The House of Spitfires

The spitfires were black and hairy and lived in the crook of two branches in front our house in Maidstone. The tree with the thick grey trunk was empty except for the ugly black and yellow striped lump that writhed and squirmed each summer. Dad would throw salt on them and they’d fall to the ground, curl up and die, but there’d be a new bunch the next day, as black and inseparable as ever. I’d run past the tree, terrified that if I slowed down they’d shoot off the branch and cling to my six year old limbs.

Despite the black mass staining our front yard, the backyard was beautiful. Dede was the master gardener in blue striped cotton pyjamas and a white singlet; he’d plough and nurture Australian soil until it gave him ripe tomatoes, capsicums, cucumbers, garlic shoots. He’d trim the grape vine; stalk the garden like a walking scarecrow, hands behind his back, protecting this little piece of home. I was the biggest threat to his garden and would steal the baby cucumbers. The furry leaves would itch my skin but not as bad as the muddy garden hose that would land on my bum when Grandpa caught me. “Essek oglu essek,” he’d curse and chase me around the backyard.

Maidstone was maroon plum trees lining the streets. It was the almond tree in the backyard where each branch promised new adventure, it was the sticky smell of boiled honey and lemon cooling on the sink. It was Mum’s pungent sweat tickling my nose when I’d nuzzle her, it was the web of family ever present, their background noise deafening with laughter and barbed words. It was Glad who lived next door, her hair cotton white, her smile kind, her kitchen small and inviting with the promise of cookies in glass jars. Hers was a different world, bright with star spotted cards in her lounge and the big tree with colourful lights. I wanted that world with the flashing globes so Mum brought a bit of it home. Every Christmas she’d buy a small plastic tree for her three girls and we’d decorate it with colourful tinsel. She even hung white socks in the lounge and filled them with prima and chips. Ours was a practical Santa. And she was growing up.

Unroadworthy Love

We can’t take it for a drive, it’s leaking in three places.

But it’s smooth to touch.

The engine’s faulty, it needs a service.

But it sounds so good.

We can’t fix it, it will cost too much.

And yet we try to patch it up with bandaids that are soggy with sweat and tears.

Well, girls, time for an upgrade.

I Got Lots of Voices in My Head

You’re lame, one whispers as Mum searches my face. She eyes her purse. Tighten my lips sticky with gloss. Smile; shake my head. “I’m fine, thanks, Mum.” Nope, you’re a loser says the voice louder as I walk out the door. You’re so lame, a charity case. All you got is loose change. I got my words, I say, so shut the f#$k up. A shrill laugh like a banshee. Yeah, you got your words. They’re broke like you.

 

I tell you story, you write ten books! His accent’s thick, I imagine he has a moustache to match. Not in the mood for your migrant story I tell him. Oh, but I want to tell you how I get shot in my back when I kidnap my bride! Sounds interesting, really, but today I’m writing about boys. Teenage boys, angry boys, horny boys. I carry her and my back break from pain but I never let go. Fair effort with a bullet in your back. Yes, that same bullet kill me forty years later. Oh. His words nip my brain like hooks.     

 

Hey stop writing. I can smell the shit you’re spinning from here. Piss off. I tap the keyboard like a woodpecker. Tap tap tap out that hideous voice. But I’m serious. Just because you’ve fluked your way in to a magazine or two doesn’t make you a writer. Tap tap. It’s not about publication, it’s about creation. HA HA HA. The laugh settles around my bubble of hope like frost. Tap.       

 

Them Indians are a worry. This voice is whiny like a mozzie. They’re taking over the country. I don’t want to hear it. You think you’re better than me you wog? Didn’t say that. You’ve all taken over the country, a bunch of cockroaches. Bzzzzzz. Not listening. You stink like kebabs. Blah blah blah. I’ll never forget what you people did in Gallipoli. You’re so low. I don’t want to write about you. Then you move here to add insult, you stupid Turks. You’re an ignorant pig. Nah, I’m an Aussie.   

 

Her eyes are like two black holes, they suck you in like lies. She sounds evil. They’re dark and mysterious like the jungle where lions sleep and the howl of wolves drill my ears. What else has she got? My guts, they are slippery in her hands. Hmm. Bit gross. I’m scared she’ll let go and I’ll slip through her fingers. Been nice listening, really, but who’d want to read this gruesome shit? Cross out the words, close my notebook on many ideas that may never hit the white screen.

