writers, who had migrated voluntarily or involuntarily, use the medium of literature to broker, affiliate and translate the places, peoples, cultures and languages to work through the ethical, political and affective ambivalences of diasporic identities and subjectivities. At the beginning of the new millenium a new phase of mass movements of people creating new diasporas, border(land)s, transcultural and transnational identities has been emerging globally. These new displacements and border crossings have created new diasporic literary discourses. In Canada the Slovenian literary presence has, perhaps with a few exceptions of authors who write in English, not really made it into the mainstream. Also, what is important to acknowledge is that living in a diasporic space essentially signifies the forging of a new identity and a

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new diasporic, hybrid subjectivity. Diasporas today in the contested in-between spaces are part of the process of the construction of Us vs. the Others, but the problem lies in the question as to how to identify the former and the latter, since binary constructions clearly no longer seem to work. Should we identify them with Home in the country and culture of origin, which holds a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination and is, paradoxically, a place of no return? The lived experience of the locality of Home, combined with that of cultural memory of remembering and therefore 'belonging', is namely very different from that of an imaginary or, better still, imagined homeland. Language, the basic element of dialogue, is at the same time an inexhaustible source of conflicts, one which can divide people. Intercultural dialogue thus appears a must in a contemporary multi-ethnic and multicultural society. Contemporary Canadian diasporic literary authors, including the best Slovenian ones, have increasingly come to be seen as transcultural and transnational, the writers of two homelands, figuring in the global cross-border English-speaking cultural collage space and in the Canadian multi-ethnic society. The recent Canadian diasporic literature challenges in a significant way the contested formulation of the margin vs. centre dichotomy. The writing of these authors from a wide variety of diasporic communities traces the links to various locales in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, South America, Europe etc. and often perceives Home as several locales, liberated from the spatial concept of location. This concept of Home is, however, deeply embedded in the volatile collective cultural memory of a migrant and her/his own personal biography or that of the parents or grandparents. There is no unitary national narrative tradition in Canadian fiction. Canada today, as a culturein-process, largely expresses itself in literary texts as an imagined community, a translational cultural identity in the global context, one that undergoes consistent transformation in the processes of interpretation and expression. The increasingly empowered voice of diasporic authors continues to pluralize and globalize contemporary Canadian literary production. Poetry is in the Slovenian diaspora in Canada a very frequent form of literary articulation, as is generally the case with all receptive countries of migration. It differs greatly in its aesthetic quality: Zdravko Jelinþiþ, Cvetka Kocjanþiþ, Tone Zrnec, Marija Hoþevar, Jože Krajnc, Francka Seljak, Tone Zagorc, Branka Ožbalt, Danica Dolenc have all written poems in Slovenian (Jurak 1999: 333-8). Tom Ložar and Franc Šehoviþ, meanwhile, have published their verse in English and their work substantially differs from the other authors in the formal and thematic

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sense. Ložar, who is a literary historian and cultural mediator (as well as a translator of Edvard Kocbek's poems Na vratih zveþer/ At the Door at Evening) between the Canadian and Slovenian cultures/literatures has also written fiction and essays and has been a regular contributor to major Slovenian newspapers about things Canadian. During 1976 and 1993 Ložar contributed a number of articles to the journal The Canadian Forum and Matrix, which he signed as A. D. Person (A Displaced Person). Like Ložar's verse in prose (published in the anthologies Canada First and New Canadian Poets), Šehoviþ also published his visual typographic poems in free verse in various Canadian journals, including Poetry Toronto and Black Moss. Sketches (a typical Slovenian short fiction form), short stories and novels are the most frequently used literary forms by diasporic Slovenian authors in Canada. Ted Kramolc, Ivan Dolenc, Cvetka Kocijanþiþ, Irma Ožbalt and Ludve A. Potokar (Jurak 1999: 339) are aesthetically the most prominent ones. There have also been scores of other prose writers who have published their usually shorter pieces in newspapers, journals and books: Janez Kopaþ, Franc Sodja, Tone Zrnec, Tone Zagorc, Rudolf ýuješ, Miro Rak, Franc Grmek, Lojzka Saje, Marija Koprivšek, Nataša Kolman, Dore Sluga, Franc Skumavc, Anthony Ambrozic, Stanislav Pleško, Danica Dolenc etc. Many of these writings are based on the sad and terrible experiences of the authors/fictional characters during and immediately after the Second World War, when they had to flee their Slovenian homeland as political refugees through Austria to finally settle and find peace and freedom in Canada. Miro Rak and Franc Grmek, on the other hand, in their short stories and sketches, described their adventurous experiences of hunting and fishing in the Canadian wilderness in several collections written in Slovenian. John Krizanc, who does not however consider himself part of the Slovenian diaspora in Canada despite his partly Slovenian roots (his father was born in Trst/Trieste), is a successful dramatist writing in English and certainly part of the mainstream (cf. Jurak 1999; 2005). He co-founded the Necessary Angel Theatre Company and received the Governor General's Award for his play Prague.

II. Ted Kramolc (1922-2013) went to Austria in 1945 as a refugee after the end of World War II from the changed political system in Slovenia as a constitutive part of the newly formed socialist state of Yugoslavia. Displaced in Austria for three years, he came to Canada in 1948. Schooled as a painter and an architect, he has lived a great part of his life in Toronto,

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where he still continues to teach painting, as well as write and paint in his own right, of course. His numerous works are on display in the National Art Gallery in Ottawa, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, etc. Kramolc, a well established painter-writer, who distinguishes himself in his writing style of, sees himself and for that matter all people very much defined by the spaces they inhabit. He describes Canada and Slovenia in these terms: "Slovenia is a nice, enclosed, controlled space: neat houses, charming hills and mountains carefully distributed among lakes, rivers and meadows. But Canada demands a different perspective: wild untamed forests, grand expanses of never ending prairie, savage peaks of solid rock. Nature in Canada is writ large: immense, enormous, and uncaring. Yet breathtakingly beautiful" (qtd. in Urbanþiþ 2008). He enthusiastically welcomed the formation of the independent state of Slovenia in 1991 and in 1992 a selection of short stories came out under the title Podobe iz arhivov (Images from the Archives; Kramolc 1992). They are linked together by the main protagonist who is also the narrator. The people appearing in them are displaced persons, D.P.'s from the refugee camps all over Austria after World War Two that Kramolc himself knew during his own refugee years in Austria. The stories are largely autobiographical, as they end with the protagonist's arrival in Canada and his establishing himself as an architect specializing in interior decoration. Kramolc wrote many sketches and short stories in English, although his novels are written in Slovenian. The important thing about his work is that it is not just about the emigrant experience but also about the meaning of Man's existence as such. Also, it is largely devoid of political ideology and very independent and original, which is why "the Slovenian 'political emigration' more than once reproached him for having estranged himself from it and for having avoided it (not merely in art but also personally)" (Jurak 1999: 352). He wrote poems and short stories (in English and Slovenian) which were published in Slovenian presses especially after 1991, before that in Slovenian migrant press and anthologies in Argentina and the USA. He has so far produced three novels, all of which were written in Slovenian and have been published by major Slovenian publishing houses. For one of them he was shortlisted for the prestigious Kresnik Prize for the contemporary Slovenian novel. The novel Potica za navadni dan (A Cake for the Ordinary Day; Kramolc 1997) is set in Canada during 1986 and 1996, with four Slovenian married couples in the first part and the focus on one of the women protagonists, Sonja Zavrtanik, and the retired Canadian colonel Tyrone Harrington in the second. The Slovenians in the first part of the book constantly reflect on the Second World War and their

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role in it, their flight from the newly emerged socialist one-party political system in the former Yugoslavia, the lost years in refugee camps in Austria and finally their emigration to Canada. They are labelled by Kramolc as "professional Slovenians", whose main preoccupation is politics, and consequently there is no place among them for people who think very independently and critically about this situation (e. g. Gorazd Prunk). "Potica", the typical Slovenian walnut cake, which is traditionally made and eaten on holidays and special occasions does not taste the same to them in Canada: the Canadian version is more sour, because the Slovenians have brought too much hatred with them. In the second part Sonja and Tyrone, who dies a meaningless death in a bank robbery, are like a loving couple despite their kindred souls shown as 'betraying' each other in their minds by thinking about their former partners (Jurak 1999: 356). The constant shifts of narrative and the downright postmodern technique of this novel do not lead to a happy ending and a vision of a happy coexistence of the two cultures, Slovenian and Canadian. Slovenians in Canada often think very highly of themselves, although they are shown here to be really torn by envy and hypocrisy. Tango v svilenih coklah (Tango in Silk Clogs; Kramolc 2002) is the author's second novel, which was shortlisted for the prestigious Kresnik literary Prize. It is a story about a femme fatale model and a paintermigrant, which definitely transcends the typical emigrant subject-matter. According to Kramolc himself, "clogs in the novel are symbolically coated with silk, which is to cover the filth, stench and decadence of contemporary society" (Kramolc 2003). In his most recent novel set in Canada, Sol v grlu (Salt in Throat; Kramolc 2008) Ted Kramolc revisits the past in a gradual dramatic style, remembering the atrocities of the Second World war and especially the Austrian political refugee camp after it that the protagonist Karl experienced. Canada, the Promised land, which provided him with a shelter, is very different from what the emigrant Karl had envisaged. He encounters corruption and immorality in human relations (Kocjanþiþ 2009). After three love relationships he still cannot find peace and happiness, deceitful love on either side is at the heart of the book and Karl is at the end almost driven into madness. Kramolc has shown once again that he is a good writer and very much part of the unified Slovenian cultural space that includes the Slovenian diaspora in the world and the Slovenian minorities in the neighbouring countries. The protagonist's lost youth and the aftereffects of war intermingle with the theme of involuntary migration. He passed away in Toronto on Tuesday, 3 September 2013.

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Cvetka Kocjanþiþ (born 1949) is an important promoter of Slovenian culture and literature in Canada, the editor of the major migrant paper in Canada The Slovenian: Glasilo Magazine and an established author in her own right (see also Kocjanþiþ's study "Slovenes"). She has written poetry with emigrant, patriotic and social themes, sketches and short stories. Particularly interesting are her books, (partly fictionalized) biographies of the Slovenian emigrant painter to Canada Andrej Štritof and the adventurer and explorer Janez Charlie Planinšek. Her excellent biographical novel Unhappy Rebel: The Life and Art of Andy Stritof (Kocjanþiþ 1993, published in Slovenian as Upornik s þopiþem) is a study of Andrej Štritof, a displaced Slovenian artist in Canada. The figure of Andy Štritof in this biographical novel is psychologically very convincing and the author's background information about the historical and political developments in Canada and Slovenia within the then Yugoslavia add to the social portrait of the two countries. The book is based on Kocjanþiþ's interviews with Štritof during 1982 and 1986, his notes, correspondence and exhibition catalogues, other published material on him and his paintings (Jurak 1999: 376). Tom Priestly describes him as an idealist in his social and private life: He thought long and deeply about the social role and obligation of the artist, and about the meaning and purpose of art; but there, as elsewhere, he was an idealist. He believed that his painting should be guided by his own creative urges alone, and in no way by the demands of North American or Slovenian society. He could not come to terms with the gulf between what he felt driven to paint, and what the art-buying public would buy. (Priestly 1996)

In 1996 Kocjanþiþ published another much more bulky and ambitious biographical book, titled Gospodar golega ozemlja (The Master of Arid Territory; Kocjanþiþ 1996). This biographical novel is about a Slovenian named Janez (Charlie) Planinšek, who migrated to Canada in the early twentieth century and who finally settled in Alaska and married an indigenous woman. An adventurer at heart, he is tempted by the wilderness of the North-American White North, crosses from Alaska over to Siberia and back and all over Artic Canada, as well as through the US down to the Gulf of Mexico. Fragmented and postmodern in structure, based on Planinšek's diaries, memories, and the travelogues he wrote and were published in various journals, letters etc., the narrative is a fine example of an inter-genre production, oscillating constantly between fiction and reality. Cvetka Kocjanþiþ very successfully draws a psychological profile of an early Slovenian migrant in Canada, who remains optimistic and stubborn facing all the challenges of his stormy

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adventurous life when he was constantly trying to push the limits of human knowledge of North-American Arctic farther and beyond. Ivan Dolenc (1927-2006) has a special place in Slovenian diasporic writing in Canada, as a journalist, cultural mediator between the two countries, and author in his own right. He wrote numerous short stories and sketches, journal articles and very little poetry about the life of European migrants in Canada, their hardships, who retain their hopes for the future and at least some optimism to endure. Particularly important is his novel Za dolar þloveþnosti (1983), which is the very first artistic description of a Slovenian migrant in Canada. Not only does he feature Slovenian migrants in this work, but also those belonging to other national and ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia. The novel ends with a description of the move of the narrator, his wife and three daughters from Winnipeg to Toronto. This means a lot to them, for they feel it is easier to succeed in the city than "in the country". The hero of the narrative is set asunder between the old and the new "homeland", although he is ever aware of the fact that it is best for him to integrate into the new environment (Jurak 1999: 370). To this end he wants to get well acquainted with Canadian culture and literature in particular, while at the same time he tries to keep contact with his Slovenian countrymen: he starts to write short stories and publishes in various Yugoslav papers across Canada, where one can definitely see Ivan Dolenc's biographical traits in the narrator. Dolenc was also very active as a contributor to various migrant journals and an editor in his own right, who paved the way for further development of Slovenian press in Canada. Irma Ožbalt (born 1926) has published her short stories in Slovenian and in English (Mrzle peþi 1994, Dež gre 1998), and more recently also a novel Anka (Ožbalt 2008). She has accepted Canada as her new home, although in her literary work she is emotionally still torn between the two countries, at least in memories. She frequently revisits the locales of her youth in Slovenia and, interestingly, in her sketches and short stories she shows a special interest for village eccentrics with whom she sympathizes. She writes about Slovenian places on a nostalgic note, while she is much more critical and rational describing life in Canada and in the US. Her work is often very critical about the social reality (materialism, alienation etc) and injustices experienced by common people on both sides of the Atlantic. Women are in the centre of her literary attention in the poetic social realist narratives. Ožbalt's novel Anka is clearly autobiographical. She describes her youth and growing up during the Second World War and the German occupation, the immediate post-war years in the former socialist Yugoslavia and the sad events of killing political refugees who

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fled to Austria, including her brother, all of which stigmatized her politically and eventually forced her to move abroad with bitter memories of her homeland.

Works Cited Dolenc, Ivan. Za dolar þloveþnosti (For a Dollar of Humanity). Ljubljana: SIM, 1983. Jurak, Mirko. "Uvod" (Introduction). "Literarno ustvarjanje Slovencev v Kanadi" (“The Literary Creativity of Slovenians in Canada”). Slovenska izseljenska književnost: Severna Amerika. Janja Žitnik and Helga Glušiþ, eds. Ljubljana: ZRC: Rokus, 1999, 307-383. —. "The Soul Divided: Slovene Immigrant Writers in Canada". Michael Kenneally et al. (eds.). From "English Literature" to "Literatures in English": International Perspectives; Festschrift in Honour of Wolfgang Zach. Heidelberg: Winter, 2005, 195-212. Kocjanþiþ, Cvetka. Unhappy Rebel: The Life and Art of Andy Stritof. Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1993. —. Gospodar golega ozemlja (Master of Arid Territory). Novo mesto: Dolenjska založba, 1996. —. "Slovenes". http://multiculturalcanada.ca/Encyclopedia/A-Z/s7/2 (6. 10. 2009). —. "Nove knjige" (New Books). Glasilo 13.2 (March/April 2009): 24. Kramolc, Ted. Podobe iz arhivov (Images from the Archives). Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 1992. —. Potica za navadni dan (A Cake for the Ordinary Day). Ljubljana: Slovenska matica, 1997. —. Tango v svilenih nogavicah (Tango in Silk Stockings). Ljubljana: Nova revija, 2002. —. "Every Piece of Writing is a Form of Confession". An interview. Slovenia News July 22, 2003. —. Sol v grlu (Salt in Throat). Ljubljana: Nova revija, 2008. Ožbalt Marinþiþ, Irma. Anka (Annie). Celje: Celjska Mohorjeva družba: Društvo Mohorjeva družba, 2009. —. Mrzle peþi (Cold Stoves). Celje: Mohorjeva družba, 1994. Priestly, Tom. "The Unhappy Rebel: Cvetka Kocjanþiþ's Biography of Andrej Stritof and Its Translation into English". Ethnic Literature and Culture in the U.S.A., Canada, and Australia. Igor Maver, ed. rankfurt am Main: Lang, 1996, 193-203. Urbanþiþ, Anne. "The Spaces that Define Us". An interview with Ted Kramolc. Glasilo 12.1 (January/February 2008): 39-41.

PART II: AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND

CHAPTER FOUR AUSTRALIA IN THE HABSBURG CAFÉ: ANDREW RIEMER’S WRITING ABOUT CENTRAL EUROPE

In the Central European cultural context, cafés represent many things: the foci of social parade and recognition and places of professional identification, where a particular café often attracts a certain set of people from a particular social layer or group. And what happens when an “outsider”, who has been away from this milieu for many decades, when the Prodigal son, the naturalized Australian writer Andrew Riemer, returns fleetingly (albeit because of this sometimes superficially) in the much changed Vienna and especially Budapest after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, renegotiating his Jewish Austrian-Hungarian roots and his new Australian identity? The book The Habsburg Café (1993) is essentially a travelogue recounting Andrew Riemer's brief visit of two countries in Central Europe, Austria and Hungary. He visits them after many decades of living in Australia, only after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1991, when it became more easily possible to do so after many decades of political totalitarianism. This book certainly expresses a feeling of hope, optimism and winds of change for the better in the former Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe. Riemer is primarily looking at the brighter political and economic future particularly of his native Hungary, which explains some of the shortcomings of the book. He namely avoids to deal with the grim aspects of Central European past, for example the suppression of the Holocaust past in this part of Europe in his recollections that he and his Jewish family somehow luckily managed to avoid and about which he remains silent throughout the book. It seems as though he wants to avoid the World War II period and, instead, prefers to evoke the grand Habsburg (post)imperial past. Rather, it is the artistically effective all-encompassing metaphor of central European café culture that he focuses on and one that suggestively inspires him with a sense of bafflement and embarrassment upon revisiting the lieus of his youth.

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The Habsburg Café follows the line of Riemer's first memoiristic travel book Life between Two Worlds: Inside-Outside (1992) and represents an attempt to come to terms with his migrant roots. Also his third book, a somewhat less enthusiastically received travelogue America with Sublitles (1995), belongs to this group of autobiographical books. In 1998 Riemer published Sandstone Gothic: Confessions of an Accidental Academic in which he discusses his long academic career, almost exclusively spent at Sydney University, which he left early because of the arrival of “Theory”, to retire and to engage more fully in writing and reviewing. This book, too, is concerned with expatriation, which “is emblematic of Riemer's situation” (McCooey 7) which, however, has nothing to do with the beneath mentioned non-existant concept of “Middle Europe” but rather the political, geographical and cultural idea of Central Europe (Mitteleuropa): Indeed, in this work he seems less sanguine than in Inside Outside or The Habsburg Café about the apparently postmodern condition of his narrative, with its emphasis on parody and surfaces. The insider on the outside, or the outsider on the inside, is not a position gained without costs. While mimicry is a way of controlling the object of attention (English culture in an antipodean context, or a remembrance of Middle Europe) it also, Riemer seems to say, has real effects upon the psyche. (McCooey 7)

Andrew Riemer was born in Budapest in 1936. Having left Hungary in 1946, in 1947 he was travelling via the U.S.A. and finally settled with his parents in Sydney, where he now lives with his family. At first he became an expert in French-knitting, a skill acquired when, unable to speak English in a new Australian environment, he was put in a class for intellectually handicapped children. And then it was as if he, a migrant, wanted to prove just the contrary. After 'migrating' into a new language as well, which involves living with different and changed concepts and emotional responses to life situations, his university study and professional career paradoxically led him to becoming a professor of English literature at the University of Sydney. He recently retired from this position to become a freelance writer and a regular contributor of book reviews to The Sydney Morning Herald, Australian Book Review and The Age. It has been pointed out that Riemer significantly addressed the language assimilation of his childhood in Australia. He is aware especially in his book InsideOutside that throughout his adolescence he had pretended to have forgotten Hungarian altogether, which is why he employed (post-colonial) mimicry of the Anglo-Australian culture and migrant irony not to look “foreign” and “acutely embarrassed” at his language as well as physical appearance (cf. Besemeres) in the new environment.

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In all of his travel books/memoirs he is (re)visiting his past, trying to come to terms with his double self – the suppressed one and the adopted one, his “schizoid” identity – and to reconstruct the past from shreds of his own memory and family myth. His first book Inside-Outside: Life between Two Worlds, published in 1991, recounts the experience of his return to the city of his birth, Budapest, in 1990, to the chaotic world awakening then from totalitarian rule. This autobiographical work was well received by critics and readers alike, which has not been entirely the case with his travel book America with Subtitles, published in 1995; some critics have, somewhat unkindly, suggested that he has simply written the same book three times over again. Although there is indeed much structural repetition in the travel/memoir books Riemer wrote before 1995, it could be said that his second book, The Habsburg Café from 1993, and especially the recent book A Family History of Smoking (2008), which is not discussed in detail here, possibly show him at his literary best: he captures the spirit of Central Europe in a metaphorically suggestive way even if he mostly avoids the Jewish level of his identity in The Habsburg Café. It is true that in all of his books Riemer obsessively, narcissistically even, tries to portray himself: he seeks to recover his submerged Central European identity and by contrast also define his (new) Australian identity. It is obvious that certain Australian critics do not fully understand the spirit of Central Europe and the literary sensitivity of its writers, saying about his work that “migrant writers rarely escape being comedians, even when they are not being intentionally funny” (Juers 11). Also, it is an understatement to say that his books appeal to and are intended particularly for a European-Australian readership, “with whom he shares the experience of migration and those keen cultural insights with which outsiders are gifted” (Juers 11). Riemer's books could only tentatively be called migrant memoir novels, but even then only in the best sense of the word, for they can better be described as factional autobiographies often disguised as travelogues. They do, in fact, appeal to the Australian readers of Hungarian as well as non-Hungarian origin, because they are never exclusivist in treating the migrant, European subject-matter. Rather, they try to attune Australian readers' ear to the finest sounds and shades of meaning of Central Europe, rendering it susceptible to the specific cultural issues and esprit of Central Europe. What's more, in trying to transcend his ethnicity the author explicitly points out in Inside-Outside: Life between Two Worlds that the term “multicultural” in Australia, both to describe society as well as its literature, may entail some sort of marginalization, for “preserving an 'ethnic' identity, in the manner implied by the propagandists of

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multiculturalism, may also be tantamount to cultural and social isolation” (Ballyn 289). In the book he comes to gradually realize, upon his first visit to his home town Budapest after many years, that he is after all a foreigner to these people, who … had nothing in common with this world, I came to realise as the initial impact of return began to wear off. This was not my life; it had almost no bearing on what I was or felt myself to be. I began to be acutely aware of the advantages of my real life. Sydney, with its sprawling suburbs, its harsh, allrevealing light, seemed a blessed place compared with the murk and grime of this depressing city.... I got confused about the elaborate rituals governing cafe-life: who served, whom to pay, how to tip, and when to leave. I realised that l desperately wanted to go home. (Riemer, qtd in Hergenhan and Petersson 180-81)

Andrew Riemer's family inheritance is not an easy one, it is one of a persecuted Jewish family, who fleeing the totalitarian regime, decided to seek new life elsewhere, despite its organic connection with the Central European world, Budapest/Hungary and Vienna/Austria alike. The relative avoidance of addressing his Jewishness – some critics even complained that he cannot spell the word “Jewish” – sheds another significant light on his identity search. He is throughout The Habsburg Café culturally aloof with regard to Central Europe as well as to Australia and as a result experiences some sort of identity crisis. Riemer's autobiographic books under the guise of a travelogue are, despite their sometimes melancholic and nostalgic vein, so visual and cinematic that, as regards The Habsburg Café, one is readily reminded of the Hungarian film about the staging of a Wagner's opera. The film in question is Isztvan Szabo's Meeting Venus (1991), which takes place in Paris and in Budapest at roughly the same time as Riemer's voyage and is explicitly Central European in expression and with similar cultural connotations. In Riemer's book The Habsburg Café there are various exquisitely prepared and sophisticated foods, the opera and the cafés are the main settings as well as the three major clusters of metaphors standing for Central European life and culture. It could be said that they represent a kind of “cultural translation”, with the narrator literally “lost in translation”, since two sign systems collide (or are superimposed) in them, on the level of the signifier and the other on the level of the signified. Each of them is through these metaphors saying something different to either a Central European reader (such as myself) or to a non-Central European (Australian) reader.

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The Habsburg Café is an extended metaphor, a palindrome, like the author's life itself, which, like any palindrome, can be read in the same way forwards or backwards. It traces the return of the native and describes above all the author's spiritual repatriation “in this palindromic year” (10). The circular framework of the book, which practically does not include fiction proper, is represented by the arrival and eventually the departure flight at Vienna International Airport. The motto to the book sets the mood and is very telling in evoking Robert Musil's novel The Man Without Qualities, which attempted to recreate “the good old days when there was still such a place as Imperial Austria... that vanished Kakania”! The introductory chapters describe the present-day moment of Central Europe, the heartland of the former Habsburg and the latter AustroHungarian Empire, which in the author's view still partly lives steeped in the past, in the mythical nostalgia and immitation of the imperial pomp and grandeur, although many of its myths have already been turned upside down. It would be wrong to look for any kind of clear political and cultural analysis in the book, as it describes the Central European spirit and its culture indirectly, by superimposing the images of Vienna and Budapest in the author's recollections of the actual, the imagined and the expected. Undoubtedly, the book can serve as a rich source of historical data about the period and the countries where he travelled. However, it does, too, grow beyond the sheer documentary reportage book, as it describes the experience of repatriation of any returning migrant (even if only for a short visit), his/her experience of the gulf between the remembrance of things past in an “imagined” country and things present in a new, adopted country. Riemer fittingly uses the known (self-)ironic concept of “Kakania” when referring to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the closing decades of the empire, when its grandeur slowly crumbled away into the Great War: Kakania sounds romantic, an ancient duchy or quaint principality, one of these long vanished territories of fiefdoms that came at length to be absorbed into the Austro-Hungarian Empire, yet was still remembered fondly. It was, however, cobbled out of a familiar bureaucratic abbreviation, “k.k., standing for the phrase “kaiserlich und königlich” (imperial and royal), which was used to denote the dual nature of this world... the fiction of the dual monarchy which, by virtue of those two “k”s, sounds like kaka, that is to say, ordure, faeces or manure. (10)

He stresses the multicultural value of this realm, for people moved easily among its various linguistic and ethnic divisions. Despite the apparent, naive safety, stability and benevolence of this world, the author

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nowadays still sees it as touchingly fragile, then only too easily blown away by the gunshot assassination in Sarajevo. Riemer draws a parallel (in brackets!) with the war reverberating in 1991 in the former Yugoslavia, first in Slovenia, then Croatia and eventually in Bosnia: (None of us knows at this time that in less than a year Sarajevo itself will once again stand as a symbol of the hatred and enmities which have always disfigured this part of the world.) (11)

The author is aware that, on returning to Central Europe, he will not find the Central Europe of 1946and that his (double) identity could be tested in an embarrassing way. Paradoxically, there he is also in search of Australia and his identity as an Australian, for he was invited to take part in a most “odd, even eccentric enterprise”, which is, however, “appropriate”, namely to give a course of lectures on Australian literature and culture in various Hungarian universities to young people who have “only the haziest notions of that distant, exotic and, for them, probably outlandish place” (6). A tenuous link still exists, therefore, with the place where I know, more or less, who I am, for I have lived in Australia long enough to make it possible to call myself an Australian. It is true that this identity may have been assumed or invented, yet it is an identity of sorts (7).

