Digital Commons Network^™

Binlids At The Boundaries Of Being: A West Belfast Community Stages An Authentic Self, Tom Maguire

Kunapipi

Much work has been attempted to forge identities beyond the dominant topographies of the political divisions within Northern Ireland; divisions which are expressed most visibly in the so-called 'peace line', a fortified wall that separates communities in West Belfast. The dominant ideologies within the state of Northern Ireland, Britain and internationally, seek to emphasise commonality between communities as a means of diverting attention from the gulfs between them that have been and remain unresolved politically and structurally. In the face of such strategies, the staging of a play in 1997 devised within a Republican community in West Belfast might appear …

The Absent-Minded War: The Boer War In James Joyce's Ulysses, Richard Brown

Kunapipi

The historical event survives in the modernist literary text not as fact or fixity but as a trace, a textual memory that may be refracted through the multiple private perspectives of character, through literary language, and through innovative technologies of narrative form. One such trace in Ulysses relates to the Boer War, an historical event whose significance, arguably, becomes more complex the more closely we focus on the processes of its refraction through the three central private consciousnesses of Joyce's book. This war that ended the nineteenth-century and opened the twentieth, finds a suitable home in a novel that itself …

A Dream Deferred: Fifty Years Of Caribbean Migration To Britain, Caryl Phillips

Kunapipi

Text of the Arthur Ravenscroft Memorial Lecture, delivered at the University of Leeds, 11 May 1998 I have imagined the scene many times. We are in the late 1940s, or in the 1950s, or even in the early 1960s. Crowds of young West Indians are peering from the deck of a ship, eagerly securing their first view of the white cliffs of Dover. Before them lies a new land and a new future. At the moment of that first sighting I imagine that their dominant emotion would have been that of a profound sense of loss, for clearly they knew …

'Logocinema Of The Frontiersman': Eugene Jolas's Multilingual Poetics And Its Legacies, Marjorie Perloff

Kunapipi

Language as neurosis or language as 'super-tongue for intercontinental expression'? For Eugene Jolas, a self-described 'American in exile in the hybrid world of the Franco-German frontier, in a transitional region where people swayed to and from in cultural and political oscillation, in the twilight zone of the German and French languages' (MB. p. 5), language was clearly both. For his was not just the usual bilingualism (or, more properly, the linguistic divisionism) of the Alsace-Lorraine citizen at the turn of the century; it was compounded by the acquisition of American English (already, so to speak, Jolas's birthright, born as he …

Dear Future, Danny Morrison

Kunapipi

The bodies have been buried. There was no retaliation. The soldiers have been withdrawn from the streets of Belfast but on every corner the ghosts of the dead remain stranded until their features fade with memory. The odd British army helicopter, of course, still carries out surveillance. The border is still patrolled. Some militants, stranded with the ghosts of comrades, embittered or hurt too much, still imagine circumstances where the old struggle can be replicated. Some unionists, bitter, intransigent, also hurt, recalling their dead, still indulge in the dream of stopping the clock, or better still, turning it back.

Fatality, Elleke Boehmer

Kunapipi

My very dear Aunt Margaret

How long it has been since my January letters! How many times I have tried in vain to send but one or two lines assuring you that I remain well in body and certainly determined, despite the dejected exhaustion last described. Wounds and diseases however are no respecters of war or its fortunes. While the past week has given us many reasons to rejoice, our hospital work has been if anything more consuming, especially since a particularly violent form of dysentery closed its grip on the camp.

Kunapipi 20(2) 1998, Anna Rutherford

Kunapipi

Editorial, Contents

Kunapipi 20(2) Editorial, Contents, Anna Rutherford

Kunapipi

Editorial, Contents

Kunapipi 19(2) Editorial, Contents, Anna Rutherford

Kunapipi

Editorial, Contents

Old Myths And New Delusions: Peter Weir's Australia, Livio Dobrez, Pat Dobrez

Kunapipi

To the layman's eye Gallipoli is technically flawless: superb shots of outback country, a convincing evocation of the period, thoroughly believable Gallipoli cliffs, fine acting (even in the minor roles), and something which is to say the least rare in the Australian film industry, a good script - thanks to David Williamson. Moreover the picture, unlike Picnic at Hanging Rock (an otherwise impressive film which was fumbled towards the end), is dramatically tight, completely under control from first to last. It is full of splendid touches, like the appearance of the wooden horse early in the piece, to which the …

