By: Susan Hawthorne

Let's be up front about the title of this piece. You get to decide whether I am whinging or making justifiable arguments about discrimination. You get to decide if highlighting silence, indifference or sidelining is reasonable to discuss in public. Some of you will already have decided that I am a whinger. I hope some will applaud the attempt to make known what usually is not spoken about.

Spinifex Press is a feminist press, that means that we have specialist knowledge about the international women's movement, the histories of women in many places, that we have opinions and have carried out research on subjects where the experiences of women have important social, political and even creative ramifications.

Feminism is a huge subject area and feminist writers and thinkers have much to say about this area. Feminist thinking can be applied to almost any area of knowledge. From time to time the media decides to run some kind of commentary on feminism. They ask this social commentator or that political commentator for their views. You would think that we would be rushed off our feet answering such questions from the media about what is important to half the world. But we are not. In fact, the media almost never talks to us or to the many authors published by Spinifex about the subject of feminism. In recent years a number of writers festivals have had panels to discuss whether feminism is still relevant (the wrong question in my view). Again, you would expect that Spinifex Press would be an important place to source writers who are well versed in discussing feminism. So far, we have never been asked to suggest a writer to speak on such a panel in spite of the fact that we publish more feminists per square inch than any other Australian publisher. Occasionally our international writers are invited to participate, but Australian feminists like Diane Bell, Sheila Jeffreys, Bronwyn Winter or Betty McLellan are not on the festival circuit. Let alone Renate Klein or myself.

In the last couple of years a group of brave women writers have come forward to highlight the asymmetry of awards given to women writers. Out of that has come much discussion about the Stella Prize. There have been fruitful discussions about the poor levels of reviewing of books by women, and it is having some effect on the level of awareness in the media of these issues. You would think, given our specialty, that the media would ask Spinifex Press whether these statistics were reflected in our experience of publishing women writers over the last 21 years. To date, we have not been asked that question, we have not been asked for our opinion in an area in which we have obvious expertise. This is so even though we participate in blogs, online discussions, Facebook and twitter commentary.

The issue of gay marriage has become mainstream in the last twelve months. Spinifex Press probably publishes more lesbian writers than any other publishing house in Australia. You would think that the media who are often caught short-footed in this area would come knocking to ask for comments from some of our out writers (many writers in the mainstream as well as those published by presses like ours still keep the lid on their sexuality to avoid being pigeon holed). To date, no festival organiser or journalist has asked us this question.

Ecofeminism is an area in which Spinifex has considerable expertise. What is often forgotten is that like human rights, women have always been at the forefront of discussions on ecology. Think of Rachel Carson, Donella Meadows, Maria Mies, Helen Caldicott, Vandana Shiva. Feminism and ecology go together. However, there remains great ignorance among many in the media who want to keep feminism out of ecology. But ecology would not exist as a discipline without feminist thinkers.

In a multicultural society like Australia you would expect there to be commentary on women's experience. And if you thought about a feminist perspective on these issues, you would find plenty of expertise at Spinifex from writers with diverse backgrounds. You would find Indigenous writers, writers from Asia, Africa, the Middle East and many other places. For commentary on the political changes taking place in the Arab world, you would find several of our anthologies packed with information as well as books by writers like Nawal el Saadawi and Evelyne Accad.

We, of course, wish that the issue of violence against women would go away. But it continues to grab headlines. The increasing sexualisation of girls and women has garnered a lot of comment; sexual slavery, prostitution, pornography and rape of women in war as well as violence against women in the home are regular subjects in the media. Spinifex has been responsible for a significant number of books in this area and we have dozens of authors who could make comment, could speak at conferences and festivals and yet few are ever asked to do so, or when they are, they are frequently expected to be targets of hostile interlocutors. It is unusual that a group who is subjected to violence should also be expected to be apologists for the perpetrators of that violence, but women who speak out against men's violence against women are frequently expected to defend men. The vilification of women should be as important as the vilification of people based on race, ethnicity, religion, class or caste, sexuality, disability or any other form of oppression. Hate speech based on a person's sex is just as hateful as all the other forms of hate speech I have listed. But pornography is strangely exempted as a form of hate speech. And those who speak out about it in these terms are called prudes and whingers.

The publishing industry has gone through massive changes in the last decade, and none more so than the advent of eBooks and digital publishing. Spinifex Press began creating eBooks in 2006. While we have often been asked to participate in industry forums on this subject, the media and most festivals have not asked for input or commentary from us. It's hard to say whether this is because we are feminist publishers and therefore would not know anything (although we were innovators in the field in the 1990s also) or whether there is the assumption that we would only know about feminist issues (but why are we well qualified activist publishers not asked to comment on feminism either?).