Riemer's book describes Central Europe, largely a country of the mind, fashioned out of nostalgia and fantasy. It is the land of his heart's desire he often finds longing for in Australia, “that place at the other end of the world I now know as my home” (8). He both builds and deconstructs the popular myths and auto- and heterostereotypes of the Austro-Hungarian world through the muddled collection of images and metaphors which are couched in his imagination: sights, sounds, smells, social rituals and music. Three clusters of metaphors, the insignia of this world, are used to this end: foods, the opera and the cafés. He literally revels in the description of rich pastries, towering gâteaux, mounds of chestnut purée surrounded by snowy peaks of whipped cream, sandwiches shimmering under films of aspic, saying that “modern Austria obviously seeks to display its individuality, its charm and appeal in terms of the richest yet most delicate of foods” (15). It is fascinating how real the writer manages to render these delicacies even if he does not sample them himself; indirectly he thus tells a great deal about that society in the near past, the mores and the mentality of the people, for example their abhorrence of becoming déclassé, their striving to create a niche for themselves in that

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rigidly stratified society, where upward movement was practically impossible. Eating, and by no means only Strudel, Mozartkugeln, Sachertorte or Wiener Schnitzel, was and, according to the author's acute sense of observation and penetrating socio-cultural analyis, to a certain extent still is a proper social rite (in which the tourists also relish). Food was in the Austro-Hungarian world the focus of communal life, adulated and intimately connected with the elaborate social structures. The fact remains that from the sociological point of view the family circle, a Freudian feudal-bourgeois kind of a family, was the centre of social life, where, of course, the quality as well as the quantity of food represented a powerful social metaphor. This metaphor reflected all the diversity of the AustroHungarian world, from Viennese custard slices, pâté in aspic, richly fragrant Prague ham, spicy salami from the Hungarian plains, to the baroque sandwiches laden with slices of meat, eggs, caviar and cheeses. Five-o'clock tea, a curious and copious meal, usually consisted of gooseliver pâté sandwiches, quivering custard slices and that confection known as lndianer, made of two chocolate-glazed hemispheres of sponge held together with stiffly whipped cream – the magnified images of which are floating across the screen in front of me. These were the ritual trappings of a ceremony fundamentally important to the maintenance and preservation of a cherished way of life (16).

For Riemer the actual building of the Viennese Opera House in the past is of lesser importance, compared to its metaphorical representation of the dreams and social aspirations of a sentimentalized past. Opera houses are placed in the strategically central points of these European cities where political power wanted to express itself also through art. The author is right in asserting that the more absolutist the regime, the more prominent places these “secular shrines” occupied in the city. The opera house in Vienna is described by the author as the symbol of reconciliation between political absolutism and the people, to create an illusion that the monarchy was built not on subjection and domination but, in his view, on the willing submission of the people. The Central European mania for the opera reflected a social ritual with its individual conventions and characteristic codes. To attend the opera was a mark of cultivation and indicated one's place in the complex hierarchy of feudal-bourgeois society. At the opera the social hierarchy came to its utmost expression: everybody sat in that part of the building to which one's status entitled one, with subtle social gradations, from the royal box down. The author of the book shrewdly observes the opera-goers

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at the performance of La Bohème, trying to find shreds of the imperial past in their manners and code of behaviour. He comes to a revealing conclusion: he had often thought in his “antipodean exile” that the Central European society is a place where arts are really valued, where audiences are well-informed and well-mannered. However, he is greatly disappointed observing the audience and listening to their uninterested chatting; one of the Habsburg myths is thus being destroyed before his very eyes. Central Europe's famed respect for culture is to him merely a lie, “one of the instances of dishonesty that have marred the political and social life of this part of the world” (71). If there is at the beginning of the book an occasional sense of nostalgia for the Central European imperial past, then it is almost completely dispelled by the end of the narrative. The author's descriptions of the image of Australia and Australiana in Central Europe are another interesting point. He describes, for example, a garden party at the Australian Ambassador's residence in Budapest, trying to raise money and help with the forging of Australo-Hungarian friendship, which meets there occassionally “in a basement rumpus room decorated with posters of Bondi Beach and the outback” (130). He finds that Australia is very “chic” in the Central Europe of the early nineties, for tourist agencies in the elegant streets of Vienna feature seductive posters of Ayers Rock (Uluru), koalas and the dreamy images of the Sydney Opera House. Despite the spirit of the place Riemer feels relatively strongly attached to in Budapest, he all along remains in a much more intimate relationship with Sydney, a city he knows far better, a city where he feels “much more safe, comfortable and at ease” (141). The author, in desperately seeking his Australian identity in the Habsburg café, detached and in exile in Budapest, the second site on his Proustian journey through Central Europe and his childhood years spent there, draws constant parallels with Australia. A phoney neo-Gothic brick cathedral in Budapest, for example, immediately reminds him of some of the “stone extravaganzas” of Australia, which the Australians, in his view, regard as living signs of Australia's colonial status, “of that cultural cringe that worshipped and attempted to emulate the institutions of a distant and arrogant world” (144). He points out that even in Europe, similarly nostalgic examples of trompe d'oeil are to be found and, indeed, come as a surprise, for not everything is genuine in Europe either. The author is increasingly aware of the gulf he finds between the Hungarians and the Australians. Not knowing which part of his split identity to resort to and to fully endorse, he swerves again and again. Despite all sympathy and the sense of identification with Australia after so many years spent there, he culturally still feels closer to Central Europe as a kind of in-between outsider:

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Andrew Riemer's The Habsburg Café continues with visits to a whole series of different cafés in Vienna and in Hungary, each of which has its own story to tell about the people frequenting them and the world in which it is set. Thus the reader is (mis)guided by this major all-embracing metaphor of the book which on the one hand represents the tradition and order of the Austro-Hungarian past, while on the other it illuminates Riemer's experience of a new, troubled and perplexing post-Cold War and pre-Euro age in Central Europe. He is in a temporary exile from Australia and finds this world and his own identity emerge, metaphorically and literally, from the rich aroma of freshly roasted coffee at the emblematic and ambivalent “Habsburg café”, be it in Vienna, Budapest or Szeged in the very South of Hungary. This is edified to the central suggestive metaphor representing exchange, social and national diversity, flux and an overall felicitous mixture in this part of the world: ... I am convinced, it must emerge from a private vocabulary of images and memories. It is a visual and olfactory emblem of the lost fantasy-world of Kakania: the characteristic appearance of its streets in some city or town, mixed with a whiff of its equally characteristic and perhaps most significant institution – a café where the sweet odour of vanilla mingles with the pungent scent of highly roasted coffee. In my imagination, this café of the Habsburg world – in some unknown city or town of my early childhood when that Empire and realm, though no longer a political reality, still exerted an influence throughout its former territories – has assumed a position of undisputed centrality. It has become a distillation, a compact, fleeting yet powerful image of a world irrecoverably lost, a world compromised by hatred and brutality, and yet a world of irresistible allure. (19)

For Riemer, café-life is the social drug addiction, the staple of Central European life. It involves much more than mere eating or the consumption of coffee. It is where conversation and social relationships are made to work, where some sort of “social harmony” emerges, comparable to the one the rulers of the former Kakania wanted to achieve among their often unruly subjects: the Hungarians, Austrians, Czechs, Slovenes, Jews, Catholics, Protestants, gentry and bourgeoisie. The café, the last metaphor of the mythic Kakanian world which, much as an outside observer, Riemer visits in his travel account The Habsburg Café, is located in Vienna. He ends the book by referring to the fossil of the Dual Monarchy, the bitter-

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sweet, seriously-comic operatic dreamworld of latter-day Kakania. However, to the author this is not an operetta-like world; this world is still very real and embedded in the past, its traditions and culture, which he himself is part of and which have resurfaced upon his physical return to Central Europe. In Hungary things past start to grow on the author and his Australian identity. His fears prior to departure were after all perhaps not entirely unfounded, especially after an uncomfortable reunion with his Hungarian Jewish cousin, the only surviving member of his immediate family with whom they were “almost like brother and sister” (12): no word, however, about the atrocities of the Second World War and the Holocaust. The result of this is Andrew Riemer's “national identity” crisis and culture test during his visit to Central Europe, which involves shock as well as painful and pleasant recollections, materialized in the fine travel book The Habsburg Café. It reflects the images of his own and of the romantic past that are still alive both in Vienna and Budapest, in the period of the recent major socio-political change in Hungary, as seen from the perspective of a Hungarian-born Australian traveller, flâneur, social analyst and journalist. Andrew Riemer's memoir/travelogue The Habsburg Café (1993) reveals the author's identity crisis under the guise of a travel book, a sense of cultural embarassment upon revisiting Austria and Hungary after many years. If indeed Australia is often considered as being mediated by somewhere else, then this book offers an insight into the ironic stance the author adopts in the process of the return of the native, the “homecoming”. He recounts his life story and that of the vanishing/-ed K und K world from the various Habsburg cafés in Vienna and Budapest, a nostalgic and yet acerbicly ironic view which helps to frame the Australianness of his adulthood years, for, going abroad always also means coming home. Riemer published a sequel to the The Habsburg Café, entitled A Family History of Smoking, in 2008. This family memoir follows two European Jewish families during the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In contrast to his other travelogues/memoirs in this new life writing text, Riemer captivatingly describes the perception(s) of Jewish identity at different times in Central European history with various generations of the families until the mid-twentieth century (with the Holocaust experience yet again almost absent), focusing on the assimilated and prosperous bourgeois Jewish community of the last decades of the empire. The leitmotif is that of the family experience(s) of smoking, the habit and its consequences for the author and his family, which is intrinsically linked with history, the smoke-filled cafés of the past in Hungary and Austria already described in The Habsburg Café. In A

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Family History of Smoking Riemer relies much on anecdotes, family myths and legends, in a painful absence of documented fact. However, racism and xenophobia have been there for him even in Australia, since “it was nice to be living where people despised you, not because they thought you were Jews but because you were undeniably foreign” (211). Challenging the very boundaries of autobiography as well as trauma, his family story is not told in a conventional way. The book shows how selfrepresentation and the representation of trauma grow beyond simple causes and effects, exceed their duration in time, and connect to other forms of historical, familial, and personal pain. In its movement from an openly testimonial form to one that draws on socio-political as well as literary knowledge, such a text could produce an alternative means of confronting kinship, violence, and self-representation (see Gilmore 2001). At the beginning of the book Riemer claims that the beginnings of his family, his grandmother served as an informant when he was growing up in Sydney where they moved after the Second World War, represent the mixture of German and Hungarian language and other elements and this hybridity is one of the most potent emblems of his family's complex identity. This became, at least officially, more complicated with the rising Hungarian national demands after 1867, when the dual monarchy was institutionalised into the Austro-Hungarian empire: Great-Grandfather David's family came from a dusty village not far from a shallow, reedy lake at the eastern extremity of Austria or on the western edge of Hungary. They were never entirely sure of their true nationality; all they knew was that they had lived for generations around or near that lake, …. They slipped with the greatest of ease between German, or at least the dialect of Burgenland, the easternmost province of Austria, and Hungarian, sometimes mingling both in the one breath. For a hundred years or more, whether they lived in Austria or Hungary was almost beside the point. (8)

Riemer's descriptions of his 1992 visit to the Hungarian border town of his Jewish ancestors called Fertószentmiklós are replete with the literary allusions to Robert Musil, Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig, which describe the atmosphere of the vanishing empire around the First World War. He finds the town likewise grim, depressing a hundred years after that. Smoking and different types of tobacco members of his family had consumed is the leitmotif, as well as the Jewish identity that, he finds, was tolerated along with other identities in the former empire until »the Habsburg realm disintegrated, my great-grandfather was ruined and the dream – or perhaps it had been a reality for a while – of a world where Jews and Christians, Austrian, Hungarians and Slavs could live in relative

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harmony, or at least in an uneasy tolerance, ended abruptly« (45). In the review of his family's life right after the Second World War, Riemer mentions the fact that in 1945 his father acknowledged the painful and terrible truth that none of his family would ever return. He realized nothing was left but the old furniture, which he decided to ship all the way to Australia where they moved in 1946. Also, there were a beautifully decorated silver tobacco cigarette-box and a snuff-box, made by a famous tobacconist firm in Vienna, one of which was stolen upon their arrival to Australia in a Sydney suburb. The author's mother, too, was a chainsmoker, which she became only after the allies' bomb-attacks of Budapest, namely to calm her nerves. Before the war the cigarettes were, so she thought, a sign of sophistication: »She smoked one brand of cigarettes only imported from Vienna – I am not sure what they were called, but I have at the back of my memory the words Für Damen, indicating ladylike cigarettes« (117). The author insightfully provides the history of secular Jewishness rising anti-Semitism in Central Europe his non-observant parents did cultivate, with a deep respect for Christianity and its symbols alongside it. A particular strength which elevates his writing far above non-artistic pamphleteering is the fact that he makes continuous efforts to make allusions to well-known literary works, e. g. by Arthur Schnitzler, Thomas Mann, Josef Roth, Jaroslav Hašek, Stefan Zweig, Irène Némirovsky, Imre Kertész, Italo Svevo. His family's life stories are thus contextualized suggestively in the climate of two cataclysms, the First and the Second World War, the latter being almost fatal for his Jewish community. This is why the mother hold told her young son in 1942: … my mother came into my bedroom she hugged me and whispered in my ear that I must never forget that I was Hungarian, no matter what anyone might say. I did not know what she was talking about. Of course I was Hungarian, what else could I have been? (138)

Riemer himself became a chain-smoker after his arrival to Australia at any early age. Whenever, he tried to stop, he had to continue yet again, he admits. He felt an immense sense of loss, like Svevo's fictional character Zeno in Confessions of Zeno (1923), symbolical and psychological more than physical, really, one that he »cannot even attempt to understand, has to do with /his/ family's history of smoking, but most of all, and perhaps in a sense both irrational and appropriate, with Vienna and Budapest, the sacred sites, the holy cities for so many people in /his/ family« (189). Riemer, too, considers himself still, after many decades of living in Australia, an heir to the family spirit of his great-grandfather, grandmother

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Ilka, or, for that matter, Italo Svevo's Jewish-Italian dilemmas in the former empire: Yet all these people, whether in Trieste, in a dusty little town on the border of Austria and Hungary or in Budapest, shared sets of aspirations, beliefs, prejudices and snobberies too, that marked them as true citizens of that Empire, Musil's Kakania. (203)

Works Cited Ballyn, Susan. “Of Centres and Margins: Some Aspects of the Migrant Voice in Australia”. Ethnic Literature and Culture in the U.S.A., Canada, and Australia, ed. Igor Maver. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1996: 289. Besemeres, Mary. “Immigrant Irony and Embarassement: Andrew Riemer's The Habsburg Café”. Journal of Australian Studies (March 1, 2001). Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Hergenhan Laurie & Petersson Irmtraud (eds). Changing Places: Australian Writers in Europe. St Lucia: UQP, 1994. Juers, Evelyn. “Riemer's Rope of Present Tense”, Australian Book Review (December 1995/January 1996): 11. McCooey, David. “Metropolis”, Australian Book Review (June 1998): 6-7. Riemer, Andrew. Inside-Outside: Life between Two Worlds. Pymble: Collins/Angus & Robertson, 1992. —. The Habsburg Café. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1993. —. America with Subtitles. Minerva, 1995. —. The Demidenko Debate. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1996. —. Sandstone Gothic: Confessions of an Accidental Academic. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1998. —. A Family History of Smoking. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2008.

CHAPTER FIVE AN ANTIPODEAN BYRON? A. D. HOPE’S VISION OF AUSTRALIA VS. EUROPE

A. D. Hope (born 1907) is usually described as an Augustan poet, because of his frequent usage of allusions from classical, Greco-Roman and the later neo-classical English literary traditions, as well as because of his insistence on the explicitly formalist poetic manner (cf. Hart). To be sure, Hope in his poems tried to revive the classical poetic ideal, although the unabashed identification with Lord Byron’s (anti)hero Childe Harold also shows just one aspect of his admiration of the ‘Byronic hero’: his mordant satirical wit. The long epistolary poem “A Letter from Rome” (Hope 1972), written upon A. D. Hope’s visit to Rome as part of his first European ‘Grand Tour’ in 1958, is, in fact, based on a pre-text, which therefore serves as an intertextual model as well as a formal impetus, Byron’s work Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Byron). Parallels between the two poetic oeuvres are to be found especially in the last Canto IV of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The last two Cantos are usually considered to be more analytical and objective than the first two, which are typically Byronesque, narcissistic and subjective. In “A Letter from Rome”, written in ottava rima, Hope depicts Italy through the ‘historical’ eyes of Lord Byron and the later Victorians – John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Robert Browning and Henry James. Like the discontented Byron, he complains about the obvious “barbarian” behaviour and indifference of present-day Italians. The poem’s epigraph is thus very much to the point: “Rome, Rome! thou art no more / As thou hast been!” That Roma non e più come era prima Which Byron heard the Roman workmen sing Gives scope to write on anything at all Since Romulus and Remus built their wall. (“A Letter from Rome”)

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It is significant to note that the quotation in Italian used by Hope is almost identical with the one in Byron’s letter to John Hobhouse (Venice, January 2 1818): “And when we ourselves, in riding round the walls of Rome, heard the simple lament of the labourers’ chorus, Roma! Roma! Roma! Roma non e più come prima! ...”. The author, A. D. Hope, does not comprehend Rome historically, but in a romanticized, partly fictitious, preconceived way, where the past is considered very much part of the present, as was typical of the Victorian admirers of Rome in the previous century. Identically, Australian visitors’ response in the nineteenth century was “colonially and provincially predetermined” as regards the pre-formed images of spirit and without a proper connection with reality (Pesman). The ‘reality’ they saw was the English/classical slanted one. Hope is essentially doing the same thing so brilliantly in poetry, although clad in an ironical stance. The image of Italy was for these visitors clearly ambivalent: they were suddenly confronted with two Italies, the country of Art and Beauty on the one hand, and the “barbarian” country of contemporary Italians, disinterested in art, on the other. A. D. Hope is clear on this point: And Italy from which the West arose, Falls prey to new but more barbarian foes ... Surely no sadder irony than this Which brings that noble, intellectual voice To drown in trivial and distracting noise.

(“A Letter from Rome”) Hope, a poet and an Australian, on Italian ground for the first time, attempts to discover his real, “lost ego,” although, to his great surprise, he finds that technocratic, industrialized Italy cannot be what he has been looking for. This dichotomy can be observed in Hope’s entire poetic opus, namely the vision of Art that is being endangered by modern, overtechnicized civilization. In the process of the reinterpretation of the classical ideal, ancient Greece and Rome are regarded not merely as the source, but also as the cradle of European culture: “Athens perhaps begot, Rome was the womb”. The last Canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage recounts Byron’s journey to Rome in 1817 and tells of classical antiquity and the fall of civilizations in an elegiac tone: The commonwealth of kings, the men of Rome And even since, and now, fair Italy! Thou art the garden of the world, the home

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Of all Art yields, and Nature can decree; Even in thy desert, what is like to thee? (Canto IV, 26)

The most pungent lines suggest Byron’s scheme of changing generations, with a gradual decline in all kinds of standards. In Byron’s case there is a glimpse of the fall of Athens and Rome, with a hint that London may soon follow. So might as well Sydney and Melbourne, which agonize in a ‘cultural cringe,’ as, on the other hand, we learn from Hope. The fourth Canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is also symmetrical: in form it constitutes a kind of debate between Art and Nature in two almost equal parts, the first being concerned with Venice and the journey to Rome, the second with Rome itself. The two are completed by a coda, Byron’s famous apostrophe to the ocean, which also found an expression in Hope’s verse. The ruins of Rome almost inevitably suggest the themes of grandeur and decay, the triumph of time, of the transcendence of human limitations by Art. Art and Nature are contrasted and blended in the landscape of mighty ruins. In this poetic discussion Byron is particularly concerned with literature, sculpture and architecture (Cf. Jump). Lord Byron’s Don Juan, which was humorously introduced by A. D. Hope in Hector Munro’s Don Juan in Australia, also features Nature’s ambivalence and the possible ultimate reconciliation between Art and Nature; the ruin in particular is a significant (Romantic) object of human contemplation, for it visibly demonstrates the power of time both to conquer and to transform the monuments of human greatness. Oh Time! the beautifier of the dead, Adorner of the ruin, comforter And only healer when the heart hath bled ... (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage)

Sea imagery in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is frequently combined with that of wreckage and destruction. The ocean assumes the metaphorical value of the passage of time and change. Byron towards the end of the work apostrophizes the ocean in a visionary mood (“the type and symbol of eternity”) and contrasts the sea’s sublime permanence with the inevitable fall of empires: Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee Assyria-Greece-Rome-Carthage-what are they? Thy waters wash’d them power while they were free, And many a tyrant since, their shores obey The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay

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A. D. Hope maintains that his retelling of the last stanzas from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (“Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean — roll!”), entitled “The Ocean to Lord Byron” as a proof of his fondness to rely on Byron’s poetic models, sprang out of his ‘ecological’ concern: “It was after finding that it was impossible to sit on the delightful beaches of the Algarve without getting fouled with pellets of ships’ oil and disgusted by the garbage strewed about by tourists that I meditated the ocean’s reply”. Byron’s original statement, on the other hand, expressed the typical Romantic communion of Man with the paramount element — Nature (“I love not Man the less, but Nature more”), while in Hope’s answer it is transformed into a modern Man’s physical ‘destruction’ of Nature, “spreading wastes less horrible than Man’s:” There’s pleasure in those pathless woods no more, The woods themselves are cut for pulp or scrap. As for the raptures of the lonely shore, Pick any place you like upon the map, The tourist trade has caught it — view the lap Of Ocean ankle-deep in trash and cans. Nor can the deep sea music match the crop Belched from transistors. Time and circumstance Wreak havoc and spread wastes less horrible than Man’s. (A.D. Hope, “The Ocean to Lord Byron”)

According to René Wellek, until the end of the nineteenth century the notion of classicism had rarely been used and English neo-classicists did not call themselves that (Wellek 55). T. S. Eliot’s contentions in the essay “What is a Classic?” (1944) are strongly reminiscent of some of those A. D. Hope expressed in “A Letter from Rome”. In it he describes his return to the “source”, for he sees ancient Italy as a cultural, physical and metaphysical cradle of European civilization from which, by extension, the Australian civilization has gradually also emerged. Yet here am I returning to the source. That source is Italy, and hers is Rome, The fons et origo of Western Man; Athens perhaps begot, Rome was the womb, Here the great venture of the heart began. Here simply with a sense of coming home I have returned with no explicit plan Beyond a child’s uncertain quest, to find

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Something once dear, long lost and left behind. (A. D. Hope, “A Letter from Rome”)

In “A Letter from Rome”, ancient (pagan) gods and myths are aestheticized, used in a playful, allegorical manner. The superscription onto Byron’s model Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is explicitly stated by Hope. Prior to his departure to Italy he had carefully read Byron’s work (“which is sometimes no more than Baedeker in verse”), with whose (anti)hero he identifies on his journey. I’ve just re-read Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Which offers, almost equally combined, The shrewd, the silly, the noble and the sage, The stamp of genius and the touch of sham ... And one specially is in my mind The limping man, the legend of his age. (A.D. Hope, “A Letter from Rome”)

On the pilgrimage, Hope, just as “the limping man”, tries to find the lost “primordial link”, which is why he is instinctively drawn to lake Nemi in central Italy, to the place of Diana’s alleged grave with the holy oak and its Golden Bough: It ends with Nemi and the Golden Bough What instinct led him there? I like to think What drew Byron then Is what has drawn me now …

The allusion is to the bulky anthropological study of ancient myths by Sir James G. Frazer (The Golden Bough, 1890), who postulated the principle of the cultural exchanges and the oscillations in fertility and sterility. Hope uses the ‘myth’ in the scenes depicting the legendary priesthood of Diana’s shrine by the lake. There’s nothing now at Nemi to evoke Sir James G. Frazer’s memorable scene The sleepless Victim-king, the secret oak; A market garden spreads its tidy green Where stood Diana’s grove, no voices spoke ...

