SWIRLING

When I was working in a tin mine on the west coast of Tasmania in 1981/2 at one of the dirtiest but emotionally challenging jobs I’ve ever had, Salmon Rushdie was catapulted to literary fame. I think I may have come across his name on the morning news before going to work on the bus and usually in the dark and the rain, for it nearly always rained on the west coast of this beautiful island state of Australia. News of Rushdie and his Midnight’s Children(1981) was the beginning of his story in the narrative that is my own life and, over twenty-five years later, I still follow the writing and life of this acclaimed and controversial writer.

Yesterday I listened to an interview on ABC radio1 with this Indian-British novelist and essayist, this Muslim-born and self-proclaimed atheist around whom have been swirling literary and political issues, especially since the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses(1988). I had left the tin mine by 1988 and was living in what is arguably the most isolated city on the planet, Perth, Western Australia. The comparisons and contrasts between Rushdie’s writing and mine I found helped to place my own work in a useful personal perspective. This first of a series of prose-poems examines these comparisons and contrasts.-Ron Price with thanks to “The Book Show,” ABC Radio National, 21 April 2008, 10:05-11:00 a.m.

I tell stories, too, Salmon
but I don’t draw on the
deficit model of history1
in the same way as you.

I, too, subvert linear history
with spacial, sacred, circular
and fragmented models, far
more transnational, not the
discreet national-local story
here, more the flickering film
of a phenomenal world where
a sense of unity is demanding
fulfilment on a tide of desire
for an outward and political
form mounting to a flood, to
a climax in these tempestuous
times of troubles and woes.

Writing for me was a second
choice, too, Salmon, after I
realized I could not make a
career of baseball and life
wore me out with forty years
of endless talking and listening
among other slings and arrows
of life’s outrageous fortune.

1Camilla Nelson, “ Faking It: History and Creative Writing,” TEXT: Vol. 11, No.2, 2007.

Ron Price
22 April 2008