Open Relations
Angelita Biscotti on Lucy Van
This essay is part of our 2022 collaboration with Cordite poetry review, edited by Bella Li, Cher Tan and Leah Jing McIntosh.
For this series, Liminal commissioned Asian Australian critics to respond to a work of their choice from Cordite’s Archives. As part of this collaboration, Cordite poetry review published 30 new poems by Asian Australian Poets. Read more here.
‘What's open about an open relationship?’ Justin Clemens asked during his reading at the launch of The Open in 2021. This reminds me of an idea Slavoj Žižek touches on in The Metastases of Enjoyment (1994). The point was not about open relationships but about BDSM partnerships, where he writes: ‘What is of crucial importance here is the total self-externalisation of the masochist's most intimate passion: the most intimate desires become objects of contract and composed negotiation.’ Agreements that accompany erotic power games—as well as open relationships and relationships that broadly fall into the ‘consensual non-monogamy’ category—are often worked out with a microscopic scrutiny reserved for the pre-nuptial. What appears open is not always so. The low Australian skylines, the way earth and sky appear to embrace and melt into each other—the appearance of innocent and natural co-existence belies the ongoing reality of settler-colonial violence. Clemens’s provocation is a suitable apéritif for the poetic-philosophical experience that is Lucy Van's The Open.
The Open is structured into four multi-part prose poems, set across Saigon, Perth, and Melbourne. ‘Hotel Saigon’ explores the complexity of simultaneous belonging and unbelonging in the city and country of one's ancestors, the intersections of class, race and colonial identifications and dis-identifications, the uncanny sense of returning to a Saigon that is not quite home. ‘The Esplanade’ recalls a carefree youth in Perth as the speaker enjoys the highs and not-low-lows with boyfriends, girlfriends, musicians, recreational drugs, and finding in herself the desire to write. ‘Australian Open I’ centres yet another chapter in the speaker's life, reminiscences of watching the tennis with her son, and with her mum, who was a tennis champion in her teens. Finally, ‘Australian Open II’ reflects on the mode of existing within the quotidian everyday-ness, one that is not everybody's everyday—in a world where class, race, gender, ability, and age structure what one's everyday might hold.
To read ‘The Esplanade’ is to encounter the quintessential artsy middle-class educated young adult Australian woman's life: weed, literary ambition, sharehouse dramas, sex, alcohol, overseas travel, love triangles, generous continental philosophy citations. It contains a brief moment of self-confident feminine invincibility, a buoyancy of being that contrasts the weightiness of personal and political history in ‘Hotel Saigon’:
The Esplanade where Marwah and I drank with that mob that was always down there and when the cute guy propositioned me I worried I was somehow being racist when I said I have a boyfriend even though I did.
[...]
a beautiful older woman who was probably 25 gave me a frangipani (‘here is a frangipani’) at 4 a.m. leaving the club together and I offended her a year later by telling someone else she came on too strong [...] I had no idea then, but I was weirdly beautiful at 18, 19, not reassuringly but weirdly, it brought about intense encounters that I assumed to be a normal part of growing up.
To become conscious of one's beauty as a young woman is intoxicating. This is a welcome awakening when one has spent all of one's early life as a racialised subject, and especially so within both ancestral and current cultural communities. To be romantically and sexually wanted is probably a universal longing, and when one is not white, it can feel like its own fucked-up welcome on stolen, colonised land. It’s a crude validation, a way of taking up space when other ways of taking up space are being denied to you. A way of grasping to be seen as human, to connect with another's humanity, as Van gestures to:
[…] I'd just seen my sister's dog run over and it was basically my fault for crossing the road irresponsibly and it was close enough to our childhood house that my dad came running or was he chasing my death away. Me crying and Ben and then Ben undressing me and then after saying, ‘I just wanted to know how it feels to be the other guy.’
It is sobering to encounter ‘Hotel Saigon’ before, and then after, reading about moments of growing up in relative privilege. In ‘Hotel Saigon V’, Van describes reading Freud’s Civilisation and Its Discontents by a ‘colonial swimming pool’: ‘I now do nothing for myself because the workers do everything for me. I watch myself not working and I watch the workers working. They are waiters, their work is to wait. Or they are servers, and their work is to service ... I am aware this is this way because I am from a rich country. I am from a rich country because I was smuggled over from this poor one.’ Her grandfather, a chef acclaimed for his French recipes, tells his sons to never pursue a career at the back of the house.
To be the first artist or writer in one's family comes with significant baggage. One might have a personal history ripe with literary fodder, but lack the intergenerational exposure to potential associates and mentors. It is what Pierre Bourdieu calls ‘habitus’: an embodied cultural capital, the body's way of feeling settled and confident about taking up space. In the poems about her pre-motherhood years, Van documents an awareness of wanting to write, and not being taken seriously. In ‘The Esplanade III’, the poet recounts an encounter with an older Spanish writer who asks her for help with editing his story. This relationship is not reciprocal, however: he only shows interest in her writing once, and with dismissiveness. In ‘Australian Open VI’, as the speaker considers Letters Home (1975), Plath’s book of letters mostly addressed to her mother, Van writes:
In her letters Plath was upbeat until she died.