However, the evocation of the myth causes some sort of inexplicable tension due to the fact that there is nothing left by the lake that would remind him of the past or Byron’s visit. The “force” and “insistence” is

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felt by Hope as fate, which is according to him quite different from Byron’s “calm and cherished hate”. A. D. Hope in “A Letter from Rome” refers to his “obsession,” with the ritual “baptism” in lake Nemi, which signifies a symbolic initiation of an Australian (poet) into the system of European ur-myths. They appear to him as more or less inexplicable entities, but he persuades himself that he has to perform “Europe’s oldest ritual of prayer;” he wades into the water to be baptized. I seemed constrained, before I came to drink To pour some wine upon the water’s face, Later, to strip and wade out from the brink ... I was possessed, and what possessed me there Was Europe’s oldest ritual of prayer. (A. D. Hope, “A Letter from Rome”)

Byron’s description of the lake as an ‘objective correlative’ is as follows: Lo, Nemi! ravell’d in the woody hills So far, that the uprotting wind which tears The oak from his foundation, and which spills The ocean o’er is boundary, and bears Its foam against the skies, reluctant spares The oval mirror of thy glossy lake; (Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage)

Throughout his poetic career Hope had been writing poetry which drew upon the resources of European mythology, particularly ancient Greek mythology and literature. He remembers “the beginnings of mythology between the ages of four and five”.7 Hope further contends that the most characteristic phenomena of the modern world (high technology, industry, science, entrepreneurship) do not offer good grounds to create new myths but rather hasten the development of “the aristocratic art of satire,”8 which Hope explicitly cherished (e. g. his brilliant mock-epic Dunciad Minor). Still, the poet’s experience at lake Nemi, though clearly important and visibly effective, is not particularly striking to the reader of “A Letter from Rome” and is in fact less impressive than other parts of the poem which have so far been quoted, for example the fons et origo section. It has none of the conviction of Wordsworth’s ‘revelation’ poems and hardly matches the strength of Byron’s meditation inspired by Lake Nemi at the end of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. In Australian criticism simple caricatures frequently emerge, portraying Hope in bold apodictic strokes as neo-classical, Parnassian, anti-modernist and the like. Such categorizations, however, do point to the one indisputable

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element of Hope’s poetry, namely that it is essentially “strategically restless and subversive”.9 In quite a few of his poems, however (e. g. “Conquistador,” “The Kings,” “Flower Poem”) there are Decadent and finde-siècle undertones. Critics have for the past twenty years found Hope the architect and the purveyor of neoclassical ideas in Australian poetry. But how are we to explain, then, the ‘romantic agony,’10 the agony of the divided soul in his poems, particularly the penchant towards modelling some of his satirical poetic pieces on Lord Byron’s verse? This applies, for example, to “A Letter from Rome” or his satirical Byronesque rhymes in the introductory lines to his friend Hector Munro’s mock-epic Don Juan in Australia.11 The link that seems to be particularly strong between Byron and Hope is not in the Romantic traits, but rather in the scintillating satirical impulse, which is essentially characteristic of both poets. Lord Byron’s early work shows that his self-esteem was shattered when Hours of Idleness were savagely attacked by the influential Edinburgh Review. Byron’s counter-attack on literary critics in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers owed more to the tradition of Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad than to that of his Romantic contemporaries, for he greatly admired the eighteenth-century satirist Pope; on the other hand, it is also known that A. D. Hope greatly appreciated Pope. Byron is said to have admired “Gifford inordinately, and Pope almost to idolatry, yet his own tastes were really quite different from either”.12 Every satirical description of the world implies an ideal one: every assault on the way things are depends upon the understanding that they can be better. Satire thus somehow springs from the divided self or the Romantic divided soul to be found both in Byron and Hope. The exaggerated, mock-epic, burlesque satiric style which achieves its major effects by exploiting the contrasts between radically different levels, the heroic and the commonplace, is an important element linking the poetry of Lord Byron to that of A. D. Hope. Byron’s Don Juan is very much indebted to Augustan poetry, although in some views not so much in the part represented by Alexander Pope but by that of Jonathan Swift.13 We may question with enough reason, why Byron chose satire, on account of which today he is even more highly valued than for his explicitly Romantic pieces, as an important mode of expression, especially in the ‘English’ Cantos of Don Juan, which are rich in satirical relevance and resonant with literary allusions? One possible answer may be found in the fact that eighteenth-century satire was rather static, while the overall Romantic feeling and Zeitgeist was dynamic: Byron, in using a somewhat ‘Romanticized’ satire, thus tried to find a modus vivendi, a poetic form that should give his well-loved form of satire a sense of flow and clear-cut forward movement. In this respect the

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‘standards’ of Popean satire were accommodating and flexible enough to embrace new experiences, those of Byron and, much later, those of an ardent admirer of his, A. D. Hope. The poetic paradox of Byron and Hope cannot be better exemplified for, even if the subject-matter is Romantic, the (satirical) mode and mood of their verse tend to be Augustan. It is paradoxical that Hope’s strong subjectivity and Romantic personal choice be dressed up in classical values, which is, in fact, his true classicism. Another possible line of comparison between Byron and Hope could be drawn with respect to the Byronic hero phenomenon. Peter L. Thorslev classified, on the one hand, eighteenth-century hero types (the child of nature the hero of sensibility, the gothic villain), and Romantic hero types (the noble outlaw, Faust, Cain, Satan and Prometheus) on the other. Hope’s heroes, however, do not fit into any of these categories. The complex Byronic hero, a curious mixture of those mentioned, is the direct ancestor of many of the pessimistic or nihilistic heroes and philosophical rebels to be found in French Romantic and Decadent literature, who frequently occur in Hope’s verse. The persona of Don Juan does retain many of the characteristics of the Byronic hero, which is why it is no coincidence that Hope took him as a model in his introduction to Hector Munro’s mock epic Don Juan in Australia. He is sceptical and defiant, but as the poem develops, it takes on specific characteristics, especially because Don Juan becomes strongly tolerant for all his satirical wit. Hope namely finds it impossible to properly introduce Lord Byron’s Don Juan to “the ocker world,” strongly ridiculing Australia as “the arid wasteland of its sporting scene:” HECTOR, MY FRIEND, you strike me dumb with wonder, You who so late and neatly cooked the goose Of the philosophers, now turn to plunder Lord Byron’s Don Juan to introduce His hero to the ocker world ‘down under,’ Where, in vain Hope’s of playing fast and loose You bring within the range of observation Love, politics and Woman’s Liberation, Sunbaking and, contriving not to bore, The arid wasteland of its sporting scene, Feats that might well have tasked the Burlador Of Seville, if like little Wilhelmine, He asked “What do they love each other for, Since having sex’ is what they really mean? For love below the Line’s a thing of snatches To make a nice break between cricket matches.” (A. D. Hope, Introduction to Hector Munro’s Don Juan in Australia)

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A. D. Hope’s literary affiliations with Lord Byron’s poetry are, thus, at least threefold, as exemplified by “A Letter from Rome”, Introduction to Don Juan in Australia, and Byron’s works Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan. First, Hope’s ‘Romanticism’ is comparable to the mood of Childe Harold in his palimpsest superscription of Byron’s original texts. Byron’s frivolous sensibility does not emanate from Hope’s verse, but it is significant to note that both poets possibly felt they were self-imposed ‘outcasts’ from their respective societies. The second contention is that A. D. Hope relied on an exaggerated, Baroque classicism, typical of the late Victorian period, a classicism that remains on the level of sheer decoration, ornament and form, whereas the content may well be Romantic. In the third place it can be maintained, mutatis mutandis, that the Popean satirical value of Byron’s and Hope’s verse is possibly the strongest link between their literary achievements, one that instructs us about their own position in native lands, about Byron’s ‘physical exile’ from the shores of Albion and Hope’s deliberate ‘spiritual exile’ from Australia, which enabled them both to take a critical attitude towards their homelands, respectively. The central emphasis in Hope’s poem “The Damnation of Byron” is on the man-woman relationship, a theme not entirely absent even from “A Letter from Rome,” in which it takes the form of a rather banal love story between Louise, an American student of art history, and the native Italian Alessandro. Hope’s nihilistic experience of eroticism, reduced primarily to its sexual aspect (e. g. the femme fatale figure), is again, in some respects, reminiscent of Byron’s stance. In “The Damnation of Byron”, Hope prophetically anticipated his own creativity as early as 1934. Indeed, on the grand Shakespearean stage he performs his Don Juan daily, doomed to the searching, lifelong ‘artistic pilgrimage’ of Childe Harold: Through the Infernal Fields he makes his way Playing again, but on a giant stage, His own Don Juan; pursuing day by day Childe Harold’s last astonishing pilgrimage. (A.D. Hope, “The Damnation of Byron”)

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Works Cited Byron, Lord. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in The Poetical Works of Lord Byron. London: Oxford UP, 1957, 179-252. England, A. B. Byron’s Don Juan and Eighteenth-Century Literature. London: Associated University Presses, 1974. See also Paul G. Trueblood, Lord Byron. New York: Twayne, 1969. Hart, Kevin. A. D. Hope. South Melbourne, Vic: Oxford UP, 1992. Hope, A. D. Collected Poems 1930-1970. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1972, 129-148. All subsequent references are to this edition. —. Native Companions. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1976, 10. —. The Cave and the Spring. Adelaide: Rigby, 1965, 67, 91. Jump, John, ed. Byron: ChiIde Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan. London: Macmillan, 1973. Kramer, Leonie. A. D. Hope. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1979. Munro, Hector. Don Juan in Australia. Hawthorn: Hudson, 1986. Pesman, Roselyn. “Australian Visitors to Italy in the 19th Century,” Gianfranco Cresciani (ed.), Australia, the Australians and the Italian Migration. Milan: Franco Angeli Editore, 1983, 137. Thorslev, Peter L. The Byronic Hero. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962. Wallace-Crabbe, Chris. “True Tales and False Alike Work by Suggestion: The Poetry of A. D. Hope,” Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 14/4 (October 1990): 415. Wellek, René. “The Term and Concept of Classicism in Literary History,” Discriminations — Further Concepts in Criticism. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970, 55. Cf. also the lengthy study of Hope’s classicism by Noel Macainsh “The Suburban Aristocrat: A. D. Hope and Classicism”, Meridian 1, (May 1985), 19-29. Yarker, P. M. “Byron and the Satiric Temper in John D. Jump (ed.), Byron: A Symposium. London: Macmillan, 1975, 78.

CHAPTER SIX CHRISTOPHER KOCH’S LITERARY WORKS

Christopher Koch (1932-2013), an internationally acclaimed Australian writer and twice Miles Franklin Award winner, born and educated in Tasmania, has been writing full time since 1972. Probably his best known novel is The Year of Living Dangerously, which was made into a highly successful film by the Australian director Peter Weir that was also nominated for an Academy Award. In his book on Koch’s writing JeanFrançois Vernay covers and most minutely analyzes his novels, which mostly seem to talk about binaries such as illusion and reality, East and West, past and present or double identities: from the early novels The Boys in the Island, Across the Sea Wall, The Year of Living Dangerously, The Doubleman, Highways to a War to Out of Ireland. It has to be added, however, that Koch’s literary fame at this very moment does no longer rest solely on The Year of Living Dangerously (1978), set in Indonesia in the 1960s, but also on his most recent, well-received spy novel The Memory Room (2007), which came out to be met with great success right at the time of the publication of his monograph and which Vernay obviously was not able to discuss. In The Memory Room Koch once again, as in several of his novels, interweaves the political and the personal and juggles the double nature of the protagonists, in this particular case the motivations of Vincent (based loosely on Koch’s long-time friend and in reality a secret agent), who chooses to live the life of an Australian secret intelligence officer. Koch, who at times also lived in England, is someone who has always been aware of the power of the media, of political intrigue, and Australia’s closeness to Asia and its developments (Austral-Asian). The fictionalization of Asia (as for example in the works by Blanche d’Alpuget, Brian Castro and others) is thus also one of his recurrent themes, although most certainly not the only one. Although Koch rejected the notion of being a political writer, he is frequently concerned with Australia’s relationship with its Asian neighbours, putting white Australians into tense political scenarios in South-East Asia. He says in a recent interview that South-East Asia was what you flew over on your way to Europe and now

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multiculturalism has helped bring people closer; yet it still interests him to see typical Australians dropped into these ‘exotic’ worlds. There has been some controversy regarding Koch’s alleged racism in his post-colonial literary construction of otherness in seeing Asians and Asia, e.g. in The Year of Living Dangerously, which the book does not address. In the realism of The Boys in the Island (1958) Vernay sees the rise of the Australian poetic novel. It is true that Koch’s novel, despite its surface realism, charts the inward journey of the "failed" character into the irrational forces of the psyche, the landscape of the mind, as Patrick White would have it. In the novel Across the Sea Wall (1965), Koch brings together the two worlds, Australia and Asia, the West meeting the East, which, as Vernay’s book clearly shows, starts from the Orientalist stereotypical construction of otherness, but one that eventually turns into its opposite and mutual respect: With hindsight, Asia has proved a tremendous success with Australian citizens and has even superseded Europe in terms of identification. It has ceased to embody just mere backdrops to political intrigues in fiction and has gradually been recognized as a strong economic partner…Australians need to deal with on a more intimate level. (52)

Koch’s probably most successful novel (and its film adaptation) The Year of Living Dangerously shows his fondness of historical novels but also "a Baroque-inspired Weltanschauung" (83), as Vernay puts it, one that introduces the Indonesian context of the theatre of life with stages, masks, stage effects, plots, puppetry, costumes, and the like, thus relativizing the concepts of illusion/appearances and reality. The novel The Doubleman (1985), a modern fairy-tale for which he won the Miles Franklin award, confirmed Koch’s reputation, although it also earned him the first acerbic attack, in which he was accused of "xenophobia, male chauvinism, and misanthropy" (91). Vernay’s narrative and psychological analysis interestingly leads him to maintain that The Doubleman, very much like the original function of the Doppelgänger, is therefore an evil figure, which highlights a spiritual conflict within Man. Yet, …, the Double-man does not take over the identity of his victim as he is only interested in the individual’s soul. (102)

He furthermore draws the conclusion that in several of Koch’s novels the "flawed personalities in search of their alter egos must renounce to their sui generis identities and become their models’ shadows in order to feel complete" (106). Moreover, Vernay correctly maintains that within

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the Australian context the use of an exclusively male alter ego figure may well just be a literary expression of the cult of male mateship, derived on the one hand from the hostile reality of bush life for men without female companionship and on the other from the idealization of the laconic and lone male that, in this way, rebels against authority in a new land. In The Doubleman the Australian postcolonial dilemma is clearly played out; regarding the question of the transplanted Europe in the Antipodes Vernay concludes in favour of the latter. The novel Out of Ireland (1999) deals with the recurrent Australian collective trauma, the one-time penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land, which is depicted as a land of terror and, better still, "the land of the damned or as a terrestrial Hell – which generated the anti-Eden myth on which the palimpsest of the national psyche has been fleshed out layer upon layer" (153). Vernay brilliantly juxtaposes Dante’s The Divine Comedy and Out of Ireland and concludes that Koch updated one of the founding myths of Judeo-Christian belief, namely man’s damnation. Koch may not have written "Christian novels", as Vernay writes, yet he also sees in the last two of Koch’s novels discussed the writer’s expression of the need for the expiation of sins, spiritual distress and "the crisis in religion" (172). In his book-length study of Koch, Jean-François Vernay demonstrates with an assured critical hand how some of his novels owe a lot to certain classic hypotexts (or pre-texts that served as models), ancient epics such as for example, The Reincarnation of Rama (an Indonesian religious play), or Dante’s Divine Comedy, and how reality is and always will be a social and cultural construct: illusion and reality are thus constantly in an ambiguous relationship. He is right in discovering a sense of bovarysme in the novels discussed, as well as "an undeniable postcolonial dimension, which challenges the Eurocentric perspective on Australia" (174). It is owing to his fine in-depth study of Christopher Koch’s literary oeuvre that we now have a much needed book-length critical study of his work. For over a decade, Koch’s oeuvre has fallen from literary grace in Australia – due to his alleged conservatism, anti-postmodernism and even male chauvinistic treatment of certain women characters. Regardless of this, Koch is a great Australian literary author, despite some of the shortcomings that Vernay does not sweep under the carpet; rather, he makes an excellent scholarly case for Christopher Koch’s writing.

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Works Cited Jean-François Vernay: Water from the Moon: Illusion and Reality in the Works of Australian Novelist Christopher Koch. Youngstown, N.Y.: Cambria Press, 2007.

CHAPTER SEVEN OUYANG YU’S THE KINGSBURY TALES

Why do Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales still represent an appropriate twentieth-century narrative framework with the Australian literati? Christina Stead, with her book The Salzburg Tales (1934), only very loosely followed Chaucer’s structure, where the ‘pilgrims’ attending the Salzburg Summer Festival are in real and mythical settings motivated by their various social backgrounds, cultural and musical tastes. Now, once again, there is Ouyang Yu with his “verse novel?” (15) The Kingsbury Tales and intercultural/transcultural travellers between China and Australia, a book that is “no match / For The Canterbury Tales” (15). Pilgrimages are always a good opportunity to bring together people from various walks of life, a cross-section of society, which is also the case with Yu’s multicultural and multi-ethnic Melbourne, where he lives part of the year while away from his home country China. He is also the editor of Otherland, the only Chinese-language literary journal in Australia. The best known Chinese-Australian-Portuguese author to date, however, has been Brian Castro (e.g. Castro 2003). Almost each poem featured in Yu’s ‘tales’ juxtaposes China and Australia, their relations and the poet’s own life caught up in the precarious migrant web of time and place and explores the various characters in present-day Australia, wives, concubines, lawyers, diplomats, students, professors, factory workers, mental patients and foreign visitors, each from a colonial and post-colonial point of view, historical and non-historical figures from the time of the First Opium War (1840) to our very day. Ouyang Yu’s first programmatic poem in the collection makes it clear right at the beginning that the poet/ narrator is a cheeky and most versatile Chinese-Australian (or the other way around) trickster, whose art goes undisputed through the whole book: he chose the novel form to be written, “For novel readers / To get novel grant(s) / At the moment” (16). Perhaps the guess mentioned earlier is not all that unusual if one considers the fact that The Kingsbury Tales in Chaucer’s format, including the rhetoric, lowbrow and bawdy elements, are really the reflections of Ouyang Yu’s own life story, himself an intellectual, cultural (and political) pilgrim down

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under, which represents a cross-section of society and Chinese-Australian cultural relations. Cultural translation, transformation and the fact of being caught up between cultures are the main themes in The Kingsbury Tales: his intellectual estrangement in the new environment made him for a long time feel a total stranger, as he says in an interview, and he “had to kill /himself/ spiritually in order to gain a new life linguistically, culturally and spiritually”. The newly found freedoms in Australia and its democracy (which he through punning calls “demoncrazy”) soon made him disillusioned in the everyday routine of unfulfilled expectations and turned him into an angry poet, employing an acerbic, funny and very political poetic style, which most critics of his work have noted. Angriness can, however, also represent a new beginning and it has indeed given rise to his impressive literary production to date (poetry, fiction, non-fiction, literary translations into Chinese), which is unique in the contemporary Australian literary landscape. Yu came from China to Australia in 1991 to study Australian literature. He obtained a PhD from La Trobe University and established himself in Australia as a poet, fiction writer and translator who has received several literary prizes; as a translator of some of the major Australian texts into Chinese he thus acts as an important cultural mediator between the two countries. As a counterpart to the leading Australian cultural review Overland, he established Otherland, Australia’s first Chinese-English literary journal. He is a Professor of Australian literature and Director of Australian Studies centre in the English department at Wuhan University in China. As he lives between Melbourne and China, his dividedness is very central also to his literary experience. The poems are thus a literal (and literary) site of collision between the two cultures, Chinese and Australian. The language he uses clearly illuminates this process: funny and laden with suggestive sometimes cacophonic references, Yu uses Australian English to explore all the poetic potentials of the differences, similarities and parallels between Chinese and English in a distinctly Australian context, using many Chinese words as well. As the poet John Kinsella writes in his introduction to the collection, Yu creates a new language and new poetry altogether through his rhetoric of “devastating images”: “A new Australian poetry, a new Chinese poetry” (8). The poet wrestles with sexual desire and love, both poignantly enticing, the former sometimes brought to the perverse and Chaucerian bawdy (“Ms Cui’s Tale”, 31-2). The poet is also trying to deconstruct the negative (hetero)stereotypes that had been created in Australian literature, where they were essentially demonised, made look dirty and sinful: many Chinese names employed in the past contained the word “Sin” with the

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literal meaning of signifying sinful people, since they were not Christian people as opposed to the “heathen” Chinese. He takes as a starting-point for “Two Bulletin Tales” the 14/4/1888 short story entitled “Mr and Mrs Sin Fat”, published in the (“male”) Bushman’s Bible, The Bulletin, written by the colonial writer Edward Dyson. He does not see much change from then, however, himself going through the same kind of prejudice-based publishing (“female”) policy as he imagines the Chinese went through more than a hundred years ago: “But hang on and listen to my other male newspaper story that happens today / In which this female editor emails to say, in her response to the submission / Of something I wrote: ‘I’m afraid we can’t place this piece’ / I wonder if the then male editor of the male newspaper had said something similar / Or in a more honest Aussie manner: I’m sorry, ‘Mr Sin or Mr Fat / But I’m afraid we can’t place this piss as we are full (of shit) till the end of 1888’” (20). In “An Aboriginal Tale” (21-2) Yu Ouyang directs his rage over racism at the novels Capricornia and Poor Fellow my Country by Xavier Herbert, which he finds excruciatingly anti-Aboriginal in constructing the image of the ignoble savage: “Last night I thought of photocopying the pages where Suvitra / Is killed, raped and eaten by the Aborigines in Poor Fellow My Country / And mail them to him but, in the end, I gave up on the thought, putting the book away / Never to be read again” (22). The twelve clusters of ‘tales’ in the verse collection under review here (e.g. Historical Tales, Artists’ Tales, Philosophical Tales, Wuhan Tales, The Empire Tales), there are also Migrants’ Tales. These poems, which always contain clear political implications, reflect all the multi-ethnic diversity of Melbourne’s Kingsbury area: “In Kingsbury, English is not the only spoken language / Chinese, for example, is one of the many spoken, and written as well as read / Languages” (58). Ouyang Yu is throughout very funny, anti-consumerist, and as a person split between two countries and civilizations, at the same time anti- and pro-Australian and Chinese as well, seemingly accepting the best of both worlds. Clearly both can and do contribute. The first tale from Wuhan Tales speaks about the speaker’s own (intellectual) defection back to China from the Australian Western “demoncrazy”, because of his disappointment with some aspects of Australian “repressiveness” as regards the humanities (and scholars like himself who cannot get a proper job), as he claims in an interview. His poems (cf. also Yu 2005) are the reflections of a displaced poet who translates his life experience in two systems, a poet of the in-between, split between two (non)homes, where Home is stripped of its spatial dimension. In his poem “An Oz Tale”, which reads like a companion piece to A. D. Hope’s iconic poem “Australia”, a desert country from which

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“prophets come” as Hope would have it, Ouyang Yu describes Australia as “a land of mental darkness / Where the core values are metallic…, / a nonhome kept there for you to return to, again and again / Oz, Oz, Oz / Oi/ly, Oi/ly, Oi/ly” (96), a land where no prophet is in sight. Despite the stark accusations of Australia’s “mediocrity kept alive as a national treasure” (96), the poet still laments his departure and expresses yearning for the land every time he leaves it left behind: he dwells just as ambivalent in his affective allegiances to “her, him” as does Hope in his famous poem. Yu’s verse is all but light and easy on the senses: yet it makes one alert to the ethical and political ramifications of the contemporary Australian cultural condition. A powerful new Australian poetic, a read not be missed.

Works Cited Castro, Brian. Shanghai Dancing. Artarmon, NSW: Giramondo, 2003. Yu, Ouyang. Kingsbury Tales. Blackheath, NSW: Brandl & Schlesinger, 2008. —. Moon Over Melbourne and Other Poems. Melbourne: Papyrus Publishing, 2005.

