Memoir – Page 2

No Friend But The Mountains: seeking the human in asylum

7 October 2019 1 Comment

Mira Harrison

No Friend But The Mountains is an extraordinary book by a remarkable author. Behrouz Boochani has now won four major Australian literary prizes – including the 2019 Victorian Prize, worth $125,000 – for his first-hand account of his asylum-seeking journey. The Kurdish writer’s manuscript was painstakingly tapped into thousands of text messages on a cell phone from within Manus Prison, where he has been held captive since 2013. Omid Tofighian, who translated the messages from Farsi, describes the experience of working with Boochani as being ‘rich with multiple narratives’ as they consulted, collaborated and constructed the text for publication. Working oceans apart, these two academics – one a researcher at Sydney University; the other a writer, journalist and scholar held in an Australian offshore prison – developed close bonds.

Prison writing is one possible genre this book could fall into. Boochani and Tofighian have refused to call Manus a detention centre, refugee camp, or other name which might soften the harsh reality that Manus is a prison, where innocent people have been kept against their will under inhumane conditions. The descriptions of life inside Manus Prison compare with those in Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. All are extraordinary accounts of extraordinary experiences. They are harrowing, yet enlightening to read, helping us value our everyday freedoms and the basic human rights we take for granted.

Every morning, so far, I’m alive

3 June 2019 Leave a Comment

Chris Prentice

Professor Wendy Parkins was professor of literature at Kent University in the UK before returning recently to New Zealand. Her newly published memoir, Every morning, so far, I’m alive, offers an intimate and honest exploration of living with depression, phobias and OCD, and how these conditions have affected her in personal, professional, family, and social life. The title comes from American poet Mary Oliver’s 1986 poem, “Landscape”, and is a resonant epigraph for Wendy’s story. Her book is a gift to those who might find support in recognising shared or similar struggles, and at the same time to those who’ll appreciate its broader concerns with how to live in the world, and to live well. It’s also about how to place ourselves in the world, and how place shapes our ‘selves.’

Parkins’ interest in everyday life — in how people live — had informed her earlier academic cultural studies book, Slow Living (2006), co-written with Geoffrey Craig, about the Slow Food movement. They refer to slow living as an “attempt to live in the present in a meaningful, sustainable, thoughtful and pleasurable way”; and to “slow arts of the self” as processes whereby “we can ‘desanctify’ parts of our self-understanding”. In Every morning, so far, I’m alive, the process of ‘desanctifying’ self-knowledge isn’t an intellectual enterprise, or a conscious life-style choice, but an intimate challenge.

Right eating: Dr Muriel Bell

4 March 2019 1 Comment

Barbara Brookes

The bag of nuts I have in front of me has a Health Star Rating of 5. The back of the packet tells me the nuts contain vitamins B1 and E, are a source of monosaturated fats and a source of fibre. With this good news I am invited to enjoy ‘happy snacking’. But I’m sure that ‘snacking’ in itself is not good for me. Snacks in between meals can only add to my overall calorie intake and hence increase my weight. I might join the stream of overweight New Zealanders (if I’m not already swimming in it) threatening to overwhelm our health services.

Dr Muriel Bell spent her life dedicated to thinking about nutrition and its effects on New Zealanders’ health. Diana Brown’s recently published valuable biography of this pioneering medical researcher, The Unconventional Career of Dr Muriel Bell, charts Bell’s life from her childhood, when vitamins were a little-known entity, to her death in 1974, by which time she had played a major role in nutrition research and education in New Zealand.

“A cataclysmic emergency”: the influenza epidemic in Dunedin

17 December 2018 3 Comments

Sue Wootton

In March 1917, a school leaver called Frances McAllister travelled from her North Island home to the southern city of Dunedin. She was one of seven or eight females among thirty new entrants at the Otago Medical School. (The 1917 intake was much smaller than usual due to military conscription.) McAllister graduated as a doctor in 1922. Her memoir (published under her married name Frances Preston), Lady Doctor, Vintage Model, is a fascinating window into New Zealand life in the first half of the twentieth century. As the blurb puts it:

The early days of New Zealand medicine were not for the squeamish. Tuberculosis, hydatids, osteomyelitis and syphilis were common, bush-felling and saw-milling accidents abounded, and the 1918 Influenza Epidemic cut a swath through the country.”

A car crash in Cambodia (Part 2)

3 December 2018 4 Comments

Marnie Walters

In 2012, New Zealander Marnie Walters was working in Cambodia managing communications for the Cambodian Children’s Trust. Returning to Battambang City after visiting isolated families in Prey Veng province, her vehicle was involved in a terrible accident. This is the second part of her story about what happened. It continues from Part One, which you can read here.

Glowing in the centre of the scene, the two crushed cars illuminated each other with their headlights, but the surrounding countryside was vast and dark. There were no flashing lights of salvation, no emergency services to call. I examined my phone again and could now make some sense of it. I must have made over fifty calls sitting there, first to New Zealand, then to nearby Battambang, but it was late and for so, so long, nobody answered. When one of our social workers finally picked up, my tongue turned heavy and clumsy in my mouth.

“Bub-bub-bub-bub-bub-” I burbled. “Bub-bub-bub.”

As hard as I tried, I could not convert thoughts into recognisable sounds. I had to hang up. Eventually, I managed to send a text to my friend Erin, a message that I would take back if I could. We had a horrible car crash. People are dead. Please call me. After reading that text, Erin rushed to find help and nearly came off her motorbike in panic.

A car crash in Cambodia (Part 1)

26 November 2018 6 Comments

Marnie Walters

We’d been driving through the Cambodian countryside for seven or eight hours and I’d become restless from sitting so long. Wriggling around to get comfortable, I slipped the shoulder strap of my seatbelt over my head and stretched out as well as I could. The Hilux was brimming with road-trip supplies: backpacks, camera and laptop bags, water, tropical fruit, even a whole roast duck. Next to me in the back seat, a young mother held her new baby girl, shifting her from arm to arm. She did not speak English and I had long exhausted my limited Khmer, but I smiled over at her and considered offering to hold the baby. If the mother’s arms ached she hadn’t noticed, there was nobody else in her world as she gazed lovingly down at that tiny sleeping face. I didn’t interrupt them.