Resilience ed. by Michelle Cahill, Monique Nail and Anthea Yang
When I see or hear the word ‘resilience’, I feel the corners of my mouth pull back in a poorly suppressed grimace. It is a word so overused as to be almost entirely rubbed of meaning. ‘People’, Lucy Van observes, ‘keep talking about resilience and so it has materialised in language as something one possesses, or I should say, something one hopes one possesses. And especially, as something one hopes one’s child will possess.’ (10) As a high school teacher, I have seen resilience marketed to teenagers as a mindset, the end product of the right combination of mindfulness and positive thinking. I have heard it flung at children: You need to be more resilient.
Resilience, Mascara Literary Review’s first print anthology, brings together a collection of rich and varied writing that works in concert to offer the reader a complex portrait of what it means to be resilient. Unlike other recent lit mag anthologies (such as KYD’s New Australian Fiction and Liminal’s Against Disappearance) , Resilience blends poetry, fiction and nonfiction — essays and poems sit shoulder-to-shoulder, short fiction converses with memoir. The collection’s formal hybridity, combined with the chorus of First Nations, diasporic, LGBTQIA+ and disabled voices that contribute to its hum, make Resilience a model of the kind of hospitality that pushes back against the structural oppression that concerns many of the anthology’s contributors.
It is on the strength of this openness that editors Michelle Cahill, Monique Nair and Anthea Yang manage to capture the particulars of a moment that is by turns familiar and confronting. A number of works inhabit the stillness and attention of suburban lockdowns: Jo Langdon relishes the ‘softness & hold’ (1) of stolen camelias and Beau Windon watches and re-watches Naruto from the inflatable couch where he eats and sleeps. Children move through houses like spirits, their excitement and honesty flashes of sunlight caught on the mirror of their parents’ days.
Then pieces like Hani Abdile’s ‘I will rise’ rip through the insulation of domesticity:
You may lock me in detention
and damage my hopes
but it’s like dust
and one day I will rise. (19)
The directness of Abdile’s address both compels the reader to acknowledge the reality of her ‘mind…so full of thoughts’ (20) and implicates us in her suffering. More than this, the repeated refrain of ‘I will rise’ challenges the static characterisation of asylum seekers as victims. As Shokoofeh Azar asserts of the in Anne Brewster’s essay on The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, ‘Magic Realism and Political Violence’:
An asylum seeker is a person who is temporarily in a victim situation and has lost control of their life for political reasons in their country. We should not forget that a refugee is one who wants to overcome the victim situation and become an ordinary citizen. By emphasising their asylum situation, we remind them that they should always remain a victim. (46)
Shokoofeh’s delineation of how labels assigned by the media can warp the shape of a life is one example of the way the resilience of the individual depends upon the structures within which they must live and exist. Christopher Rees offers another in his harrowing memoir, ‘Inhuman Services’, which documents the absurdity of lodging a Newstart claim when your condition does not fit the department’s ‘criteria of illness’ (250). Resisting the effacing optimism of a perfectly formed narrative arc, Rees leaves us with an image of himself immobilised in his lounge chair, ‘parastically drained’ (252) by the interminable threat of yet another phone call. Like many of the pieces included in the anthology, Rees’s story reworks a resilience narrative that too often frames the ability to withstand adversity and oppression as a matter of personal grit into a commentary on the structures that relentlessly demand resilience of the individual in the first place.
Yet social structures and the external world can also be a source of resilience. In Ellen Van Neerven’s ‘Cousins’, common ancestry is a resonant heart-beat that defies distance, time and language:
got to remember
same grandmother
same grandmother (160)
and the land that holds family and memories alike ‘heals all my city blues’ (161).
Resilience bristles with coastal grass, desert flora and spreading roots. Water pours from the sky in remembered monsoons, ‘rises through the laminate’ (149) (Anna Jacobson) and hidden deep in the ground, links generations separated by migration. ‘Hopeful’ is not how I would describe this collection, nor is ‘honest’ the word I am looking for. I am, however, entranced and hence, consoled by the gardens and waterways threaded through the anthology. And after I finish reading, I am left convinced that resilience, as the editors write in their foreword, is ‘a quality that we grow collectively’ (vii). ‘Yes’, admits Maria Takolander of the drive she feels to write on domestic violence, ‘I want to bring you down with me, but I also want us to get up again—together.’ (115).
Megan is a teacher, writer and critic living and working on the land of the Wurundjeri people. Her writing has been published in Sydney Review of Books, Kill Your Darlings and Meanjin. She is the recipient of a 2022 CA-SRB Emerging Critic Fellowship.