CHAPTER EIGHT SLOVENIAN DIASPORIC LITERATURE IN AUSTRALIA AND ITS MAIN ACHIEVEMENTS

Slovenians first came to Australia in the middle of the nineteenth century, working on Austrian war ships on their journeys around the world, since Slovenia, as most of the other Central European countries, was part of the Habsburg and the later Austro-Hungarian Empire. They did not decide to settle there, despite the alluring sensational news of the Gold Rush in Victoria. In the period between the two world wars, some 10,000 Slovenians migrated to Australia. They were mostly people from the Primorska (the Slovenian Adriatic Littoral) region, which after the Great War became part of Italy. They wanted to avoid the strong Italianizing process in the area, and also find a better life, since the economic situation was extremely difficult because of the Great Depression. However, the main reasons for the migration of Slovenians to Australia after the Second World War were the changes in the socio-political system of the then socialist Yugoslavia Slovenian territory was part of, as well as the increasingly difficult economic situation in the country, which had resulted from rapid industrialization and de-agrarization. The number of Slovenian migrants living in Australia today is around 25,000, although with the second generation of migrants included, it may be as high as 30,000. Since the 1970s the massive immigration stream has vanished and even some return migration has occurred. Slovenian migrants have established a number of associations/clubs in all the major cities, they have their churches, papers, they broadcast on multicultural radio and, most importantly, they can learn the Slovenian language at the elementary and secondary level (cf. the Slovenian Australian Network, ). The literary creativity of Slovenian migrants in Australia started soon after the biggest influx of migration to Australia right after the Second World War at the beginning of the 1950s. It was then that the publication of the journal Misli (Thoughts) started (1952), where along with the discussion of religious issues and life among the migrants, the Slovenian

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Catholic priests first tried their hand at writing literary pieces—Rev. Klavdij Okorn and Rev. Bernard Ambrožiþ. Later laypersons started publishing their works in the journal, among them Neva Rudolf and Ivan Burnik-Legiša. Rudolf lived in Australia only a couple of years; however, with her collection of poems Južni Križ (The Southern Cross, 1958) and the collection of sketches, Avstralske ýrtice (Australian Sketches, 1958), though not published on Australian ground, she was one of the first literary authors among the Slovenians living in Australia. With the publication of the migrant magazine Vestnik (The Bulletin) in that period literary creativity received a new impetus and a new possibility of getting migrant literature published. Ivan Burnik-Legiša, despite his numerous collections of verse, has drawn critical attention only in the last two decades with his collections Jesensko Listje (Autumn Leaves, 1991), Za Pest Drobiža (For a Handful of Coins, 1993), Hrepenenje in Sanje (Yearning and Dreams, 1995), and Klic k Bogu: pesmi (The Call of God: Poems, 2008). In the poems he recollects his youth at home in Slovenia; it seems he has never come to accept the new Australian environment as his very own, while, clearly estranged, he does not feel at home in Slovenia either. The first book in the Slovenian language to be published in Australia was the collection of poems by Bert Pribac, Bronasti Tolkaþ (The Bronze Knocker, 1962). Among his numerous publications, the collections V kljunu Golobice (In the Beak of a Dove, 1973) and Prozorni Ljudje (Transparent People, 1991) have to be mentioned, and, more recently, Kiss Me Koštabona = Poljubi me, Koštabona: Ljubezenske Pesmi in Baladice (Kiss Me Koštabona: Love Poems and Short Ballads, 2003) which indicate that Pribac with his substantial quality literary output ranks along with Jože Žohar and Pavla Gruden among the very best Slovenian migrant poets in Australia (see Maver 1994). In 2000 the second edition of his first collection Bronasti Tolkaþ with some additional poems was published in Koper in Slovenia, the Northern part of the Istrian peninsula. In these the poet, both a Slovenian Istrian and an Australian, symbolically (and literally) returns to Slovenia, although he remains split between the two countries, Neither in this nor in the other homeland Fully anchored, Yet frozen in the love of both [ . . . ]. (Pribac, Bronasti Tolkaþ: 199; my translation)

Pribac can be placed very high among Slovenian poets writing in Australia. It is true that his early work is characterized by a somewhat

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Baroque language, coupled with the typical migrant nostalgia and longing for home. However, he quickly outgrew this early apprentice stage to mature into a subtle Impressionist poet of his native Slovenian Istria along the Adriatic Sea and his “new” second homeland, Australia. He can for this reason also be called a poet of two homelands, who feels at home both in Slovenia and in Australia, who uses in his verse images taken from both lands and whose poetry transcends the borders of space and time to address generally valid issues. Pribac, who has now permanently moved back to Slovenia, has also written a number of essays on the literary productivity of Slovenian migrants in Australia and was instrumental in bringing to publication various recent translations from Australian verse into Slovenian (Pribac 2003). Together with Jože Žohar, Danijela Hliš and Jože ýuješ, Bert Pribac was a co-founder of SALUK (1983), the Slovenian-Australia Literary and Cultural Circle, which was founded as a natural outgrowth of the literary magazine Svobodni Razgovori (see Suša 1996 and 1999). This magazine, established in 1982 by the energetic editor Pavla Gruden, was a natural Slovenian literary response to Naš List, a literary journal of Yugoslav migrant writers in Australia and New Zealand. SALUK gathered most literary Slovenians in Australia, but its foremost merit was that it brought its exponents during the 1980s into close contact with their Slovenian counterparts, resulting in numerous publications of Slovenian migrant authors in Slovenia and several organized reading tours. There were three major literary anthologies published during that time by SIM, the Slovenian Emigrant Association from Ljubljana, which featured fictional and verse works by the authors gathered in SALUK: Zbornik Avstralskih Slovencev (An Anthology of Australian Slovenians, 1985), Zbornik Avstralskih Slovencev (An Anthology of Australian Slovenians, 1988), and Lipa Šumi med Evkalipti (The Lime-tree Rustles among the Eucalypts, 1990). Pavla Gruden, along with her important work as editor, published a number of poems both in English and Slovenian. Her poetic strength can especially be seen in her collection of haiku verse Snubljenje Duha (1994; Courting the Mind). She reveals herself as a subtle poet of this originally Japanese epigrammatic verse, which helps her to depict her migrant experience in Australia (see Jurak 1997). Australia is no longer conceived as a foreign land but rather as a terra felix, which may offer migrants refuge, showing them the way out of the controversies of the modern world: Softly the Southern Cross Shows the way to the shipwrecked –

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Her contemplative stance and carpe diem approach speak in favour of a harmony between Nature and Man. Pavla Gruden’s recent book of verse published in Slovenia is titled Ljubezen pod Džakarando (Love under the Jacaranda Tree, 2002). The group of migrant poets include the interesting but little published poet Peter Košak – Iskanje (Search, 1982), Ko Misel Sreþa Misel (When a Thought Meets Another Thought, 2006, see Gregoriþ 2006), Cilka Žagar, Vika Gajšek, Ivanka Sluga-Škof, Marjan Štravs – Pesmi iz Pradavnine (Poems from Ancient Times, 1993), Ivan Žigon, Danica Petriþ, Ivan Lapuh, Ciril Setniþar, Caroline Tomašiþ, Ivan Kobal, Draga Gelt, Marcela Bole, Rev. Tone Gorjup, and others. Jože Žohar deserves special attention, for he belongs among the best of Slovenian poets in Australia. His collection of verse Aurora Australis (1990) was the first book by a Slovenian migrant from Australia to be published in Slovenia, and it received for its thematic and stylistic experimentation and innovations a very positive critical response (Maver 1992). In 1995 he published his second collection in Slovenia, Veku Bukev (To the Crying of Beeches), and in 2004 his third collection Obiranje Limon (LemonPicking) was published. As regards Slovenian migrant poetry written in English and sometimes bilingually, the poetry and prose of Danijela Hliš comes first to mind. She represents the first generation of migrants who write in English, with, for example, Michelle Leber and the deceased Irena Birsa as members of the second generation of Australians born to Slovenian parents. These writers are no longer preoccupied with such typical migrant themes as nostalgia for home or the problems of migrants trying to establish themselves in a linguistically and culturally different environment, for they take as themes existential issues, urban impressions and the like, though tainted with the typical Slovenian melancholy. Bilingualism fits into the framework of the Australian policy of multiculturalism and has thus changed the conditions of literary creativity, especially since the 1980s (Maver, 1999: 305-317). Hliš writes her sketches and poems mostly in the two languages. With her perfect command of English as a literary medium of expression, she is the first author of Slovenian origin who has managed to enter Australian multicultural anthologies and even the secondary school reader for Australian state schools, with her bilingual verse collection Whisper/Šepetanje (1991) and the collection in English Hideaway Serenade (1996). Poems in the latter book show her migrant experience as essentially ambivalent: she describes the Slovenia she had left behind not only nostalgically but also bitterly, and, on the other hand, she seems to have accepted Australia as

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the new homeland with which she emotionally identifies not only in the poems but also in the short stories, essays and sketches. As regards Slovenian migrant fiction, a great number of short prose or documentary writings have appeared in Australia and Slovenia: Rev. Bernard Ambrožiþ, Marijan Peršiþ – Per Aspera ad Astra (2001), Draga Gelt, Stanka Gregoriþ, Danica Petriþ, Ivanka Sluga-Škof, Pavla Gruden, Danijela Hliš, Ivan Žigon, Lojze Košorok, Aleksandra Ceferin, and many others. From among the longer prose works, the book by Ivan Kobal written in English as Men Who Built the Snowy (1982) appeared first, published later in the Slovenian language as Možje s Snowyja (1993). This essentially memoirist work is based on the author’s personal experience of participating in the construction of the hydro-energy system in the Snowy Mountains during 1954-1958 in which many migrants participated, including Slovenians. The book is a documentary testimony about this project, which according to Kobal, brought the migrants of various nationalities together to work after the Second World War in a harmonious union to build the new Australia. Cilka Žagar is probably the best known migrant fiction author, for two of her published novels were received very favourably: Barbara (1995) and Magdalena med ýrnimi Opali (Magdalena among Black Opals, 2000). She published the book Goodbye Riverbank (2000) in Australia, describing the various life stories of Australian Aborigines who she knows well from her work and life among the opal seekers at Lightning Ridge; she wrote about the Aborigines also in the book Growing Up Walgett (1990). Žagar’s novel Barbara, written originally in English and then translated into Slovenian, presents a chronicle of the Slovenian migrant community in Australia, from the construction of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Scheme to the current problems of the community. Through the eyes of the protagonist Barbara and her family in the fictitious town of Linden, one receives an insight into the sad and even cruel but also happy moments in the lives and times of Slovenian migrants living under the Southern Cross. Her novel Magdalena med ýrnimi Opali is about a split personality, the double ego of a single migrant person (Magda-Lena) and develops into a saga of a migrant family. While Magda takes care of the family, Lena looks back and tries to find ways to return to the past, when she was loved and she herself loved and still nourished the hope of a better future. Magdalena, two aspects of a personality, dualistically set asunder between the search for the material and the spiritual aspect of life, constantly seeks a perfect love that would provide safety and spiritual meaning as opposed to material things. Ivanka Sluga-Škof, along with many previously published articles, in

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1999 published a book of memoirs that range from her childhood in Slovenia to her life and cultural work among the Slovenians in Australia. From among the younger generation of writers Katarina Mahniþ should be mentioned, for she has for some years now been editing the journal Misli and has already received important recognition of her writing published in Slovenia, although she now again lives in Slovenia, where she also acts as a translator of Australian literature into the Slovenian language. In 2000 a book was published by Ivan Lapuh—Potok Treh Izvirov (The Brook of Three Sources, 2000), containing mostly sketches, some poems and a few aphorisms. There are two more books that should be mentioned in this regard, although they are written in English. The Second Landing (1993) by Victoria Zabukovec, who is not of Slovenian origin, is an historical, memoirist and part-documentary book based on the life experience of her Slovenian husband. Janko Majnik in his autobiographical memoir Diary of a Submariner (1996) describes his experience of the Second World War as a Yugoslav submariner, when, , not wanting to be captured by the Germans, he defected to the allies together with the crew and eventually migrated to Australia via Egypt (Maver, 1999: 75-84). Jože Žohar (b. 1945) has been living in Australia since 1968. As a contemporary Slovenian migrant poet, Žohar experiments with the potential of the Slovenian language and constantly tries to expand the borders of his world and language by transcending traditional poetic aesthetics and through linguistic self-awareness. Žohar’s verse written in Slovenian is characterized by linguistic experimentation using palindromes, alliterations, vocal colouring, puns, homonyms and ornamental adjectives, as well as lexical and syntactic play. Žohar, as a migrant in a new Englishspeaking environment, is interested in testing the very borders of Slovenian poetic (linguistic) expression. Experimentation is central to contemporary Slovenian “poetology” and to Žohar, in a way, it signifies even more: his personal freedom. He could also be described as a migrant poet from the Prekmurje region, for genius loci is of great importance in his verse: the Prekmurje region on the one hand (the plain and the hills of the Goriþko region in Slovenia bordering with Hungary and Austria), and Australia (the arid bush) on the other. Žohar constantly moves between the two locales and identifies with each of them increasingly in his poems. The fact that the poet writes about his Prekmurje experience is significant, because this experience is like the region itself, close to the archetypal, elementary folk tradition, and the typical melancholy, mostly flat Prekmurje landscape as the landscape of the mind. In all three collections of his poetry, an element that is present strongly is the specific geographical environment, which

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appears in a dual relation: on the one side the poet’s native Prekmurje and Goriþko, and on the other the Australian desert landscape, which he copositions throughout. He wishes to be at the same time “one in two, be there and be here” simultaneously, something he considers a special yet agitating privilege. Jože Žohar migrated to Australia in 1968 and published quite a few of his poems in the Slovenian press as well as the migrant press in Australia. But it was only in 1990 that his first collection of poems in the Slovenian language, Aurora Australis, appeared in Slovenia, which became an independent European country only in 1991, after the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia. In an interview, Žohar made it clear that he did not approve of the division into a physical and a spiritual migration, as “a physically displaced Slovenian is at the same time also a spiritually displaced Slovenian.” He chose exile primarily for social-economic and not for political reasons, unlike many of the Slovenian migrants who left immediately after the Second World War to go to Argentina, Canada, and also Australia. He describes his situation thus: To spend half of my life in a country that is so terribly remote and different from my mother country, to overcome all the migrant traumas and problems, to try to integrate into the foreignness and probably to live with homesickness, is to be an Australian, and still, especially to be a Slovenian. All of this must influence a migrant to make his world alive in quite a different manner. (Žohar 1990b)

In his verse Jože Žohar seems almost erotically attracted to Slovenia, his native land: I shall be in you for a very long time And you shall be in me the eternal serpentine. (Aurora Australis 11)

The crucial question for him seems to be how to reconcile the two lands in himself: he has merely become displaced and never really settled. Almost all of his poems are written in the Slovenian language, although his good command of English would certainly allow him to write good poetry in English as well. Slovenian, however, remains the language of his heart. Despite the displacement and dividedness that characterize Žohar’s Aurora Australis, he nonetheless deals with the migrant’s sense of estrangement in the new world, his search for a true mother country and,

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interestingly, a possible acceptance of the new land, Australia. In an earlier poem written and published in English (“Let’s Go Home”), after the initial description of the migrant’s suffering, the lines towards the end rather unexpectedly suggest an identification of the Sydney suburb Penrith with a new home. Home is capitalized and accepted by the speaker as a new reality: In our quiet, great desire, In hidden suffering we burn. Maybe after all Somehow, someday To the land of our birth We’ll finally return. But there’s the beauty Of the Blue Mountains that we have Yet to see, and to discover. . . . With new zeal From the sadness we shall sustain, And agree: “Let’s return to Penrith. Let us go Home! (Jože Žohar 1981)

Žohar’s collection of verse Aurora Australis features an artistically intruiguing poetic cycle entitled “Apple Poems”, written during a sleepless night in a motel in Orange in April of 1987. They transcend the typical migrant nostalgia and again reflect the poet’s erotic relationship with his homeland, tinged with thoughts about death. The external flight is replaced, and thus balanced, by the withdrawal into an “inner exile” that remains laden with existential anguish: “We are drowning, drowning, oppressed and twisted, deafened by the howl inside [...]” (Aurora Australis 25). These poems are characterized by unusual tropes, paradoxical comparisons and very private symbolism. An apple as the symbol of “Slovenianness” has turned into mere apple-skins, Australia having squeezed out all its juices of life. Elsewhere, only sour, sulphured wine remains, as in the poem “We Are Apple-Skins”. Žohar’s stream-ofconsciousness technique enables him to make ample use of private hermetic symbols which are difficult to decode. “Apple Poems” also point to the multiple alienation of the speaker of the poems (geographical, personal, social). The “black sister” who appears in some of the poems metaphorically stands for the night, death or a prostitute, with an ErosThanatos relationship firmly in place. The poet contends that there is no easy or relaxed erotic connection between man and woman, but rather a

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constant mutual self-denial and fear, a search for something else, a fear of spiritual chaos and hallucinations caused by separation. Frequent sound effects and typography, not devoid of semantic significance, show the poet’s postmodern penchant. It all betrayed me. Even the sun and the sky. Through a blind pane the black sister Stares black into my Eye BEFORE DAWN I have to wash my face With the blood of the sky, bloodless and restless For apple-trees, for apples [ . . . ] APPLE-TREES MIGRATE with overripe faces Into my dreams that are for me by the town of Orange. THE APPLE WIND from the apple ships Is breaking through the cracks of the tired windows. The galleon oars are rowing into darkness. Oh, Man, why are we so alien to each other, Why is there no Sybilla, no words among us? [ . . . ] WE ARE APPLE-SKINS and nothing can save us. The black sister squeezes us black Among the apples in the green press. (Aurora Australis 26)

The Eros-Thanatos relationship is clearly recognizable in the final stanzas of the twelve-poem cycle “Apple poems,” where night, death, the poet’s mistress, and by extension his homeland, all metaphorically merge into one: SATISFY ME, oh Night! Make me A statue, a beam, something That knows no nightmares and peaceful dreams. But you are growing pale, retreating from the room! Far behind the mountains you take off your clothes, The black robe, and you are white. You are hope. You are faith. (Aurora Australis 27)

The second part of Aurora Australis in particular shows the poet’s predilection for linguistic experimentation in the fields of Slovenian lexicon and syntax, which is difficult to render in English translation. He

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is, for example, fond of homonyms, synonyms, phonetic intensifications; he deftly uses onomatopoeia, occasionally adds alliterations, internal rhymes, assonance, interlocking and end-rhymes, and the like. The poetic cycle “Mourning Poems” is still tinged by the hue of sometimes pathetic migrant nostalgia. The speaker of these poems longs for a spiritual and physical néant and laments the fact that he shall forever try in vain to return home: Only you shall never sleep In these beds between the furrows, Your own with your people. You are too far. A disconnected joint. In vain searching for the way back. (Aurora Australis 66)

As a migrant poet in Australia Jože Žohar finds himself in a double exile; as an emigrant from his native country and as an artist, thus by definition an outsider in society at large. His verse has nevertheless managed, metaphorically, to span two continents, Europe and Australia. He has found a striking balance between his memories of the old country, Slovenia, and the experiences in the new country, Australia, with an emphasis on the characteristic Australian landscape, this paramount Australian literary trope. In contrast to many other migrant poets, there is no place for pathetic, maudlin and self-centred melancholy in Aurora Australis. The two elements causing schizoid displacement in his verse are geographical distance and the poet’s past. Hence his constant departures and returns create an impression of the transitoriness of life: Every time I come back, there are fewer warm hands, Ready to be shaken. And there are more and more of those Who cannot recall me. At least I know how I fade into nothingness [ . . . ] And southerly wind blows Over white bones. (Aurora Australis 40)

In his very first collection of poems, Aurora Australis, Jože Žohar states that he does not acknowledge the division between a “physical” and “spiritual” migration, since the two appear to him complementary, never separate. In his almost erotic link with not only his native Prekmurje, but with all of Slovenia, which is to remain in him as “the eternal serpentine”, he feels that the key question is how to reconcile within himself two

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countries. He became “dis-placed” and never finally “trans-placed”, remaining a cultural hybrid, half Slovenian and half Australian, which in his case represents a sort of homelessness (see Maver 1992; Jurak 1997). It should be stressed that in the different thematic clusters of this first collection he already reveals a gift for linguistic experimentation, which suggests an allied formal significance, reflecting his dividedness between the “old” and the “new” homeland (Suša 1999). The initial homely sentimentality is replaced by the existential anguish of a migrant and a person per se. Žohar’s second collection is called Veku Bukev (To the Crying of Beeches, 1995). This can mean a chronological definition of his youth spent among the beeches, but also crying after it; that is, an ode to a Proustian “time lost”, time spent among the reeds, poplars and beeches (see Maver 1995 and 2003). Geographical locale is again of prime importance in the book and it appears in the typical dichotomic relationship: the Prekmurje and the Australian bush country are constantly contrasted and juxtaposed. This second collection of the poet’s verse represents his attempt to identify Australia as his new home; yet Žohar remains caught “in between” and sings to the Australian “harem of camels in the desert, tombstones under the eucalypt trees, the waves broken on the shore, kangaroos, run away from bush fires” (Veku Bukev 29; my translation). Žohar revives alliterative verse, amply uses paronyms (words that are identical but have a different meaning in a changed context) and palindromes (that can be read forwards and backwards and may have the same or a different meaning). He amasses numerous homonyms, synonyms and uses onomatopoeia. However, the question remains: has Žohar really migrated? Certainly physically, but not also spiritually. As in his first collection Aurora Australis, Žohar still remains set asunder in the pain between Eros and Thanatos, between the erotic experience of the homeland, Slovenia, and a wish for a physical and spiritual nothingness in the vicinity of death that can only bring “salvation”. This dichotomy also accounts for the poet’s ambivalent attitude towards his homeland, which on the one hand urges him to become erotically involved with it, and on the other, it makes him suffer, triggering off a wish for death because of the abandoned homeland. The poet’s dilemma is how to “reconcile” the two homelands, Slovenia and Australia, within himself? Indeed, he remains displaced and has never really completely migrated to the newly adopted land. An element that is very apparent in Žohar’s new collection is a specific geographic environment, which again appears in a typically dichotomous relationship: on the one hand there is the poet’s native Prekmurje and

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Goriþko, the river Mura, and on the other the Australian desert landscape. They are being constantly juxtaposed in his verse. In his melancholy, the poet is constantly returning home and at the same time biding farewell to it: he wants to be “one in the two, to be there and to be here,” which he finds a special privilege that especially excites him (Veku Bukev 9). However, it is not that he thus finds himself in a sort of homelessness and a schizophrenic divided position, he who describes himself as “an excited galley-slave between Scylla and Charybdis”? (Veku Bukev 29). Žohar’s displacement and geographic schizophrenia never become a self-centred, pathetic tearful lamentation and weeping. The poetic account of Žohar’s migrant experience is clearly enough set into the Slovenian-Australian context, although it could represent any migrant or exilic experience. A certain thematic development in the collection is represented by the poet’s Herakleitean preoccupation with the transience of everything, with the flow of time, which, in his view, runs in a circle, with the approaching of old age and, nonetheless, with the poet’s shame from his running away, from himself, “into a non-day, non-being” (Veku Bukev 21). The collection structurally consists of four cycles, each of which comprises several sections or units, which could only conditionally be called stanzas, for the poems are written in free verse, with occasional embracing and internal rhymes. Žohar’s linguistic experimental vein is also strongly present in Veku Bukev. Not only does he experiment with typography (for example, in the verse sections “a mar rama” and “mure erum”), sound colouring and ballad characteristics, but as one of the rare Slovenian poets he tries to revive the old Germanic alliterative verse, which is an important novelty in contemporary Slovenian poetry. Žohar uses rather sophisticated paronymes and palindromes. His experimentation with words, the changing of individual letters in them which completely changes the meaning, the poetic description of his stream-of-consciousness represent a significant development in contemporary Slovenian poetic expression. The surprising introduction of alliteration into contemporary Slovenian poetry is perhaps the result of Žohar’s knowledge and attachment to the Anglo-Saxon, Germanic accentual-syllabic metrical system, while the palindromic arrangement of letters and the search for new or similar meanings, lexical and syntactical experimentation, the accumulation of homonyms, synonyms and onomatopoeic sound colouring, places the poet among successful Slovenian (postmodern) verse experimenters. In the first poetic cycle of the collection Veku bukev titled “Emigrants” Žohar asks himself about the motives of Slovenian migrants to go and live in Australia “by the muddy rivers”, “in the snowy Mountains” or on the sugar cane plantations of Northern Queensland (Veku Bukev 6). He mentions

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the attraction of displacement, of leaving one’s homeland for an exotic land, but it should be pointed out that his puns and word games are practically impossible to translate into English. However, it remains true of Žohar’s descriptions: Nature is completely indifferent to the fate and life of an individual, a migrant – “the beeches in the Panonian marshes do not care” (Veku Bukev 6). The poet is “an erring figure,” the Prodigal Son who has to write his poems, odes to “the time of beeches that is no more”, which turn out to be elegies (Veku Bukev). The last part of this artistically effective cycle is partly surrealistic and full of painful awareness of approaching old age and passing away. The second cycle of the collection, “To the Time of Beeches”, establishes Žohar’s life paradox: “To grow there. To grow up here.” The poet tries to identify himself with the beech and to define himself by a series of very original metaphors. He suffers because of the separation from home, which is, however, not characterized only by nostalgia for time lost, but also by the wish to actively participate in the growth and development of the now independent homeland, Slovenia, “to witness the burgeoning of the land”. Žohar’s verse at times becomes painfully trapped in merciless nihilism: he merely sees living corpses around himself that travel through the day into a “non-day” (Veku bukev 21). The poem becomes an invisible apron string which ties the poet to this “eternally young woman”, the homeland (Veku Bukev 23). The cycle ends with two short typographic stanzas, which clearly express the poet’s allegiance and feelings: instead of “hare krishna”, Žohar cries out “mura mura” (Veku Bukev 25). “I Am in Between, I Am in Between”, the third cycle of the collection, is the longest one. The speaker suffers because he is split between the two countries, Slovenia and Australia, he is “in between”, “a mixture, a conglomerate of both, the blood of the blood of generations, departed beyond their boundaries” (Veku Bukev 35). He is aware of his flight that has found expression in “crying” from “the time of beeches”, which opens itself as a spiral and at the same time it closes and collapses within. The attitude of the poet towards his homeland is very telling: in his first collection the erotic man-woman relationship comes to the fore, while in Veku bukev it is complemented by the relationship (“old”) baby(“ancient”) mother. Biblical allusions represent another thematic novelty in Žohar’s collection – “I lay myself down on beech-nut, crucified I lay down on it” (Veku Bukev 39), and assume apocalyptic significance – “until the return of the Shaman who will be a snake” (Veku Bukev 39). Painful departures and returns characterize this third verse cycle. The collection is thematically and structurally concluded by the fourth cycle, “The Dry Shadow-time”, which is not set in the Australian setting

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by coincidence. This is the environment where the poet now lives, “the kind second home, surrounded by the power of oceans” (Veku Bukev 44). The cycle is actually dedicated to Australia, which in his eyes is a dry, deserted and empty “stolen continent” (Veku Bukev 45). There is a biblical allusion to the saviour – “him who shun the grave” (Veku Bukev 45), who is to return “from the sky”. But according to the poet, the saviour is not going to arrive there, “there will be no sky with clouds above the poor consumed by fire.” Žohar’s allegorical journey across the Australian desert countryside is described in a masterly manner. The ironic label “Lucky country” refers to the description of a kind of hell, where the Australian Aborigines live. They are identified with the land, which represents for them “a bowl of memory” and is no hell to them (Veku Bukev 47). Žohar envies them, for in contrast to him, the migrant, they are on their own piece of land and they feel at one with it, with “the land into which they are cursed” (Veku Bukev 47). How to win over time and transience in the dead, dried-out country? This question, too, is posed by the poet himself and he answers it by describing a metaphysical search in a love act between two people, who “pant into the sky and the earth, who hold back, prolong the moment” (Veku Bukev 48), with which they would at least for a moment experience this illusion. Just as the black Aborigine blows the memory of ancient times into his didgeridoo, the poet at the end of the poetic cycle cries out for darkness and water for the dried-out land. It should drink till it is drunk, which he himself also desires: to forget. Žohar’s most recent verse collection Obiranje Limon (2004; Lemonpicking) shows that he has remained true to his bold linguistic experimentation. As a migrant he constantly tests the borders of Slovenian poetic expression, and in this book he uses rhythmical prose for the first time, representing the dark inventory of the poet’s life via the metaphor of lemon-picking in Australia. This rhythmical prose or poems in prose also represent some sort of reconciliation with the anguish of a migrant abroad and the significance of “homeland,” reflected in “Wanderings” for an emigrant as “one of us, displaced, with home away from home. Jernej. Domen. The tenth child. And much more” (Obiranje Limon 49; my translation). Žohar intimately yet only partly accepts Australia as his new homeland, because as a migrant he remains constantly displaced and not fully trans placed (Maver 2004). He sees his life as an endless process of saying good-bye and claims that every time there is less of himself, whether departing from Slovenia or from Australia, where, as the prodigal son, he tries to find his peace, but also finds poetic inspiration. In “Complaints, Conciliations” he writes: Where you are now, there is June, when lemons and oranges become ripe,

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time when you leave all behind and everybody leaves you behind, because you want it like this for a change. For you know full well that among lemon-trees sensually rich poems happen too. Find yourself shelter among them. (Obiranje Limon 29; my translation)

The poet’s new collection of poems Obiranje Limon contains seven cycles or thematic clusters: “At Home! At Home! At Home! (The Two of Us)”, “Symposion”, “From Apple-tree Orchards”, “Indian Fragments”, “Lemon-picking”, “Nameless”, and “Word Anguishes”.. The first cycle represents the poet’s most explicit wording of his migrant experience and the overpowering sense of homelessness. “Lemon-picking” consists of lengthy poems in prose, and the cycle “Nameless” features puns and linguistic experimentation. Žohar’s poems in rhythmical prose are a new form for him, where he shows his essential dividedness between the two “Homes” in “Lemon-picking”: You feel: there is less of you with each new coming back. Anywhere you Go, you are merely saying good-bye. From everything and everybody. From bays and beaches. From the Blue Mountains, when they dwell cold in silence or when they Speak out in fire. From the house which is the home of Home. From eucalypts, magnolia. From fences and walls between wordless Neighbours. From new roots. Yes: from new roots. You feel: there is no more of you With each new coming back. You bite into a ripe lemon, Suck out its juice. The tongue pricks you. The tongue that is called [ . . . ]. You feel like crying. (Obiranje Limon 35; my translation)

In “Word Anguishes” there are poems consistently written in rhymed stanzas, which once again, as in his earlier work, establishes an erotic relationship with his homeland personified as a woman: Who is this coming back Down the muddy road? An old man To see his bride. (Obiranje Limon 65; my translation)

The cycle “Symposion” re-establishes the image of a dark “aurora australis” (Australian dawn). The themes and the allusions and elements taken from Greek mythology are, however, quite new for Žohar. The third cycle “From Apple-Tree Orchards” inspires the poet with melancholy nostalgia, not only for a home left behind (characterized by apple-trees) but also for one’s own lost youth at the realization of Man’s fragility and

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transience, which drives him to an Australian pub where he does not find solace, nor does he feel at home. The cycle titled “Indian Fragments” represents an important novelty in Žohar’s poetic opus, although certain references to Buddhism (or Hinduism in his most recent collection) can already be found in the collection Veku Bukev. In “Pilgrimages”, Man’s anguish at the realization of his own transience suddenly strikes the poet – a Man, a migrant, as Everyman and as a pilgrim through life – as less dense and pressing during his visits to India, for he seems to be able to find a way out of it in an after-life voyage and search for a new life after death: Scented flames, O, bright flames of cremation, Anoint the body that through you Offers itself to the gods. There is the time of search and migration. All the destinations and terminals are also the returns. (Obiranje Limon 18; my translation)

It is interesting that the speaker’s experience and thinking about life (abroad) ends with a certain projection into the future, into what is for him a more “neutral” locale and culture, India – not Slovenia and not Australia. India represents for him, physically and symbolically, “something inbetween”, the phrase he uses to describe himself in a previous collection, a Slovenian migrant to Australia (“Pilgrimages”, “For Indira” and “Vishnu”). Jože Žohar’s collection Obiranje Limon connects descriptions of Man’s existential anguish with questions of migration. Does the future culture/literature of the newly settled migrant in countries such as the United States of America, Canada, and Australia belong to the salad bowl mixture, ethnic mosaic, some transnational hybrid or a new fusion of various ethnic identities? Recently introduced new concepts, in addition to the already well-established multiculturalism, are polyvocality and hybridity. Homi Bhabha (1994) argues that the concept of hybridity as a form of cultural difference, while sometimes regarded as manipulative, allows the voices of the Other/migrant, the marginalized and the dominated to exist within the language of the dominant group whose voice is never fully in control. In recent theoretical debates diaspora and its writing have been connected with the constructed and transnational nature of identity formation, since the concept refers to both voluntary and involuntary migrations and movements. In the future, migrant/diasporic writing should be examined for how it represents “otherness” in a text and how it brings this otherness to bear on the actual experience of reading.

