It is a great honour to launch Merlinda Bobbis’s book .

Some books are very easy to describe – they fall into well-known categories or genres, they carry with them a kind of commercial promise of familiarity, a kind of complacency, if you will, that reassures the reader of a certain comfort and ease. Then there are those books, like Merlinda’s, like Fish Hair Woman, that are utterly singular, books that challenge and excite us because they are like no other, books that transport and transform us, that require us to imagine larger, richer, more profoundly and more audaciously...

So my job this afternoon is to give you a sense of the qualities of this remarkable book without reducing or summarizing it, without spoiling the plot…

Fish Hair Woman is a kind of magical history, set in the Philippines, mostly in 1987, but with an investigation, a sort of detective narrative, set much closer to the present. To say it is magical is not to suggest it is escapist fantasy; but that it is magical in the sense of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Gunter Grass or Angela Carter, writers who – paradoxically – employ the marvelous in order to suggest the irrepressible richness of real life, its folded and intricate dimensions, its weird interiorities and inexplicable goings on. And like those writers, Merlinda has a political purpose; to challenge the social order of received and simple explanations. This is a kind of magic, then, that speaks truth to power, but it is a literary truth, conceived in an ambitious register which figures calamity, grievance, brutality, depredation, but also – and crucially – its radical counter: intimacy, eroticism, the wonderfully implausible persistence of individual heroism and love.

1987 was the year of a war on terrorism in the Philippines, a time in which the military tried to extinguish the New Peoples Army, insurgents calling for social renewal and justice for the poor. It was a time of atrocity, disappearances and irreparable social damage. Within this terrible context, within the dark spaces of history, Merlinda has chosen to focus on particular individuals in order to remind us that those who disappear in any catastrophe have faces and names and personal stories and families; they have loved and experienced tenderness in the context of their suffering; they can be recovered within story in their all-too-human complication. The fish hair woman is a woman who has 12 metres of hair; she is condemned to retrieve the bodies of slaughtered villagers from the river, to fish them out, dragging the awful corpses with the net of her own making, trawling the depths to bring the truth of violence to the surface.

 Desaparecidos. Our disappeared, ay, so many of them. And the lovers left behind became obsessed with doors – one day my son, daughter, husband, wife, will be framed at the doorway. Behind my beloved will be so much light.

It’s a metaphor for the writer’s task, of course, to return what is hidden or unacknowledged to the light, and to loving attention and appreciation; but its also an extraordinarily bold conceit, that a woman might perform so grotesque and necessary a task, that she might carry the hope and the mourning of everyone in her village. So this is a painful magic, and this novel is sorrowful and serious; it requires us to imagine mutilated bodies and the savagery that produced them.  Most writers would be daunted by so very large a theme, and so difficult a history, but Merlinda is courageous, and committed to her moral storytelling. She has cleverly structured her book through intertwined stories, so that we learn slowly of the characters and become enmeshed in a different kind of net, if you like, in which threads of story stretch and contract, open and knot, and gradually begin to form a discernable pattern.  There’s a wonderful sense, reading this book, of continuing revelation, of coming to know the plot through this careful net-like structure. And as you can tell from the tiny piece I’ve just read, the prose has an elegiac beauty to it, a compelling lyricism and loveliness, so that the reader is also emotionally involved. It’s always a mystery to me how beauty and atrocity can co-exist in writing, but this too is central to the work of art: I’m reminded of the French philosopher, Maurice Blanchot, who believes that in a sense we write to acknowledge the dead, that the corpse is the reason that we have art, and that the decent of Orpheus to rescue Eurydice, for example, is paradigmatic of the metaphysical function of writing. In this sense the bravery of Merlinda’s vision is to lead us all to the point of witness, then allow us to sense the precious, if frail, affirmation of so terrible a journey.