I’ve opened another notebook with lots of space for new voices in 2010, a year full of holes. Have fun filling them in with love,  adventure, randomness, new beginnings and happy endings lovely people. I know I will

Have a happy New Year!

Letting the past in

The first thing I notice when I invite the past back in is the smell. Then an image, a small blur that slowly clears as I wrap my mind around it. It’s only then when I follow the scents of my youth and zoom in on the past that I feel something. The emotions tug and pull, tighten my chest, sting my throat, and make me smile at the chaotic years in Footscray.  When I think back to those first few years they stink. Like homesickness, wafting in the smoke of Mum’s cigarettes, like sweaty feet lingering in dad’s shoes after a hard day’s work at the factory, Grandma’s soap floral and musky as she plaited her wet hair, dead fruit in foam boxes at Footscray Market, fat chips and vinegar at the Forges food court.

Our first neighbourhood in Footscray was congested with my dad’s family. All five brothers and sisters lived in Australia. My uncle Sam migrated here with his wife in the 70s and invited the rest of his family when Australia had its doors wide open to diversity. And so a colony of Turks settled in Melbourne’s west sweating in factories, in restaurant kitchens, chasing stable futures in a land that had lost its identity a long time ago. One night, among the racket and congestion of family, magic happened in Footscray. I was sitting in the lounge with my Grandma and Grandpa watching TV, trying to listen to the muffled adult voices in the backyard. “Kalk kanali cevir,” said Dede. I didn’t want to, but I dragged my feet to the television set. “But you don’t even understand it,” I said, flicking through the channels. My grandma smiled, hands in her lap, and my grandfather grumbled in that low guttural tone I knew well so I shut my mouth. My dede was a cute little package. He was small, skinny with a mop of white hair, gold teeth and big protruding veins that hinted at the strength hidden beneath his creased skin. “Ha, tamam,” he said spotting Toni Barber’s head and waved me back with a golden smile. Sale of the Century. They didn’t understand a word but they were drawn to the show with the bright buzzers. The way I was drawn to the voices in the backyard. My grandparents were immersed in the show so I tiptoed towards the back door and took a peep. The flood of light was blinding. I squinted until my eyes adjusted. And held my breath.

It was snowing.

The whole garden was white like the Christmas movies on TV. My heart beat quickly and I ran back to the lounge before anyone saw me. It was years later when I asked my mum about it that she’d laughed and explained that one of my uncles had found cheap roosters for sale while driving in the country. “He brought home boxes of white roosters, she’d said, “and what you saw were the plucked feathers.” So my family had slaughtered, plucked and pulled at roosters all night only to find the meat leathery tough. Inedible.

Births

The room wasn’t big enough for eight bodies yet each night my mum and her seven siblings crammed grimy limbs around each other on a makeshift bed on the floor. They’d bring the day with them, the dirt from marbles matches on dusty streets, sore fingers from work on the cotton field, restless stomachs ringing with hunger. As Mum explained, she would toss into someone’s back and turn into someone’s stinky feet and cry from frustration. It was in this room with the iron barred windows where the children fought, laughed and went through puberty that I was born a few years later. In Adana, Turkey, where roads are rocky, men are tall, dark and hairy, and streets are cramped with tattered kids and vendors who showcase their goods on wooden carts.

Mum delivered me into the hands of a local midwife at fifteen. I received a sticky initiation to life. My mum’s aunt sprinkled sugar all over my naked new flesh so I’d be sweet and not resemble her mother-in-law whose wide nose I’d inherited. She got to work on my nostrils, squeezed and squeezed them until my nose shrunk to her liking. I was welcomed into the world with a body scrub and a nose job. Try getting that at a maternity ward!

“We never had dolls,” said my aunt Esin on my last visit, “we had you to play with. Your aunt Pervin would crack your toes one by one until you’d scream.” No wonder they’re a little skewed. Mum would breastfeed me, wash my cloth nappies, and hand me back to her eager family. By fifteen, she’d worked on a cotton field, learned to sew, become a wife, a mother. At fifteen I was figuring out how not to leak on my jeans, how to tame the brown, wiry shrub on my head and how much work I’d need to do to scrape through high school. Mum had a head start in life but it came with many losses.

