The Book of Jeremiah by Beatriz Copello, Ginninderra Press 2024, was launched by Richard James Allen at Gleebooks on 3 December 2024.

Let me start by quoting one of my favourite lines in Beatriz Copello’s The Book of Jeremiah, and one that, for anyone who knows my work, will know has resonances for me:  

Tired, he fell asleep and dreamt
that the answers to his questions
were hidden inside his head.

The renowned British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore has recently spoken about how exceptional the period from 1945 to the present has been: “a great liberal reformation”, a time of “radical” advances in social, political and environmental justice. He notes that, living through this era, we pretty much took the inevitability of this progress for granted. Some, like American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, flushed by the success of Western liberal democracy with the fall of the Berlin Wall, were even foolish enough to declare “the end of history”. But, as we have witnessed since 9/11, Brexit, and the rise and return of Trump and other authoritarian strong men, the blind and savage fundamentalist drivers of human history, in the words of US conservative commentator George Will, have “returned from vacation”.

Because, in fact, the comforting, rational and apparently reasonable (though not always equitably distributed) values and fruits of small ‘l’ liberalism that underpinned this unique period since the Second World War have not guided human societies for most of our history, which has been a veritable abattoir of selfishness and greed, social injustice, environmental degradation, and cataclysmic misogyny. So it is in a sadly timely way that we gather here today to unveil the patriarchal nightmare, a melange of 1984, Mad Max, The Handmaiden’s Tale and Fahrenheit 451, which forms the backdrop of Copello’s new dystopian fantasy, The Book of Jeremiah.

Those of you still familiar with the Bible, will hear Biblical references in this title, though a cursory examination of its Jeremiah and his book, seem to point to a very different story, one still resonant with the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East today, but in a very different way.

Copello’s book paints the portrait of a post-apocalyptic world run by a selfish elite, the Pures, and their unquestioned leader, the Great Code Keeper. In this world, books are banned, as is even speaking words about the past and its now secret knowledge. Young women are in a completely degraded position, whereby, as soon as they first menstruate, they must immediately, to use the uncomfortable term in the book, be “deflowered”, ostensibly to drive procreation, repopulating the world after the decimations of war, but also “making them slaves to their body”. When older women are depicted they are usually witches, expelled to the remote “Forbidden Lands”. They appear as either healers, keepers of otherwise prohibited arts, such as abortion, or bitter sexually frustrated monsters.

Our hero, Jeremiah, navigates this barren landscape, where “anyone found with a book must be stoned and offered to the sacred river” and “parents are to discourage new thinking in children”. Cursed at birth by his raped mother, he is buried alive, but saved and brought up by magical Pigeons, who have kept the best of human knowledge hidden in the Oruja Caves. Surrounded by “a library, notebook and artefacts”, he “dreams of a new world”, but is torn between his own baser desires and the aspiration to do good, between his addiction to the accepted morning sport for young men of finding virgins to rape (or rather relieve of the “blight” of their virginity), and his aspirations to rebalance a society where mutants from earlier Atomic blasts are enslaved.

On his quest to “build a better future”, where

women are equal to men and
the Mutants deserve respect and may be cured,

Jeremiah is a complex and not always appealing figure, but that may be the point, as he is Copella’s vehicle for an examination of the contradictions and complexities of being human. In fact, one of the strengths of this book is its fearless honesty about human urges. Jeremiah is physically conflicted by the impulses that wrack his body. In ‘Jeremiah Reflects’, we read:

What is this heaviness
that crushes my heart?
Black ocean of torments
that shakes my body,
celestial debris igniting
my cells, my body …
this part of me
that craves ‘something’
as the Maratuja’s people
thirst for water.
The Pigeons had preached me:
“Reject the flesh!” But why?
I reflect on the lesson
as I rub my sex with wet moss.
An in vain act, as this enduring pain
consumes my brain
like anthrax consumes skin.

And ‘Jeremiah’s Harvest’:

…He slept and woke up in pain,
his sex burnt with a fire like
the ones that clean the land
of stubble before planting the seed.
He went in search of maidens,
deflowering had become an obsession.
With his head down he walked
through a forest where he saw
a book he had lost a long time ago.
It was opened on page 33.
Jeremiah half closed his eyes
to read: “It is ignominious
to corrupt virgins in the morning.”
Jeremiah cursed and sat on a rock,
he swayed his body as he masturbated.

And one of the most dramatic scenes in the book is the final encounter between Jeremiah and the Woman who has stolen his heart and hidden it away in a box. Jeremiah ingests ‘cretanis’, an aphrodisiac “known for its ability / to give sexual power and prevent sleep”:

On the dirt ground they made love for the remains of the day.
Night found them still on the ground, murmuring
words of passion and desire. Morning brought
renewed energies but finally The Woman, exhausted,
entered the world inhabited by gods, spirits and demons

While the Woman is finally a sleep, in a story reminiscent of Homer’s Odyssey, Jeremiah searches for and finally recovers his “enchanted’ heart”. After his escape, the scene ends with a richly poignant epilogue:

There is a story around the village that says that The Woman slept for one hundred days and when she realised the heart was gone she never slept again.