Fish Hair Woman is social history, lamentation, magic, cultural investigation, but it is also a romance, working indirectly, with a poetic logic. Throughout the book, Estrella, the fish hair woman, is writing a kind of love letter to an Australian adventurer, Tony – though this is a clumsy way of describing a subtle device (there’s a mystery to the status of the love letter). Par-da-ba, the word for beloved, echoes within the book, and reminds us that weeping is possibly like singing, that there are forms of desire and mourning that are both implicitly musical. The metaphor of the heart is central too; the fish hair woman has a “tricky heart”: there is left ventricle and right ventricle love; and there are broken hearts aplenty and a deep reverence of the body and its capacity to be hurt and to find pleasure. The poetic logic – a wholly distinctive feature of this book – is no less important than the plot; and it means that we are enjoined in dense imagining of the community of the suffering, that there is a solidarity – if you will – required of us, that we are addressed through the animation of our necessary fellow-feeling.

In the investigative thread of the novel a young man, Luke, is searching for his father Tony, who is one of the disappeared. In inserting a white Australian man into the Filipino situation Merlinda raises some of the most vexatious political questions in the book: is the body of a white man more important than the body of a Filipino woman? Why might we ask this question or even dare to contemplate it? What relations of power and colonialism give more weight and prestige to the disappearance of a white man? We share a bodily vulnerability – an existential vulnerability – and in representing so sincerely, with such pertinent care, the grief of indigenous Filipinos, Fish Hair Woman is above all an ethical novel and one that requires us to be circumspect about the politics of which it speaks, and the magnitude of forms of loss we might find it easier not to consider.

I want in closing to offer my gratitude to Merlinda. We all read a great deal, and what matters finally are those books that come to rest within us, that have taught us something – not with a message, but in the process of encountering a richly imagined other-world. So I commend this book to you for its ethics, its complication, its wonderful writing, but also, finally, for reminding us that the dark human shape in the doorway, the shape surrounded by light, is what we need to recall and attend to, to vouch safe and to treasure.

Gail Jones March 2012

It was with great disappointment and disgruntlement that Spinifex yesterday learnt of Amazon’s decision to cease sales of IPG Kindle titles.



For those who don’t know, IPG is a US distributor offering services like marketing, sales and distribution to small publishing houses. They are a vital service for those of us who are a presence in the American book market, but cannot physically distribute over there. Spinifex is just one of IPG’s 400 clients whose eBook titles will no longer be available to purchase through Amazon, for the Kindle eReader. The publishing world is reporting on this news, and many articles make the salient point that IPG did nothing wrong in their negotiations with the conglomerate, but are simply the victims of Amazon’s cutthroat narrow margins.

It should be noted that print editions of Spinifex titles are still available to purchase through Amazon. It is only Kindle eBooks that are affected. But there are alternative booksellers for our American readers wishing to purchase from the Spinifex digital list. Spinifex eBooks can be purchased as NOOK books through Barnes & Noble. They are available through IndieBound, which sources titles from independent bookstores. And IPG sell our print and digital books direct.

It is especially unfortunate that this fall-out has come when the US release of Spinifex’s best-selling ‘Big Porn Inc’ is right around the corner. ‘Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry’ is officially released in America on March 1: but copies are now available from Barnes & Noble. The print & digital versions of ‘Big Porn Inc’ will be available as a B&N NOOK book and can be purchased directly from IPG.

Spinifex is proud to remain a client of the Independent Publishers Group, and we are very grateful to them for the superb work they do promoting and selling Spinifex’s titles overseas.


— The Spinifex Team

 

 

 

 I always knew there was something different about this man. Professionally he was used to being in power. At home he had a constant need to know where I was, who I was with, and what I was doing. My attention had to be on him. After the birth of my three daughters, the emotional abuse increased. He also developed an addiction to pornography. I made a decision not to have my daughters grow up in an abusive household and I left with nothing. The violence continued after separation through letters and emails-it was hard but I would do it again,’   ….Tanya

 

 On February 16, Spinifex women attended Be The Hero! Held at the Melbourne Town Hall, the event was organised by the Victorian Women’s Trust. It was part of Storming Against Violence 2012, a week of action and awareness of violence against women, and the Trust’s ongoing work in the community.

