Our founding editor, Svetlana Sterlin (SS), spoke to our Issue 4 poet, Sharlene Allsopp (AS), about her venture into poetry with ‘After Flanders Fields [No Man’s Land]’.
SS: Our collaboration came about when I reached out to you about performing a poetry set at a special Volta event earlier this year. Can you walk readers through the process of creating the suite of poems you performed? Did you feel like you were stepping outside of your comfort zone?
SA: I was taking a poetry course and felt completely out of my depth, because I’m a novelist at heart. Why say something in one line when you could take a whole chapter?!
When I learned about traditional poetic forms, I felt like they were a great place to begin because there were clear rules. It made corralling my novel-length thoughts into poetry much easier because I had those rules to guide me. Basically, I ended up with a suite of traditional forms—a quatrain, a rondeau and a triolet—telling contemporary stories that deliver the theme of time travel.
‘After Flanders Fields’ speaks back to the poem ‘In Flanders Fields’. My great grandfather was wounded in those fields, but he does not lay dead there. And yet, what did surviving those fields deliver? What freedom did an Aboriginal man receive on his return home from Flanders? I have no issue with ‘In Flanders Fields’ as a snapshot in time, as a poem written by one man. But as a national mythology-making text it is problematic and powerful.
SS: The poems within the suite, including Issue 4’s ‘After Flanders Fields’, are prefaced by references to other pop culture texts—specifically sci-fi films and a Monet painting. What’s the link between sci-fi movies, temporality, and your family heritage in relation to the suite?
SA: I am obsessed with time travel movies and the night sky because every night we get to sleep beneath a giant time machine. We look up and see a sky that might not exist now. For example, if the star Betelgeuse exploded, we would continue to see it shine for another 500 years! The speed of light delivers time travel. I even live in a street called Celestial in a suburb named for a constellation.
The time travel movies that I use to title my poems have themes, and ‘After Flanders Fields’ follows those themes. Project Almanac (the movie) is focused on the inevitability of the time loop. The time loop seems to trap you within it. ‘After Flanders Fields’ addresses the circularity that war continues to trap us in. National narratives maintain that circularity and create a mythology that it is ‘un-Australian’ to question. And yet what does war deliver? What freedoms do ex-servicemen gain? Why can’t we question certain ‘truths’ or myths? ‘Lest we forget’ becomes ‘best we forget’ when applied to Frontier wars, for example.
Monet and his waterlily paintings are so important to me because they act like a veil between the past and the future. He gifted his paintings to France as a healing balm after the wounds of WW1. I didn’t know that my Bundjalung great-grandfather served in France in that war and spent his post-war leave in Paris at the same time that Monet was painting the waterlilies. So my traditional poems combined with Monet’s waterlilies performs time travel for me and connects me with my great-grandfather. I also love the way that time travel movies blur past, present and future, just like Impressionism blurs harsh boundaries between colour. There is a poetic quality to time and art and words and love. My poems do that no justice, but it is a way to express the elusive nature of all those obsessions.
SS: Your debut novel is due for release soon! Can you tell readers a little about the project and what to expect?
SA: I hope that my novel asks some questions about genre. About why certain genres wield more authority than others. Why do we bestow credibility on writers of history more so than writers of fiction? Is one actually more true than the other? Does something even have to be true to be powerful?
My protagonist is a Truth-Teller. Scarlet’s job is to invite many voices into the historical archive to ensure that no one voice gets dictatorial power. But Scarlet gets stranded on the wrong side of the globe. BloodTalk has failed and the world has no record of identity. Australia’s prophetic declaration that seeking asylum is illegal has been fulfilled on a global scale. Borders are clamped shut.
Befriended by a stranger, Scarlet grabs an old, faded copy of Ernest Scott’s A Short History of Australia and writes her own version over the top – a record of the Great Undoing on the run.
Scarlet returns home to Bundjalung Country and is reunited with her father and their great sadness. She can no longer avoid facing up to her own family’s historical truths.
The Great Undoing blurs the lines between fiction and non-fiction to navigate the contested borders between history and fiction, truth and lie, archive and heresy. Written not by the winners, not by the powerful, but by Scarlet Friday T.T., an Australian refugee. The Great Undoing will be released in February 2024 with Ultimo Press.
Sharlene’s poem is available to read here.
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