The Promised Land

The Promised Land - Sushma Joshi - in ITCH - Journal of Creative Expression - Issue 6 - 29th June 2010.

December 16, 2013 I was moved to see all the Mandela memorial events this week. And it reminded me that I'd had a story published in ITCH, a South African journal, in 2010. So, in his memory and with South Africa on my mind ...

beyond today

Umesh Acharya, only son of an illustrious family of judges and diplomats, inheritor of lavish acres of land in Banepa, and owner of two centrally located Kathmandu apartment buildings, decided to leave for America a week after his marriage...

beyond the valley of home

But Umesh, who had watched all his friends leave Kathmandu one by one...

could the light be brighter

if he attended community college for a year and improved his grades, he could transfer to a better college...

could I learn more

Umesh reached Ohio in the middle of September.

but the leaves are turning

Welcome to America," he said, taking out Umesh's Samsonite suitcases and dragging them into the narrow, carpeted hallway. It smelled of old cats.

the warmth is dying

"Its expensive to live alone, so all eight of us in the college share the rooms," Abhisekh explained

we cannot be what we were

All of us work these kinds of jobs. Remember Kundan-Sir?" "Our physics teacher?" "That's right. He is stacking boxes at a supermarket right now in New York. Remember Suresh? He was a batch behind us?" "What about him?" "He pumps gas at a station in Idaho." "I don't believe it," was all Umesh could say. "Remember Ranay?" Abhisekh continued pitilessly. "Ranay who wanted to be a doctor?" "Ranay works at an Indian restaurant now, waiting tables. He dropped out of college and is illegal."

we cannot become

more than we were

Was this the America that all his other friends had gone to, or had he arrived at a special nightmare version?

we have lost 

'Have I come thousand of miles and paid ten times more for an education that was worse than a public college in Kathmandu?' he thought. 

I have lost

"The Promised Land," said somber ochre letters outside the funeral parlor where Purna dropped him off.

I can only

light

the ashes


MORE BY SUSHMA JOSHI
Shelling Peas and History Lessons - Mascara Literary review


NOTE
I intercepted her words with side-track poetry
which becomes my review

The End of the World

The End of the World - Sushma Joshi. 8 short stories. 2008.


the sweetness of
guavas
could not save Nepal
from Civil War
1996-2006

Marxism
Communism
loomed

and in the south
even in Calcutta
the British Empire
was under siege


in a world of black monsoon clouds streaked with silver

in a black world of Maoist blockades
without the silver

somehow
thoughts of world ends
spelt
a special kind of

freedom
from

foreign cheese



NOTE
Cheese is the first short story in this collection.
It spins a surprising tale of cheese from Switzerland.
Gopi dreams of tasting this cheese for the first time.
For many years he dreams, but then, when the moment comes
it felt almost as if it wasn’t him who had eaten it — it had eaten him. p.23

MY GOOD READS REVIEW

  The End of the World by Sushma Joshi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The End of the World is the title of one of the 8 short stories about late 20th century Nepal and those who live there. But, as the title of the whole collection of stories, it suggests that each story symbolises some kind of ending in progress - without the relief or satisfaction of closure. The people struggle with new tastes - Cheese, unravelled friendships - Betrayal and the dark side of power - Law and Order. The monsoon season could almost be a welcome distraction. There is little time to get to know any characters. There is just the ragged moment mirroring little sign of fulfilment. The collection could represent a negative view of this world, struck down by shifts in political circumstance. But then there is the enigma that we hope, we keeping hoping that such chaos of personal identity and purpose must tire, must end sometime.

View all my reviews

MY AMAZON REVIEW
Cameo Dramas in Nepal 
Imagine when cultures collide in political mayhem, what chaos and confusion follows, the emerging questions of right and wrong and the sticky web of values. These short stories are like an inside glimpse of a remote mountain country smudged by the modern world. The characters are like lost souls wandering some wild future desert, seeking some comforting sign of who they are and what they could be. Who can possibly imagine that cheese from Switzerland could become a prize, a gift, a quest, a nightmare. The first short story leads the way into the lives of disillusioned Nepalese. For those of us who know little of the ways and cultures of the people in this high country, there is simply not enough in each story to appreciate the how's and the why's of these worlds.