 Dr Jackson Katz, a leading U.S violence prevention advocate, internationally recognised for his groundbreaking work in the field of gender violence prevention education, addressed the audience and called on men to do a lot more to prevent violence against women. ‘Domestic violence and sexual violence have been seen as woman’s issues but these are also men’s issues,’ he said. ‘Everywhere women look over their shoulders and limit themselves because of the threat of domestic violence’ said Katz. He said that few men have spoken up and taken a stand against domestic violence. He challenged men, particularly those in leadership positions to get involved and confront violence against women.

 

Katz explained that the current manner in which matters of domestic violence are referred to as women’s issues gives men an excuse not to do anything about it. ‘Men have been rendered invisible’, he said. This is perpetuated by the media which frequently reports that ‘a woman was raped’, omitting any mention of the perpetrator. He stressed the importance of inserting the active agent.

 

 Reporters at The Brisbane Times also need to learn how to report on domestic violence. Yesterday they reported the death of a small boy thrown off the Story Bridge in Brisbane by his father who then jumped. The news item did not identify this as domestic violence, instead it referred to the father, who had just murdered his son, as a ‘top bloke’. In this article the inevitable loss and suffering of the child’s mother was rendered invisible.

 

The VWT’s Be The Hero forum departed from previous protocol where the activists and researchers deliberating on matters of domestic violence were women. On this occasion it was Jackson Katz along with Dr Michael Flood, a sociologist at the University of Wollongong and a White Ribbon Ambassador, and Be-The-Hero co-ordinator Paul Zappa. Not everyone agrees with this change of order.  The executive director of the Victorian Women’s Trust, Mary Crooks told the audience she had received a call from a supporter who was highly critical of the Trust’s decision to invite only men to speak about domestic violence.

 

 While it’s easy to understand that this new approach might be interpreted as ‘fraternising with the enemy’, maybe it’s time to consider the role that men can play in reaching abusers and potential violators.

 

 In his presentation, Dr Michael Flood acknowledged the great debt that society owes to feminist research and activism. In the 1960s and 70s, the public interest and action around domestic violence grew after feminist activists established refuges for female victims and their children. Over the last forty years, both public and private funding has been provided for shelters, laws against domestic violence have been toughened and education programs for health care professionals to recognise the symptoms of DV have been established. But Domestic violence still poses the greatest risk for disease and premature death for women 15 to 44 years-old. In 2009 the economic cost of violence against women to the Australian community was 13.6 billion dollars.

Michael Flood spoke about the unequal gender roles that still exist in society today. ‘Men’s violence is grounded in systematic inequality between men and women,’ he said. ‘We have to stop using words ‘bitch’ and ‘cunt’ – our language has to change’. He said there is a real need for society to be aware of the way that woman are portrayed in pornography and he called on governments to end inequality and for men to mobilise and join movements such as The White Ribbon Campaign.

 

 Flood is understandably concerned about the influence of pornography on relationships between men and women. Currently we live in an increasingly pornographic world where brutal and violent images that depict porn stars having their vaginas and anuses penetrated by more than one penis at a time are instantly downloadable. Such brutal images cannot help but perpetuate the inequality between men and women and the sexual violence against all women.

 

 On the Spinifex Press table were many books written and published about violence against women such as Big Porn Inc which exposes the harms of the global pornographic industry, Pornland :  How porn has hijacked our sexuality, and Not For Sale: Feminists resisting prostitution and pornography.

 

Let’s hope they get the message and pass it on!

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Victorian Women’s Trust is holding a week of community action to protest against violence towards women.