‘She died.’ Not she ‘suicided/took her own life/committed suicide/passed away/fell ill on the train’ and the other words we have for deaths like Plath’s. It is true that she died, and also true that the manner of her death has probably been made a greater fuss over than the other details surrounding the great author Van has noticed, such as the way
Somewhere in her last letters she asks if her new sister-in-law, whom she'd never met, might come to England to help with the children. This is an example of how her major problem in life was access to affordable child care.
[...] So much of what she wrote was around this conditional: ‘if only i could find a girl...’ and ‘if I can just write uninterrupted for four hours a day’.
For The Open to be possible, Van devoted however many or few opportunities she had to sit down to the task of writing poetry. A mother who managed to find the time. In the essay ‘Poetry is Not A Luxury’ (1984), Audre Lorde writes:
Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizon of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives. For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.
Poetry disrupts the ways existing as a woman (a mother, a lover, a worker) can often be about attending to everyone else's needs but one's own. It is a way of rejigging the rhythm of one's days.
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In ‘The Malouf’, Van reflects on having read the photocopy of David Malouf's Quarterly Essay piece 'Made in England' (2003). ‘I couldn’t find the original.’ ‘It was held together with a bulldog clip; I couldn’t find a stapler.’ What if that is what Australia is—a photocopy, an anxiety about fungibility? ‘Australia’ is an interruption, a savage invasion of a place where worlds already existed. The ongoing settler-colonial efforts at erasure bears the brutish legacies of Britishness. There are now many more gestures to the past and the future yet it seems difficult to locate a present. White settler responses to their favourite conversation starters—‘Where are you from?’ and ‘What's your background?’—are examples of ‘moves to settler innocence’—the discursive flexes that deflect colonial guilt and centre settler accounts of ‘what happened’ and ‘what next’, thoroughly explored by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang in their thesis ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’ (2012). The refrains are all too familiar: Australia is thoroughly British heart and soul; America-adjacent British rejects; a British-Asian multicultural mixed salad on the arse-end of a world that doesn't bother to know this place beyond footy and koalas and kangaroos and crocodiles and The Wiggles and ‘g'day’. Beyond the white disdain for ‘identity politics’ is a disdain for the times the discussion doesn't centre them.
The chill, low-key Australianism Malouf describes in 'Made in England' is, of course, a settler self-preservation tactic, a smokescreen for histories of violence within which British expansionism is directly implicated. In The White Possessive: Property, Power and Indigenous Sovereignty (2015), Distinguished Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson writes:
In his essay “Made in England: Australia’s British Inheritance,” David Malouf argues that essentially the values Australians inherited from Britain involve “[a] low church puritanism and fear of the body and its pleasures, British drunkenness; British pragmatism and distrust of theory; British philistinism and dislike of anything showy, theatrical, arty or ‘too serious’; British good sense and the British sense of humour.” According to Malouf, these attributes are tied to a habit of mind that is essentially Anglo- Saxon. Malouf argues further that Australian English is derived from late Enlightenment English and as such it is “purged of all those forms of violent expression that had led men to violent action.” It is moderate language grounded in reason, negotiation, and compromise that created a form of social interaction in Australia, which tempered extremism and kept “the worst sorts of violence at bay.” It is the language of Australian literature, courts, and the education system. What Malouf does not acknowledge is that this language is also tied epistemologically to a possessive investment in whiteness. Binary oppositions and metaphors had by the eighteenth century represented blackness within the structure of the English language as a symbol of negation and lack. Indigenous people were categorised as nomads as opposed to owners of land, uncivilised as opposed to being civilised, relegated to nature as opposed to culture.
As such, cruelty and hypocrisy lurk beneath the veneer of cosmopolitan tolerance the tennis represents. In ‘Australian Open IV’, Van describes how, as the tennis is showing, another section of the telly screen briefly displays images of refugees facing indefinite incarceration for the crime of wanting to live—a situation enabled by Australian law, on stolen land. As many may be familiar with by now, Australian Open mainstay Novak Djokovic was detained and then deported at the beginning of 2022 for not complying with regulations to prevent the spread of COVID-19. He was temporarily held at the Park Hotel, the same location where refugees were locked up. Yet another instance of Australian open non-openness. Here, transcontinental stories find each other; they entwine briefly. But Djokovic was released 10 days later, while many asylum seekers in the same establishment had been detained for years. It is not illegal to seek asylum. In ‘Hotel Saigon XIV’, the speaker ruminates on how her father’s name (‘loi’) could be the French word for ‘law’. He is an awful conversationalist, so taken up with the ‘procedures of reason’; Van also notes that an early Vietnamese historian characterises this as a marker of French colonial superiority. In the case of asylum seekers living out their years in the confines of immigration detention for the unpardonable crime of inadequate documentation, these legal ‘procedures of reason’ read more like procedural un-reason. Torture and murder by administrative process are still torture and murder. Van reminds us that [it’s] ‘difficult to see the connection between the sacred text and the brutal act. / [...] when it comes to origins, this connection is barred from view.’ Inverting the well-worn Shakespeare quote about roses, the rot by any other name would smell as fetid. In ‘Hotel Saigon V’, the speaker’s father ‘hates our sweet talk’ as he ‘arranges flowers carefully’. Even the stench of rubbish retains notes of a lingering former loveliness; otherwise, it wouldn't be so retch-provoking.