You can see that I am caught in a whirlwind and cannot get out no matter whether I shout or remain silent, no matter whether I put forward a critique or try to make jokes and be good humoured about it, or whether I whinge.

That's all very well, say the doubters, but perhaps these books are badly written or didactic, perhaps they are poorly argued or rushed to print with lots of editorial problems, perhaps the designs are sloppy or the book covers unappealing. If any of these were issues, you would read about it in reviews. While it's not possible for every book or every writer to win awards, many Spinifex authors have won awards for their books, state awards, national awards and international awards. Some books have been named in best-of-the-year lists, some authors have been recognised for their work. Spinifex Press has won awards, as have the publishers. On matters editorial, it is something we pride ourselves on and we have been known to spend several years on getting a book right. Our book covers are frequently remarked upon. Internationally, we have numerous translations, including Betty McLellan's Help, I'm living with a man boy in 17 languages. Other books have been translated into Spanish, German, Korean, Chinese and Turkish. I ask, given all this, should you be able to hear our writers at festivals or read features on them in the media?

Don’t get me wrong, we are more than grateful to those festival organisers and media who do support us, as well as to readers who buy books and writers who have stuck with us over the years.

There are many others areas Spinifex authors have written about. Here is a beginning list: war, terrorism, economics, water, health, creative writing, poetry, autobiography, GM foods, holocaust, trauma, sanity and madness, peace, literature, the politics of knowledge, globalisation, climate change, lesbian culture and history, mythology, religion, Indigenous knowledges, abortion, cyberfeminism, ecofeminism, reproductive technologies, menopause, international relations, violence against women, international feminist movements, intimate relationships, exile, masculinity, revolution, history, prehistory, politics, ecology, animals, colonisation, biodiversity, trade unions, education, children, theatre, circus, art, photography, humour, feminism.

When a group of feminist artists in New York began protesting about the number of women artists represented in art galleries, they donned gorilla masks and called themselves Guerilla Girls in part to avoid reprisals from the art establishment and the media. What we see in public fora in Australia is feminism sexed-up, feminism cat-fights, feminism lite. Any attempt to engage seriously with the ideas of feminism, ideas that have changed the lives of millions of women and girls around the world, is met with derision, distortion, exclusion and silence. I say let's have feminism noisy, feminism fun, feminism serious. In short  guerrilla feminism.

 

* Apologies to Shakespeare.

 

Spinifex Press was established by Renate Klein and Susan Hawthorne 21 years ago. Both publishers have PhDs in Women’s Studies and have lived and worked feminism for many decades. They are authors of hundreds articles on feminism as well as dozens of books and have organised local, national and international feminist events.

For more on Guerilla Girls:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_Girls

http://www.guerrillagirls.com/

 

'It’s a global phenomenon so widespread that a new name has been coined for it: the precariat,’ wrote workplace editor Clay Lucas in The Age, 21 March. Precariat is a term describing the millions of people who finding themselves without job security are forced to take insecure, poorly paid and precarious jobs.

I  came across ‘precariat’ meaning casualised, insecure labour in The Lace Makers of Narsapur by Maria Mies. Author and theorist Mies, claims that economists have invented the word ‘precariat’ because they are reluctant to have us understand the brutality that lurks behind this concept. Politicians proudly report that employment has risen but fail to admit that most of these  jobs have no holiday or sick pay and lack security of tenure.

The Lace Makers of Narsapur was first published in 1982 and is a ground breaking and sensitive study of women at the beginning of globalisation.  Maria Mies examines how the poor  women of Narsapur are used to produce luxury goods for the western market. The rural lace makers are marginalised and responsible for the subsistence of the family and due to the patriarchal norms of society are  unable to compete  with men for the small amount of  paid work that is available. The lace makers combine their work with domestic chores; their piece work is invisible – regarded as housework, even though it’s often the only family income.

Like the lace makers of Narsapur who could not survive without their precarious, low paid work, Australia, once a  country where  permanent jobs were the norm, now leads the way in the casualisation of labour with job seekers forced to move from one short-term contract to the next. In her preface to the 2012 edition of The Lace Makers of Narsapur, Maria Mies asserts that such precarious employment where millions of people lead lives of social and economic uncertainty suits the owners of capital very well. Just as the lace makers did not produce a full lace garment but parts thereof,  workers in the today’s global market produce components for products such as cars, computers or phones for unknown foreign contractors. There is little job security, scarce ability to pay for health insurance, a house, or sick pay- just dependence on the vicissitudes of the international market.

