Island Magazine, Issue 148

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I’m writing these words in the days after the ascension of a vainglorious braggart and swindler to the most powerful role on the planet, and evidently I’m not alone in feeling that the ground has given way beneath our feet. Those of us who came of age in the years after 1989 could be forgiven for feeling cheated. Hadn’t the end of History come with the fall of the Berlin Wall, with Pax Americana the rock on which global peace and prosperity was to be founded? We grew up and accepted as eternal something that has turned out to be built on a fault line, and now the earthquake has come.

Looked at from another perspective, all we have lost is insulation from History, which has continued unabated for others, elsewhere, over the past decades. I remember backpacking through Berlin early in 1991. There were stalls selling bags of wall rubble on every other corner yet cab drivers were already complaining about subsidising the impoverished East. A fortnight later, and little more than a year after events that promised a reconciled Europe and a unipolar world, I walked out of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome to discover that the first Bush administration had invaded Iraq.
If we feel hopeless in the face of America’s spoiled omnipotence, we should at least welcome the fraternity of the oppressed we are joining: those around the globe who have not lived in settled comfort as the Middle East burned and the Balkans descended into murderous tribalism; those, such as Bosnian-American author Aleksandar Hemon, whose experience has left him less illusioned regarding the resilience of democratic norms. Writing in The Village Voice, Hemon gives voice to those fears many of us are unwilling to acknowledge:

'The only unbearable consequence of the electoral outcome was that the reality – the world – in which I lived had become instantaneously unimaginable. It was clear to me not only that nothing would be as it used to be, but also that nothing had ever been the way it used to be. I knew neither what had happened nor what would. Overnight, America – its past, present, and future – had become unreal. This might all seem like an abstruse stretch, but I can attest it is well familiar to those of us who have lived through the beginning of a war, through a time when what cannot possibly happen begins to happen, rapidly and everywhere. Many of my fellow Bosnians, for instance, will easily recognize how the piece-by-piece dismantling of familiar and comfortable reality commences. Ideological markers are suddenly different . Physical space is transformed, so that, for instance, enemy positions are established around the city, in the hills around Sarajevo, or, soon, in the suburbs surrounding your liberal city. Friends become the enemy without telling anyone except those of the same ethnic persuasion. We can recognize when the continuity between the present and the future is fucked as nobody knows what will happen – except for those preparing the liquidation lists.'

Hemon’s essay is notable for the precision with which it describes the new unreality we inhabit and in its assessment of our tendency to inertia when faced with radical change. It is not true that the past can be used as a guide to the future, the author suggests: to do so is to cling to a self, a world, and a political order that is going, gone. Literature, Hemon concludes, too often colludes in bolstering this conservative consensus that everything is okay. And he is highly critical of those contemporary authors who cosy up to our desire to postpone acceptance of new conditions.
What he calls for instead is a literature that admits and holds in tension a mind divided between past and future – writing that takes the adrenaline that attends acceptance of radical change and uses it to transform the static of the present into coherent noise for the future. He wants art that rewires our sense of the world, not lulls us into accepting its Kafkaesque terms. This is a stirring call for journals like Island – these pages are the proving grounds, after all, for new voices, experimental voices, insurgent voices. Lit mags will be the crucible in which fresh responses to our situation will be trialled. Dive into our cover piece – Gregory Day’s wonderful amalgam of dream-work and essay – if you want to see how it might be done.

Editorial - Geordie Williamson

ESSAYS
On Being Stupid - Tadhg Muller
Forever Underneath - Michael Blake
Mere Scenery and Poles of Light - Gregory Day
Cycling the City - Saskia Beudel

ART
Milan Milojevic: Printmaker - Judith Abell
8° of Artful Thinking - Liz Walsh

FICTION
She Says - Jason Fischer
The Children of Flood Street - Jov Almero
The October Pub Tours - Adam Rivett
The Raptor - Erin Ritchie
Aaron - Nick Nedeljklovic

POETRY
Hard Sell / Baguettes at the End of Days - Liam Ferney
The Olives - Louise Wallace
Miracle of Anti-nostalgia - Michael Farrell
Breath - Omar Sakr
Shattered Head - Maria Takolander
At the Psychiatric Clinic - Alexis Lateef
The Cattle Egret - Damen O'Brien
Siberian Migratory Patterns - Julie Maclean
Anti-semantic - Lachlan Brown