I owe my name to the girl at the birth registry office who advised my indecisive dad that Hatice, my grandmother’s name, was archaic and Demet was more modern. Don’t get me wrong, Hatice is lovely but it’s a name that works in Turkey where every letter is pronounced. In Australia, however, I would have been lost in pronunciation and found on the tongues of many children who’d nickname me Hat-Ice. ‘Damn it, Demet’, was more than enough thank you.

Two months after my birth, my mum turned sixteen. In a few months she’d be old enough to go to Australia, leave the backyard with the small cement well my grandfather used to fill up on hot days for his kids to cool off. Leave the street where her and her sisters used to board the tractor to the cotton field, laughing and singing with the rest of the workers. Leave her home with poverty etched into her hands and memories that I’d watch resurface years later. She was leaving for a new country, with fear, excitement and a new family in her lap.

Death’s Touch

I                                                                                                                                                               

When God cries for his children,

death obeys.

 

II

A skeletal tree

bows to the leaves at its feet.

The remnants of death.

 

III

Death has a callous touch

as it draws you back into its

dark womb.

 

IV

Empty eyes peruse me

from an empty soul,

death’s vacuum.

 

V

A baby is born,

its tiny fingers blue.

Death cuts the umbilical cord.

 

VI

An arrogant leader,

death unleashes its pack

to bring home the kill.

 

VII

A lonely cemetery embraces

the deceased;

death sleeps.

 

VIII

Red, black and white

glisten mockingly

on death’s rainbow.

 

IX

A brilliant dawn salutes the day,

a luminous dusk declares its death.

 

X

Earth stirs.

Wolf howls.

Death takes.

 

© Demet Divaroren

 

 

Lonely Bird

Lonely Bird

                                    

sits perched

on top of the pyramid

every day

she has no nest

no flock

no tune to sing

she flaps her wings

                                         one!

                                                two!

                                         three!

slumps back down

deflated

it will be time for her to leave soon

when other birds take flight

she will descend

down the pyramid steps

                                             one

                                                 by

                                                   one

to an empty playground

 

© Demet Divaroren

Don’t Settle for Someone Else’s Kebab

Two weeks ago, the Northcote Town Hall was buzzing with another energetic performance by the Anti Racism Action Band (A.R.A.B) who hip hopped, sang, belly danced, rocked and Krumped their way through their latest production Conjure. The story was about a brave young writer from the ‘burbs’ who’s chasing a dream that’s not restricted by her past, her family or cultural comfort zone and follows her desperate attempts to please a demanding publisher. It opens with a young boy, Habs, who owns ‘Hab’s Kebabs’ a small, popular stand in the North. He is the boy next door, the one you pass at train stations with the loud wog accent and gold chains and quickly look the other way, the one you write off because of his Broady slang or his background which suggests his dreams can only reach as far as kebab stands or take away shops. But that night, the Northcote Town Hall was the writer’s imagination and her stories starred kids like Habs who did not disappear in the backdrop of society but raised their voices and conjured bold futures beyond the suffocating mould of their stereotypes. The publisher was going insane demanding “more Neighbours,” not Bollywood, not Broadmeadows, not reality. More fake backdrops, sterile characters, whiter streets. After all, who wants to read or watch a reality cluttered with migrant kids caught between two worlds, who are daring to believe in another future? These stories have always been reserved for budget productions, not for the big screen. Not anymore. As I watched the A.R.A.B kids act, dance, sing, and believe, I saw passion. These kids are no longer settling for “someone else’s kebab”. So line them up, Habs. We’ll risk the onion breath, the heartburn. Give us kebabs with the lot!

Silent Triggers

Moments in our lives are like bracelet charms. Some are cute, some colourful, some are jagged; they dig into our skin. When I think back to earlier years, of primary school in Footscray, in Turkey, in Meadow Heights, my charms don’t jingle, they don’t make a sound. That’s because I had no voice. When I was eight we’d moved to Turkey for two years. My first day at school I stood in front of a class of twenty or so kids, my hair a boy short mess, heart in my mouth, staring at the first word of a story I was asked to read to assess my Turkish. The word was Ev. House. I knew the word; I was tutored briefly before starting school to have basic reading and writing skills. With each second that passed the word got bigger and bigger, it took over the page. Ev I repeated in my head over and over, felt my lips move, heard my teacher’s encouragement, took a deep breath, looked up and saw the smirking kids and the word got stuck in my mouth like an ulcer. My teacher let out an exasperated sigh and closed the book. The kids laughed out loud and my confidence was crushed by a one syllable Turkish word that followed me home to Australia. When I think back now, it’s that moment that dictated the rest of my education. In high school my friends called me ‘D for Demet’, that’s the grade I averaged until year 11 when an inspiring speech from the assistant principal made me realise that I could have the one thing I’d convinced myself I wasn’t good enough to achieve: success. This moment was my catalyst for change, my lucky charm.