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Contemporary theory of diasporic literature perceives Home as several locales, liberated of the spatial concept of location, which is at the same time deeply embedded in the cultural memory of a migrant and her/his own personal biography. In Jože Žohar’s poetry dis-placement and transplacement and the fluid diasporic identity, as well as the changing position of the subject in the globalized world, show his contemporary, dynamic global view. The sense of movement in his verse underscores his themes. Considering the numerous – according to the bibliographical data of over a hundred published books collected by Milena Brgoþ (1996) – and increasingly noteworthy literary works by Slovenian migrants in Australia, at least two ideas for the future suggest themselves. Artistically, important works ought to be more adequately represented in the anthologies of the unified Slovenian literature within the so-called common Slovenian cultural space, a syntagm very rarely heard during the past years; and, second, literary critics and editors should try harder to publish and republish individual literary works, especially if they were previously published in Australia with success. With the increasing number of verse collections and books in prose published during the last years, the situation is improving, yet the status is far from satisfactory. As to the literary genres in Slovenian migrant writing, (confessional) poetry is by far predominant, followed by short fiction, biographical and documentarist fiction and, more recently, novels. Within the Slovenian migrant community there emerges the problem of the literary language, English, which is mastered fully by the second generation of authors – Michelle Leber and Irena Birsa – and by some representatives of the first generation of migrants to Australia – Bert Pribac, Pavla Gruden, Danijela Hliš, and several others. The most important body of migrant writing is, of course, still published in the Slovenian language, although works by the Slovenian migrant written in English (or bilingually), one may claim, also belong within the framework of Slovenian literary sensibility and creativity, a phenomenon that can be found also with some other migrantemitive European nations. Bilingualism (in collections of poems in English and Slovenian) results from a long-standing physical and spiritual displacement, which is why many migrants artistically and intimately experience Australia as their new or “second homeland”. Slovenian migrant experience has recently seen its first major literary expression (and film version) outside the Slovenian diaspora, in the novel by the Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan, The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1997). Flanagan took as the basis of his book the tragic life story of his wife Sonja, a Slovenian migrant who had arrived to live in Australia at an early age with her parents after the Second World War (see Jurak 2000).

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Slovenian migrant literature in Australia, despite its relatively short existence in comparison with that in the USA, deserves special mention and research due to its swift growth and artistic quality. Quite a few of its literati have by the beginning of the new millennium published independently their collections of poems or prose works in Australia, as well as in Slovenia, and they have seen a warm reception. On the other hand, the most productive and successful among them justifiably ask themselves why they have not been included in the most significant Slovenian literary anthologies and histories (and thus become “canonized”), in light of the publicly proclaimed artistic merit of their literary work. They do not wish to be pushed, in Slovenia too, into a kind of ghetto, in which some migrant writers still sometimes find themselves in the Australian “multicultural” environment. Many factors, among which artistic merit, are beyond doubt of major importance and speak in favour of including individual migrant works into the Slovenian literary canon. They frequently transcend the thematization of the Slovenian migrant experience in Australia and adopt a cosmopolitan existential stance which addresses readers internationally, in Slovenia and abroad. In the present processes of globalization, all migrant literature is most valuable and should not be treated separately or ghettoized, certainly not for the geographical “tyranny of distance” and even less so for its artistic merit, which in some instances is high indeed. This has been acknowledged also by nations much larger than Slovenia, with a considerable migrant body living abroad. Spiritual and physical dividedness in which many migrant authors have found themselves may even represent an advantage for artists, as, less burdened and with a greater critical (di)stance, they can reflect the world around them, the new migrant environment, and also the world they left behind “at home” in Slovenia. It is true, however, that their country of origin is also changing quickly and is no longer as it was when they left it. Slovenian migrant writers in Australia translate reality in two different systems, which is why their work can be regarded as an enrichment of both cultures, the source one and the target one: thus they emerge as “transcultural” writers in the best sense of the word, figuring both in the unified Slovenian cross-border cultural space worldwide and the Australian multicultural society. Their empowered literary voices and visions have pluralized and globalized Australian as well as Slovenian literary production.

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Works Cited Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Birsa-Škofic, Irena. Slovenians in Australia. Ed. Keith Simkin. Bundoora: Birsa and La Trobe University, 1994. Brgoþ, Milena. Opisna bibliografija slovenskega tiska v Avstraliji (An Annotated Bibliography of Slovenian Books and Periodicals Published in Australia). Melbourne: Brgoþ, 1996. Burnik-Legiša, Ivan. Klic k Bogu: pesmi (The Call of God: Poems). Adelaide: The Author, 2008. —. Hrepenenje in Sanje (Yearning and Dreams). Adelaide: The Author, 1995. —. Za Pest Drobiža (For a Handful of Coins). Adelaide: Slovenci južne Avstralije (The Slovenes of South Australia), 1993. —. Jesensko Listje (Autumn Leaves). Adelaide: The Author, 1991. Cimerman, Ivan (ed.). Lipa šumi Med Evkalipti (A Lime-Tree Rustles among the Eucalypts). Ljubljana: SIM and SALUK, 1990. Flanagan, Richard. The Sound of One Hand Clapping. Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 1997. Gregoriþ, Stanka. “Pesniška zbirka Petra Košaka” (“A Verse Collection by Peter Košak”). Misli 55.5 (2006): 9. Gruden, Pavla. Ljubezen pod džakarando (Love under the Jacaranda Tree). Ljubljana. Prešernova Družba, 2002. —. Snubljenje Duha (Courting the Mind). Ljubljana: SIM, 1994. Hliš, Danijela. Hideaway Serenade. Kings Meadows, Tasmania: Silvereve, 1996. —. Whisper/Šepetanje. Wollongong, NSW: Five Islands P, 1991. Jurak, Mirko. “Slovene Migrants in Richard Flanagan’s Novel The Sound of One Hand Clapping”. Essays on Australian and Canadian Literature. Ed. Mirko Jurak and Igor Maver. Ljubljana: ZIFF, 2000, 107-118. —. “Slovene Poetry in Australia: From Terra Incognita to Terra Felix”. Acta Neophilolgica 19.1-2 (1997): 59-67. —. “Poetry Written by the Slovene Immigrants in Australia: Types of Imagery from the Old and the New Country”. Australian Papers. Ed. Mirko Jurak. Ljubljana: Filozofska fakulteta, 1983, 55-61. Kobal, Ivan. Možje s Snowyja (Men Who Built the Snowy). Gorica: Goriška Mohorjeva Družba, 1993. —. Men Who Built the Snowy: Men without Women. Newtown, NSW: The Saturday Centre, 1982. Košak, Peter. Ko Misel Sreþa Misel (When a Thought Meets Another

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Thought). Maribor: Samozaložba Stanka Gregoriþ, 2006. —. Iskanje (The Search). Melbourne: The Author, 1982. Lapuh, Ivan. Potok Treh Izvirov (The Brook of Three Sources). Melbourne: The Author, 2000. Majnik, Janko. Diary of a Submariner. Inglewood: Asgard, 1996. Maver, Igor. “Slovene Immigrant Literature in Australia: Jože Žohar’s Aurora Australis”. The Making of a Pluralist Australia 1950-1990. Ed. Werner Senn and Giovanna Capone. Bern: Lang, 1992, 161-168. —. “The Mediterranean in Mind: Bert Pribac, a Slovene Poet in Australia”. Westerly 39.4 (1994): 123-129. —. “Zbirka Veku Bukev ali oda izgubljenemu þasu, þasu med bukvami, topoli in obmurskim trstiþjem” (“The Crying of Beeches”). Veku Bukev. Jože Žohar. Murska Sobota: Pomurska Založba, 1995, 52-57. —. “Literarno Ustvarjanje Avstralskih Slovencev v Angleškem Jeziku” (“The Literary Creativity of Australian Slovenians in English”). Slovenska IzseljenskaKnjiževnost: Evropa, Avstralija, Azija. Ed. Janja Žitnik and Helga Glušiþ. Ljubljana: ZRC SAZU, 1999, 305-317. —. “Four Recent Slovene Migrant Novels in English”. Contemporary Australian Literature between Europe and Australia. Sydney: University of Sydney, Sydney Studies in Society and Culture No 18. Nottingham: Shoestring Press, 1999, 75-84. —. “Slovene Immigrant Literature in Australia: Jože Žohar’s Aurora Australis”. The Making of a Pluralist Australia, 1950-1990: Selected Papers from the Inaugural EASA Conference, 1991. Ed. W. Senn and G. Capone. New York: Peter Lang Verlag, 1992, 161-168. —. “Slovene Migrant Literature in Australia”. Acta Neophilologica 35.1-2 (2002): 5-11. —. “Jože Žohar, Izseljenski Pesnik med Prekmurjem in Avstralijo” (“Jože Žohar, a Migrant Poet between the Prekmurje and Australia”). Sezonstvo in Izseljenstvo v Panonskem Prostoru/Seasonal Work and Emigration in the Panonian Space. Ed. Marina Lukšiþ-Hacin. Migracije 4. Ljubljana: ZRC SAZU, 2003, 423-428. —. “Jože Žohar, Slovenski Izseljenski Pesnik med Prekmurjem in Avstralijo” (“Jože Žohar, a Slovenian Migrant Poet between the Prekmurje and Australia”). Obiranje Limon. Jože Žohar. Ljubljana: Cankarjeva Založba, 2004, 71-75. Peršiþ, Marijan. Na Usodnem Razpotju: Per Aspera ad A(u)stra)(lia), (At the Fatal Crossroads: Per Aspera ad A(u)stra(lia)). Ljubljana: SIM, 2001. Prešeren, Jože et al., eds. Zbornik Avstralskih Slovencev (Anthology of Australian Slovenes). Ljubljana: SIM; Sydney: Slovenian-Australian

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Literary & Art Circle, 1988. Pribac, Bert. Kiss Me, Koštabona = Poljubi me, Koštabona: Ljubezenske Pesmi in Baladice. Koper: Capris, 2003. —. “Književnost Avstralskih Slovencev” (“The Literature of Australian Slovenians”). Glasnik Slovenske Matice 27-28.1-2 (2003-2004): 68-75. —. Bronasti Tolkaþ (The Bronze Knocker). 1962. 2nd rev. ed. Koper: Capris, 2000. —. Prozorni Ljudje (Transparent People). Ljubljana: MK, 1991. —. V kljunu Golobice (In the Beak of a Dove). Canberra: The Lapwing Press, 1973. —. Lepa Vida or the Poems from the Two Homelands. Canberra: The Lapwing Private Press, 1987. Rudolf, Neva. Južni Križ (The Southern Cross). Trieste: The Author, 1958. —. Avstralske ýrtice (Australian Sketches). Trieste: The Author, 1958. Slovenian-Australian Literary and Art Circle. Zbornik Avstralskih Slovencev. Ljubljana: SIM; Sydney: SALUK, 1985. Sluga-Škof, Ivanka. Skozi Ogenj in Pepel (Through Fire and Ashes). Ljubljana: SIM, 1999. Suša, Barbara. “Literarno ustvarjanje Slovencev v Avstraliji v slovenskem jeziku: Jože Žohar” (“Literary Creativity of Slovenians in Australia in the Slovenian Language: Jože Žohar”). Slovenska Izseljenska Književnost, Evropa, Avstralija, Azija. Ed. J. Žitnik and Helga Glušiþ. Ljubljana: ZRC SAZU, 1999, 267-303. —. “The Slovenian Language among the Slovenians in Australia”. Ethnic Literature and Culture in the U.S.A., Canada and Australia. Ed. Igor Maver. Frankfurt: P. Lang Verlag, 1996, 295-298. Zabukovec, Victoria. The Second Landing. Adelaide: Anchorage, 1993. Žagar, Cilka. Goodbye Riverbank. Broome, WA: Magabala, 2000. —. Magdalena med ýrnimi Opali (Magdalene among Black Opals). Ljubljana: MK, 2000. —. Barbara. Celje: Mohorjeva Družba, 1995. —. Growing Up Walgett. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1990. Žohar, Jože. Obiranje Limon (Lemon-Picking). Ljubljana: Cankarjeva založba, 2004. —. Veku Bukev (To the Crying of Beeches). Murska Sobota: Pomurska založba, 1995. —. Aurora Australis. Ljubljana: Mladinska Knjiga, 1990a. —. “Emotions Exposed to Draught Are Just Fine, They Will Not Catch Cold”. Interviewed by Milan Vincetiþ. Trans. Igor Maver. Delo. Ljubljana: Književni Listi: 1990b, 7.

CHAPTER NINE AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND THROUGH THE EYES OF AN EARLY SLOVENIAN TRAVEL WRITER

Alma Karlin (1889-1950) between the two world wars searched for the “otherness” of life experience far beyond her homeland in the Slovenian territory through her travels and writing. The literary aspirations of this determined and independent woman were in some ways ahead of her time and its constrictive social conventions. She tried to go beyond the limitations of her gender and nationality. Karlin set off to seek new opportunities and sources of inspiration outside her native land and cultural context, i.e. the Slovenian lands within the Kingdom of Slovenians, Croats and Serbs, later officially called the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, established immediately after the Great War. Alma Karlin, a fragile young woman, “a being of the female sex”, as she called herself, embarked on a shoe-string journey around the world all on her own in 1919, with New Zealand as “the farthest point of /her/entire journey, with even Japan closer to home”. The journey was to last three years but was extended to over eight years, until 1927 (Karlin 1930a). The travel account and ethnographical study of Karlin’s journey was written and published to great international acclaim in German at the end of 1929 and is dated 1930: Die Einsame Weltreise, Tragödie einer Frau (Solitary Journey, the Tragedy of a Woman). It describes her journey from Slovenia to the various parts of the Americas, the Far East, Australia, New Zealand and the Fiji Islands. It was translated from German into English by Emile Burns and was published in London in 1933 by Victor Gollancz only three years after its original publication, under the title Odyssey of a Lonely Woman. In 1930 the book Im Banne der Südsee (Karlin 1930b) followed, describing her journey from Hong Kong to Australia and the Fiji islands, ending with the description of her leaving New Guinea and the Melanesian and the Micronesian islands of the South Pacific and her journey back home through South East Asia. “Among the earliest European labels applied to the Pacific region were the ‘South Seas’ or the ‘South Sea

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Islands’: these terms, coined by late eighteenth-century European explorers, became synonymous with Romantic conceptions of the Pacific as a utopian paradise” (Hau’ofa). Such was also Karlin’s preconceived view of this vast area, and after the Second World War the term “South Pacific” became in a similar vein popularized through James Michener’s 1946 Tales of the South Pacific, partly adapted into a very successful musical and film called South Pacific, which is according to Hau’ofa, in fact, misleading as far as the diversity of the geocultural identities subsumed by it are concerned. The same part of the journey is described in Karlin’s travel book Erlebte Welt (The Experienced World), which is based exclusively on the Asian leg of the travel around the world and describes her return journey from Indonesia back to the town of Celje in Slovenia. It was published in German in 1933 and contains insightful commentaries on the life of women in these countries, which helped to forge new, different views of the lives of non-European women living overseas. The only novel by Karlin, however, which takes place in the South Pacific on the island of Vanikoro, is entitled Vier Maedchen im Schicksalswind (Four Girls in the Wind of Destiny, 1926), featuring a British governor whose family lives in Australia, South-East of New Guinea, and four girls, one of whom is Australian, who live on this remote island. Like the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead, Karlin was particularly interested in the lives of Aboriginal women in the South Pacific islands, and generally the life of native people. To Karlin, however, sexuality was far less important than to Mead, who with her studies in the 1920s, when Karlin was travelling through the islands but never met Mead, paved the way to the sexual revolution by positing the cultural construction of sexuality (e.g. Coming of Age in Samoa, 1928). Karlin, on the other hand, is in her writings convinced that cannibalism was then still practiced on these islands, a view not shared by many scholars. Unlike Mead, she is more interested in the parapsychological phenomena and the various charms used by the natives. Describing life in the Fiji islands, she mentions an anecdote that “in the tradition of these aborigines the toughest meat they had ever eaten were the soles of the missionary Baker: when they had prepared his body for a cannibal feast they left his sandals on his feet believing them to be a part of his body, yet they found them undigestible” (Stanonik). Alma Maximiliana Karlin has been relatively unknown in the Slovenian cultural space, with two major monographs on her life and work appearing only recently (Jezernik; Trnovec). The reasons for Karlin's public scant or downright non-presence in Slovenia after the war all the way until the 1990s, however, can be sought in several directions. For one

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thing, she was a German-speaking person, not uncommon for the Slovenian bourgeoisie of the early twentieth century. This however was problematic right after the Second World War in the new social order of Socialist Yugoslavia, where Slovenia became one of the constitutive federative republics, despite the fact that Karlin actively collaborated with the Partisan Resistance Struggle during the war and was explicitly anti-Nazioriented. Alma Karlin was born in the Slovenian town of Celje (German Cilli) in 1889. Her father was an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, who died when she was very young, and her mother the daughter of a Slovenian notary in Celje. Although they were both Slovenian, they were state officials until the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and spoke German at home, which is why Alma considered German as her mother tongue and all of her books are written in German. She could, of course, understand and speak some Slovenian from her childhood on, but she really saw herself as part of the German-speaking cultural context also between the two world wars, which was not unusual for the Eastern part of the country, the Štajerska region. Karlin’s father originally came from a small hamlet near Rogaška Slatina, where Alma was also born, and rose to the rank of a major in the Austro-Hungarian army. Alma studied French and English in Gorica (today’s Gorizia in Italy) and Graz and at an early age, in 1913, went to London to study and work as a translator in an office in Regent Street. She also became a member of the British Theosophical Society. She met there a young Chinese man Hsi Sing Jung Lung, who asked her to marry him. She took him to Celje where her mother was not very pleased with her daughter’s choice and also she herself started to find him too indecisive, so she gave up the idea of marriage. Back in England in 1914 as a German-speaking person originating from Austro-Hungary, she started to feel a persona non grata and moved to Sweden and then Norway. After the war she decided to embark on her ‘solitary journey’ around the world, including North and South America, Asia, Australia and the Pacific Islands with New Zealand. Her impressive literary opus consists of more than twenty books (travelogues and fiction) written in German, many novellas, sketches, poems and drawings, as well as articles in English she wrote during her voyage around the world, including some Australian and New Zealand newspapers. She wrote about her experiences for various papers, the German paper of the German-speaking community in Celje, Cillier Zeitung, and certain German and Austrian newspapers in the period between the two wars. After her return to Celje in 1927 she lived there until her death in 1950 with her German friend Thea Schreiber Gamelin. The fact remains that because of her writing in German she is certainly

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not known in the English-speaking world, although she can be counted among the best early twentieth-century women travellers writing in German (Šlibar). A woman of many stark contrasts, who, for example, believed in the superiority of the white race (Trnovec), Alma Karlin was cynical towards everything, including herself, and possessed an uncanny British-like ability to laugh at herself in most dire straits. After the first publication of her book she had a series of lectures during 1930 and 1933 throughout Germany, Austria and Switzerland and her popularity was such that fan clubs of Alma Karlin were established. Her book Solitary Journey was published in Slovenian translation only in 1969 and again only recently, in 2006 (Karlin 1930, trans. into Slovenian in 1969 and 2006). The Experienced World came out for the first time only in 2006. She was a German-speaking Slovenian woman from Celje, which sealed her fate at home in the socialist post-World War II era, as she lived and died in relative poverty, away from the public eye. Along with the travel book The Experienced World, Alma Karlin also wrote several novels and short stories based on her experiences in China, Siam and Japan. They were published in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s and were extremely successful. Some examples are O Joni San: Two Novels from Japan, Little Siamese, the earlier mentioned Four Girls in the Wind of Destiny, and above all Twinkling in the Dark. In November 1933 even the New York Times reported briefly about the publication of Karlin’s travelogue trilogy. While they commend the travel she undertook all by herself, they nonetheless criticize her views of the local people and ultimately herself: Despite our profound admiration for this writer we cannot avoid the impression that her trip around the world, in its manner unprecedented for a woman, would have brought her far more satisfaction and happiness if she had not had to struggle for her living from the very beginning, had she not met with disappointments constantly and everywhere. (qtd. in Trnovec 55)

Karlin’s currently little known travel book The Experienced World (originally published in German as Erlebte Welt), which is also an ethnological study, is based on her journey which was to begin in Trieste right after the Great War in 1919, from where she was going to board a Lloyd Triestino vessel to Japan. Setting off for Trieste, Karlin, however, suddenly changed her mind and decided to start her single woman’s round-the-world journey in Genoa instead and first sailed to South America – Peru, Panama, Ecuador – then to The United States, Hawai’i, Japan, China, Formosa/Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and New

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Guinea, where she reached the frontier of the then known world and allegedly barely escaped the cannibals. The travel book is based on her return journey home from Asia through Indonesia, Singapore, Burma/Myanmar and India, the last long stay of her journey, where she visited Calcutta, Benares, Agra, Delhi, Lahore, Madras and Karachi. From there she headed home to see her dying mother via Aden, Port Sudan, Port Said, Venice and Trieste and arrived home to Celje in 1929, ill and impoverished.

