Author: myfwilliams

On womanhood …

My all-girls’ high school taught me that advanced mathematics and physics were for everyone (as long as you applied yourself and didn’t sit at the back of your Year 11 physics class writing poetry). My mother, a mathematician herself, taught me that no physical task was insurmountable if one applied logic and a knowledge of Newtonian physics. She taught me that with a good education, a woman could be financially independent.  The world taught me that womanhood was both deficit and currency.

Woman as deficit. Pre-pubescent, not quite girl, not quite woman, because every child has a harassment story, what girl-child hasn’t been sexually harassed, be careful what you wear be careful where you walk, be careful be careful take care, society tells you. If something happens to you, you clearly haven’t taken care enough, even if the something is an adult, and you simply cannot fight them off.  Woman as deficit, becoming twice as qualified as your male colleague, spending 20 years in higher education acquiring degrees and the right tone of voice so people will take your ideas seriously.

Woman as currency. 18 and navigating sticky nightclub floors in stilettos, my hair reeking of second-hand tobacco back in the indoor smoking days, with a bra that cut into my flesh to give the illusion of cleavage. Enhancing womanhood with a push-up bra and Revlon colour stay mascara, as currency, to get the guy, to get the girl. Womanhood as delightful performance, an artist’s fantasy of lace and tulle, rainbow of costumes and artifice. Woman as currency, to show vulnerability, to speak truths that all humans feel but men are told to silence. To be intimate, to share our flaws, our realness.

The last time I was reminded of my womanhood, I was having my appendix removed. I awoke gasping, my stomach bloated from key-hole surgery, with the surgeon standing over me in dismay. “The surgery was successful…but…but you have endometriosis. It’s everywhere!” What did that mean?  I thought, in my post-operative drug addled state. Was my brain still functioning? Could I still run? Could I still feel deeply? Yes, yes, yes.

“But the endometrial cells have escaped the uterine walls, wrapped around your ovaries, your bladder, your bowels. This can affect fertility,” the surgeon said.  

Are you a woman if you cannot grow life in your body, if your body itself is hostile to new life? My womb has grown monstrous out of its cavity, annexing its neighbouring organs. In some cultures, an infertile woman is shunned, driven from the village as though infertility is a contagious disease, a plague liable to disrupt society itself. In other cultures, such a woman takes on an elevated role, of healer, elder, counsel.

A gynaecologist later told me that it was lucky the surgeon had diagnosed the endometriosis early. It could be contained without further surgery. My fertility could be saved. There was hope for me.

Can I still think? Can I still feel? Can I still run?

 Yes, yes, yes.

Does anything else matter?

 Yes, no, possibly.                                                      

We never did make it…

We never did make it to the Halloween party. Even though I was dressed as Eowyn, and you were dressed as Aragon, and we carried collectors’ swords and you carried a dagger that an elderly Asian lady on the train thought was a Samurai sword. The way we chuckled at her look of disappointment when she realised it was simply a Lord of the Rings dagger.

We never did make it to the Halloween party, and my little voice who sees the truth told me we’d never make it. It said we’d travel the train lines in humid, sweat coated circles, five hours on a Sunday, around and around. Me with my little brain voice and the louder brain voice that sings off-key in a child’s voice, singing for hope.

That is the way of it, the way of us.

There is always alcohol and drugs, and there’s always hope.

Hope that if I keep trying, that I can engage you with the world. Hope that if I only try a bit harder, you won’t need a beer, a Carlton dry long neck sipped from a paper bag at a Western Sydney train station, the Valium, a flutter at the pokies.

We never did make it to the Halloween party.

A letter to all my creative friends

What is your art worth, my dear friend? I write this as someone who has been writing for 25 years, whose writing is infused with the type of experience I would not wish on anyone. I write this as someone who wakes at 4am to write with a broken French Press and discount Lebanese coffee, as someone who spends her evenings creating digital art with pharmacy glasses as I cannot afford prescription lenses.

So, you tell me that your jewellery is not worth the price tag, though I know you have spent years training and hours making the piece which you undersell. I have seen the callouses on your fingers and the chisel slices taken from your hands.

You tell me your art is not worth the price, and I tell you the problem is not your jewellery, nor the price-tag.

The problem is that you do not yet know your worth.

Because there must be something beyond the daily labour that reduces us to automatons. A rationale for placing one foot beyond the other. There are those who say they are not creative, but even they enjoy a unique bangle bought, a song on the car radio played in peak hour traffic, a series on Netflix, a spring garden that they tend.

Art makes life bearable, my dear friend. It gives us a reason to keep going, and you might say well that this the role of children, or a partner, or a pet. But love itself is an artform, a creative practice infused with intuition and hard work.

Art gives us a reason to breathe, dear friend.

Please know your worth.

Rain-song for rogue women

Inspired by violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja

I think I might love rogue women who hold their music

under their chins,

the first symphony she heard was rain falling on her Moldovan or was it Austrian roof

and she was only four and maybe it was this same rain that gave her permission to walk barefoot

on a concert hall stage and play Tchaikovsky with a rainbow flag on her shoulder rest

and today I am listening to the rain-song, and

though we may be underwater soon,

I have lived so long on parched land that

I ask to be swept beneath the current

shocked, surprised.

and yes, yes ‘Surprise me….

if art ceases to surprise it becomes a dead museum.’*

*Patricia’s Kopatchinskaja’s response to a critique of her interpretation of Ravel’s Tzigane.  