Notes On Contributors, Index, Anna Rutherford

Kunapipi

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS, Index

Casually Over The Balcony: Memoirs Of A Bloke, Brian Matthews

Kunapipi

It comes on to September of 1989 and Arthur's cows are out on the road again. I've been looking after a dozen of them on my property (fifty acres of heavily mortgaged stringy bark scrub surrounding about ten acres of undulating pasture), but with the mellower airs of spring, the lushness underfoot, and the roaring of randy bulls each night in the perfumed darkness, two of these beasts have turned maverick and won't stay behind the wire.

'Rogues And Brutes ... In Pinstripe Suits': Timothy Findley's Headhunter, Diana Brydon

Kunapipi

Timothy Findley's recurrent obsessions with the legacy of colonialism, new forms of Empire under capitalism, and the social construction of masculinity come together in his 1993 novel Headhunter in a particularly troubling fashion. The novel replays Conrad's Heart of Darkness during a terrifying time of an AIDS-like plague in the late twentieth century, sometime in the near future, relocating its characters and their obsessions in Toronto, Canada's financial heartland. This deadly disease proceeds by discoloured speckling of the body that could be termed 'speckulation', the implicit pun signalling an intertextual relation with 1980s capitalism as much as with Camus' The …

A Lament For Imperial Adventure: Lawrence Of Arabia In The Post-Colonial World, Graham Dawson

Kunapipi

The Lawrence of Arabia legend has proved to be one of the enduring myths of military masculinity in twentieth-century Western culture.1 The famous story of the British intelligence officer who lived among Bedouin Arabs, became a commander of their guerrilla army, and led them to freedom from Ottoman tyranny during the latter part of the First World War, has been told and retold in an abundance of forms since its original narration (as ' the Greatest Romance of Real Life') by Lowell Thomas over seventy-five years ago. Subsequent versions include T.E. Lawrence's own Seven Pillars of Wisdom, numerous biographies and …

America's Raj: Kipling, Masculinity And Empire, Nicholas J. Cull

Kunapipi

The posters for Gunga Din promised much: 'Thrills for a thousand movies, plundered for one mighty show'. That show was a valentine to the British Raj, in which three sergeants (engagingly played by Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) defeat marauding hoards of 'natives' with the aid of their 'Uncle Tom' water bearer, Gunga Din (Sam Jaffe)[Plate VII]. Audiences loved it. Its racism notwithstanding, even an astute viewer like Bertolt Brecht confessed: 'My heart was touched ... f felt like applauding and laughed in all the right places'. 1 Outwardly the film had little to do with the …

Dragons In E.8, Atima Srivastava

Kunapipi

I'm waiting to see my social worker in her office. It makes me angry when she's late, because she's supposed to be working not doing me a favour. Here she is. Sandra. She's just been up Ridley Road market to do her shopping and she got stuck on the one-way system up there. She apologises to me as a matter of course. Manners are important to Sandra. When I was little I remember a story I read about a girl who never said 'please' and 'thank-you' . Her aunt who came to visit cut big 'P'and 'Q' letters from card …

Richardson, Indians And Empire: History, Social Memory And The Poverty Of Postcolonial Theory, Jack Healy

Kunapipi

Canada's first novelist is the usual reply.1 He was born at Amherstberg in present day southern Ontario in 1796. When the War of 1812 broke out, he was sixteen, bored with school and fired up to join the Army in defence of Upper Canada against the Americans. He became a volunteer in the 41st Regiment, was involved in the surrender of Detroit to the British, took part in a number of skirmishes and battles in the years 1812 and 1813 in the Western District region of the front, until he was captured, together with most of his regiment, at the …

Derek Walcott's Omeros: The Isle Is Full Of Voices, Geert Lernout

Kunapipi

Richard Rowan, the hero of James Joyce's Exiles, explains at the beginning of the third act that while he was walking the length of the beach of Dublin Bay, demons could be heard giving him advice. 'The isle is full of voices', Rowan says, adapting a phrase from The Tempest, and this sentence aptly describes Joyce's aesthetics. In his poem Omeros Derek Walcott may well have succeeded in doing for St. Lucia what Joyce did for Ireland and Dublin.1 And he has done so, not in the naturalistic or psychological mode of Exiles, A Portrait of the Artist as a …

