Australian Public Intellectual [API] Network

Foreign Matter

By Ouyang Yu, Melbourne: Otherland, 2004, 82 pages, paperback, $24.95. Reviewed by Tim Metcalf in the June 2005 issue.

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Ouyang Yu won the 2003 Fast Books Prize for Poetry with Foreign Matter, self-published by his Otherland Press. From a prolific author across several genres, this book was not written for the reader reclining at ease on their 'gilded cloud'. Indeed, this reviewer found assimilating the text an uncomfortable task.

Foreign Matter predominantly concerns the state of belonging, unfortunately parlous, of its Chinese born author to the Australia he emigrated to in 1991:

a contemporary convict
sent from China by my former self. (p 68)

Anger and disappointment are the most pervasive emotions in sequences with titles such as 'Writing Poetry: An Un-Australian Activity', 'Citizenship', 'Democracy', and 'On Invasion Literature'; and white Australians such as myself are attacked repeatedly in direct English. In 'Goodbye Australia he writes

Sometimes my hatred is such that it runs
as wide as the sky
as dark as the night
that envelops everything in the world

and in his paraphrase of a 'Job ad in China':

come to Australia all of you
we've got so much freedom
in fact a prisonful of it.

the latter line contains one of the few traditional poetic devices in a seven page piece.

All the glimpses of the author, including a back cover photo of his turned back, assemble into a picture of loneliness, depression and uncertainty experienced by someone who has left a place they despised, and found a new place they also despise. The long-established Chinese community in Australia seems to represent the unwanted old country, and the new is unwelcoming, tainted by arrogant 'white supremacy'. What I believe is a common experience for Australia's many overseas students becomes in this poet's hands a more universal rail against 'the world' when it appears to exclude one.

For me the core of the poetry in this book is found in 'City in Waiting' (the only poem not embedded in a sequence), 'Lines Written at the Melbourne Mental', and 'Her Story'.

The latter tells of a darkly amusing encounter with a woman who thinks the poet is probably composing a vitriolic poem as he embraces her. She wishes all poets killed as she falls again into his arms. It is part of the sequence 'Democracy', which also provides a platform for the author's disease model of Australia's political system; and the segment 'Being Difficult', published in Meanjin, in which he wishes a critic's head wrapped in his car around a telegraph pole, and which is not designed to encourage publishers or reviewers. (there are other angry and ambivalent attacks on critics and academics in the book).

'Lines Written at the Melbourne Mental' begins with a precisely Melbourne winter's day, and relates in a series of poignant moments a hospitalisation for depression:

occasionally
flashes of memory would break out
like fresh diseases.

It is this poem that transforms the collection from a furious denunciation of Australia into a sobering look at the experience of being foreign matter: the mutual misunderstandings; the not-belonging; the

becoming useless at forty
becoming out of date
in a new country
becoming less and less sure of who I am
what I am doing here (Poetry Unemployed).

It is not easy for a reader to relate to a text if they feel attacked by it. One can try psychological tricks, such as imagining Ouyang Yu, as a knocker, mate, more Aussie than the Aussie knockers themselves; or changing each 'Australia' into a 'China' and vice versa. Although 'genuine Australians are always very bigoted people' who 'never argue with anybody', I suspect the author's chosen path into poetry is capable of alienating anyone who takes it.

Practising creatively seems to involve a degree of stepping outside, of self-alienation, in any culture; and depression is not an uncommon companion to the poetic journey. In Foreign Matter Ouyang Yu demands a humanist response, one that individual Australians, if not their government, are obviously capable of. His story is of the kind that has often been suppressed by the twentieth century white patriarchy, so that this contribution to the literature of the Chinese in Australia may one day be a key witness at the poetic truth and reconciliation commission that is gradually taking statements from the many nations that have built contemporary Australia.

Citation

Tim Metcalf. 'Review: Foreign Matter by Ouyang Yu' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), June 2005. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 18 June 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

Ouyang Yu's fourth book of English poetry, Foreign Matter, was just published in Melbourne, Australia, as part of the Otherland Poetry Series No. 3, 2003, by Otherland Literary Magazine.

This book contains 12 long sequences, totaling 60-odd poems, for 82 pages long. There are such sequences as 'Writing Poetry: an Un-Australian Activity', 'Lines Written at the Melbourne Mental', 'Citizenship', 'On Invasion Literature', 'Lines of Least Resistance', 'At the Anti-Racism Conference' and 'An Australian Dream', etc.

They were written over a period of 8 years from 1995 to 2002 in Australia; many of the poems have appeared in literary magazines in Australia, New Zealand, UK, USA and Canada.

In October 2003, Foreign Matter won Fast Books Prize for Best Poetry in the self-published category. The judges, in their report, say, 'Here is poetry that is at once sardonic and lyrical, with a sadness that haloes the work'.

NRB June 2005

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