In the Antipodes Karlin describes her visit of New Zealand in 1924 in her travel-book Solitary Journey (1930). The last part of the book (fourteen chapters) is dedicated to the description of her experiences in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific islands of Fiji. In Hong Kong she bought a ship ticket to Australia where she landed at the end of February 1924, travelling through and stopping in the Philippines, Borneo and Thursday Island. From there she wanted to get a boat directly to Port Moresby in New Guinea, formerly Kaiser Wilhelms Land, which Australia gained from the German Reich after the Great War “and was more of a burden than an asset to it”. Yet this time was not successful in finding one that would take this frail woman on board, as it was easier to do it from Sydney: “If I were a man, it would probably be all right, but being a woman!” (Solitary Journey 376). She describes oyster-growing and pearl divers: “They practically do not do any fishing, yet oyster plantations attract people from North and South and occasionally there are three thousand little boats circling around. Where the place with its already Australian shops is placed in the bay, it is still bearable, but whoever goes around the island in the main fishing season gets all the stench of rotting oysters right into one’s nose” (Solitary Journey 377). Karlin sailed through Darwin, Cairns and Townsville in Northern Queensland. She describes Townsville in very uncomplimentary terms as a wonderfully boring place, built in the typical English style. “A small town behind the coral reef with a view of the endless expanse of the greatest ocean on earth is practically without the hinterland! Gossip, fog that often thickens into a soft rain, heat, loneliness. Brrr!” (Solitary Journey 378). The author is very complimentary about the White Australia policy and feels very strongly against mixed marriages, an explicitly racially discriminatory view, one that she herself declines eventually since, she claims, she has the utmost admiration for the Japanese, so she could not harbour “racial hatred” (Solitary Journey 380). Clearly, this has to be seen within the framework of the then colonialist and still very

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predominant racist views, which is how her ethnocentric and racist statements can be explained, although they represent a major drawback of her writing. After a stop in Brisbane, where she is attacked by the Brisbane mosquitoes, “downright lions”, she finally comes ashore in the Sydney harbour, where her passport is taken away and a thorough medical checkup is performed. Sydney was Alma Karlin’s first major stop in Australia, where she stayed in a tiny room for twelve and a half shillings a day. However, the friend of her Adelaide pen-friend, a Miss Elsie, with whose family she stayed, was a confirmed entomologist. They went shell-hunting and caught a cold, but as a result she was able to bring back home to Slovenia a number of dried-up bugs and shells which she distributed to various schools. There are still a number of her paintings of endemic Australian plants that have been preserved from 1924 to this day. In Sydney she visited museums, galleries, went to lectures, saw a koala and a kangaroo, a kookaburra, a cockatoo and a caraduck in the zoo, and made a trip to the Blue Mountains, then a few hours away from Sydney. She worked too, but because of the “Australia for Australians” policy she was not able to earn much and work as an intellectual, since she was a foreign citizen. Somebody suggested she should try to get aboard the missionary ship The Southern Cross, which leaves Auckland in April and goes all the way to the infamous Solomon Islands. She therefore decided to spend a fortnight in South Australia before setting off for New Zealand. On the train she listened to the two ladies talking about the harvest, rain and crop, but she angrily concluded: “Oh, just one state was right – New South Wales. Australians are such confirmed local patriots that, in order to satisfy their love of their hometown, establish the capital city in all those places that it even does not belong, where it would not work and where you, to this day, can only find the founding stones…” (Solitary Journey 386). Karlin describes Melbourne in 1924 as Manchester, only with more sun, thus as very English, a place where she feels at home. Upon her arrival in Adelaide she found her pen-friend, a Miss Annie W., who lived at the Fullerton Estate and took Karlin to be interviewed by the Adelaide paper The Register, where she also contributed after this first meeting and earned some money from it. She was catapulted into “fame”, as she calls it. She is aware of the fact that the society of women she met in Melbourne was a society of liberated women’s rights group and she consequently described the life of Australian Aboriginal women in these terms: Generally women in the tribes are completely neglected. Men go fishing and hunt deer, while she has to go with a stick from one tree root to the other and dig up fat worms with which she feeds herself. If a man is

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In the Adelaide paper The Register an article/interview about Alma Karlin was published on the Women’s Page under the title “From Lapland to Peru” by Elizabeth Leigh on 22 April 1924. Few women in the world have had such experiences as Miss A. M. Karlin, a little lady from Yugo-Slavia, who arrived in Adelaide the other day on her way round the habitable globe. Novelist, journalist, botanist, and archaeologist Miss Karlin has set out in the spirit of Marco Polo to discover what may be known of the world. In five years she has seen the midnight sun in Lapland, has ventured alone up the Andes, and interviewed head hunters in Formosa…. (Leigh)

She is further introduced by the author as a woman who “has travelled alone, without money to speak of, and equipped only with a mastery of ten languages; an ability to earn her own living by teaching, translation and journalism; and a courage that is truly unconquerable” (Leigh). In Yugo-Slavia, far away, Miss Karlin possesses, like anyone else, a home and a banking account, but, under the present conditions of exchange, no money is allowed to leave the country, and the proceeds of her journalistic work there is allotted to indigest authors and journalists among her compatriots, so that in her journeys round the world she literally has to work her own way. “I would never advise any woman to do it”, she says, however: the world is too uncivilized. Only in Europe and in Australia it is quite safe; and travelling is very lonely. (Leigh)

From Adelaide and Melbourne she headed for New Zealand to Wellington, made a botanical album, travelled through Aotearoa and in Auckland in The Auckland Star an article was published about her in 1924. Karlin begins the description of her arrival in Wellington where she first saw the beautiful buildings of the city but the customs official did not let her off the ship, for on the ship’s list it was written she was British, but the passport said the Kingdom of SHS, “which had never even been heard of down there” (Solitary Journey 392). After changing the money and thus losing her savings almost completely, for she was not able to use her credit letter in Japanese yen, she was finally helped by the two Quaker ladies who worked in the editorial office of the Domino Paper (perhaps she had in mind the Dominion Post?) and the Evening Post who intervened so that

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the bank paid Karlin the sum stated on the credit letter. As there was a strike on, she was unable to go to Auckland immediately, so she found refuge in a Quaker dormitory “high on a clearing of one of the hills surrounding Wellington. Until the Kelburn suburb, the last stop, one took the mountain railway and as one reached the top a magnificent view opened up…” (Solitary Journey 394). Karlin compares New Zealanders to Australians and in her experience Australians wanted to sever links with Britain, at the same time making fun of the British even considering themselves superior to them, whereas “New Zealand is still an English baby, far from its mother’s breast, thus being a little spoiled. New Zealanders nurture a blind kind of love for their home country (England?) which is touching, although sometimes even unpleasant. … New Zealanders order all the goods from England, they imitate, they feel for the life of each individual member of the royal family and they are really much more British than the British themselves” (Solitary Journey 394). Karlin describes a kind of inferiority, a colonial cultural cringe complex of the then New Zealanders and she is clearly quite negative about them, because they were “much more hostile towards the Germans, which made my travel there more difficult” (Solitary Journey 394). Nonetheless, Karlin enjoyed Wellington and was somewhat sorry to leave for Auckland. Describing in detail the special flora and fauna and the landscape, she arrived to the unusually cold Auckland at the end of April 1924, where she first enjoyed the beautiful buildings, rich vegetation and the bridge linking the two parts of the city. Finding accommodation in the Catholic dormitory, she then met a Miss Jones, the editor of the women’s pages of the Auckland Star. Interested in the New Zealand fauna, she wrote to a famous botanist, whom she describes in the book as a Mr P, but her data are perhaps wrong on this point, for during 1915-1925 the Mayor of Auckland was one James Gunson, before that, however, during 1911-1915 the Mayor was Christopher Parr. Karlin must have had in mind James Gunson, who, according to the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (wwww.dnzb.govt.nz) served as Mayor of Auckland until 1925, so Karlin may have met him. As regards his alleged botanical interests, it was his Methodist wife (Jessie Helen Wiseman) that was a keen amateur naturalist, and a member of the Forest and Bird Protection Society of New Zealand. Karlin avidly studied New Zealand plant life and she produced her own album of botany which is still preserved. While in Auckland, Alma Karlin also became acquainted with the Anglican priest, Reverend Coates and his wife, who offered her temporary lodgings. Then her life became very dynamic, since many newspapers became interested in her travel around the world: she became something of

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a celebrity reported upon by the press. She went on many trips across the island to give lectures and as a spokesperson of peace she was not insignificant, since she was considered a “German”, only a few years after the Great War (Takapuna, Henderson etc). She, for example, also describes a very bumpy ride by car to a lecture to the city of Henderson, where Alma Karlin hoped to find the Yugoslav immigrants, but at the last minute she decided not to go and see them: “I did not know which of the three languages (Slovenian, Croatian-Serbian, Macedonian, my note) they speak and if I would really be greeted with such great enthusiasm” (Solitary Journey 407). This just goes to show the deeply set uneasiness Karlin felt regarding her own fellow-countrymen, for she really belonged to the German-speaking cultural sphere, by the choice of her parents and not by virtue of her birth and ethnic origin,. She then speaks at length about the Maori tradition, for which she has the highest esteem. Her trip to Rotorua, Rotomahana Valley, Lake Tarawera and the model Maori thermal village of Whakarewarewa and Whangaroi in the very North of the Northern Island are indeed very vivid, but they do not go beyond a traditional tourist description of a new exotic place. Before setting off for Fiji, Karlin describes her “Auckland theosophical, Bahaic, Christian and Pagan friends” with great sympathy and is thankful for their help, including the financial one. Her book Solitary Journey ends with New Zealand and she announces the description of an even more adventurous experiences in the Pacific in the next book Im Banne der Südsee (The Spell of the South Sea, 1930). In 1931 Karlin also published Mystik der Südsee (The Mystique of the South Sea) about her trip in Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia, which is more centred on the indigenous gods, beliefs and lifestyle. From New Zealand Alma Karlin continued her journey in the South Sea and stopped in Fiji, New Caledonia, Vanuatu and the Solomon islands, the toughest part of her journey. She got malaria and while in the Solomon Islands she experienced several attacks of the malady. She visited the Australian Bougainville Island and various other smaller islands off the coast of New Guinea and wanted to get to Hollandia, the border area on the big island, despite warnings not to trust the men from the Wutong area and their canoe. However, she did just that. They attacked her during the journey and she supposedly saved herself by throwing a bottle of pepper at them. She met a judge in Hollandia that helped her and she travelled via several islands, the Sulawesi, and finally arrived to Java in Indonesia.

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Back Home through South East Asia Alma Karlin’s travelogue The Experienced World, subtitled “The Destiny of a Woman through Insulindia (i.e. the Malay peninsula and archipelago) and the Kingdom of the White Elephant, through the Wonderful World of India and through the Door of Tears”, begins in the second half of 1926 on the Moluccan islands in Indonesia, describing the spice island of Celebes, where she befriended a Dutch man on the way, who was “unlike the other two-legged creatures, who see in a woman only a female” (The Experienced World 23). There followed Bali and Java on her sea journey, where she particularly liked the city of Yogyakarta and the Borobudur temple built by the Hindoos that had migrated to Java in the past. On the other hand Karlin experienced severe poverty on Java, illness and also spiritual pangs for being no more able to publish her reportages in various German and Austrian newspapers. She, for example, asked several Javanese philosophers for help in trying to obtain a cheap room for rent, but they did not seem to pay much attention. Consequently, she criticizes them in the book for being only able to preach about the world’s love and help, while they were not ready to actually offer it when needed. At the close of 1926 Karlin sailed aboard a passenger ship along Sumatra and arrived in Singapore, where she enjoyed the Asian “wonders” (e.g. pepper, silk sarongs) and the Hindoo temple much more than in Java, even if, as she writes, just before her arrival they had to shoot a man-eating tiger that tried to get from the then sultanate Johor (Bahru) on the mainland to the Singapore island. She describes the Malays as carefree and is upon arrival forced to avoid the raging cholera. In Singapore she was practically broke but due to her knowledge of languages was able to get a job at the German Embassy and had lunch at the famous Raffles Hotel “despite /her/ ridiculous hat” (The Experienced World 67). On her train journey towards the kingdom of Siam through Penang, after some time working at the consulate in Singapore to earn money for the continuing journey by train, Karlin, with the eye of a keen ethnologist, was buying items for her collection to be taken home and describes all the little natural and cultural details of the Malays, the Chinese, the Indians, the Tamils, especially women, boarding the train in colourful saris or sarongs, or those working relentlessly in the paddy fields. Her sympathy and almost feminist sensitivity are clear in the description of a Siamese woman when they reach Southern Siam: There the first Siamese woman entered. She looked more Asian than the Malay women, gentle and tiny, with naked knees, she had a panung wrapped around her waist, gathered in short trousers to her knees which

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In the Venice of the East, Bangkok, she found lodgings with the missionary couple and started to explore “the land of the white elephants”. Siam (today’s Thailand). This features importantly in Karlin’s literary oeuvre, as she produced a novel several years after her travel through Siam, Twinkling in the Dark, published in 1933 in Leipzig. In it the critics particularly appreciated her descriptions of the melting pot of races, mixed marriages between the Europeans and the Siamese and praised the powerful literary images of Siamese women, e.g. her fictional character Princess Tup Tim. Karlin saw most of Siam, including Chiang Mai in the North and the old capital of Ayutthaya in the centre of the country and continued by train to Burma and Rangoon, as well the colonial town of Mandalay on the Irrawaddy River, the site of the famous ballad written by Rudyard Kipling. Finally she reached the estuary of the river Ganges and Calcutta, India, the land of her dreams, where she arrived in the monsoon season and floods; she liked it nonetheless. In India she, explicitly started to research the position of women in the Eastern/Indian society for the first time. In the book Karlin draws a bold conclusion: Indian women are not “unhappy or terribly suppressed” nor are they “unfree” (The Experienced World 153), for “poor is a woman actually always, regardless of her high or low birth, this is my firm conviction, and this depends on her physical constitution and the fact that she has to carry and give birth to the emerging human thing” (The Experienced World 154). She used all of her connections through the embassy, friends and theosophical as well as just casual acquaintances she met on the journey to get in contact with and to talk to as many women as possible, women of various castes and religious backgrounds. She writes that for a woman from the East “marriage is not only a possibility, as with us, but also an utmost necessity” (The Experienced World 154). Further on, she writes with acerbic irony that, with marriage, the husband becomes her trustee, protector, the father of her children. If a woman does not marry, she is even more despised than a widow, so that “the fathers prefer to marry their daughters with a pot or a tree rather than leave them to go unmarried through life” (The Experienced World 154). As an Indian woman is brought up from early youth onwards

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to “venerate all that is male” (The Experienced World 155), including her brothers and especially the father, she is, in Karlin’s view, unconditionally obedient to her husband whom she sees as a demi-god. She believes that given the fact that he himself is also fresh and unspoilt entering the marriage, they consequently learn from each other and they do get along, “even love each other” (The Experienced World, emphasis mine). So, Karlin concludes, most of the women she spoke with would never want to trade places with her. She ends the description of her meeting various women in Calcutta with an Indian saying, which may well have served as her piece of advice to European women, to bridle their unruly demands, to be patient in order to go through life better than herself, the sorry “spinster”, who has to pay a high price for her independence: Do not be as sour as the neem tree, or else they will spit you out! Do not be as sweet as sugar, or they will eat you! (If you be stubborn, you will be chased away, and if you are obedient and loyal, you will be given too much work.) (The Experienced World 158)

Benares was the next stop on the Indian leg of her journey. She found herself in a new fairy-tale-like world and writes in her typical dry humour: “Here were holy monkeys, holy cows, holy beggars, holy kings and probably also holy flies from everywhere. Here was an unholy heat and everywhere around undoubtedly also cholera” (The Experienced World 161). There followed Agra, Lahore and the then Indian Karachi that she reached exhausted, sick and impoverished. This did not prevent her, however, from constantly enriching her ethnological collection of artefacts and from producing several fine paintings and drawings. She managed to get aboard a Lloyd Triestino ship and set off for home through Bab el Mandeb, The Door of Tears, to Aden, where she admired the Parsi community that had preserved its racial purity, culture and beauty. In the Italian-controlled Eritrea she stepped on African soil in Massawa (today Mitsiwa), this “old, ur-old, black continent, the land of mysterious charm, submerged cultures” (The Experienced World 226). She sailed on The Bologna through Port Said, Alexandria to Brindisi and after a while she stood for the third time in her life in Piazza San Marco in the cold bora-swept late autumn Venice. She caught the train to Trieste and then on to Vienna, changing train in Villach in Kärnten to go to Ljubljana in Slovenia. Finally she, the Prodigal Daughter, stood on the border of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, where customs officers at first did not believe her to be a Yugoslav, although she had expected in her youthful dreams to be greeted by girls with flowers and men with the typical and tasty Carniolan (Kranjska) sausages. She, the cosmopolitan, arrived at the local capital

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town of Ljubljana (Germ. Laibach), “Is this empty railway station, this snow-covered little town really Laibach?” (244). She arrived home to Celje by train in the late 1927 and found her mother on her deathbed; she died half a year later. Alma Karlin travelled to London to study at an early stage in her formative years of life and returned home rebellious, adopting an antiprovincial and non-conformist lifestyle in a rather conformist, constrictive and conservative social and cultural milieu. Karlin perhaps found an “escape” in learning English and other foreign languages she studied, an escape from her German upbringing in the Slovenian ethnic national background. Karlin’s travel writing in her many books, including Solitary Journey and The Experienced World, challenges the borders of the genre, where the external world frequently reflects her internal disposition: “After a considerable deliberation I finally decided to focus only on my personal experience: the problems I had to cope with – especially as a woman travelling alone ….; my most profound experiences and adventures and nonetheless the influence of every individual country on my deepest feelings” (Solitary Journey 5). It seems of paramount importance to stress that Karlin refused to view a woman as a victim, unless she herself, she writes, alas all too frequently allows to be victimized by men. In The Experienced World, which is based entirely on her travels through Asia, she dismantled at least some of the exoticist myths and stereotypes of the colonized Orient, especially those concerning the role of women, and presented vividly realistic descriptions of Asia and its culture in the 1920s as well as the South Pacific in her other books. Karlin’s life was one of asceticism and self-denial. She maintained a rebellious stance versus the various established conventional views and beliefs, she was critical about the role and particularly the status of women in the Western society but also in Asia. Along with her many books in German originals and their translations into several languages, many of them also into Slovenian, she has recently been given a virtual home/museum on the world wide web (www.almakarlin.si), a statue in her home town, a successful monodrama. Several film versions of her life have appeared so far, while her ethnographical collection is preserved in her home town of Celje.

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Works Cited Hau’ofa, Epeli. “The Ocean in Us”, The Contemporary Pacific 10.2 (1998): 391-410. Qtd. in Michelle Keown, Pacific Islands Writing. Oxford: OUP, 2007, 11. Jezernik, Jerneja. Alma M. Karlin, državljanka sveta: življenje in delo Alme M. Karlin (1889-1950) (Alma M. Karlin, the Citizen of the World: Life and Work by Alma M. Karlin). Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 2009. Karlin, Alma. Die Einsame Weltreise: Die Tragödie einer Frau (Solitary Journey: The Tragedy of a Woman). Minden: A. Köhler, 1930a, 391. —. Im Banne der Südsee (The Spell of the South Sea). Minden: A. Köhler, 1930b. —. Samotno potovanje (Solitary Journey), trans. into Slovenian by M. Sever. Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga 1969; trans. into Slovenian by M. Korošec. Celje: Celjska Mohorjeva družba, 2006. All the translations into English are by I. Maver. —. Doživeti svet (Erlebte Welt, das Schicksal einer Frau, Durch Insulinde und das Reich des weissen Elefanten, Durch Indiens Wunderwelt und durch das Tor der Traenen; The Experienced World. Celje: Mohorjeva družba, 2006, trans. from German by C. T. Kovaþiþ. Passages translated from Slovenian into English by I. Maver. I thank Darja Zorc Maver for her valuable insights and collaboration. Leigh, Elizabeth. “From Lapland to Peru”, The Register, Adelaide, 22 April 1924. Stanonik, Janez. “Alma Maximiliana Karlin”, Australian Papers, ed. Mirko Jurak. Ljubljana: Faculty of Arts, 1983, 47. Šlibar, Neva. “Travelling, Living, Writing from and at the Margins: Alma Maximiliana Karlin and her Geobiographical Books”, Transforming the Center, Eroding the Margins. Eds. Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, Renate S. Posthofen. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 1998, 115-131. Trnovec, Barbara. Kolumbova hþi: Življenje in delo Alme M. Karlin (Columbus's Daughter: The Life and Work of Alma M. Karlin). Celje: Pokrajinski muzej, 2011.

CHAPTER TEN REPRESENTATIONS OF SLOVENIA IN MAINSTREAM AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE

Slovenia has only recently come to feature in mainstream Australian literature, more precisely in contemporary Australian poetry. It should be stressed that Slovenia is no longer present only in Slovene migrant poetry written in Australia as it has been the case so far: rather, it has entered the major contemporary Australian anthologies. This testifies to the fact that Slovenia no longer belongs to the uncharted part of Central Europe on the geographical and consequently also on the literary map. Rather than that, Slovenia is increasingly part of an average Australian “Grand Tour” travel itinerary in Europe; it has thus entered the Australian cultural consciousness. In this light, two recent Australian poems with Slovenia as a literary locale are discussed: Andrew Taylor's “Morning in Ljubljana” (Taylor) and Susan Hampton's poem “Yugoslav Story” (Hampton). Andrew Taylor, “Morning in Ljubljana” Austro-Hungarian! Houses yellow and confident. The streets crawl parallel to the river. Always the Sava. Visible, to the north, the Alps. At night frost slides quietly over the fields and seizes the city. It takes the air, filling it with mist and particles of utter cold. Later the sun, winnowing, willowy, warms us. This is almost the end of autumn, but the brown edges of the plane tree leaves store memories of the sun. In the trees' upstretched arms I can hear winter approaching as once someone in a ball-gown

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leaning against a decorated chest might have heard the beginning of silence after every third beat of the waltz and the faintest rumble of a Baroque square filling with tanks – somewhere somewhere, somewhere in the future ...

The Australian poet and critic Andrew Taylor (born in 1940) wrote this poem upon his visit and reading in the Department of English at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, in 1985. Along with his professional career as an academic, teacher and critic, he is the author of several books of poetry. For Travelling (1986) he won the British Airways Poetry Prize, which shows his interest in travel, this “voluntary temporary expatriation”. Taylor's poetic vision in the poem “Morning in Ljubljana”, which was published in the anthology On the Move: Australian Poets in Europe (1992), is an Impressionistic one; it is a meditation on the situation and mood in autumnal Ljubljana in the late 1980s, the years preceding the Slovenian state independence achieved in 1991. In the poem Taylor prophetically announces great· historical events that are to take place in Ljubljana “somewhere, somewhere in the future”. He describes a Baroque square that will be “filled with tanks”, which indeed happened during the independence war in 1991. The rendering of the locale is superb/the descriptions of the Alps to the North of Ljubljana and the still present Austro-Hungarian tradition in architecture and manners. Taylor convincingly juxtaposes the waltzing in the Viennese manner in the past, which might be replaced by the rumble of tanks in the future. He is aware of the uneasiness and tension lingering in the air; the chill and fog of autumn serves him as a very fitting objective correlative standing for the ominous situation and the pending Damoclean sword of war above the city of Ljubljana. Susan Hampton is a well-known contemporary Australian woman poet and fiction writer (Hampton), who published the poem titled “Yugoslav Story” in The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets (1986), where Yugoslav really refers only to Slovenian experience. The poem recounts her own life story, her marriage to a Slovenian whom she had met back in 1968. His name was Jože and he was a Slovenian migrant from Loški potok, who probably did not know much English upon his arrival to Australia, which is why she reproduced many Slovenian words and expressions in the poem. The spelling of these words is surprisingly correct, even of such difficult ones as palaþinka or pražena jetra.

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The poem is essentially a straightforward poetic narrative; however, in a sincere poetic and unsentimental way, it describes her experience of what it was like being married to a Slovene migrant. The speaker of the poem tries to be objective, presenting the life and cultural background of her Slovene husband Jože chiefly without comment, a great deal of Australian broad humour and a fine sense of minute observation. Susan Hampton compares the background of an Australian woman (“my father was a builder in bush towns”) with that of a Slovene man (“His father was a policeman under King Peter”). However, the events described pertain to a regular boy-meets-girl story written with a great deal of cheeky humour, namely the Slovene-Australian migrant experience from the other end, which is rather unusual and new, from an Australian-Australian point of view. Susan Hampton, “Yugoslav Story” Jože was born in the village of Loški Potok, in a high cheek-boned family. I remarked that he had no freckles, he liked to play cards, and the women he knew were called Maria, Malþka, Mimi; and because he was a 'handsome stranger' I took him for a ride on my Yamaha along the Great Western Highway and we ate apples; I had never met someone who ate apples by the case, whose father had been shot at by Partisans in World War 11, who'd eaten frogs and turnips in the night, and knew how to make pastry so thin it covered the table like a soft cloth. He knew how to kill and cut up a pig, and how to foxtrot and polka. He lifted me up in the air. He taught me to say Jaz te ljubim, ugasni luþ ('I love you, turn off the light') and how to cook filana paprika, palaþinka, and pražena jetra. One night in winter Jože and two friends ate 53 of these palaþinke (pancakes) and went straight to the factory from the last rummy game. Then he was my husband, he called me 'moja žena' and sang a dirty song about Terezinka, a girl who sat on the chimney waiting for her lover, and got a black bum. He had four brothers and four sisters, I had five sisters. His father was a policeman under King Peter, my father was a builder in bush towns.

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Joze grew vegetables and he smoked Marlboros and he loved me. This was in 1968.

Australians have a reputation of being long-distance travellers and Andrew Taylor's poem shows that travel currently exists very much as “text”, as well as part of the real experience. Australian self-definition, closely linked to the migrant experience, is the subject-matter of Susan Hampton's poem “Yugoslav Story”. Both poems show that foreign, nonAustralian models can provide a new and better understanding of the composite Australian culture and identity. The fact that Slovenia has become part of this process shaping the Australian mind is not unimportant. Richard Flanagan (b. 1961) is an Australian writer who lives in Tasmania. His wife was born to Slovenian parents, who had migrated to Australia after the Second World War. Much of their life story and also those of other migrants in Tasmania since the 1950s is reflected in Flanagan's most recent novel The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1997), although he explicitly claims at the beginning that the characters and events in the book are “fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental”. Flanagan's first novel Death of a River Guide was much acclaimed. He recently directed a feature film based on The Sound of One Hand Clapping, which opened the 1998 Berlin Festival and which has been in 1998 shown with success in cinemas all over Australia. Is it perhaps no exaggeration to say that with Flanagan the Slovenian migrant experience entered the Australian “mainstream” literature and Australian consciousness, that it broke loose from within the borders of the Slovenian ethnic group living in Australia. The novel, which was shortlisted for the prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award, is a “migrant novel”, and much more. It is also a subtle depiction, a document of a certain historical period in Tasmanian past and of its people, a region not too frequently represented in the landscape of Australian literature. And, finally, the book is a domestic novel, testifying to a domestic migrant family tragedy and survival, which can be achieved through love and understanding. it is a touching book and a book to learn from. The plot of the novel revolves around the Buloh family, Bojan Buloh, the father, Marija Buloh, the mother, who walks out into a winter night into a blizzard never to return, leaving Sonja, her three-year-old daughter motherless to her father Bojan, a construction worker. The book is full of flash-backs and flash-forwards, moving back and forth in time in order to create an appropriate contrast of Sonja's life as a child in Tasmania in the fifties and sixties, and as a grown-up woman when she returns from

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Sydney, where she worked as a barmaid, to Tasmania some thirty-five years later. There the past begins to intrude forcefully on her, it is there that her drunkard father Bojan lives and that new life symbolically begins with the birth of her child, bringing about also a reconciliation with her father. The Slovenian lullaby is some sort of leitmotif in the novel, since it appears at the most emotionally intense moments and introduces Sonja's recollections of her mother Marija: 'Spancek, zaspancek crn mozic hodi po noci nima nozic ... Lunica ziblje: aja, aj, aj, spancek se smeje aja, aj, aj. Tiho se duri okna odpro vleze se v zibko zatisne oko Lunica ziblje: aja, aj, aj spancek se smeje aja, aj, aj.' (421-22)

When Sonja returns to the sites of her childhood years, her whole life reels off quickly before her very eyes, her stays with the Picottis and the Heaneys, where her father had placed her since her mother's death, Sonja's quarrels with her father, his attachment to Jean, whom Sonja liked but was not able to accept as a surrogate mother. This caused her father to leave Jean and after many years, when she comes back to the place where Jean's house and orchard once was, “it had all vanished: Jean and Bojan... and the marvellous taste of it all, bitter and sweet and crunchy all together” (237): All that remained, she thought, was her. And him. But apart, they were nothing more than a home become a barn, an orchard ploughed under to become an empty paddock. The smell of a tree without blossom. The look of Jean's window without lace. The sound of one hand clapping” (236).

Another novel by Flanagan that echoes Slovenia to a much lesser extent is Death of a River Guide, where the protagonist is Aljaz Cosini. He is an Australian born in Trieste, who has Slovenian roots, since his parents

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come from the area that is today the border space divided between Slovenia and Italy, one that had been under the Austro-Hungarian rule until World War I.

