Linda Marie Walker

LACEIVIAKING
a

form, madc up as muchby holes as fabric

review - Pamela Brown's Keeflt Ouiet

(Sea

Cruise Books, Sydney, 1982 $8).

This is a small book, seventy-odd pages. The epigraph says: 'The something and
the something and the first cigarette of the day." Itts a fitting sign, it indicites the
plain-like style, made with absences, spaces for the reader. And it shows the
vacancy of some of the language: 'Yesterday, a new person told me that she would
like to 'get to know' me. I almost fell asleep on the spot." 1
Pamela Brown is a feminist writer living in Sydney. This is her ninth book, the first
of prose.

Cruise is a small Sydney press run by writer Anna Couani. It's a non-commercial
enterprise producing cheap books in close cooperation with the authors. It's been
operating since 1976.
Sea

While reading Keep It Ouiet I remember two other small books: The Expedition To
The Baobab Tree by Wilma Stockenstr<im, an Afrikaan writer (translated by ].M.
Coetzee, whose own book The Life and Times of Michael K is a work of austere
beauty), and At The Bottom of The River by Iamaica Kincaid, a West Indian/New
York writer.
The three works are linked by a similar rhythm, a curiosity about the ordinary
which they make significant or specific by stating it, remaking it with finely sifted
words.
I am charmed by small seemingly non-epic books (that is, not lofty or about
notables), which are epic though in the Brechtian sense: "The first commandment of
epic ... is that'the one who shows' ... 'shall be shown'." 2 I can take my time, I'm a
slow reader. I'm also seduced by lack of description, I tire under the weight of
detail, I don't want to know another place, nor the psychological reasons for
character traits. So these small books suit me.
Pamela Brown's writing is pared but poetic, there's a delight with language

with-out the burden of adjectives:

There was a Mae West film on television and it was whatever time it
was in the morning still dark and approaching breakfast, and now it's
early again and I want bacon and eggs.

With Keep It Ouiet you must (almost) gtve up the expectation of portrayal,
explanation, and analysis. But this is replaced by a freedom for readers, who can
consider themselves in relation to the work, not vicariously though, and can
write/work in their own time (not the book's) for the meaning.
This does not signal a free-for-all (or as stated elsewhere: "... a
whatever-gets-you-through-the-night approach ..."). a The work has within itself
a form, made up as much by holes as fabric. The holes are not vacant, but sensual
expanses where possibility dwells. The work is simultaneously story and writing.
It's concerned with writing, with how understanding comes about, how we know
things, how we interpret. There is room to manoeuwe, there can be no talk of
motivation.
Brown's piece toward the end of her book, 'Comprate Del Vircl', is a series of lists

about places, like titles for snapshots:

ITALY

ROMA

Madonnas.
Monuments.
Pan and
The nightrnare.
Laughter.
Music.
Marvellous.

Cars.
Colosseo.

Clothes.
Chaos.

Cigarettes.
Caesar.
Churches.
5

Stockenstrom and Kincaid also use forms of listing:

My labour his. My sleep his. My coming and my going. My sweat My

hair. The soles of my feet The ant can hide away. So can the
cockroach. And the rat. Not I.
- Stockenstrdm 5

I milked the cows, I churned the butter, I stored the cheese, I baked the
bread, I brewed the tea, I washed the clothes, I dressed the children;
the cat meowed, the dog barked

...

- Kincaid

The three books are about alienation and communion. Both notions are rendered
matter-of-factly and magScally. They are not victim oriented, they are woman

65

centred, and aligned with continual working-out, re-assessing dying over

and over,
but not decay or lying low.

kicking woman

with oceans of notions

gocrs on down
to the white page,
kicks the shouting shit out of my words.
-Kicking woman from Cafs sport (p 69 in the Selected poems)

It seems Pamela Brown has kicked the shouting shit out of her
bones and murles and eyes and ears.

writing, and Ieft the

there must be more to it

than climbing baobab trees
and drumming up eclipses
behind ayers rock / she thought.
- Brown from the same title.

Pamela Brown is writing about borders, margins; they are her middle, a striding
about between tiredness and watchfulness. Her work is woman-personal, and it's

hard, afraid, and funny.

