Mahomet and the golden camera

Tags

faction, Serjilla, Syria

This is a piece I imagined based on my encounter with the family in Serjilla that I mentioned in my last Postcard from the past. I’m not much good at writing fiction, but I really enjoy taking a kernel of reality and playing with it. That’s what I’ve done here. It was written a while back in the days when I was semi-prolific. Next week, I’m having a writing retreat at Potato Point with a writing friend, and I’m hoping concentrated time and the presence of a critiquer will inspire a few changes of style and a flurry of writing. I’m also posting it as I procrastinate over a background piece for my time at Pella in Jordan.

Mahomet peered around the ruined stone wall. There she was again, an old woman, a foreigner, on her own. She was shabbily dressed. She didn’t look like most of the tourists who visited his home. They usually came in crowds on a bus and they didn’t stay long. She came in a battered yellow taxi and she’d been here wandering around for ages, ever since he came up after dinner to look at the motor bike the archaeologists always left parked near where they were digging.

She looked poor – for a tourist – but in her hand was a golden camera. It gleamed in the cold Dead City sun, against the green grass, the blue sky and the stone of the ruins. She had taken many photos, of strange things sometimes. She seemed to be photographing blades of grass and single stones. She seemed to like taking photos through windows or doors.

Mahomet was good at watching. It was one of the things he really liked doing, when he could get away from his younger brothers and sisters and his mother who always seemed to want him to do something. Sometimes he watched ants and scorpions, but they belonged here. What he really liked doing was watching strangers and trying to figure them out. Why were they here? What was their life like at home? How did they get the money they always seemed to have lots of?

Sometimes he talked to them. He didn’t know much English or French or German, but he was proud that he knew more than they knew Arabic. Suddenly he decided he would talk to the old woman with the golden camera.

She was staring at one of the old roofless buildings. He said “Madam …” and she jumped and looked startled.

“Oh. Hello.” she said in a flat voice.

“You want me to show you places?” he asked.

“How much?”

 It was his turn to look startled.

 “For free. No money.”

He moved off towards one of the buildings he knew she would like. It had plenty of window and door holes and enough grass to keep her happy forever. They didn’t talk much. She held the golden camera and used it often, as they rambled away from the centre of the buildings. She was happy to follow him. Sometimes he asked questions about the camera.

 “Why do you take so many photos?” “What do you do with them all?” and finally “Why is your camera golden?’

 She looked surprised again.

 “Golden? I suppose it is golden. It was just the one I bought, because it did the things I wanted to do. “

 “How strange foreigners are,” he thought. “She has a golden camera and she didn’t even know it.”

As they approached the last building he planned to show her he heard the sound of voices. Oh no. He recognized them. His mother and Saleh and Ahmed and all of them. And there they were coming up the hill their heads first and then the rest of them. His mother called him

“Mahomet. What are you doing? Are you annoying the lady?”

Suddenly he saw his opportunity. Tourists like having photos taken with the locals. His family were locals and there was even a baby. Babies seemed to be especially attractive. He couldn’t figure out why. This might be his chance to hold the golden camera and even use it. He’d never used a camera, never even held one.

 “Photo madam? You like photo with my family? I will take it.” He held his breath.

 “I’d love a photo” said the old lady. She handed him the camera, putting the strap around his neck.

“You look through here,” she said. “And when you can see the picture you want to take, you press this button.”

He peered through the viewfinder. There was his family. The baby’s nappy was sagging and his mother was squinting in the sun. His sisters preened and looked important and his brother, he knew, was about to whinge: “I want a turn to. Give me a turn.” Behind them was the familiar landscape, strangely carved off and boxed by the little viewing hole.

He pressed the button, holding the golden camera steady. And then he pressed it again, and again and again till there were ten photos of his family locked up inside. What a pity he would never see them, and how much he wanted a camera of his own.

The lady took back the camera and told him to stand with his family and she took two more photos. Then she said something astonishing: “Do you want to see?” They all crowded round and he noticed a tiny screen. In the sun you could see nothing, but in the shade there they were, caught on this sunny day with a chill in the air.

The lady said thank you and went back to her yellow taxi. Mahomet no longer wanted to buy a motor bike more than anything else in the world. He wanted a golden camera to catch all the things he saw and keep them forever.

Writing: a memoir

Tags

ecstasy, writing communities

I’ve dabbled in writing from the time I was in primary school. One Christmas my beloved aunts gave me a book with a blue mottled pseudo-leather cover, and a small perfumed biro, and I began my first serious diary. My writing in those days was stilted, banal and cliched, a child’s attempt to capture experience in large neat letters, without the verbal resources that would make it sparkle. I submitted earnest pieces to the Argonauts club (I was Mykonos 11) on ABC radio, and I always got good marks for Composition.

High school put a stop to frivolous writing: my pen poured out essays on the continental system and Macbeth, and reports on vaguely understood science experiments, and Latin proses. The only remotely creative thing I remember writing was a book on Antarctica, complete with dust jacket, index, a blurb by my mother (“This author will go far”) and pages beautifully hand-printed and illustrated with black ink and a mapping pen. University stymied creativity even further: five years churning out acceptable stuff that earned me credits and distinctions and, eventually, first class honours.