Works Cited Flanagan, Richard. The Sound of One Hand Clapping. Sydney: Macmillan, 1997. Hampton, Susan. “Yugoslav Story”. Susan Hampton and Kate Llewellyn (eds.). The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin Books, 1986; previously published in Meanjin, No. 4, 1980. —. Costumes: Poems and Prose. Chippendale, 1981; White Dog Sonnets. Surrey Hills, 1987; Surly Girls. Sydney, 1989. Tay1or, Andrew. “Morning in Ljubljana”, Geoff Page, ed. On the Move:Australian Poets in Europe. Springwood, N.S.W.: Butterfly Books, 1992, 68; also published in Andrew Taylor, Selected Poems 1960-1985. St Lucia, Qld.: UQP, 1988, 175-76.; cf. also Igor Maver, “Krajina v avstralski literaturi in pesem o Ljubljani” (“Landscape in Australian Literature and a Poem about Ljubljana”). Ljubljana: Delo, Književnilisti. 25 November, 1993, 16-7.

CHAPTER ELEVEN AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE AND SHAKESPEARE’S PLAY THE TEMPEST

Shakespeare studies have become subject to post-colonial readings since the late nineties of the previous century, a process emanating from the revisionist studies of new historicism, Marxism and feminism of the late eighties and early nineties (e.g. Post-colonial Shakespeares, 1998). These approaches attempted to ‘postcolonialize’ Shakespeare’s work and provided new important insights into the relation between his texts and attitudes to race, class and gender. Since the early seventeenth century, for all its ambiguity in intention and despite being written at the beginning of the British colonialist preimperial expansion, Shakespeare’s play The Tempest has invited numerous critical responses and reworkings/rewritings in several genres. It has been treated as a major Ur-(pre)text mirroring the European domination (symbolized by Prospero) and oppression of Caribbean/African/Latin American culture including slavery (e.g. George Lamming). The ProsperoCaliban relationship features particularly strongly in this debate around the psychology of British colonization, which practically destroyed the indigenous cultural (and linguistic) identity of the Americas. The role of Miranda has come to be challenged and properly contextualized only later – and this is what the book does especially well in Part II, in the chapter called “Miranda and Sycorax on the ‘Eve’ of postpatriarchy”. Tempests after Shakespeare by Chantal Zabus is an eye-opening work of interdisciplinary cultural criticism working in loops and unexpected illuminating turns, which amazes even a well instructed reader with its erudite background and scholarly knowledge of various art forms and genres, where The Tempest has loomed large during the past fifty years. Zabus insightfully shows just how the rewritings of this play from the 1960s onwards can help us understand the three movements she tackles in each of the three larger chapters: postcolonial discourse, feminism/ postpatriarchy, and postmodernism. These are aptly represented by the dramatis personae of Caliban, Miranda/Sycorax, and Prospero. Zabus

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researches how these fin de siècle discourses vie for ownership of meaning. Clearly the characters of Prospero, Caliban, and Miranda are all somehow hostages of a power relationship: In Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, Australia, and Québec, Caliban becomes the inexhaustible symbol of the colonized insurgent. In Canada and the Caribbean (after the ‘Calibanic’ phrase), Miranda revisits the Bardscript while, in African American texts, Sycorax embodies the threat of gynocracy. Both women characters as well as Ariel represent “Others”, who potentially challenge patriarchy (2).

The book covers the period from the sixties to the turn of the millennium in 2000 and considers a great geographical variety of writers, from the Commonwealth, Australia, Britain, Canada, the Caribbean, West Africa, Latin America, and the United States, occasionally even India, New Zealand, East and South Africa, including various genres, poems, plays, novels, film scripts, and critical essays, all of which have made a textual transformation of the original Shakespeare’s play The Tempest: imitation, parody, pastiche, satire, duplication, revision, inversion etc., i.e. rewriting as “the appropriation of a text that it simultaneously authorizes and critiques for its own ideological uses” (3). When reading this book, it soon becomes evident that the play has been a much-visited site of contest and negotiation, since scores of writers (that would be impossible to mention here) of diverse ideological, cultural, racial, and sexual persuasions have decided to rewrite Shakespeare’s play that can obviously accommodate various discourses “from countless subjectivities, and over multiple spaces” (7). In Part I Chantal Zabus argues that the original dramatic text was first seen from the standpoint of Prospero-qua-colonizer and it became necessary to wrestle with this emblem of (post)coloniality and to rewrite The Tempest from Caliban’s perspective. She explores, for example, rewritings by Mannoni, Mason, Ngugi, Césaire, Fanon, Memmi, Lamming, Brathwaite, and Dabydeen. As an example, let me dwell here briefly only on the Australian component. Zabus describes the “Antipodean metamorphoses” of David Malouf. His novel An Imaginary Life (1978) speaks about exile as, in fact, most of his work, about Australians as exiles who find death after encountering the “Aboriginal” Caliban, although they also “feel themselves Calibans in relation to England”, and “nonetheless tend to play Prospero in the South Pacific” (81). Zabus reads Malouf’s novel as a “warped” rendition of the colonial encounter between the settlers and the Aboriginals. The (Wolf-) Child via Caliban becomes the Australian “Red Man”, namely the Aboriginal whom Malouf never

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mentions, who teaches Prosper-Ovid the language in exilio at the very edge of the known world: “And possibly only an Australian, as someone who has been driven from the centre to the edge, could comfortably speak of that transformation at the edge” (83). The second work by Malouf under scrutiny, which engages more directly with The Tempest than his novel An Imaginary Life, is Malouf’s play Blood Relations (1988), which takes the viewer back to the “edge”, to a dystopic island between the desert and the sea in remote North-Western Australia: “In Blood Relations, the storm is the climax of the play rather than the prelude to it as in The Tempest, and the Prospero-Caliban encounter is etherealized in one abrogative moment, which is death itself, as in An Imaginary Life” (89). A Christmas family reunion in a secluded beach house brings together Willy, his children Dinny and Cathy, Hilda and her gay son Kit. Several other characters that appear in the play can also be pre-identified in The Tempest and they sometimes merge into one single voice. Prospero/Willy’s power is felt from the very beginning when he reminisces about his coming from a small Greek island some twenty years ago to literally change the Australian landscape: in the intricate and complicated story Dinny of partly Aboriginal stock is the Australian Caliban, who accuses Willy of having raped her mother and the ancestral land, which he now claims as his own. He would occasionally break into an Aboriginal chant and additionally blame Willy for sending him, as a Stolen Generation victim, to a Brisbane school (cf. Malouf’s own Brisbane school years) “to learn to think like a white boy”, thus severing him from his “mother’s people” (66). Zabus in her fine analysis of Malouf’s play concludes that in both Malouf’s novel An Imaginary Life and the play Blood Relations, within a decade of each other, death is the ultimate transformer for the Australian Prospero while Caliban lives on. The third Australian work based on The Tempest discussed in the book is Randolph Stow’s Visitants (1979), featuring the deprivileging of Prospero, often through death, and the rise of Caliban playing Prospero in the Pacific. Zabus aptly traces the precarious Australian history with Papua New Guinea, officially designated as an Australian territory until 1949, rightly claiming that Malouf’s two works and Stow’s Visitants describe “crucial steps in the history of Australia, from the beginnings of convictism, whereby Prospero is marooned, through penal servitude, on the isle of Caliban, on to Australia’s neo-colonial role in the South Pacific” (95). Part II of the book discusses the characters of Miranda/Sycorax as virgin/whore on the “eve of postpatriarchy”, blending the feminist critique of patriarchy, postmodernist technique of representation, and postcolonial

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retrieval of discourses “under erasure” (103). The figure of Miranda is thus elevated, rightly so, into both a pre-feminist and what Zabus calls a “postpatriarchal” icon. The third part of the book is about the future, the return of postmodern Prospero “in an intergalactic exile”, this “global male oppressor”, and more than that because he shows his fragility as the result of an increased introspection, in literary works (e.g. John Fowles, Iris Murdoch), films (Derek Jarman, Peter Greenaway), as well as contemporary science-fiction novels and films. Chantal Zabus’s book of critical essays Tempests after Shakespeare is – due to its straightforwardness and sometimes taboo-like topics – sure to cause a few “tempests” in their own right in the critical domain. It is a book sine qua non in contemporary postcolonial literary criticism and it is written in an engaging and erudite style, one that is of interest not only to scholars working in the field of (post-colonial) literatures and cultures written in English, but also to Australianists.

Works Cited Malouf, David. An Imaginary Life. New York: Vintage, 1996. —. Blood Relations. Redfern, NSW: Currency Press, 1989. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1998. Stow, Randolph. Visitants. London: Secker & Warburg, 1979. Zabus, Chantal. Tempests after Shakespeare. New York: Palgrave, 2002.

CHAPTER TWELVE WAR AND TRAUMA IN C. K. STEAD’S NOVEL TALKING ABOUT O’DWYER

The first part of the title of this chapter deliberately points to the basic tension in New Zealand cultural and political history, i.e. the history of the Maori islands of Aotearoa (the country of the long white cloud)/New Zealand before the arrival of the colonizers, on the one hand, and the white-settler Pakeha tradition on the other, from the very beginning of the charting of New Zealand physically and spiritually for the Western imagination in 1769. Similarly to Australia, New Zealand was labelled terra australis incognita, the construct of the wildest Western-European projections of extreme exoticism of the early (pre)romantic bourgeoning just before the French Revolution. The merit should be attributed to the legendary British explorer of the South Seas, Captain James Cook, who ‘discovered’ Australia in 1770. His statues or grotesquely overdimensioned images in more or less precious materials can still be found in many Australian and New Zealand museums, hotels or even the most dingy country inns to this day: history can (sometimes) sell for profit. Just like its bigger neighbour Australia, New Zealand too has for a long time felt the ‘tyranny of distance’ (from the British colonial centre) and some sort of geographic schizophrenia. At the same time it was increasingly independent nationally, politically and culturally, caught in the love-hate relationship with the imperial English heart of Albion, which was being more and more exhausted by the decolonization processes all the way until the Second World War. However, New Zealand has had a rather different cultural and political development from its great South Pacific neighbouring continent Australia. This is especially due to the indigenous Maori, caught in endless exhausting tribal struggles, who, nonetheless unified, signed with the English the Waitangi Treaty in 1840, which stipulated that they cede their sovereignty to the British in exchange for their protection, but with an assured ownership of their lands. Despite an implicit deceit, the British still had to treat the Maori as equal interlocutors, which in contrast cannot

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be said of Australian Aborigines, whom the colonial authorities practically wanted to (and managed to) wipe out in certain parts of Australia. After many problems and tensions and a mid-nineteenth century war between the Pakeha (the white people) and the Maori, New Zealand first became a dominion within Great Britain and achieved its full independence only in 1947. In recent years, Maori culture and literature (Maoritanga) was strengthened, perhaps even more than the neighbouring Aboriginal one. The 1980s saw many new discords between the Maori and the Pakeha, since the New Zealand government tried to partly revise the Treaty of Waitangi with financial reparations to numerous Maori tribes whose lands were unjustifiably confiscated. The past two decades have seen the rise of the literary imagination of the ‘New’ Pacific and thus of the indigenous production in English over the entire South Pacific and Oceania (apart from New Zealand, e.g. also from Samoa, Fiji, Hawai’i, the Solomon Islands, the Cook Islands and Papua New Guinea). The ‘New’ Pacific literary-cultural body in the making is, as authors claim, traditionally a tattooed body. It represents a combination (and certainly not a kind of transcultural hybrid) of the original indigenous Pacific tradition and mythology in their almost completely absorbed English, after Edward Said deconstructs and demystifies the construed Euro-American stereotypes of the ‘Orient’, in this instance Pacific culture. Authors that have made it internationally with their writings are, for example, Patricia Grace, Alan Duff, Albert Wendt, Witi Ihimaera, Keri Hulme, Marjorie Crocombe, Vilsoni Hereniko, Subramani, Epeli Hau’ofa, Haunani-Kay Trask and others. Many of these are actually from New Zealand, which in this geographical milieu is a sort of cultural superpower, especially as regards the development of the new Pacific indigenous literary creativity (cf. Hereniko). The first major, internationally acclaimed New Zealand literary author (many of whom were women) was Katherine Mansfield, who managed to break through the physical and spiritual borders of her homeland and the prejudice against the colonial women of her day. She was active in the London modernist Bloomsbury group scene (with Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence), who in the period between the two world wars far away from her constrictive New Zealand colonial context. She published the famous short story collections Bliss and Other Stories (1920) and The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922). Her creativity was interrupted by her untimely death. Today the best known author from New Zealand is probably Janet Frame (1924-2004), whose novels brought a whole new dimension to New Zealand writing: To the Is-Land (1983), An Angel at My Table (1984), The Envoy from Mirror City (1985), Carpathians (1988). A

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film based on her autobiographical trilogy An Angel at My Table (1990) resulted in the breakthrough of New Zealand film internationally. It also contributed to the early success of female film-director Jane Campion, who became famous later on for her in-depth visual depictions of misunderstood and suppressed women, especially in the colonial/Victorian milieu (through films such as The Piano and The Portrait of a Lady). As for New Zealand films based on literary texts that have been successful internationally, we should at least mention the novel by Alan Duff (Once Were Warriors, 1990) and Witi Ihimaera’s The Legend of a Whale Rider (2004). C. K. (Christian Karlson) Stead (b. 1932) became a well-known New Zealand writer only after his withdrawal from critical and academic life, which had been extremely productive and successful. After his debut in poetry in the 1950s, he became a professor of literature at the University of Auckland and the author of a very well-received study of English poetic modernism (The New Poetic, 1964). In his academic career Stead dedicated much of his research time to the short story genre and particularly that of Katherine Mansfield. Since the 1980s he has been retired, but during this time he has also established himself as a wellknown New Zealand author of fiction: e.g. All Visitors Ashore (1984), The Death of the Body (1986), Sister Hollywood (1989), The Singing Whakapapa (1994), The End of the Century at the End of the World (1992, rpt. 1999). His recent book Mansfield (2004), a fictional biography of the writer Katherine Mansfield, was shortlisted for several literary prizes, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. C. K. Stead’s fiction of his mature period is very personal, while at the same time he has been labelled a metafictional author. This is due to the fact that his books always reflect their own fictional status and the process of the genesis of the narrative. Such are, for instance, the movement between parallel narrative levels, set in the present and the past, and the usage of supposedly ‘original’ documents written by the protagonists (often the characters discuss the very process of writing the novel). On the other hand, Stead’s novels are very lucid and straightforward, written in a realist manner, a confessional one even, with clear plots, although poetic passages and philosophical intellectual elements in them are plentiful as well (Robinson and Wattie). One of the several narrative levels of the novel Talking about O’Dwyer (1999) refers to the period during the Second World War. Donovan O’Dwyer as a Pakeha – a white New Zealander and commanding officer in the so-called ‘Maori’ battalion of the New Zealand division – loses one of his men in the fight for the Maleme airport during the battle for Crete between the English and the Germans. The Maori Joe Panapa dies in

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unclear circumstances, which as a consequence causes his family, through aunt Pixie, to pronounce a curse over O’Dwyer, a makutu. When he dies fifty years later as a professor, an Oxford don, his colleague and compatriot from New Zealand in Oxford, Mike Newall, is the only one who knows the whole story about O’Dwyer and this tragic event. Following a curious set of circumstances, it also becomes his own, connected with his memories of youth, which decisively start to influence his present. Stead masterfully intertwines these two stories in different time frameworks. The reader is faced with a mosaic and something of a whodunit thriller operating through talking about O’Dwyer between Newall and his older Oxford colleague and friend Bertie Winterstoke over lunches in the local pub, while the complete truth is revealed only after O’Dwyer’s funeral. Was O’Dwyer really responsible for the death of the Maori private Joe Panapa? This is what Newall was asking himself throughout his whole life. This is why he tried to reconstruct the story of Panapa’s death at all costs, from letters, a diary, and most of all from the events and talk about his own life, which the author interestingly puts into the third person narrative. Newall, too, was a New Zealand expatriate in England, where he met his compatriot O’Dwyer, whom he always admired and who also helped him in his professional advancement at Oxford. The migrant or rather the expatriate perspective is an important aspect of the novel, which is true of quite a few Australian and New Zealand literary works. Also, the larger context of talking between Oxford dons about O’Dwyer is somewhat reminiscent of the Anglo-American tradition of the so-called campus novel. Mike Newall’s best friend and next-door neighbour of his youth in New Zealand was Frano Panapa and he was the son of the very Maori soldier Joe Panapa killed in the war. Frano was Joe’s son, married to the Croatian migrant Ljuba Selenich, with whom Frano’s cousin Marica was also living at the time. Mike was spending carefree years of youth with Frano that are realistically described from the point of view of the New Zealand way of life, the ‘New Zealand Dream’, and the atmosphere of relative intercultural and inter-racial tolerance and co-existence between the Maori, migrants from Europe and New Zealanders of Anglo-Celtic descent in the late forties and fifties of the previous century. There was also the barrier of language. The younger Dalmatian adults, recently arrived, struggled with English; their parents spoke it hardly at all. And though the children were fluent in their language, they went to the local Catholic school, while the Newalls went to the State school, Henderson Primary. The two school groups, when their paths crossed, sometimes shouted juvenile insults back and forth. At those times the

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However, the love that bursts out between Mike and Marica put an end to the sweet dreams of youth: Frano is not able to accept this fact and dies in a car crash just after the revelation of their love. He may have even committed suicide, which the author does not explicitly confirm, nor deny. Mike’s relationship with Marica is severed and he is quite shocked and sad. The day after the death Mike walked all the way to Bridge Avenue, and sat where he and Frano had gone so often to swim. As he walked down Te Atatu Road, and as he sat alone watching the tide flow into the estuary, he was saying the word “dead” silently to himself, over and over, slowly, like a funeral march. Sometimes it took on its full painful meaning, at other times it became only a sound, an utterance, from which meaning vanished. (89)

Life then takes him, as a New Zealander, to the Vietnam War. As he is an expert in the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, he plans to advance his academic career in the United States of America. Then he moves to Oxford and becomes estranged from his wife Gillian, whom he painfully divorces, although they remain in close contact. This is one of the important narrative levels of the novel about Mike’s intimate private life, interspersed with memories of the love of his youth Marica Selenich and the new, much younger woman he falls in love with in Croatia, Ira, while searching for answers about O’Dwyer and Marica. After years of ‘talking about’ O’Dwyer with his friend Winterstoke, Mike Newall, a professor of philosophy at Oxford, is eventually brought to Croatia (Zagreb and Dalmatia), which was in the 1990s at war and in the process of gaining independence from Yugoslavia, which was falling apart. During his visit he becomes intimately close with Ira and makes contact with Ljuba, the widow of the Maori private Joe Panapa. In the meantime, she had moved back to Dalmatia from New Zealand and, while in search for her, he encounters his long-lost love from his youth, Marica Selenich once again.

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Mike explains. “Stella – my sister in New Zealand – she’s still friends with the Selenich family. She phoned me. Ljuba Panapa – Frano’s mother – had gone back to live in Croatia. She’d been there quite a few years, resettled in Dalmatia, in the area the family came from. But now trouble was looming. Slovenia and Croatia declared independence. Belgrade was threatening. Ljuba was in a disputed area. The family heard from a relative in Zagreb that her house had been damaged in a bombardment – or possibly destroyed, they weren’t sure. They were worried. My sister wanted to know whether I had any way of finding out what had happened. They put the idea into my head. I’d visit Croatia before going to New Zealand. I’d be the one bringing out news. Mainly of course for Marica. She was always close to her aunt.” (29)

On his deathbed Donovan O’Dwyer had asked Mike to scatter his ashes over Panapa’s grave at Crete in Greece. Only towards the end of the book, while examining the causes, consequences and “evidence”, as in a detective story, do we learn that O’Dwyer shot Panapa to death , in the head, to prevent him from falling into German hands (they were successfully occupying the Maleme airport); this is what Joe had been begging him to do. The curse, makutu, of Panapa’s family over O’Dwyer had be en pronounced precisely because of this shooting, which was in their view unnecessary and cruel, since they did not know the other circumstances of the death until the very death of O’Dwyer, who bore the curse stoically throughout his life and did not want to upset them any more. Stead’s descriptions of Zagreb during the war of independence, Dalmatia, Oxford university life, New Zealand or the US immediately after the Second World war, as well as the events at Crete in Maleme and Chania are direct, suggestive, at times subtly poetic and without unnecessary pathos. They enable a constant tension, an evocation of the memories of youth and the past, provide an insight into numerous relationships – friendly, love, family, inter-generational, inter-racial, inter-national – and represent a short but powerfully expressive vignette of war(s), serving not merely as the backdrop but as a veritable “character” in the lives of the protagonists. Zagreb itself was a strange mix, half imperial grandeur, half communist austerity. Its central streets and squares, its equestrian and literary statues, its museums and public buildings, elegant in the style of Vienna, generous in space, redolent of privilege, told one story; its broken pavements, dingy offices, and post-Second World War apartment buildings, grey and dirty and in need of every kind of repair, told another. The foreignness of the place, and the political and military drama of the moment, took him out of himself. He found himself interested, and not unhappy. But there were moments when he plunged back into the old wretchedness. Once, in a post-

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When he and Ira travel down to Dalmatia, he is shocked to see the disastrous effects of the war: So he made his way down the road slowly, watchfully. Soon he was photographing the scene, the burned-out houses, feeling that it was faintly indecent, that he was a trespasser, but doing it anyway. It was very quiet. There was no traffic on the road, no one among the ruins. The crops were running to seed. There were no animals grazing the pastures. He saw a black dog, all ribcage and backbone and hangdog head, scavenging in a grassy ditch. He whistled to it and held out his hand, but it loped off on three legs among rows of corn that were drying out unharvested. He could hear birds, a breath of wind among the trees, a river rustling under a bridge. The peace that followed war, it seemed, was more peaceful than the peace of human occupation. Nature raised no objection to ethnic cleansing. (193)

Stead’s tolerant stance towards the Maori in the novel is certainly laudable and they are never exoticized. He does use quite a few Maori words in the text but adds a brief “Glossary of Maori Words for non-New Zealand Readers” (145-6). The ending of C. K. Stead’s novel Talking about O’Dwyer, however, is somewhat contrived: it takes place in Chania at Crete, where the author brings together all the living protagonists of the book. They are all connected in one way or the other, mostly as adversaries bearing various grudges against each other. Stead stages some kind of reconciliation ritual on the grave of Joe Panapa in the military graveyard with numerous buried New Zealand soldiers from World War Two: 39492 Private J. P. PANAPA N. Z. Infantry 24 May 1941 Aged 29 years

It is not a coincidence that, at the beginning and at the end of the book, Stead uses a quote from the Roman poet Catullus that speaks about the return across many lands and seas, a farewell of the dead soldier and paying tribute to his memory. The Panapa family asks Marica Selenich to

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perform a karakia over the grave and thus lift the curse/makutu on the now deceased Donovan O’Dwyer. All of them gathered there seemingly bury their past grudges and anger, they reconcile with each other, adversaries in love and during the war, for they are now all “Europeans”. So Mike signals and the others make their way down to the grave. They range themselves around in a half-circle facing the headstone, backs to the sea, and Marica chants the karakia she has memorised. It’s not a Maori voice – loud, harsh, like something torn from her in pain. It’s not even (Mike thinks, remembering Ljuba’s long-ago wailing and the recent cries of the young woman in the Dalmatian cemetery) a Croatian voice. It’s an incantation, but the note is quiet, clear. He’s moved by its reticence. Through his own mind are running the lines of the Catullus graveside poem – Multas per gentes et multa per aequora uectus / aduenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias – Across lands and seas I’ve come, brother, to take of you this last leave. (236)

It is true that some contemporary New Zealand literature is the prisoner of national and war myths and symbols from the past, important for national identification. In this regard the battle of Maleme on Crete in Greece is somewhat reminiscent of the Australian war myth and the national holiday celebration of the ANZAC Day and its numerous literary and cultural (re)interpretations, the battle of Gallipoli in Asia Minor during the Great War on 25 April, 1915. However, a good writer must be able to go beyond collective symbols of this kind. Stead succeeds in doing just that, despite the too glamorous ending. He produces an effective mixture of action, detective story, romance and philosophical novel. Philosophical questions are addressed through Mike Newall’s expertise on Wittgenstein, where he sometimes implicitly makes fun of the British institutions: in a chapter entitled “Dog Save the King” he punningly muses that the word “God” can actually be read backwards and thus the word “dog” emerges. His hesitation and actions not taken are echoed in the chapter titled “Hamlet is My Middle Name” and the chapter “Is it I, God, or Who, that Lifts this Arm?”, taken from Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, where Captain Ahab poses himself this ontological rhetorical question. The novel is particularly important as an indictment of war per se, as a collective madness and its consequences for the life destinies of every single individual caught in it. The Second World War and the independence war in Croatia in the 1990s are minutely described and juxtaposed: like all wars, both brought people suffering and death and radically changed and marked their lives and relationships. C.K. Stead suggestively writes about four locales in very different time periods, New Zealand, Oxford, Croatia, and Greece. His freedom of moving from one to the other, back and forth

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in time, shows that the wars have really always been global, just as an unbearable lightness of freedom has always characterized the writer’s imagination.

Works Cited Hereniko, Vilsoni; Rob Wilson; Patricia Grace; David Hanlon, eds. Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. Robinson, Roger (ed.) and Nelson Wattie. The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1998, 512-514. Stead, C. K. Talking about O’Dwyer. London: Random House, 2003.

