Angela Costi
Looping the Waves
Admittedly, I wrestle with impatience
when Yiayia unwinds to boarding the Patris
“We crossed the cruel seas
to a land I couldn’t pronounce.”
Her flowery dialect swirls through the stagnant air,
awakens the allotted gloom
of the Glenroy nursing home,
nostalgia cranks up her cinematic eyes,
fragile hands waving in the scenes
like an over-used carousel, slide projector.
The first visual is of Yiayia at nineteen
surrounded with other pressed lips,
raised to laugh at destiny’s deceit.
I stop myself mouthing the next line
falling from Yiayia’s lips as easily as saliva
“Hundreds of us from cursed villages.
The sea tossed us like a salad in a bowl.
Swimming was a skill they gave to fishermen.
I prayed the sea sucked my breathe while I slept.
Oh, but sleep was the lost treasure.”
Yiayia grabs hold of the bedsheet
to steady her decline into the lower bunk
as the sea comes searching for memory.
This is the part when I’m meant
to play the hero, Captain Nikolaos
and take my young grandmother’s hand
telling her, she will arrive safely.
Or this is the part when I’m meant
to awaken Yiayia to seventy years later,
to a room managed with programmed activity,
to unnatural light tricking the mind,
to speaking mostly to shadows.
I sit on the bunk
reach for Yiayia’s quivering hand
and the old carousel continues to loop
“One man was kissing the ship’s spine.
The food made me erupt, I was stuck to the ship’s rail.
My vomit travelled back to slap my face.”
Yiayia’s words in dialect
do not dither with direction
or meaning, they sail gloriously
into inclement downpour,
navigating the deep and the shallow,
unlike Yiayia’s English
drowning with confusion, searching
for the missed shore, finding
the shark infested bay.
“The water is calm, nothing to be scared of
Miss Maroulla, you can open your eyes now.”
Yiayia opens her eyes and sees her Captain
smiling and says,
“Thank you for making the sea behave.”
Angela Costi is a poet and writer with a background in social justice and community arts. The author of five poetry collections/books. Her most recent is An Embroidery of Old Maps and New. Her poetry has been placed or shortlisted in a number of awards including the Mary Gilmore Prize, Woorilla Prize, Meniscus Award and Joanne Burns Microlit Award. She is also known as Αγγελικη Κωστη among the Cypriot diaspora, which is her heritage. She lives on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung land.
Questions for Angela Costi
How did you start to write poetry?
I was reading poetry from childhood to adolescence, both in Greek and English.
I was also brought up in a religious household where Ancient Greek scripture was found in old leather-bound books. When I left home in my early 20s, I began to write poetry, which weaved in the language of my childhood, the Cypriot-Greek dialect.
Poetry grabbed my pen more than prose as I found myself immersed in the musicality of language and the deeper meaning found by distilling experiences.
I developed a way of noticing through a circling back rather than using a linear narrative, and this seemed to point my pen towards the poetic form, content and narrative.
Have you been inspired by works to which you return ?
When I was a younger poet, in the 90s, I spent a lot of time with the complete works of well known poets like Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds, Elizabeth Bishop, and the poetic writings of Jeanette Winterson.
In the early 2000s, I would re-read the collections of Yannis Ritsos, Nazim Hikmet, C P Cavafy and Czeslaw Milosz.
Closer to home, with respect to Australian authors, I’ve returned to a great number of Jordie Albiston’s collections, in particular the Hanging of Jean Lee and The Book of Ethel, and I return again and again to BlakWork by Alison Whittaker.
Currently, I’m in a wonderful space of reading a combination of collections by ‘long-ago’ poets such as Diane di Prima, Muriel Rukeyser and Adrienne Rich, and contemporary poets such as Andy Jackson, Tishani Doshi, Patricia Smith and Ocean Vuong.
All these poets come from a space of caring; informed by their personal experiences and yet able to extend their words to support us in this world of loss and grief.