Forty years ago it was thought that by now we’d  be working just 20 hours a week, but as  the author of The Precariat - The New Dangerous Class, Guy Standing says ‘we have experienced the growth of a new and dangerously angry class, the precariat’. This global phenomena consists of people who have lost working – class jobs, and  others such as migrants and the disabled,  along with the educated and frustrated who form much of the  protest movements that spread across Europe and the Middle East last year.

But did it have to be this way? What if there had been a change in the sexual division of labour? In The Lace Makers of Narsapur,  Mies theorised that if men had to share non-wage work equally with women requiring them to spend more time at home and less at the office or factory,  the labour power needed to produce ever more commodities for the capitalist market would shrink.  Under such equal conditions, according to Mies, capitalism could not have developed in the way that it did. Instead, the atomised and disorganised lace makers working for sub-subsistence wages, ‘are now the image of the future for us’.

Guy Standing, is also Professor of Economic Security at the University of Bath in England. He warns politicians  to take note of this rising precariat whose members are suffering from anxiety. Uncertainty  is spreading rapidly throughout society, leading to alienation and despair – in turn feeding  into the growth of the protest movements around the globe, says Standing.

‘The lacemakers show the way,’ writes Mies.  ’The conditions under which they worked never disappeared, as we can see now.’ ‘Their working days are hard and long and so is the working life of these women – from the age of 8 to the age of 70 or 80. The lace-making women virtually never stop working until they die.’ These conditions have returned to the rich countries of the west from where they were exported’, she says.

While the proletariat has disappeared  the precariat is on the rise.

Maria Mies is a German theorist, activist and author. She is Professor Emerita at the University of Applied Sciences (Fachhochschule) in Cologne. She is the author of numerous works of women and globalisation including: Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalised Economy with Veronica Bennholdt-Thomsen and Ecofeminism with Vandana Shiva.

The Lace Makers of Narsapur  is an important book.  Published by Spinifex Press , it’s due for release in May 2012.

Helen Lobato 

How many of us, I wonder, blame our mothers for our failings or disappointments? Not these two writers, anyway, even though their childhood experiences were disturbingly extreme.

 

I grew up in a family where religion was just one of those things, punishment was by private disapproval, not public shaming or violence, and “do your bit” (for an unspoken general good) was the guiding principle. I am still shocked when I read about families like those in these two books, families controlled by parents with extreme beliefs that are justification for treating people—children—badly.

 

 Winterson and Rendle-Short come from families where religion ruled, in both these cases via their mother. For each as a child there was the danger of being thrown into a turmoil of embarrassment, loyalty and fear at the public behaviour of her mother. (For Winterson, add physical treatment that would have social services at the door today.) That each woman has come to some kind of resolution with her childhood shows in the dedications. Rendle-Short dedicates her book to her deceased mother, Winterson hers to “three mothers: Constance WInterson, Ruth Rendell, Ann S.” with Ann S. being the birth mother she makes contact with towards the end of the book.

 

 It is well-known that Winterson wrote a fictional version of her childhood in Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. Rendle-Short creates a fictional character, Gloria, within Bite Your Tongue to tell the childhood part of her story where the mother, so help us, is on a mission to “purify” the Queensland school curriculum by banning and burning certain books. The adult writer Rendle-Short fossicks among newspaper reports and other records for details of these events and interweaves the fictional and the factual. (“Dr Joy’s Death List” (of books) can be found at the end of Bite Your Tongue.) For Winterson’s adoptive mother, it’s more personal, the child herself appears to be the enemy, being told when her mother is angry with her, “the Devil led us to the wrong crib.”

 

 These two books keep inviting comparisons. Rendle-Short’s actual mother’s first name is—yes, really—Angel. Her character Gloria’s mother is called MotherJoy. Winterson’s mother is always referred to as Mrs WInterson and she is cruel and punishing. Both authors survive their mother, developing emotional muscle on the way.

 The writing, however, is very different. In Why Be Happy there’s a lot of space around the words, much that is not said, and the tone is matter-of-fact while the statements are often passionate, sometimes shocking, especially when the young Jeanette is being grossly mis-treated. Defiance, refusal to see herself as a victim, a small child gouging out a space for herself in the world, is what we are shown. “Books,” she writes, “for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home —they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside.” In the fiction of her childhood, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, she says she tempered the actual events, making them more believable. Goodness. Are there moments of melodrama? Or just the truth? We, her readers, can’t know, but we can feel her conviction that she is not a damaged person, no victim, (though not good at longterm relationships). “I was very often full of rage and despair. I was always lonely. In spite of all that I was and am in love with life.”