A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens. 1843


Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it. 

Scrooge took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern 

He carried his own low temperature always with him

 he iced his office

 and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.




not many knew
that the rich Scrooge
was once a poor child
a lonely child
trapped in a colourless world


joy
friendship
love
were meaningless ghosts

he himself had
no meaning


he could be a ghost


he could not connect with
ghosts


Scrooge the cold child became the cold man
absorbed in wealth
not spending it
not giving it
just
hoarding it


but this year
the ghosts of Christmas
would awaken
what he could have been
what he could be

he faced his own ghosts

they awakened his heart
they found rest
and stirred
his spirit


 the secret of finding joy
is giving joy


 
NOTE
Images adapted from Works of Charles Dickens. Avenel Books. 1978.

MY GOOD READS REVIEW
 A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It is easy to get caught up in the colour and mystery and intrigue of the Christmas ghosts of A Christmas Carol. But I have read this story - usually at Christmas - a number of times. For once, I found myself pouring over the Christmas past - the 19th century London Scrooge as a lonely child, little more than a ghost himself. Somehow the older, selfish monster that he became was a sad reflection of why - perhaps a sad reflection of why many today still lock out the Christmas spirit. The story is an enchanting carol, celebrating a possible transformation from ghost to spirit.


View all my reviews

A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens. 1859.


...Guillotine. 
In front of it, seated in chairs, as in a garden of public diversion, 
are a number of women, 
busily knitting... 
 Dickens, Charles A Tale of Two Cities (p. 233). Public Domain Books. Kindle Edition.



Therese Defarge
bold leader of the knitting sisterhood
missed the game
today

but let me begin at
the revolutionary
beginning

it was
the best of times to see
the worst of times

Madame's benefactor
(her damaged sister)
paid The Ferryman

and Madame 

was able to watch the game
right from
the preliminary finals




She
was there
to muse
when Doctor Manette
emerged from his tower prison

She
was there
to plot
when spies
spied

She
was there
to grind her own axe
when the doctor's daughter
cried for her Charles Darnay
imprisoned
wrongfully 
for treason

She
was there
to turn
sweetness
sour

She watched many games
and played along with them

but
She missed
the grand final

the grand moment
when Sidney Carton
 idlest and most unpromising of men,
 took the place of Darnay
on the scaffold
and rose to glory

She
missed
her final revenge

the switch of
fate

too busy with
her own




NOTE
Images adapted from Works of Charles Dickens. Avenel Books. 1978.


Linking to:
Imaginary Garden With Real Toads - Open Link Monday

MY GOOD READS REVIEW
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Many years ago, I had to read this book as a school text. I was in Year 7 at the time. I remember being mesmerised with the knitting theme (knitting round a guillotine haunted me) and totally disenchanted with Lucie Manette, the Doctor's daughter. For some reason, I thought of Shakespeare's Desdemona - syrupy and tragic, bearable but not totally warm and likeable. All these years later, and my views haven't changed, but I have noticed other features in this story. Dickens is adept at personifying the weather and the countryside. The personifications subtly add tone and mystery and depth to unfolding dramas. He shaves off a few layers of character and storyline and then moves on. So frustratingly delightful. And he is also adept at seeing beyond external characters. Sidney Carton, the ugly, insipid loser of the whole narrative, becomes a tragic hero of grand proportion. I read the whole book in two sessions over two days. It still enchants.