Storming against violence runs from the 13 – 17^th February featuring
Be the Hero is the premier event with Insight, action & strategies that break cycles of violence. Hosted by Andrew O’Keefe, with Dr Jackson Katz, with contributions from Dr Michael Flood & Paul Zappa.

To mark the event initiated by the Victorian Women's Trust, Mary Crooks (VWT Executive Director) has penned an opinion piece which examines the undercurrents of sexism, violence & complacency existing in Australian society, where individuals fear to speak against the status quo, enforcing a culture of tolerators.

The end of the tolerator

True story. People hovered in the chemist shop waiting area. She felt one of the guys looking her up and down in a way that made her uneasy. In taking his turn to speak with the chemist, he said in a loud voice – ‘You can always tell a depressed lesbian can’t you?’ Mildly discomforted, the chemist remained silent.

 By choosing silence, the chemist becomes what filmmaker Abigail Disney describes as a ‘tolerator’ - someone who knows that another’s behaviour is unacceptable, but offers no resistance or contestation.  As a ‘tolerator’ he becomes complicit in the other’s action. Because he did not challenge his customer’s attitude, the guilty party receives tacit permission to continue behaving boorishly.

 Why did the chemist choose to be silent? It would not take much for him to challenge and contest this abusive behaviour. He could simply say with a soft smile, ‘Mate, there’s no need to talk like that,’ sending the other man a signal that he was not prepared to endorse his words. Without social sanction, his customer might think again and may even change his ways.

 This sort of action and response is acted out thousands of times a day, all over the country – the turning of a blind eye to situations that we know in our hearts and minds are unacceptable. By soft-peddling on abusive behaviours and insidious violence, we erode our collective capacity to exercise compassion and respect, as well as guaranteeing the safety and well-being of our fellow citizens, young and older.
 
When it comes to both sexual assault and violence within families, we are a nation of ‘tolerators’. The latest statistics tell us that these particular crimes are on the increase. In Victoria alone, the latest police crime report reveals that the rape offences recorded in 2010/11 increased by 9% on the previous year. Crime against the person offences arising from family incidents accounted for over a quarter of all such crime during 2010/2011, representing an increase of over 26% from the previous year. Even allowing for improved reporting mechanisms, these are deeply disturbing figures.
 
The impacts of this violence are immense. Sexual assault commonly means life-long trauma for victims. Family violence exacts a terrible toll, for both boys and girls as well. Australian Bureau of Statistics survey data reveal that over one third of family violence reports indicate that the violence was witnessed by children in the care of women experiencing the violence. Other research shows that exposure to violence in the family increases children’s risk of health, behavioural and learning difficulties in the short term; of developing mental health problems later in life; and in the case of some boys particularly, of being at risk of perpetrating violence as adults.
 
The economic costs are huge. Analyses carried out by leading accounting firms over the last decade suggest that violence currently costs the nation billions, yes billions, of dollars every year.
 
The stark reality is that sexual assault and family violence is highly gendered. Some rape is male against male, and some family violence is caused by women, but the overwhelming majority of sexual assault and family violence perpetrators are male. Women and girls know intimately the ways they order their lives around the threat of violence stemming from an unhealthy and anti-social masculinity that depends and thrives on entitlement, intimidation, domination and control.
 
Most men implicitly reject this form of masculinity, choosing not to have violence in their lives and not to exercise violence in their relationships with women. But here’s the nub of the argument as well as the pointer to positive social change, healthier gender relations and reduced social and economic costs of violence.
 
While many men reject violence in their own lives, they should also assume the pivotal role in violence prevention. Men (and boys) need to commit to the challenge of contestation, to learn and practice ways of confronting the particular culture of masculinity that breeds perpetrators and sustains violence. Increasingly, and with community education and positive support, they should to be prepared and equipped to confront their peers in everyday life situations – family gatherings, staff rooms, office corridors, building sites, club rooms, on-line, and at the chemist shop – sending clear signals that sexist and violent assumptions, attitudes and behaviour are just not on. 
 