 The Book of Jeremiah is structured as a series of mostly narrative poems, preceded by a helpful four poem ‘codex’, which sets out key characters, words, places in an imagined land named Epinaster, and the Code, which governs this new society. While the vivid world building and empathetic storytelling are the scaffolding, I feel that what Copello is actually trying to construct is a temple in celebration of our apotheistic potential for mesmeric complexity and this is achieved in certain lines in which key themes are also explored.

For example, this paean to sexuality:

The crumbs on my plate I devoured with delight
and will let myself be involved in crazy passions,
furious as stormy nights in the month
when the frogs croak and the lakes fill with froth.
Death waits for me, but I don’t care … I live. 

 And this a powerful evocation of destruction:

First came the fires, then the winds,
the constant tornadoes which
like a herd of camels destroyed
every blade of grass on the ground.
Buildings shook, crumpled and fell.
Cities, old and new disintegrated
like sand rocks, they turned to
a grey powder that choked humans
and beasts. No time to escape,
no time to hide. The Earth responded
to the cruel attacks, she cried
and rumbled and afterwards
tremors, eruptions, lava … then
silence … only the silence left.

And this conjuring of the visceral tactility of desire:

Jeremiah does not only speak crazy words, he also speaks
beautiful words he calls poetry. He respects
what is preserved for my prospective owner,
but he does something with his tongue
that makes me close my eyes and I reach the sky.  

And love:

Graha

Yes, I love you like plants love water
Yes, I love you like bats love dark nights
Yes, I love you like the locust love grasses
Yes, I love you like cacti love the heat. 

Here a dive into ineffable complexity, the struggle of:

Pain and pleasure.
Two forces that repel and compel each other
two worlds that clash in space, elliptical orbits
that bring them to a forbidden ritual. 

Here these poignant notes of mystery:

The score of life, mysterious music
teaches us to love and to hate but also to forget. 

Two more. Here a mesmeric expansion of the realm of the senses that veers on abstraction:

In the magical ceremony of a horizontal expansion,
the naked and the paradoxical, illuminated by the ‘no reality’
and without prejudices, they submerged themselves
in the past, in a world without scruples or shame
at the margins of the senses.

And, finally, perhaps my personal favourite lines in the book:

Back at the lake he fell asleep. He believed he was ice
In the morning he realised he was just water                                                                                                   ………………………………………………………………………….. … He cried. [40]

There are also, in The Book of Jeremiah, from when Jeremiah first reads the ancient texts through to his later seeking a pathway to foment a democratic revolution, challenging questions raised about how to”penetrate” the minds veiled in “ignorance”.

There is a refreshing invitation to learn from the past, recognising that it is full of as many mistakes as good choices.

And an exhortation to find a “patient” way forward with the “ignorant populace”, consciously avoiding using the tools that have sustained abusive power – violence and repression – in an attempt to overthrow it.

The most hopeful line in the book, informed perhaps by the “non-violent methods of resistance” of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandala and the Dalai Lama, may be: “we can build a future without doing more damage”.

So, to conclude my thoughts, offered this evening on these, in their own right, complicated, unceded, lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation:

On one level, I would say that The Book of Jeremiah is an optimistic text, because it tackles, and tries to model through the evolution of Jeremiah and others, unsimple questions around human beings’ ability to learn and grow, to expand our narrow horizons beyond immediate needs, selfishness, greed and fear.

On the other hand, unsettling threads remain, even in the most optimistic and uplifting relationship in the book, that between Jeremiah and his new love, Graha.

Perhaps these are seeds that Copello has cleverly planted to be paid off in the final surprise line of the book, which I won’t give away, but I encourage you to read all the way through to to discover, when you buy your own copy of this volume, with its arresting cover image by Loana Sinaga.

Which you can now do, as I hereby proclaim The Book of Jeremiah, written by Beatriz Copello, and published by Ginninderra Press, copyright 2024, officially launched!

 – Richard James Allen

 ———————————

Richard James Allen (he/him), is a Gadigal-based poet, filmmaker, actor, dancer and choreographer. Artistic Director of The Physical TV Company, his multi-award-winning work has been screened, broadcast, published and presented on six continents. His thirteenth book, Text Messages from the Universe (Flying Island Books, 2023), reviewed in Rochford Street Review, was a finalist for three international awards.  A film adaptation, also reviewed in Rochford Street Review, won six awards and was a Finalist for Best Narrative Feature Film at the ATOM Awards in Melbourne. A First-Class Honours graduate from Sydney University, he won the Chancellor’s Award for best doctoral thesis at the University of Technology, Sydney.

The Book of Jeremiah by Beatriz Copello, is available from: https://www.ginninderrapress.com. au/ store.php?product/page/3202/Beatriz+Copello+%2F+The+Book+of+Jeremiah