View all my reviews

Song of the Slums

Song of the Slums by Richard Harland
Allen & Unwin. 2013.


a gas filled airship
leers over
Swale House 
swollen with the warts of wealth

she played a harp in those days

but chance
launches
 Astor into
the beauty of gang music

in the slag heaps of Slumtown

and she finds
the drums

chance 
spins
Astor through
Granny Rouse's world
gives her the friendship of
the eerie Mav
the dynamic 
curious excitement of
Verrol

and the 
chance for a role in
the Rowdies

she lives
the drums

until
London

a world cluttered with
steam-powered charabancs
stream-lined velocipedes
basketwork rickshaws

and
plutocrats
swollen with militia
and political mania

slum music 
rages
slashes
the tiaras and
conventional pomposities

stirring the soul of the street

giving it a voice

giving her
a voice

and 
a drumming soul


Linking to:
Poets United - Poetry Pantry

MY GOODREADS REVIEW

Song of the Slums by Richard Harland
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It's the Age of Steam with a vibrant heartbeat growing in the slums. Astor has been groomed in the harp, but when she is left in the wealthy Swale household under rather strange marriage circumstances, and escapes, she inadvertently grooms a whole new lifestyle with matriarch Granny Rouse and her slum gang. It is there that Astor finds her real music, her real rhythms and her soul.

View all my reviews

The Red Shoe

The Red Shoe by Ursula Dubosarsky
Allen and Unwin. 2006


red shoes

stories of thoughts
and emotions
laced by
red shoes


think Dorothy
travelling in a parallel land
pushed into life by 
multiple tornado effects

Matilda craves her mother's red shoes

chance lets her  feel them
in the bush

but one is lost
when she climbs a tree


fresh echoes of war
creep 
intrude
like some angry ghost

madness
polio outbreak
nightmares
all framed by
the Petrov affair

newspaper clips
drift by

Elizabeth is brushed with a kind of madness
and cannot go to school

Frances
dreams of growing up
and loses the friend
she imagined she would marry some day

Mrs Petrov loses
a shoe
as she boards the plane


the girls' mother
receives a gift of red shoes
when her husband returns
again
from war nightmares

his brother Paul could not help him
but fortunately
the swinging rope
fails
this time


think post war 
loss
and stars
crossed

think the Land Oz
with many Dorothys

and red shoes


Linking to:
Poets United ~ Poetry Pantry

MY GOODREADS REVIEW

The Red Shoe by Ursula Dubosarsky
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The scattered debris of post war worlds is all here. The headlines of the day cut into the home lives. Disturbingly, perspectives of home mirror the crises on larger scales. This is not a novel based on a traditional, linear narrative sequence. It is like mini memoirs co-existing spiced with flashbacks; mainly the memoirs of children growing up in a world they barely understand. The effect is mesmerising; a sense of sadness grappling with the right to find some kind of happiness - with a little help from some red shoes that could be magical.

View all my reviews

Purple Threads

Purple Threads by Jeanine Leane
University of Queensland Press. 2011.
Winner of the David Unaipon Award.
David Unaipon (1872-1967) was the first indigenous writer to be published in Australia in 1929.


 of women and dogs
in the flood prone world of Gundagai

of living in a ramshackle hut
graced with a tin roof
ideal for hearing the sound of rain

of living with aunts and a nan and a sister Star
while Mum Petal tastes the colours of other worlds

of living with sheep and wildflowers

of knowing too much about worldly discords
and the unprovoked abuse of a neighbour

of loving the Aboriginal niche of my childhood
though the civilised may never understand

I was born in the purpleness of October

I am Sunshine
You can call me Sunny


Linking to:
Imaginary Garden With Real Toads - Open Link Monday

MY GOODREADS REVIEW    
Purple Threads by Jeanine Leane
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Layers of stories tumble from the worlds of a ragged home in Gundagai in southern New South Wales. A young girl is buffeted between stories from past and present worlds - her aunts' versions. But she is intrigued. She loves her different world, close to the music and moods of the earth. Only humans strike the wrong chords, but the other music plays in the background. Her purple threads - the earth colours of an Australian October, her birth season - keep her connected. Sunny is an Aboriginal girl being what she can be. The narrative becomes a series of many cameos of Sunny's world and those with her through the seasons.