To believe violence is somehow only a ‘women’s issue’ is a poor excuse. Victoria’s top policeman knows this. Assuming the mantle of Victoria’s Chief Commissioner in late 2011, Ken Lay acknowledged that domestic violence is one of the most complex, least visible and fastest growing areas of crime. Quite rightly, he said we are not going to solve it by locking people up. Instead, it requires urgent attention and a fresh approach.

Men making a difference is the critical ingredient of a new approach. This is the a key message of Jackson Katz, a leading United States’ violence prevention advocate who visits Melbourne and Sydney in February as a guest of the Victorian Women’s Trust. Author of The Macho Paradox and the film Tough Guise, Katz’s bystander approach is part and parcel of the fresh thinking that is needed to deal with one of our most pressing social issues.
 
We will continue to see unacceptably high levels of sexual assault and family violence as long as people remain ‘tolerators’. When men care deeply about the women and girls in their lives – mothers, daughters, partners and friends – then they should also be alert to, and troubled by, the fact that other men perpetrate terrible violence towards other women and girls. Silence and passivity (‘I don’t behave that way so I’m okay’) acts as potent cultural affirmation.
 
When everyone, especially men and boys, steps up and claims male violence as an issue that must involve them, and where they tackle it as best they can in a raft of day-to day practical ways, the ‘tolerator’ fabric will inexorably start to wear thin.
 
Mary Crooks
Executive Director
Victorian Women’s Trust

www.vwt.org.au

 

By: Natalie Kon-yu

This is a particularly sore subject for me today, as I’ve come back from holiday and there’s no coffee in the house.  Coffee is a ritual for me, a kind for reward for waking up and getting down to work.  It’s something I especially need if I’m writing, not only the sharp hit of it; but making a cup of coffee also gives me an opportunity to step away from the page, to think about what I’ve written , to mull it over in my mind.

There seems to be a natural affinity between coffee and writers; we have a special relationship to the coffee shop or cafe. As part of a mentorship program, I meet with Susan on a fortnightly basis in Brunetti’s in Carlton.  We often order our coffee before we have found seats, and we sip as we talk about writing, about words that have inspired us, as well as the frustrations we encounter. I’m a drinker of espresso – a perilous coffee if you don’t trust the quality of the café – and Brunetti’s being so very Italian, is a good place for this little cup. The frustrating thing about espresso drinking is that it inly lasts a few seconds, I have nothing to wrap my hands around, no warm mug to hold onto or coast on as we continue our chat.  Sometimes I wish I drank lattes so that I could keep the experience of drinking coffee go just that bit longer, but I can’t forego the espresso.

In many ways coffee is just the precursor, the bit that gives us an excuse (and a place) to meet.  What we’re really interested in is the conversation; cafés are a great place to talk about writing.  Look around any café and you’ll see people talking more animatedly than they do in a bar or a restaurant (is it the caffeine?).  A lot of my writer friends meet up in cafes, and a lot of bookshops pop in near cafés.  We’re especially lucky to have a Readings bookshop right near the Brunetti’s where we meet, and many times after we’ve finished our chat, we walk over to peruse the shelves of this fantastic bookshop, high on caffeine and conversation.  This habit of readerly and writerly people meeting up in cafés has been acknowledged by organisations such as Poetry Australia who run a Café Poets Program, which gives writers a place to work (as well as providing them with coffee and tea) in exchange for the writer bringing the café into the writing community in a meaningful way. There was a small, locally owned bookstore in Perth where I used to live, that merged the café and bookshop, and the place was, as you can imagine teeming with writers.  As we move ever forward into cyber realities (or non realities, depending on your perspective) , I’m confident that we will never lose the humble café – we all have far too much to talk about.

Natalie Kon-yu lives in Melbourne and teaches Creative Writing at university.  She is currently working on her first novel 'the list of missing things', with Susan Hawthorne.