In the early pages of her memoir Wild Card (1990), Dorothy Hewett writes of how Perth's low skylines, the land's closeness to the sun, and the wide open road paradoxically symbolise the tightly-shut minds around her. This was the world in which she grew into the communist, feminist, complicated, problematic libertine she eventually became. The vastness of the lands and natural resources make it laughable when racists, overconfident and secure in their entitlement, continue to insist ‘we're full’. Van mobilises the metaphor of the Open to speak of the many layers of contradiction here: on the one hand, to host a global sporting event from the arse-end of the planet, to be a good neighbour of the neoliberal global village in this and many ways; on the other hand, to marshal this openness as an investment in settler futurity rather than making genuine commitments to opening the heart, cultural spaces, political infrastructure, economic architecture, to exploring what land back could be like, to imagine dwelling, community, and existing on Country beyond the ethos of exploitative property relations that emerged and persists through colonialism and capitalism. Tuck and Yang remind us that ‘decolonisation is not an “and”, it is an elsewhere’, a Native-led futurity that seeks precisely to unsettle, to remain complicated, to not speed towards resolution—at least not on settler terms.
As Van recalls in ‘The Malouf’, ‘I wrote somewhere: “poetry is the negation of emplotment.”’ Plots seek endings, resolutions, some variation on closure. Poems don't really end, or they don't end when the words do. The poem is always more than the words or shapes on the page; it is more than the book-object or digital imprints on a screen. The same might be said of solidarity and revolution, similar acts of shattering monuments and building (new) worlds. Perhaps this is why manifestos often read like poetry, and why global efforts to squelch dissent from below almost always include violence against poets. In the following passage from Cruising Utopia: The Then And There of Queer Futurity (2009), the late José Esteban Muñoz writes the following of Elizabeth Bishop's ‘One Art’, which Van also references:
The poem’s narrative instructs us as to the transience of things filled with the intent to be lost, and as it does so, it retains a queer trace that lingers, tragically and lovingly, within the hold of parentheses [...] the gesture and its aftermath, the ephemeral trace, matter more than many traditional modes of evidencing lives and politics [...] after the gesture expires, its materiality has transformed into ephemera that are utterly necessary.
Van's work draws its energy from lived experience and yet extends its affective reach beyond the particularities of the personal. I think of another Elizabeth Bishop poem, ‘Filling Station’ (1983), when I imagine what poetry makes possible for women of colour who would like to assert the desire to write or do any kind of art, as we steal moments here and there, later lifting our heads and hands from the work to return to the daily task of being lovers, mothers, daughters, friends, workers, leaders, revolutionaries. Perhaps the moment-to-moment labour of crafting verse is not wildly dissimilar to the invisible quotidian acts of looking after those we love. When not giving a shit is the default in this neoliberal, consumerist, doomist zeitgeist, what stands out is somebody actually giving a damn. ‘Somebody embroidered the doily. / Somebody waters the plant ... Somebody loves us all.’
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Works Cited
✷ Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 1983.
✷ Dorothy Hewett, Wild Card: An Autobiography, 1923–1958, (Melbourne: Penguin Random House) 1990.
✷ Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches By Audre Lorde, (New York: Crossing Press) 1984.
✷ David Malouf, 'Made in England: Australia's British Inheritance,' Quarterly Essay 12, 2003.
✷ Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power and Indigenous Sovereignty, (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press) 2015.
✷ José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: the Then and There of Queer Futurity, (New York: New York University Press) 2009.
✷ Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, 'Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,' Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1:1, 2012.
✷ Lucy Van, The Open, (Melbourne: Cordite Publishing) 2021.
Angelita Biscotti uses writing, visual art, performance, sound design, and astrology to explore unconventional intimacies, grazing the border lines between illegitimacy and authenticity. Angelita is a non-binary Filipinx-Melburnian multi-disciplinary artist and sessional academic on unceded Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung Country. Her multilingual poetry chapbook Else But A Madness Most Discreet was published by Vagabond Press in 2018 under an old name. Read her recent work on Overland, Going Down Swinging, Cordite Poetry Review, Australian Poetry Journal, and The Suburban Review.
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