In the poem “Looping the Waves” you create a double narrative existing simultaneously, of remembered transit, complete with seasickness, and medical care. How do you consider care, in the sense of a burden of grief , to be linked to the migrant experience?
Your phrase ‘a burden of grief’ is apt when I think of what it feels like and how it looks to care for an older member of a family or community.
Within a migrant experience such as mine, where my grandparents and parents fled from famine, civil unrest and imminent war in Cyprus, the grief associated with loss of home through that type of experience is carried to the new country and the next generations.
This type of grief is a ‘burden’ for the next generation born in Australia with completely different experiences and values.
The care for elders, in this migrant context, as they are sinking towards death is vexed with the burden of carrying inter-generational grief – how can we care without being smothered with their politics, their identity, their trauma? We want to grieve their demise without taking on their world as ours. We want to grieve for their heroic spirits and pass on their oral stories in order to understand how we carry ancestry and heritage without it being a burden.
Rather we want to creatively document their resilience and survival.
What do you consider to be the connection between care and ageing?
The connection between care and ageing is sacred.
It’s that finite time between one person that will die soon and another that will live but be altered by loss. Before this time, there is the experience of ‘care’ and it can be a reciprocal experience as in the poem – at the end of the poem, they are both playing an important part in the familiar story – and by doing this, they are contributing to each other’s sense of self, supporting, comforting, caring before ageing can no longer continue.
How do you consider care manifests in the case of each protagonist in Looping the Waves? Can you outsource carefulness? If so how?
The grandmother, Yiayia Maroulla, in the poem is offering her story as a form of inheritance.
Her words are a bequest and gratefully acknowledged by the granddaughter in the poem.
In return, the granddaughter completes her grandmother’s story by taking on the role of the Captain. She knows this will settle her grandmother into sleep. This is a careful practice of sharing story between generations.
The poem doesn’t deal directly with the sort of care the grandmother is receiving at the residential care. The grandmother has severe dementia, and her physical needs aren’t dealt with in the poem. If the poem was to venture into the terrain of ‘outsourced care’ for the grandmother – it would tell of how sometimes it is very careful and nurturing, and sometimes it isn’t.
This is the nature of outsourcing care, which is required to carefully support complex care needs.
Do you consider care, in the sense of holding onto a form of grief, is gendered? Should we encourage others to be careless?
I think our healthcare system (with institutionalised care policies and practices) is predicated on the majority of frontline (lower hierarchy) health workers being women.
This has been my experience from the 1990s to current times. In recent years, both my parents have very serious diseases, debilitating physically and mentally, requiring home support care – they have a total of 9 carers, 8 identify as women, 1 identifies as a man.
All of these carers provide care-full care.
This gendered workspace doesn’t seem to permeate into the personal space of grieving for a loved one. Personal grief and care are inclusive human experiences, some of us care more, some of us care less, and this causes divisions and continues dysfunctional families.
Caring for older parents is a space fraught with unresolved grief.
‘Care’, like any word, that comes with emotional baggage and financial reward, can be misused – we need to bring our humanity into this fragile, vulnerable space and encourage those who do not care, to walk away.
Do you have any advice for writers or creative producers?
Continue to challenge yourself as a creator.
Learn new ways of developing your craft. Trial different forms, for example, I’ve been writing prose poems recently, conducting research on erasure poetry and will be taking up collage soon to focus on how the visual informs the text, and vice versa.
Value genuine constructive feedback about your writing. Use this to revise your writing as it can elevate it.
Enjoy those special times when your writing is spilling with ease onto the page. But don’t be too quick to submit it for publication. Sit with it for a while. After some time, you will see what it needs to progress towards publication.
And another thing….
A certain way of caring for our grandparents and parents can be described as ‘parentifying’.
This is when the child takes on the role of being a parent. Roles are reversed.
This type of care is also associated with the burden of grief as the child mourns the loss of being a child, of being a daughter, of having the opportunity to live independently of their parents and the responsibility of their survival. This is when caring less is highly recommended.
After all, a child and a daughter need to be cared for deeply.
