Unruly Narratives

....a growing collection of images from life

Part one compiled May 2008

I remember my father telling me how Jesus died because of the way his body was hanging on the cross. His arms being stretched out higher than his head pressurised his ribs and he died. Something like that. Then one day, not long after, I lay on a bed in my grandparents house. On my back, my legs were straight, together, and my arms stretched out either side. I could feel myself dying. Just like Jesus on the cross. But I couldn’t move. After a long while, my father walked in. Seeing me he asked what was wrong and I explained how I was lying like Jesus on the cross, and that I could feel myself dying like Jesus on the cross and that I just couldn’t move. It took him a while to explain to me why Jesus died and I wouldn’t. But now in my memory I still don’t understand the logic of any of it – I just remember how I felt.

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A man pushing his bike beside some roadwork has a shovel of soil thrown on his feet.
…………………..

When I arrive a lady is putting up posters.
It is her job. She is getting paid.
She has her back to me, but I say hello anyway.
And I begin work by taking the closed sign away.

A few minutes later the lady comes over to me and we both agree that you don’t need very much money to feel rich.
The lady comes over, and while working, we both agree that you don’t need very much money to feel rich.

While we are speaking I am picking up dead cockroaches with a white tissue.
The exterminator came the night before, so now their bodies lie still. They lie scattered, across the steel bench.

Two cockroaches were having sex when they died.
At first I thought this was terrible.
But maybe it’s not at all.

I don’t think the lady ever noticed what I was doing with the white tissue.
She smiled when we said goodbye.

………………………………

They left and I was sitting alone on the platform.

A lady walked past. She was the cleaner pushing a cleaning trolley along the platform. I was the only person around, and she knew I was there. But she moved past me and she never looked at me – not once.

Then the men came back.

“105 or 106 days till retirement.
Will you sell your house?
Well we might if the market doesn’t come back up.
Reckon we’ll get $350,
A week for it.
Paying rates and all that shit….”

They were wearing uniforms, and they had grey hair with round stomachs. They were at work in the afternoon heat while the time was ticking.

“he started looking around and she’d done somethin’….
….and (ha!) she can’t swim,
couldn’t bloody stop here.
Didn’t want nothing to do with her.
Copper iodine.
Snow white
She come out and her hair was green.”

I am in the shade and the tracks look really hot. In the distance, as far as I can see from down here, a sign pierces the horizon. It is the tallest thing I can see and it is blue and red and white.

But below it there is a hospital; a red brick rectangle.

…………………………..

A poet reads in the soft dim light under a tree against a backdrop of barbed wire fence that hides in the foliage. A black cat wanders. Circling carefully behind the poet it climbs into some greenery. The audience’s eyes wander with the cat and then the cat is still.

In the green foliage the cat is shitting. But none of us can see the colour of that.

The poet, with his back turned, reads on.

The poet, with his back turned, reads on, and the audience continues to watch and listen to the cat and the poet.

………………………………

As we walked up to the temple there was a fee for cameras. People were removing their shoes at the entrance in an awkward sort of fashion. Walking up the stairs and entering a tour guide was speaking in German. The temple was huge and the sound of digital camera’s permeated the space. It was full of western tourists, a handful of Indian tour guides and about three Hindu’s actually in prayer. I wondered what it would be like in Australia if a hundred Hindu’s came to watch two Catholic’s or Protestants in prayer.
………………………….

A little girl of four or maybe three has a pink mobile phone that flips open just like her parents model. It doesn’t really work, but intermittently it rings. Playing a repetition of three or four bars until she picks it up. The idea is that this will be good for her development. Feeling important she mimics the older people around her and gains a sense of responsibility. But she is only three, maybe four years old.
……………………………

Two days ago, maybe, the train came to a stop and the crowd lessened so that gaps appeared between the bodies, and I saw a lady leap threw these gaps towards a seat, like her life depended on it.

………………………………

A child was at the window of a car. The city traffic lights were red and the cars became income for those on foot. Inside a man sat in the passenger seat while a woman was driving. I think the air conditioning was on, but the man had just drawn his window down five inches offering the child, begging for money, a little boy, offering the little boy a one dollar American bill. But the boy was refusing. Desperately. The man shook the note. Take it, take it. His expression, full of excuses, squeezed with his hand, through the five inch gap of the window the one dollar American bill.
………………………………

Although I knew it before, I was sitting in the Visa Facilitation Centre reading something by the Pakistani Tariq Ali when I really realised that the US lead war on Terror can never be won. Really. Especially so long as people are pushed to the limits of survival – and are left with no other choice but to act out of desperation. More importantly, I realised the war on terror will never be won.

A man with an Australian t-shirt for the second day in a row makes eye contact with me in this place. He told me I was an Indian doll. And he has an Assylum Seeker folder from the UNHCR.

He walked into the almost empty Visa Facilitation Centre where the last few of us remained, waiting, and he remarked ‘Americans, UK first, refugees last’. His words hung in silence over the room of 6 people. Later he told me he was from Burma.

After hours of waiting together in a room with strangers, over a few days, some bonds form. And I am almost sad to leave this place without knowing more about the lives of the people around me.

Three men sit side by side, three different ages all somewhere between 20 and 35 years old, in the Visa Facilitation Centre, and I wander how they came to be together?

For one of the first times I can see real green in this city. Real green in all it’s shades and it is thick and beautiful outside the Visa Facilitation Centre.

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When I asked what the female version of ‘ji’ was they told me there wasn’t one. Maybe ‘madameji’, but that was after colonisation of course.

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you see….

With microphones and speakers to make things louder and clearer for us
We no longer need to listen so carefully
And I imagine that as the amplification rises – so too does the volume of the crowd.

Then as the photographers steal the moment with their squeaky shoes and digital camera beeps, it becomes difficult not to see them as part of the performance.

And when I finally saw this monument of love I realised I’d already seen too many images of it to appreciate the imperfections of the flesh, those that I had somehow forgotten to imagine….