A Little Joy Also

Editorial Two

There are islands that are continents that are sovereign territories of the mind’s making where waves and waves meet the visitors to these shores. On them live animals and ghosts and ancestors who dream of what happened on the day before, a time when there was a light touch of the sun on the shoulder, and a smile that passed the lips of a fish who walked onto land for the first time, letting go of the miracle of water to began to evolve and survive and make sense of a new environment, a new normal where breathing oxygen through clouds was taken in, like breath, like heaven. And on every day since, and every day after that, there has been the memory of silk, where we notice the current as it creases and reflects and casts back to us, what it is to be fish living here without seeing what is possible. And those waves return and return to greet the visitors to these shores of a sovereign territory that is a continent that is an island as well.

In this second issue of Portside Review, we focus on a few interconnected themes including place and purpose, ecology and the body, and communities within and across language. Abhimanyu Kumar provides our sound feature alongside a resource list from our friends at LIMINAL. It weaves in personal and poetic reflections on contemporary India touching on health, politics, and relationships, and has been provided with help from Aletta Andre. To provide a sense of levity, we have another sound feature, which is a playlist of music from around the Indian Ocean contributed by Centre for Stories’ Claudia Mancini, with help from our editorial interns Lauren Pratt and Sachini Poogoda. Enjoy it while you walk, wash the dishes, stare out the window, and be sure to reconnect to those around you when we need each other to remind us that the ocean still flows and the world turns on its heel. Dancing alone in your bedroom never felt so good.

In Portside Review Issue Two, our poems lean into and out of the body, thinking of what it means to inhabit space, to sit in water, to swim and row and go on. Our poetry feature comes from Sam Morley who has written a sequence about the ocean and ourselves with a sense of care, precision, depth, wonder and insight. Barnali Ray Shukla gives us three poems in a kind of referential, mythic dance between dream and reality. Our second feature by Ashwani Kumar threads the needle of metaphor and allusion to understand what our present moment of rupture and trauma actually is. Jessica Yu considers the contemporary from a different angle with a poem about celebrity, surface and meaning. Omar Sakr writes to us of family and loss and memory, while Priya Kahlon reflects on the complexity of love in its quotidian, emotional and resonant forms. Caitlin Maling returns us to brokenness and nostalgia, to home and memory, and Andrew Sutherland encourages us to reflect on the sounds of language itself. SL Lim talks to the reader in a direct way, giving us a meditation on relationships and presence. Finally, there is a cryptic poem from contemporary Myanmar by a Poet of No Name that speaks to the ongoing strife there, which was a focus in Portside Review Issue One. And we make a feature of Emily Sun, who participates in a conversation with Adele Aria as well. Her collection of poems here are wry and astute observations of food cultures, thinking of how subjects connect and consider their place in the world. And their conversation considers her new book, especially its connection to language, family, history, migration and identity.

Our other conversations cover a range of territory with Minh Bui Jones enlightening us on the history and mission of transnational journal and fellow traveller, Mekong Review. Sachini Poogoda and Lauren Pratt come up against geography and place from a different angle with their reflections on an Indian Ocean-focused exhibition at WA Museum Boola Bardip. Nearby, Elfie Shiosaki takes us closer to understanding matriarchy and power, of how to speak and consider our inheritances in various archives, especially as they relate to Noongars. Rochelle Potkar writes to us from Bombay/Mumbai while taking us through her new collection of short stories. Finally, there is a feature with Sandra Hill who writes from the coast to reflect on injustice, history and the healing power of art and community probing the depths of feeling and the past along the way.

Our prose this issue is varied with short stories, essayistic reflections and hybrid pieces that defy easy categorisation. From our short stories, Elizabeth Tan’s piece shines like glitter, or the light on the water, in a warming, resonant and complex manner, featured here as a way to think about who we are and where we stand. Sonia Nair and Jasmeet Sahi give us respective reviews on contemporary peers thinking about the way readers are implicated with texts that speak to our complex presents. Rashida Murphy writes with her customary care and precision allowing the reader an entry into imagination that is nevertheless close at hand. Susan Midalia’s short story is in three parts, equally wry, punchy and worth the price of entry. Thobeka Yose invites us into her intimate reality with an awareness of politics, pain, and what it means to go on. Susie Anderson engages with a specific text from an aesthetic and critical perspective to understand what and why art speaks to us in the heart and head in this country of its true consciousness. Shubnum Khan’s prose is astute and sensitive in covering topics that reach across the oceans and beaches of our diverse region, while Parashar Kulkarni’s dissection of colonialism through an affected and incisive narrator speaks back to commonalities as well. Something adjacent is presented by Lily Yulianti Farid in mapping the longstanding and ongoing routes and relationships between fishing people, and Anil Netto reflects on ports, the environment and the pandemic in his piece. And, in conclusion, we have Ambre Nicolson in a hybrid piece that lists and speaks back with a sense of sovereign determination.

Readers will see their own affinities in the texts collected here, and in that way, Portside Review is a collaborative and ongoing project in how we make and consider our place in the world. That includes where we stop off and go to, where we linger in our mind and our archive. It can be with a sense of the new, of moving forward and towards, or it can be a reconnection, of travelling backwards, against the street, upriver to lay eggs that nevertheless make their way into the cosmic ocean that flows from beach to port and on into the moon’s breath again. And so, no matter what the newspapers say or the troubles at home, read on and we hope you find solace, comfort, and a little joy also.

Robert Wood is the Creative Director of Centre for Stories and Chair of PEN Perth. He has worked for Peril, Cordite, Liminal, all based in Naarm/Melbourne. The author of more than 300 pieces of literary journalism, Robert is interested in translation, rocks, collaboration, walking and food. Read more about him here.