Five years ago I found myself in a Professional Writing and Editing course at Victoria University. I was going after a profession that wasn’t encouraged at school or recognised as a career at home. I sat in that class with fear eating my confidence but this time I trusted my gut. I had courage and belief and they’ve steered the way ever since. Well most of the time. I often doubt myself, my writing, my voice and some days the term ‘writer’ just doesn’t fit. Sometimes I’d rather vomit than write but I still sit there and face the screen because even with its ups and downs writing is a part of me, it’s the only time I make sense. I’ve come a long way from that scared little girl in a foreign classroom but now I have a new battle with my writer’s confidence and my emotions that fluctuate with doubts, fears, successes and rejections. Some days I still hear the laughter of those kids but this time I spit the words out. I keep writing, keep learning and continue to raise my voice.

All that Sizzles

‘The Slap’ by Christos Tsiolkas unveils a thin layer of smog from our eyes to expose the chaos that lies beneath the veneer of our multicultural society. When a child is slapped by another parent at a backyard barbecue, the effects ripple through the North, South, East and Western suburbs of Melbourne testing beliefs, morals, friendships, loyalties and the truths of the main characters in an uncompromising, unpretentious and honest narrative that captivates and awakens the reader. In one chapter each, eight characters present at the barbecue share their views on the slap and its many consequences on the friendship circle.  Tsiolkas’s characterisation is fearless, he places us into their minds, their desires, fantasies, and their pasts enabling us to better understand their present. Each chapter has enough to constitute a short story but Tsiolkas threads their stories together with such expertise they make an irresistible whole.

Tsiolkas’s characters are real, so real that their voices loom loud above the pages. Whether it’s the elderly Manolis who hobbles with the weight of loneliness and disappointments, the complexity of today’s youth in Connie and Richie or the burden of adulthood that cuffs Hector, these characters are the voices of our society. Even though some are not particularly likeable, we are compelled to read on because there’s a certain truth that echoes on the page, an honesty that can’t be ignored. Tsiolkas’s language is powerful and his descriptions so raw that his words invade the page with no warning, shocking the reader.  

‘The Slap’ is a scattered reflection of our society. From the bleak and monotonous western suburbs to the glamorous East, Tsiolkas has captured the heart of multicultural Melbourne, where generalisations, ethnic hostility, identity, morals and stereotypes unite to illustrate social and cultural issues. Manolis, an elderly Greek migrant, believes that his generation have “bred monsters,” and laments at the current generation’s selfishness, their lack of respect. His wife cannot warm to her Indian daughter in law, Aisha, wishing her son married a Greek girl, even though her daughter’s marriage to a Greek man ended in divorce. This typifies the attitudes prevalent in many migrant communities and Tsiolkas does not hold back, he honours his characters with their truth. Through them we reinforce our own truths and discover that within these characters’ minds lurk thoughts we don’t dare voice. We recognise their consciences, their fears, their insecurities, and the humanity that binds us together.       

The novel’s setting is an ideal battleground for the differing cultures that envelope Melbourne. Multiculturalism enriches our country like no other, but Tsiolkas chips at the intolerance of our society until it screams on the page. In one scene Van sings “wog man, wog man,” putting on a “ching-chong” voice, in another Manolis’s nephew Harry says Australians don’t “give a fuck about their children.” Through a string of sayings that have become social anthems, ‘The Slap’ reinforces Australia’s identity crises and questions what it really means to be Australian. From religion and its stereotype, to the wogs, the bogans, the Aboriginals, Tsiolkas’s Australia is a conundrum.

‘The Slap’ weaves a web of drugs, hostility, sex, abuse, domestic violence, corruption, around our society and challenges the role of men and women, parents and children. It is our mirror that reveals a blemished reflection. We see the world as an aging man, a confused teen, a mother, a single woman, a gay boy and we feel. Whether it’s outrage, sympathy, understanding, confusion, pain, happiness, disappointment, Tsiolkas challenges our beliefs and dares us to imagine what it may be like to live as another, plonking us in a harsh reality, to a corrupt society in need of repair.