View all my reviews

Refugee Boy

Refugee Boy - Benjamin Zephaniah
Bloomsbury Publishing 2001


I'm Ethiopian
  I'm Eritrean
  I am cursed
  I walk the line


like a lonely piece of flotsam
  in a sea of coloured skins
  I bob around east London


Sheila, Pamela and Mariam
  foreign faces 
  become my guides


I'm African
  I'm a refugee
  I'm uneducated
  I walk the line


a family moors my life
  my small room means a large view
  and Ruth becomes my sister

 
I'm African
  I'm just a teenage boy
  I want to learn
  I walk the line


I find friends I did not know were friends
  young friends
  school friends
  willing to march for freedom
  willing to walk my line


I am Alem
  I want to give
  I want to be 
  a light


without the line


Linking to:
Poets United ~ Poetry Pantry

MY GOODREADS REVIEW
Refugee Boy by Benjamin Zephaniah
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Perhaps this book disappoints- not outlining the tensions between Eritrea and Ethiopia, not fully exploring and explaining the work of young Alem's parents, but the book is about the boy; the boy finding his own journey and his own rite of passage. We feel the incredible confusions he must feel - an alien culture and climate, a Refugee Council, a foster family, a new school and the whole disturbing, temporary arrangement of it all. And in the midst of all this darkness, appear some rather special miracles. Young people dare to face and challenge legal strongholds. An apparently indifferent girl becomes his sister. This book bridges and casts a rainbow over the many tragic chasms in our world.

View all my reviews + My liberation haiku, inspired by this book, is posted on my Haiku Songlines blog.

NOTE
This story became a play - BBC Review 14th March 2013

The Art of the Engine Driver

The Art of the Engine Driver by Steven Carroll was published in 2001 - Flamingo Press.

It is an Australian novel.

Vic knows

the art of engines

but knows little

of the art of family

Michael is

the engine driver's son

he dreams of beauty

family beauty

in just a snapshot

he was there

walking the night with them

to a party

together

this night

the wreckage of this night

become a mantra

for Michael

he returns
and returns
and returns

in dreams

and wills

another journey

Michael knows the art of cricket

but knows little

he knows little...

GOOD READS REVIEW

The art of the engine driver by Steven Carroll
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A book that tantalises and frustrates! Tantalising thumbnails of characters drifting through a season in their lives. The just outside Melbourne setting of the 1950's is like a weigh station - taking stock of past and present before moving on. Initially, the sense of place is beautifully described and quite haunting. The linking thread is an engine driver named Vic who hopes that his steam driving worlds may move on to the electric worlds of the Spirit of Progress. But his driving worlds are overlaid with fractured realities that haunt his dreams. And Vic himself is one of those fractured realities. He and those living in the same street are on their way to an engagement party. Like a Canterbury Tales scenario, these pilgrims bring their stories with them. But the frustrating element is the spasmodic reference to a comet in the skies...perhaps symbolic of an upheaval of life. And when the upheaval comes, the drama seems to confuse, the characters seem to fizzle and maybe peter out. The art of the engine driver seems to become a little weathered.

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Walk In My Shoes

Walk In My Shoes (2004) - Alwyn Evans
(Teacher resources HERE!)


Am I free?

~~~~~~

I can't see Dad's face any more

Self-conscious

I know too much about trauma

New Australian camp worlds are strange

~~~~~

It's not Afghanistan of my childhood

And I'm still a child
To a point
(I sew my own doll's clothes
But I've been connecting with Abdul
For a while now)

~~~~

Do I need Afghanistan?


From a strange world view

Perhaps Afghanistan needs me

To make a difference

~~

Am I free?


I'm working on it

GOOD READS REVIEW

 Walk in My Shoes by Alwyn Evans
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Nessa's Afghanistan was a tortured world, a world living the fear of The Terror. And the fear stays alive in her mind, even when her family ventures to the Australian unknown, seeking some kind of freedom and life. Like some ugly Medusa, old realities become nightmares, recurring in jagged, disjointed fragments. But the land of "red dirt and blue sky" heals the thirsting spirit - slowly.

View all my reviews

Linking to:
Imaginary Garden With Real Toads ~ Open Link Monday