When my own children were little, I began to go to local writing workshops: one on journalism, one on writing poetry. My experiences living in the bush with a growing family were netted in letters to my mother, and in a journal I kept as we were settling into the rural life and building our house. Four children didn’t leave much time for thoughtful writing. Minutes and reports for parent groups, and for a few years regular contributions to a weekly column on education for parents in the local paper: that was about it, except for an occasional confessional diary, dynamite waiting to explode.

As my marriage crumbled around me, I met a man who wanted a ghost writer for his hitch-hiking stories. He was living in a hut along the Nerrigundah road. I’d go to his place when the kids were asleep, and he’d dictate, I’d question and record on tape, then go home and transcribe, trying desperately to keep his voice. The road answers back grew, but it was far too episodic and disconnected and I didn’t know how to shape it otherwise. I persisted and finally delivered a manuscript. Writing it gave me one of my very few writing ecstasies: a moment of ebullient solitary delight that had me hopping on my pushbike and pedalling downhill from the house, shrieking my head off. Not a state of mind that was altogether comfortable, for me or the neighbours.

Then, I moved to Broken Hill. Suddenly I was no longer chief cook and bottle washer. I had time for myself. The daughter who lived with me was an independent fifteen year old with a separate entrance. One of my new friends was a writer. Writers came to town, and I became connected with any writing community going. Gabrielle Dalton arrived to winkle out stories from different groups, including local bikies. Under her influence I wrote about my experience of a sweat lodge and read it on local radio, not even thinking that students might hear it: “Was that really true, miss?”

Elizabeth Mansutti came to research women’s role in the big miners’ strike of the 1890s. I had the first inkling of what I wanted to do when I retired when I saw her reading 19th century newspapers, a confetti of decomposition rising, even while she handled them with fine care. My project of researching my mother’s birth year was born as I watched her.

My second experience of writing-ecstasy was far quieter than the first. It came in the middle of the night as I sat up in bed writing a free verse account of a holiday trip to the Flinders Ranges: the walk to St Mary Peak; the stroll up Bunyeroo Gorge; the encounter with a powerful stump; the wild night of wind that people were still talking about years later.

My hitch hiking friend came to visit, and at a wishes picnic on my living room floor the Broken Hill writers’ group was formed, and continues still, I think. We met regularly, shared writing, did quick- writes during the meetings and encompassed a variety of people writing about boxing, sailing, family history: it never became quite a community of writers, but it kept me writing regularly, one piece a rumination on a guitar-playing Noah who left Mrs Noah to do all the hard work. I wrote a few love poems in that post-marital chaos that aren’t too bad, all things considered.

The Broken Hill years ended and I returned to the coast. My interest in writing continued, following much the same path: workshops, writers on writing, desultory pen to paper. My most productive time was during weekly writing for Lomandra, a small online community of artists, where I had an audience and a discipline. I had occasional spurts of half-hour writes in my motel rooms when I was on the road as a consultant, which offered me a pale version of ecstasy, this time arising from that mystery in writing: beginning and not knowing where it will take you. I stumbled across such a piece years later, and thought my daughter had written it. I was envious: “She writes so well. I could never write like that”, and suddenly I realised that it was mine.

After I retired, I began the research inspired by Elizabeth Mansutti amongst newspaper flocculence in the Charles Rasp library. What began as my mother’s story through her birth year, became my great uncle’s war experience when I found a pile of his letters to my grandmother, and his two leather bound war diaries. That research produced a series of factional cameos, based on things from his letters that really captured my imagination. I wrote a rather cranky essay On sacrifice, irritated by blithe use of the word by people far from mud and death, as if it was a willed thing. This writing episode culminated in a short profile of my two great uncles for a family history book.

And now of course, there’s blogging.

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 PUBLISHED WRITING

This is a bit tongue in cheek, but I am in fact pleased with all of these publications for different reasons. I really don’t mind being world-famous in Omsk.

 

In print

A Year 7 text book for English

A chapter in a book about teaching

Regular columns in the local paper about education

A short piece in the Sydney Morning Herald about returning to teaching after twenty years

Two 500 word profiles of my great uncles in a family history called “The Smalls at war”

Teaching ideas to accompany the NSW School Magazine: about 30 issues

Reviews of books for the Teacher-Librarians magazine: professional books and children’s books

A free verse rappy account of the writing camp in the Living Desert with the poet Komninos, also published in the magazine for teacher librarians

On radio

A piece about my experience in a sweat lodge which I read on air myself

A piece about memorable meals and landscapes on a Radio National lifestyle program

Speeches /talks – all carefully crafted, especially the two minute one!

A lecture to a theatre full of high school students on Shakespeare

A two minute speech launching a book about education in the Eurobodalla

A 2 hour talk about travelling alone through Syria and Jordan for U3A

A twenty minute presentation to my consultancy colleagues about life as a country literacy consultant

A ten minute speech launching a friend’s poetry anthology

Online

For ABCOpen, a program to encourage regional writers

Aunty Min: a person who influenced me

Being in Warsaw without language

Finding native orchids in the Eurobodalla

Travel blogging

Blogging

And then the floodgates opened when I discovered blogging! 750 posts since I began my own blogs in 2011.

Prizes

A short story, based on my World War 1 research, commended in the Henry Lawson competition 2008

Champion: craft – writing at the Eurobodalla show, 2011 for a poem called “My mother’s hands”

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