Things I learned from you

That nature is comprised of fractals, a golden ratio seen in a sunflower’s face and a fern unfurling, that a wave’s crest can be reduced to the rise and fall of sine and cosine, of trigonometry in motion,

That nature smiles when you plant kamote leaves, that she blesses you with rain and sweet potato tubers, that there are spirits in the trees and that the ground upon which we tread is alive

That some earth needs to be softened in order for plants to grow and indeed you sprouted forests from clay and hoof torn dirt and I learned that some people are better teachers than parents,

And I learned that the same person who can birth foliage from barren earth, command an oasis with toil and care, delighting in palms that reach to the sky

May not delight in their own offspring’s unfolding, that they will plant them in darkness, abandon them in barren land and blame them

For their leafless stems and flowerless bloom

I learned that you should have been a botanist and not a mother.

Remember

Remember that mixed cassette tape you made a friend in the 90s, before there was a Kate Bush renaissance inspired by Stranger Things, and no self-respecting teen would listen to that much electronic synthesiser in one song. Remember when you sat beside your old Sony Stereo in 1998 and recorded Kate Bush anyway, so your friend would have something to which she could laugh and listen, when she travelled to the back woods of Oregon. Because at 16 on the South Coast of Australia, you weren’t quite sure where Oregon was situated and whether they even had music there.

Remember the dreams you wrote with a friend, scrawled onto lined A4 paper, about the art gallery you would open and the cats you would own and the veranda upon which the two of you would sit, growing old. Remember another friend’s art school photography, and the collection you apparently inspired, where she photographed Henna tattoos on a belly dancer’s soft chest and muscular back.

 And actually, you don’t remember, not really. Not until they send you screen shots of the letters written, of the black and white photography, taken on a Hasselblad and processed in a photographic dark room in a time before smart phones and Instagram filters. And you still don’t remember these actual moments, but you remember how you made each other feel.

Hopeful. Inspired. Seen.

Remember friendship not merely as little moments, but also as feelings looped together on a mixed cassette tape. Today you’re celebrating friendship, not as a concept or a series of analogue remnants to be placed in a time capsule, but as feelings recorded and archived in the spirit.

And you’re thinking of memory, over pizza with two friends, one of whom is prematurely losing her mind.

This is not a metaphor.

You try not to think about the autopsy, that Alzheimer’s can only be truly confirmed after death, when an autopsy reveals a shrunken brain, filled with tangled proteins.

Today is a good day. Your friend remembers you. There will be a time when she won’t, but today over margherita pizza and fries, she remembers you, and there is laughter and, in your soul, there is a portable Sony stereo and a 90-minute cassette tape, and you remember to press record.

First date lines

I can tell you that I play the violin, albeit badly. But everyone plays the violin badly until their tenth year of playing. I can also tell you what the inside of a methadone clinic smells like: mildew and urine and cheap caustic soda. Home brand, no matter how private the clinic. I can tell you that such places are great equalizers, with everyone in the queue hovering at the edges of their skin. That some people will take their ‘done and sell it or chase it with ice or steroids.  That others will swallow their dose and let the chemicals hold them, like a slow-release embrace, and they’ll go to work as accountants, or academics or tradies.

What else do you want to know? I can tell you that each Christmas I consider driving to Flagstaff Hill and free falling from the jagged cliffs. But then I think of my calico cat who licks my nostrils every night and my tuxedo cat who enjoys second and sometimes third dinners.  And with this thought I realise that no one else would love them in the same peculiar way.  Instead, every Christmas I drive northwards past the leafy suburbs of Sydney where the self-declared successful people live. And I keep driving, to friends I would call family if only the latter felt like safety.

Anyway, did I tell you I play the violin badly?

I can tell you that I sound like a funeral dirge in the key of D minor, played in the corner of a small-town pub, sung by a tone-deaf Nick Cave/ Joan Baez cover band.

The Flood

Sing, madwoman, as the spring harvest

floats down the swollen river and the

saturated soil rejects the falling sky

Sing as adult children carry the sun

beneath their shivering skins

searching for a stolen summer

Sing, madwoman for you built your ark long ago

when you sank in human deluge

and the sadness could not hold

You, madwoman, who built your ark with

broken stories, hull hammered with upturned words,

pulling fallen folk aboard

Cry if you must for this sinking world

but also sing, for you have always floated

while the strongmen have drowned.

Things they taught me in Catholic school/transferable skills

Things they taught me in Catholic school:
How to genuflect
How to raise my cupped hands to receive
Christ’s wafer flesh on my tongue
In a way that didn’t leave pieces of 
Jesus between my teeth.
All the saints, all the holiness outsourced
In the first gig economy &
Sin.
	Girls if you have the urge to sin
Plant flowers in your garden.
	I’ve always had beautiful roses.

Things they taught me in Catholic school:
Transferable skills
Stolen from pagan lore and worship
Through the senses
Brass incense holder and sandalwood
Forest green or deep purple (the colour of sin) 
Draped across the altar, 
Woven gold vestments and
Votive candles.

And now my ritual. Each day of worship 
Beneath the Banyan, where the Asian spirits live
With the magpies and lorikeets
And here I stand
In prayer to protect 
Her buttress roots from plastic beside
The ancient Gadigal river. 
An act of devotion. 
I pray to her canopy, and she answers with peace
And I listen, 
I listen.
Good Catholic girl that I am.

After the rain

So, I am wading through a La Nina springtime,

past the mangroves bathing in a swollen river

through sodden fields where puddles have turned to

 pools to reflect

the dusk light sky and grey-pink clouds.

After the rain

I am wading through floodwater

praying for an end to a muscular mind

tightened into

a fist of fury.

All around me, all types of post rain birdsong.

But I listen for the kookaburras, their unhinged cackle calls

like maniacal laughter, and I begin to

Unfurl.