 Winterson’s statement “The trouble with a book is that you don’t know what’s in it until too late.” could have been made by Rendle-Short’s mother.

 

While Winterson invokes with spaces around the words, Rendle-Short accretes detail, in words and metaphors that make everything explicit. One example is in the two pages where MotherJoy matches “the parts of the pig’s head in front of her with an imaginary map of the female anatomy” for her daughters. And there are the sheep tongues, the full detail of their preparation and eating expanding the extended metaphor of the book’s title. 

I like it that both of these books include dedications to the mother many of us would condemn for the way they treated their daughters. Both Winterson and Rendle-Short complicate easy judgments and neither has allowed her childhood experiences to define a limited adult identity. And each demonstrates powerfully, albeit in different ways, the power, and revelatory potential of books. 

 

 

 

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

Susan Hawthorne, Director, Spinifex Press

Amazon this week made a land grab for the intellectual property of small and independent publishers.

Amazon has switched off the ability to sell Kindle titles which are distributed by IPG (Independent Publishers Group). When the period for the renewal of the contract between IPG and Amazon came around, Amazon wanted to change the terms of the contract – but not in IPG’s favour. As Mark Suchomel, President of IPG points out:

“IPG’s terms are … acceptable to everyone else in the book business … If half the accounts weren’t buying from us, I’d have to question it, but everyone else is [accepting our terms].”

Spinifex is one of a considerable number of independent Australian publishers distributed by IPG. While Amazon’s actions has had media interest in the USA, the silence in Australia is deafening.

When colonists arrive in a country they quickly grab what they can. They make land grabs. Via their distributor, Amazon is attempting to get those publishers who work through IPG to make a direct deal with Amazon. But IPG does more than distribute eBooks. They also distribute print titles, do marketing and for some, help in selling rights. Amazon doesn’t offer these services.

Small publishers sit somewhere between large multinational publishers and self-publishers. Amazon is also wooing self-publishers, most of whom are authors who have little clout. Amazon can sell these books more cheaply because self-publishers do not have overheads and because self-publishers are a dispersed workforce. It is the piecework approach to outsourced publishing. In addition, many have little experience of publishing. Amazon, I expect, would like small publishers to sign the same contracts as self-publishers, but small publishers operate on a different business model.

Amazon is using a divide-and-conquer strategy and it’s unlikely a small publisher signing up to Amazon on its own will have anywhere near the clout of a large distributor – and who knows what terms Amazon will begin to offer small publishers in the event that distributors like IPG are taken out of the picture. Nor do small publishers have the clout of publishers such as Macmillan and others who were able to stand together against Amazon in early 2010.

Macmillan and the other major publishers won that battle because this was a fight between two reasonably equal partners. Are small publishers to be cast to the wind?

Here is how Amazon framed the battle with Macmillan:

“Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it’s reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book. We don’t believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan. And we know for sure that many independent presses and self-published authors will see this as an opportunity to provide attractively priced e-books as an alternative.”

So here we are: Amazon, like Dymocks in the argument about parallel importation, is driving a wedge between consumers and publishers. Most consumers want cheaper goods, but when the long term effect of that is to drive those same businesses to the wall, it is not in the interests of consumers to think only of prices. Small publishers offer an alternative to the mainstream. Our biggest struggle is to survive. The shift to eBooks is costing everyone working in publishing a great deal of time and money.

Every eBook that is produced by a small publisher has to have all of the following done by the publisher: acquisition, editing (both structural and copyediting), typesetting, interior design, cover design, conversion of files to multiple eBook formats, creation of metadata, uploading of files to multiple distribution channels, promotion (including creating media releases), contacting media, using social media, organizing events, paying of royalties, negotiating contracts and so it goes on. These are the value-add services that a publisher provides.

While the large publishers get to set their own prices, small publishers – already faced with lower returns – are expected to allow Amazon – another business – to set their prices for them. IPG’s battle with Amazon is important because it suggests that this might be a first step in subduing the colonised.

While some have said that this is an individual fight about terms of trade, I do not believe it is that simple. It reminds me of the moves by Coles and Woolworths with farmers (my parents were farmers). Without some kind of industry response, Amazon will keep on pushing and pushing and later we will ask: why did no one speak out when this began to happen to the small – and some not so small – players?