The Legend Of Reg ‘Snowy’ Baker: An Australian Story With A Hollywood Ending, David Headon

Kunapipi

In the months leading up to the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, the Daily Telegraph, one of Sydney’s tabloid newspaper, ran a series of advertisements sponsored by Foster’s brewery which focussed on a small number of legendary Australian sporting heroes and heroines. One profile, repeated several times before Atlanta, featured a man unknown to virtually all Australians these days: Reginald Leslie ‘Snowy’ Baker. The first sentence of the advertisement referred to Baker as ‘the greatest sporting all-rounder Australia has ever produced, excelling in an incredible twenty-six different sports’. Sports journalist — and sometime rugby bard — Peter Fenton, anticipated the …

Notes On Contributors, Index, Anne Collett

Kunapipi

Notes on Contributors, Index

Coal River On A Sunday, Russell Mcdougall

Kunapipi

In 1797, when Lieutenant John Shortland sailed into the unknown waters of what is now Newcastle Harbour, he discovered 'a very fine coal river' - and, although the official name of the settlement that grew up in the 'valley about a quarter of a mile from the harbour entrance' was Newcastle, it became known as Coal River (also for a time King's Town). The reasons for settlement were coal and convicts. In the early 1800s Newcastle rivalled notorious Norfolk Island as a place of 'secondary' punishment, that is as a prison location for the worst convicts from Sydney, who, having …

Hospitalizing, Marion Halligan

Kunapipi

Veronica Ballod sits in a train travelling north. She has forgotten that once trains meant connection with glamorous places, so that whenever she saw or heard one her heart yearned to be on it, going there. Not staying here. Or rather, she hasn't forgotten, she remembers it as a fond desultory fact, long past its use-by date. Train travel is a chore, now. Planes are what is glamorous, planes to Europe. The destination, if not the vehicle. The cities of home are known.

Finding The Centre: 'English' Poetry After Empire, Mark Williams, Alan Riach

Kunapipi

The Australian poet Les Murray has talked about 'the dreadful tyranny where only certain privileged places are regarded as the centre and the rest are provincial and nothing good can be expected to come out of them. I figure the centre is everyv/here. It goes with the discovery that the planet is round, not flat. Every point on a sphere is the centre. It seems to be a corollary of the discovery of the roundness of the world that people haven't taken seriously yet'.

'Perfecting The Monologue Of Silence': An Interview With Louis Nowra, Gerry Turcotte

Kunapipi

Louis, for the benefit of those who may not know your work, I wonder if you could discuss how you started writing, and whether playwrighting was always your major interest?

Daisy Miller Down Under: The Old World/New World Paradigm In Barbara Hanrahan, Joan Kirkby

Kunapipi

Barbara Hanrahan might well be considered to be to the Australian psyche what Nathaniel Hawthorne is to the American. Both are at times Gothic writers, given to explorations of the power of the imagination, the position of women and the effect of the Old World on the New World psyche. The historical impulse in Hanrahan's fiction has been made explicit in the epigraph to the most recently published novel Annie Magdalene:

History And The Mythology Of Confrontation In The Year Of Living Dangerously, Hena Maes-Jelinek

Kunapipi

When Wilson Harris made this statement he was referring to those whom he calls 'the nameless forgotten dead', i.e., the suffering multitudes whose lives usually go unrecorded in history books, yet who carry the burden of history. They are involved in what he has termed 'the paradox of non-existence',^ the fact that so much experience, both actual and psychological, is passed over in silence in factual history or conventional narrative and appears to be non-existent. For Harris these unrecorded, unwritten lives are 'a catalyst of sensibility'.' The function of art is to retrieve them from forgetfulness and to give life …

Interview, Christopher J. Koch

Kunapipi

Christopher Koch was interviewed by John Thieme in London on 18 April 1985.

Maybe It's Because I'M A Londoner, C J. Koch

Kunapipi

London, in my earliest days, came to me always as a set of images by night.

Kunapipi 8(1), 1986 Full Version, Anna Rutherford

Kunapipi

Full text of issue.

Kunapipi 20 (2) 1998 Full Version, Anna Rutherford

Kunapipi

Kunapipi 20 (2) 1998 Full version.