Women say thing+ often the same thing in a thousand different ways.
Stockenstrom:
If I cannot know everything on the short walk from the entrance to the
baobab to the heap of potsherds and other finds, so many steps there, so
many back, what of my journey, which sometimes feels as if it took a
lifetime and still lasts, still goes on, even if now I am travelling in
circles around one place. 10

The pieces in Keep It Ouiet. like'satifactory','A Smull Story','If Life Coulil Haoe
A Soundtrnck', and 'You Walee Into', are shadows or corner+ or glimpses. Brown
makes words stop: "The thing about heroes and heroines is thit ttrey continually
frustrate us when we find oursclves so involved in the ordinary like ieeding the
dog." (11) Each sentence stops, they rely on one another yet stand alone: "Ii was the
kidergarten sexuality which drove me out. The stakes were somehow miserable,
like playing poker for five cent piecee." 12
She is a poet, and that is humming in the background, with a reverence and
irreverence for language: one moment this, one moment that,I care,I don't care:

The last thing |ane remembered about Ariel happened at school. The
new English teacher asked her name and when.she told him he said
"oh, as in 'The Tempest'." Ariel grinned and replied "No - as in car

aerial."

Each story/piece is compact, self-affeted, cut-off. "In a world ruled by

photographic images, all borders ('framing') seem arbitrary. Anything can be
separated, car be made discontinuous, from anything else: all that is necessary is to
frame the subiect differently. (Conversely, anything can be made adjacent to
anything else.) ... It is a view of the world which denies interconnectedness,
continuit/, but which confers on each moment the character of mystery." -Susan
Sontag la
The moments though are not embroidered by Brown (nor by Stockenstrom or Kincaid),
in their telling they are quietened, are believed in for themselves, stripped of any

synthetic symbolic: "She looked up to see that Mrs Thompson had fallen through
the plate glass door in the butcher's shop and slashed her neck wide open." 15 A
sense of distortion comes about because there is no detail, so as a reader I identify
instantly but give it straight back to the author, as she's only telling me, she doesn't
need me, she hits with a light well-aimed fist - (Pamela Brown again):
"A young woman, bleeding for a year. The women's problem. And you
want to know what it means, what it means for her." 16

In these three books there is longing but not nostalgia, a clear response to the past.
These are wayward womcn, they don't make one thing follow another, their order is
kaleidoscopic, they follow memory. They write layer by layer, committed to their
own voice. Instead of horizontally, they work vertically.
Brown:

This time, the time I'm thinking about, she said she had come to take
some photographs. "It's the last time we'll be together and I want to
have some photographs." I knew that this was so, that it was over, and
great lumps of sadness had crawled into my limbs and lodged there.
17

Stockenstrom:

With a stiff-face I listened on his skin-rug to the noise of the sea. I

became a shell plucked from the rocks but kept my oyster-shell of will,
my thin deposit of pride, kept myself as I had been taught. I did not
gtve in. I did not surrender. I let it happen. I could wait. I listened to
the beat of the waves far behind his groaning and it lulled me. I was of
water."
18

Kincaid:

67

In the night way into the middle of the night, when the night isn't
divided like a sweet drink into little sips, when there is no
iust before
midnight, midnight, or just after midnight, when the night is round in
some places, flat in some places, and in some places like a deep holg,
blue at the edge black inside, the night-soil mcn come.
le

Reading Brown, Stockenstrom, and Kincaid is likc watching movies such as

'Stranger Than Paradise' or 'With Burning Patience'. There is a flickering between
sadness and beauty, and no claim for thc overall vicw, as in Pamela Brown's words:
"We scrape and fold and turn the muck of language into tentative whisperings of

image."

20

- Linda Marie Walker

references

1. Brown, Pamela,

?.
3.
4.
6.

Kcrep

It Ouiet. p 41

Beniamin, Walter, Understanding Brccht NLB, Londory

Brown, Pamel4 Keep It Ouiet. p 30

l977,pl7

N"ylon, Iohn, Words ooershadow works, Advertiser. Adclaidq

16 Oct 't!6, p295.

Brown, ibid., p 70
Stockenstrdm, Wilma, The Expedition To Thc Baobab Tree. fabcrand faber, London,

7983, p

7. Kincaid, famaica, At The Bottom of The River. Picador, london,

8.
9.

1984,

Brown, P., Selected Poems 7971-82, Redress ltess, Sydney, 1984,p69

Bnown, ibid., p 59
10. Stockenstrdm, ibid., p 9
11. Brown, Keep It Ouiet. o 28
12. Brown , ibid., p 29

13.
14.
15.
16.
17.

Brown,ibid.,p2l

Sontag, Susan, On Photography, Dclta, N.Y., 1980,

Brown, ibid., p 20
Bncwn, -^
ibid., p 55

Brown, ibid., p 12
ibid., p 14

18. Stockenstrdm,

19. Kincaid, ibid., p 6

20.

Brown, ibid., p

51

p22

p 37