PART III: POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES IN ENGLISH

CHAPTER THIRTEEN PERENNIAL EMPIRES: POSTCOLONIAL, TRANSNATIONAL, AND LITERARY PERSPECTIVES

This bulky book of fourteen scholarly essays venturing into the field of the postcolonial and the transnational around the globe features four main thematic clusters: post-war representations of empire in several languages, which makes this selection a particularly valuable one (English, French, Portuguese, German, Spanish); experimental nations globalized; half of empire: the “Other” America’; and queering empire. The editors first address the protean and multi-faceted concept of empire, the “everlasting Leviathan” which “lies beyond nineteenth-century British reach or twentieth-century American overstretch; it inhabits the globe” (NagyZekmi, Zabus 1). The first thematic cluster is all about the post-imperial melancholy, nostalgia and state of mind, from W. G. Sebald (Lucienne Loh), Barry Unsworth’s quasi-autobiography Sugar and Rum (Jennifer P. Nesbitt), Shirley Geok-Lin Lim’s and Peter Rushforth’s recent works (Anca Vlasopolos) to the disordered identities in Virginia Woolf (Three Guineas) and Jacques Derrida, who discuss the issues of national identity and citizenship and define the “self” by the imperialist “other” (Andrea L. Yates). In the second part most of the essays concentrate on the French and Portuguese-speaking world, with the notion of H. Bhabha’s hybridity in the focus: contemporary Maghrebian (Algerian) writers are described by Valérie K. Orlando as nomads inhabiting “experimental nations”, e.g. spaces unhindered by borders or state bureaucracies: “In recent years, many Maghrebian francophone authors have claimed that they live in exile without nations because the very ideals of nationhood and nationality have become problematic – even violent – for them” (81). They inhabit an exilic space, according to Said, in which, through their writing, they are able to find home as they have no other homeland. Nomadism/ nomadic identity is thus also an alternative, a counter-empire, according to Hardt and Negri. Martine Fernandes argues that Portuguese immigrants in France remain invisible, absent from public discourse, since they are easily

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assimilated into French culture. She examines Carlos Batista’s novel Poulailler, where the henhouse is used as a metaphor for the loss of sovereignty and domestication of Portuguese immigrants and their descendants living in France. Zahi Zalloua juxtaposes Hardt and Negri’s understanding of the concept of difference in Empire and pleads for “an ethics of difference in the age of globalization”. Jean-François Vernay finally analyzes the more recent works through the contrapuntal reading of C. Koch and finds in them Eurocentric Australian Antipodean fantasies showing evidence of nostalgia for the “dying colonial world”: “This repressed pull of Europe in Koch’s psyche, which returns between the lines of most of his novels, testifies to remnants of a lingering empire that had imprinted itself on his consciousness as he was growing up in the southern outpost of the British dominion” (166). The third group of texts speaks about the “Other” America, namely the Caribbean islands, Puerto Rico, and Central America, a region that has unique racial and cultural patterns of hybridity. Patrick Chamoiseau’s award-winning novel Texaco, essays by Antonio Benítez Rojo, Caryl Phillips and Edouard Glissant reveal, according to Kristian van Haesendonck, “light” colonialism, where the Caribbean is seen as having no history of the construction of empire. Similarly Asima Saad Maura claims that Puerto Rico has been a liminal space between Spain and the United States. The works by René Marqués and Luis López Nieves show a similar kind of colonization of the island and its native culture. Selected Central American semi-literary and literary works are discussed by Ana Patricia Rodríguez in light of the colonial history of the region, from the Spanish Crown and Great Britain to the United States of America, which, she claims, is essential in understanding the countries’ history and culture alike. She focuses thus on “a growing body of Central American literary texts produced under the weights of empire building in the region and charged with the task of representing local struggles, realities, and visions” (218). The last part of the book of essays examines empire within the context of queer sexuality, for “sexual dissidence has a voice in the building of nations in a postcolonial age, an age that cannot afford to ignore the secret interstices between nations or between genders” (10). Patrick Mullen reads homoeroticism in Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo and parallels it with the actual historical relationship between Conrad and the Irish queer radical Roger Casement. Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy and Timothy Mo’s The Redundancy of Courage with gay protagonists are analyzed by John Hawley, who shows that the former allegorizes the Sinhalese/Tamil divide as a gendered question, while the latter echoes the Indonesian/East Timor conflict depicting the similarly torn protagonist.

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Paul Allatson discusses the relationship between the war on terror, Saddam Hussein’s queerification and feminization of the “conquered”, and the “enforced proximity of disparate pop-cultural texts and objects, a proximity that implicates a dominant queer purview in the operations of the state”, something Allatson calls imperial queer. The essays collected in this book testify to the changing, chameleonlike and indeed perennial nature of imperial design from the post-war representations of European empires in literature to the globalized and Americanized exportation of the empire in an increasingly transnational world. The much needed updating of Hardt and Negri’s Empire is very much the fil rouge of the scholarly studies of various literary authors, the selection of which also challenges the traditionally English-languagecentered line of inquiry, whereby the concept of the post-colonial acquires the much coveted transnational character. A scholarly must read for postcolonial and transnational freaks.

Works Cited Nagy-Zekmi, Silvia, Chantal Zabus, eds. Perennial Empires: Postcolonial, Transnational, and Literary Perspectives. Amherst, N.Y.: Cambria Press, 2011.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN TEJU COLE’S TRANSCULTURAL NOVEL OPEN CITY

That night I took the subway home, and instead of falling asleep immediately, I lay in bed, too tired to release myself from wakefulness, and I rehearshed in the dark the numerous incidents and sights I had encountered while roaming, sorting each encounter like a child playing with wooden blocks, trying to figure out which belonged where, which responded to which. Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks. My futile task of sorting went on until the forms began to morph into each other and assume abstract shapes unrelated to the real city; and only then did my hectic mind finally show some pity and still itself, only then did dreamless sleep arrive. (Open City, 6-7)

Teju Cole’s recent book Open City (Cole 2011) is an urban city novel about the open city of New York, although it is also as much about the ‘open’ city of Brussels, where Julius, the narrator of the book, finds the ethnic/multicultural openness of the latter more problematic. He spends a long vacation in Brussels, primarily in search of his German Oma/grandmother on his mother’s side, while he is an American-Nigerian resident of New York City. Historically, the official declaration and description of a city to be ‘open’ was made by a warring side which was on the verge of defeat and surrender. This is what happened in Brussels in 1940, which the book does mention. In other cases, those making such a declaration were willing and able to fight on, but prefered that a particular city be spared. On the other hand, the author declares New York City ‘open’ in the context of accepting the inflow of many migrants from all over the world, a city that protects them from the vicissitudes of modern life, wars and suffering, a heaven-haven, a post-colonial metropolis that he perceives as such. On the other hand, surrender also seems to be in the focus here, for there are new migrants to NYC who give and take in order to adapt to the new environment: this is actually true of all the multi-

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layered and multi-ethnic world metropolises. An Audenesque suffering is, to his mind, the conditio sine qua non of the human condition. In fact, Cole speaks about violence, trauma, the war in a new way, indirectly, describing not the external events but rather the consequences of suffering upon one’s psyche, individual and collective memory. But NYC is not immune to violence either, the protagonist broods over Ground Zero, since the novel was written in the post-9/11 period. Julius’s New York walkabouts represent the framework narrative of the text, featuring the travels and reminiscences in-between, the Proustian flâneries of the narrator, the young doctor of psychiatry Julius, who is part American, part Nigerian and part German. The text moves freely between the present and the past on three continents: in addition to New York City and Brussels, part of the plot is also set in Lagos in Nigeria, with the fictional protagonist, the hybrid and often alienated but nonetheless reliable narrator, in a desperate search of his identity, even if he is not consciously aware of that search. This is not a typical novel per se, with a weak narrative plot development, undoubtedly something of a drawback in the book, for it is, one can speculate, also based on the narrator’s/author’s own experiences. He makes no particular effort to distinguish between the two as he moves freely between fiction and reality, his recollections of the past and travels. The style of writing of the book is smooth-flowing, grappling indeed, showing the author’s great knowledge of art history, other literary texts, music and paintings. This symphonically-structured novel moves forward by leaps and retro-bounds effortlessly, with the sound of music, Wagner, Mozart and especially Gustav Mahler, stylistically chiselled, composed and tranquil, interspersed with frequent references to visual art. The text actually works like a musical piece, with Mahler opening and closing it fittingly by his musical ‘death’ piece, i.e. his Ninth Symphony (saying farewell). It moves by employing a counterpoint rhythm and fugue-like, structural techniques. The main framework of the book is the concept of the open global city, while the second one is Julius’s hybrid identity and search for his ancestors, parents, memories swirling about the inner-city natural and the various urban habitats of New York City. It is true, however, that Cole deliberately provides an intellectual show-off and artistic refinement to the extent that one may even wonder whether the narrator Julius might be an intellectual poseur. One has to clearly distinguish between the author and the protagonist of the novel: Teju Cole, born to Nigerian parents in the USA and raised in Nigeria, from where he returned to New York during his late adolescence and where he now lives. If identity is a mix of inheritance, memory and pure fiction,

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then NYC with its many historical layers of urban history is the right palimpsestic site for its examination. The protagonist and first person narrator in Open City, on the other hand, has a double hybrid identity, being American, Nigerian and German. Given the fact that Teju Cole is also a photographer and a professional historian of early Netherlandish art, the book abounds in visual images and photographic realism, often presenting New York City from the slice-of-life angle. As it results from the epigraph above, the involuntary memory of a Proustian flâneur and modern urban spectator, in a clearly Romantic stance, characterizes Julius. As Charles Baudelaire defined the flâneur: The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world – impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. (Baudelaire)

Open City is Teju Cole’s debut novel, and it won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New York City Book Award, and the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts and letters. The narrator Julius roams through the seemingly borderless open city metropolis of New York with its everchanging migrant population, still haunted by the post-traumatic memory of 9/11. Prior to Open City, in 2007, Cole had published a novella with photographs about contemporary Lagos from the point of view of a diasporic Nigerian person returning home for a brief visit. The novella, titles Every Day is for the Thief, is partly connected to Open City. In this case, however, the Nigerian narrator returns from New York to Lagos to visit his friends and relatives, only to be disappointed at the violence and corruption he finds there, although he also has hope for a change. He is now working on a non-fictional book about Lagos, based on fait divers from everyday life he can gather from the internet and the papers: “The idea is not to show that Lagos, or Abuja, or Owerri, are worse than New York, or worse than Paris. Rather, it’s a modest goal: to show that what happens in the rest of the world happens in Nigeria, too, with a little craziness all our own mixed in” (www.tejucole.com/small-fates/). The novel opens with the description of Julius, who indulges in randomly walking about Manhattan. He watches the birds migrate as part of the natural migration process, as opposed to the “unnatural” migration of people into New York City. As an avid classical music listener, Julius

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often listens to musical fugues which he compares to the city’s “incessant loudness, a shock after the day’s focus and relative tranquility” (6). Julius first walks around the Upper West Side, then he visits his old and ailing professor of English, Japanese-American Saito, for whom he has a deep respect and gratitude for introducing him to English literature during his two years at college before entering Medical School. The professor talks to him about his hybrid identity of being a Japanese-American, especially during a concentration camp confinement by the Japanese during World War II, which anticipates Julius’s own identity search in the novel: “For me, in the forties, memorization was a helpful skill, and I called on it because I couldn’t be sure I would see my books again, and anyway, there wasn’t much to do at the camp. We were all confused about what was happening, we were American, had always thought ourselves so, and not Japanese” (13). The narrator’s fascination with classical music is the fil rouge of the structural organisation of the book. Gustav Mahler opens and closes it, namely with his late instrumental-vocal symphony Das Lied von der Erde, and it is precisely his music that often transposes the narrator into a “reverie”(17). One day he ventures into Harlem to find “the brisk trade of sidewalk salesmen: the Senegalese cloth merchants, the young men selling bootleg DVDs, the Nation of Islam stalls. There were selfpublished books, dashikis, posters on black liberation, bundles of incense, vials of perfume and essential oils, djembe drumbs, and little tourist tchotchkes from Africa. One table displayed enlarged photographs of early-twentieth-century lynchings of African-Americans” (18). When Julius sees a cripple in the busy street dragging his broken leg behind him, he resorts to his Nigerian heritage and gets the impression that all the things he is seeing around himself are under the aegis of Obatala, the demiurge charged by Olodumare to create humans out of clay. He explains that the Yoruba, believe that when drunk he made dwarfs, cripples, and those burdened by a debilitating illness. Moreover, he notes that since Dutch colonization onwards Native Americans in the area of New York have been completely wiped out (e.g. Cornelis Van Tienhoven, who was described in a recent history book The Monster of New Amsterdam). Julius compares Van Tienhoven to Pol Pot, Hitler and Stalin: he certainly sees violence and supression all over the world as having existed for centuries. The author of this particular book, a certain V., becomes Julius’s patient and tells him: “There are almost no native Americans in New York City, and very few in all of the Northeast. It isn’t right that people are not terrified by this because this is a terrifying thing that happened to a vast population. And it’s not in the past, it is still with us today, at least, it is still with me” (27).

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At the end of Chapter 2, Julius decides to watch a new film set in Africa. Few people attend. He is appalled to see that the director used music from Mali to represent Kenya and is annoyed and angry to conclude that “Africa was always waiting, a substrate for the white man’s will, a backdrop for his activities. And so, sitting to experience this film, The Last King of Scotland, I was prepared to be angry again. I was primed to see a white man, a nobody in his own country, who thought, as usual, that the salvation of Africa was up to him. The king the title referred to was Idi Amin Dada, dictator of Uganda in the 1970s” (29). Walking about New York City seeing all its ethnic diversity, Julius suddenly (“on the uptown train”) starts to feel the need to see his German Oma (grandmother), who might be in one of the nursing homes in Brussels, but he has no idea how to locate her: it is then that he decides to go on a long holiday to Brussels for several weeks. We learn how he and his mother had become estranged from each other when he was seventeen, just before his departure for the USA. Likewise, he thinks, his mother had grown estranged from her own mother, Julius’s Oma, and never returned to Germany. Julius in his hybrid Nigerian-German-American identity swirl thus reminisces about Oma’s visit to Nigeria and her tour of Yorubaland, where she came from her home residence in Belgium, where she was living at the time. Julius nurtures very fine thoughts for his grandmother and, as he is not sure whether she is still alive, he decides to go to Belgium, perhaps to find her or at least to walk in her footsteps. He believes she could be in a nursing home there, though he does not know where. The next day, wandering through the streets of NYC, he has a flash-back recounting his meeting with a blind bard in Lagos when he was a child, somewhat reminiscent of himself and his grandmother: Once, in a crowded market at Ojuelgba, sometime in the early eighties, I saw him. … He sang in a plaintive and high-pitched voice, in deep, proverbial Yoruba that was impossible for me to follow. Afterward, I imagined that I had seen something like an aura around him, a spiritual apartness that moved all his hearers to reach into their purses and put something in the bowl his assistant boy carried. (38)

The narrator of the book travels through the city by bus, subway, cab, or rather mostly walks all over the city and his visual memory is acute, always comparing the diverse architectural styles, for example Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, to the English gothic style. He steps into Trinity Church just past Wall Street and Broadway to pray for an ailing friend. Trinity Church, on which he elaborates at length, has a significant place in American literature and culture. Julius quotes from the early New

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Amsterdam Dutch settler Antony de Hooges’s writing, where he describes a certain white fish in the Hudson River and a beached sperm whale. The whale had a symbolic importance for the Dutch. To see a whale and even more an albino whale in the area of the New Amsterdam settlement was an extraordinary event, since the beached whales in the Netherlands were immensely important historically (for example, the whale of Berchey near The Hague beached in 1598). It was some two hundred years later that Herman Melville was inspired by this legendary account. He was a parishioner of Trinity Church and wrote his famous novel The Whale: Moby Dick on an albino Leviathan. The narrator slips his hand into the Hudson River and thinks about the passage of life, about eternity, about how we ignore nature and are totally consumed by banal everyday questions. He is uncomfortable more than once when an African man tries to ‘brother’ him, as he is not in search of establishing a black brotherhood friendship at all cost. He passes by the Ground Zero site and concludes that atrocity is historically nothing new either to humans or animals, except that in the modern world … it is uniquely well organized, carried out with pens, train carriages, ledgers, barbed wire, work camps, gas. And this late contribution, the absence of bodies. No bodies were visible, except the falling ones, on the day America’s ticker stopped. Marketable stories of all kinds had thickened around the injured coast of our city, but the depiction of the dead bodies was forbidden. It would have been upsetting to have it otherwise. I moved on with the commuters through the pen. (58)

The narrator also describes Ground Zero: The perimeter marked out the massive construction site. I walked up to a second overpass, the one that once connected the World Financial Center to the buildings that stood on the site. Until that moment, I had been a lone walker, but people that began to troop out of the World Financial Center, men and women in dark suits including a group of young Japanese professionals who, tailed by the rapid stream of their conversation, hurried by me…. When I came up to the overpass, I was able to share their view: a long ramp that extended into the site, and the three or four tractors scattered around inside it that, dwarfed by the size of the pit, looked like toys. Just below street level, I saw the sudden metallic green of a subway train hurtling by, exposed to the elements where it crossed the work site, a livid vein drawn across the neck of 9/11. Beyond the site was the building I had seen earlier in the evening, the one wrapped in black netting, mysterious and severe as an obelisk. (57-8)

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Julius also notes that before the erection of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in the 1960s various activities at various venues had taken place on the old Washington market, active piers, the fishwives, the Christian Syrian enclave established here in the late 1800s. Accompanied by his girlfriend Nadège, he pays a visit, to an immigrant detention facility for undocumented migrants (Africans, Latinos, Eastern Europeans, Asians) and sees a plethora of new migrants who ended up there. He relates in some detail the life story of Saidu from Liberia, who made his way up to Tangier in Morocco and then Ceuta, the Spanish enclave, from where he manages to enter Spain, then Lisbon and finally arrives in the USA illegally. Chapter Six is a flash-back into Julius’s childhood and early adolescence, his attending the Nigerian Military School in Zaria, which was his father’s wish. He remembers how he had no objection to going to Northern Nigeria, which he found “a desertified territory, with small trees and parched shrubs, might as well have been another continent, so different was it from the chaos of Lagos” (77), for him far away from his native Yorubaland up into the Hausa Caliphate. He writes about a deepening rift with his German mother originally from Magdeburg. His insecure hybrid identity is explicitly stated: The name Julius linked me to another place and was, with my passport and my skin colour, one of the intensifiers of my sense of being different, of being set apart, in Nigeria. I had a Yoruba middle name, Olatubosun, which I never used. That name surprised me a little each time I saw in on my passport or birth certificate, like something that belonged to someone else but had been long held in my keeping. Being Julius in everyday life thus confirmed me in my not being fully Nigerian. (78)

He draws parallels between the Second World War and the German ancestry of his mother and the Nigerian military coup of 1976, marking also the untimely death of his Nigerian father. He saves money and borrows money to study in the USA, on his own terms. Chapters Seven to Eleven are all set in Brussels, his long vacation there, designed particularly to come across his grandmother, even if only indirectly. Julius rents a private apartment from a girl called Mayken in the centre of Brussels. On his flight to Brussels he meets Annette Mailotte, a retired doctor, who has been living in the US for a number of years, but who regularly comes to Brussels, where she keeps a small flat. He learns a lot from her about Belgium, from her point of view, of course, and he also learns why she had not stayed in Belgium professionally and academically: “She told me that she had done her training in Louvain. But

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you must be a Catholic to be a professor there, she said with a chuckle. Not so easy for an atheist like me: I’ve always been one, I’ll always be one. Anyway, it’s better than Université Libre de Bruxelles, where no one can achieve anything professionally without being a Mason” (89). Dr. Maillotte has a good friend in Brussels – Grégoire Empain, one of the grandsons of Baron Empain, an important name in Belgian history who had built Heliopolis in Egypt, where his palace still stands – and invites Julius to have dinner with them during his long vacation in Brussels,. Empain was a successful industrialist, who masterminded the Paris metro, and also an amateur Egyptologist, who had helped the Belgian government acquire some important Egyptian items for the Brussels museum. His host Mayken picks him up and on his way to the city presents a heap of stereotypes (such as “the French are lazy”, 96) to Julius, who is unable to distinguish between local concepts such as “Flemish” or “Walloon”. Julius had been to Brussels twice before, but only for a short time, on his way to America. He wants to amend the erroneous American views of this old capital: It is easy to have the wrong idea about Brussels. One thinks of it as a technocrats’ city, and because it was so central to the formation of the European Union, the assumption is that it is a new city, built, or at least expanded, expressly for that purpose. Brussels is old – a peculiar European oldness, which is manifested in stone – and that antiquity is present in most of its streets and neighborhoods. The houses, bridges, and cathedrals of Brussels had been spared the horrors visited on the low farmland and forests of Belgium, which had borne the brunt of the countless wars fought on the territory. Slaughter and destruction, ferocious to a degree rarely experienced in history, had taken place on the Somme, in Ypres, and before that, out at Waterloo. (97)

Julius is struck to find large numbers of people from Africa (from the Maghreb and the Congo) in Brussels. The Congolese presence in Brussels surely had everything to do with the country’s colonial past as the Belgian Congo Free State controlled by the Belgian King Leopold II until the early twentieth century and, from 1908, the Congo as the Belgian colony. Julius notes racial tensions and immigration discontent with many Belgians: “The country was in the grip of uncertainties – the sense of anomie was apparent even to a visitor” (100). He walks into the Parc du Cinquantenaire, feels dwarfed by the sheer size, and sees from afar tourists taking photos, silently. When he comes closer, he realizes they are speaking Chinese. He suddenly realizes that he has to try to find his grandmother, but there is no Magdalena Müller in the phone book. Near his rented home he gradually enters long conversations with Farouq, a Moroccan from Tétouan, who

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works in an internet café. He sees the feeling of rage and violent rhetoric on Farouq’s side and the anti-immigration feeling of the majority, on the other. In a café in Grand Sablon he meets a young Czech woman and ends up having a one night stand with her. There is still no sign of his oma/grandmother: he looks at old women huddled at tram stations, and hopes to see her there. He remembers the day they visited Olumo in Nigeria, and she had wordlessly massaged his shoulder. However, there is no sign of her whatsoever. Julius’s encounters with Farouq and his Arab friends make him increasingly uneasy, with anger seething underneath the surface. In Chapter Ten he returns again to his adolescence spent in Lagos, but then suddenly realizes he is in Brussels. His much sought-after solitude in Brussels is interspersed with his encounters of various Africans: contrary to his initial belief that everybody in Belgium is from the Congo, he meets people from Mali, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Liberia and the question significantly goes through his mind: “Who, among those present, I asked myself, had killed, or witnessed killing?” (139). Julius perceives life as a continuity and, only after it becomes the past, he feels, we are able to see its discontinuities. In trying to recover the submerged hybrid layers of his self, he confesses: “Nigeria was like that for me: mostly forgotten, except for those few things that I remembered with an outsize intensity. These were the things that had been solidified in my mind by reiteration that recurred in dreams and daily thoughts: certain faces, certain conversations, which, taken as a group, represented a secure version of the past that I had been constructing since 1992” (156). In Chapter Thirteen the reader learns that upon his return to New York City from Brussels, his mind is vacant, he is “subject to a nervous condition” (161), when he is buying medicine in a Wall Street pharmacy. Once again, he finds some solace in his compulsory “reverie” walks in the city. In this second part of the book he becomes a flâneur in Lower Manhattan. Every area he visits has an abundantly described historical context, the Chinese, the port of New York, etc. He walks all the way down the Bowery to the Lower East End, then away from the tourist crowds, to east Broadway, where he finds that everybody is Chinese, or can be taken for one. He finds the monument to Lin Zexu, an antinarcotics activist, a hero of the Opium wars, who was much hated by the British in their impending China drug traffic and who had been appointed commissioner in Guangzhou in 1839. One night, near Morningside Park on the North West Side, Julius is badly mugged, beaten and kicked by two very young adolescent African American ‘brothers’, who steal his wallet and phone. This makes him

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think about race differently: race does not discriminate in crime, he concludes, looking at his painfully disfigured jaw. Still, he explores the black racial history of New York City, finding an African burial ground, which is mostly covered by new buildings, not too far from City Hall Park. He writes about slavery in Manhattan and how it has been covered by the layers of the past in the palimpsest the city is today. After the rape of Moji in the past, he experiences something of a shock upon seeing her again. He manages to suppress this deed in his subconscious yet again, just as his connection/identification with Africa, which is, despite his evasive attitude, constantly there in his life and innermost thoughts through a negative presence. He remains hopelessly deracinated throughout. Julius talks a lot about death and burial at the end of the novel, the death of his father, his grandfather, that of his beloved composer Mahler in 1911, referring also to the famous El Greco painting in Toledo, Spain, Burial of the Count of Orgaz. The final Chapter 21 ends with a description of his first full day in the psychiatric practice on the Bowery with a senior partner of his. Mahler’s music fittingly ends the narrator’s musings on death: he goes to hear Mahler’s vocal-symphonic piece Das Lied von der Erde at the Carnegie Hall, and then his Ninth Symphony, commenting on both: “The overwhelming impression they give is of light: the light of a passionate hunger for life, the light of a sorrowful mind contemplating death’s implacable approach” (250). He ends his city journey symbolically with a boat trip to the Statue of Liberty on Liberty Island and feels sorry for the handful of wrens that have been disoriented and have, paradoxically, found suffering and death in it – like humans – searching for liberty. Teju Cole’s first novel Open City has received positive reviews from critics. They have compared him to the writing of Joseph O’Neill and Zadie Smith (The New Yorker), his honesty has also been noted (The New York Times). The buried layers of the past underneath the skyline of NYC today is what he aims at discovering, so that the book is a meditation on the suffering in history, identity quest and, above all solitude, that the narrator does not wish to break. At the same time he hopes to unveil the palimpsest of his own self, which he is not fully capable of coming to terms with. The Big Apple flâneur, Julius, is constantly watching the city and its bird life: he finds the city globally interconnected with the rest of the world through pain and suffering. NYC expresses and caters well to his hybrid identity, a veritable palimpsest of African-American memory. He grapples with his partly Yoruba identity and never feels fully Nigerian, and does not trust his passport which says he is Nigerian, for he is as much American and German. The “new migrants” to the USA and New York

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City are his main points of interest, from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean region in particular. Talking to the angry migrants in Brussels makes him reflect upon the American as well as the European identity crisis, especially after 9/11. New York in its post-melting pot stage is shown as a metacity (according to the well-known Dutch architect Winy Maas), which is not defined by topographical facts or prescribed ideologies, nor representation or context but rather by the people inhabiting it. The book nonetheless inspires calmness, inner peace, a Wordsworthian connection of the onlooker with nature, so his position is somewhat Romantic, isolated against the crowds, trying to find a connection with nature and with his own self. Julius is ultimately unable to do either of these two. On the other hand, Julius, who is increasingly turning from a reliable into an unreliable narrator, especially when we learn about him committing rape, is all along very distant and cannot seem to be able to connect with people around him. This is particularly true of women, with whom he has troubled relationships in one way or another (his mother, Moji, Nadège). This transcultural text ofen reads as a musical score that adds to its appeal. Paradoxically, the hassle of the great megalopolis enables the narrator to find at least an imaginary identity and mental stability, inner peace and solitude, which effectively rub off onto the reader as well.

Works Cited Baudelaire, Charles. "The Painter of Modern Life". New York: Da Capo Press, 1964. Orig. published in Le Figaro, 1863. Cole, Teju. Open City. London: Faber & Faber, 2011. —. Every Day is for the Thief. Abuja, Nigeria: Cassava Republic Press, 2007.