Rochdford Street Press and Verity La are proud to announce the publication of Mohammad Ali Maleki’s long awaited chapbook, Truth in the Cage. Written from within Manus Island detention centre, where Mohammad has been incarcerated for the last five years, Truth in the Cage is a powerful work of personal and political poetry.
Mohammad Ali Maleki is an Iranian poet and avid gardener who has been living in detention on Manus Island for five years. His poetry, written in Farsi, is translated into English by fellow detainee Mansour Shoushtari. Mohammad uses his mobile phone to send his poems to friends in Australia who help to edit, share and publish them. Mohammad’s poem ‘The Strong Sunflower’ was the impetus for, and first work published on, Verity La’s Discoursing Diaspora project. Since then, his writing has been published by online literary journal Bluepepper and by the Blue Mountains Refugee Support Group. He has been a featured poet on Rochford Street Review and his poems and letters have been included in the Dear Prime Minister Project and at the Denmark Festival of Voice. His poem ‘Tears of Stone’ was shortlisted for the Red Room Company’s 2016 New Shoots Poetry Prize and received Special Commendation for extraordinary work in extreme circumstances. His poem ‘Silence Land’ was performed at the 2017 Queensland Poetry Festival as part of the Writing Through Fences performance, Through the Moon. An essay about his writing is forthcoming in the Extreme Texts Issue of Jacket2 magazine. Despite living in extreme conditions, Mohammad continues to create poetry saying, ‘You can find my whole life in my poems, like a letter to God.’
“Mohammad Ali Maleki, along with translator Mansour Shoshtari, present an intimate and lyrical window into their world of exile as political prisoners of Australia. The work is woven with an embodied sense of their poetic and literary heritages, resulting in deeply engaging, contemplative and passionate poems. Maleki’s direct use of language often opens out into a magical horror – no less real – implicating the reader as much as the poet in a deconstruction and reconstruction of identity. ‘What if the woollen jacket I am wearing unravels / and begins to fall apart?’. Truth in the Cage delivers truths, uncomfortable and often torturous, through a painterly language, providing much-needed clarity in these times of obfuscation and systematic silencing”
– Janet Galbraith, Writing Through Fences
There will be a launch for Truth in the Cage on July 17 at The Sydney Poetry Lounge. The book will be available for purchase on the night. All profits go directly to Mohammad.
.
Within Australia $10 plus $1 postage
.
Outside Australia
$16 including postage
Dark Matters: a novel by Susan Hawthorne is a fascinating book which tells the story about women, their lives and their myths in a post-modernist style. Through diary sequences, poetry and narrative, we get to know Kate, Mercedes and Desi.
he Family Tax Benefit is an example of how neo-liberal theory which underpins the fiscal and monetary policy settings of the Australian government has reconciled itself with socialist feminist theory which was the first economic theory to recognise the home as a vital unit in a modern capitalist economy and how the labour transacted therein should be remunerated. Whether the home worksite should be subject to the same OHS regulations and insurance as other Australian workplaces is a political question, especially when one considers that many workplaces are now under electronic surveillance; economic justice, which includes protection of the body, the ‘instrument’ of performing labour and making a living (the government’s domestic violence campaign as a kind of labour rights question) can find itself opposed to privacy.
To be a reader in 21st century Australia is to be like the public agent in William Burroughs’ The Soft Machine – standing on a street, receiving messages and instructions from random fleeting scraps of signs like a page of a newspaper blowing past or a song on a passing car radio. The bewildering, oceanic quantities of signs our culture industries pump out makes reading necessarily a fragmentary, grasping and furtive activity. Our culture’s overvaluation of a certain definition of ‘production’ – that is of a perpetual one way, from inside to outside pushing out (what Burroughs himself called ‘sending’) and which covers a range of phenomena from KPIs in business and publishing quotas in academia to the emoting on social media and tv talent shows like The Voice – makes reading something vaguely suspect, interior and receptive, a passive ‘absorbing’ that seems suspiciously layabout.
Like most Australians my daily routines are spent sweetly oblivious of the hell many of the world’s peoples endure. I step out my front door and I don’t wonder whether a sniper’s bullet is going to take me out; I send my kids to school and I don’t worry that I might be pulling their bodies out of its rubble later in the day. Reading Mohammed Massoud Morsi’s novella, 22 Years to Life, is like an irruption of this daily hell into my ambivalent Australian paradise. In the peaceful early scenes of the novella, Fathi and Farida, a young Gazan couple, travel to Canada for fertility treatment. The glimpses of my kind of life (in Canadian form) – the quiet, well-ordered streets, the safe houses, the civil and legal safeguards of private life – are Morsi’s narrative doorway for me. They are the conduit into a world where houses and walls are no protection to the human animal and where any kind of intimate life is routinely annihilated.