birdgirl
by Shane Rowlands
Lori Lorion, Thoughts Forming and Floating, 2014, acrylic, oil, charcoal on canvas, 48 x 48 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
birdgirl
Shane Rowlands / Nov 2020 / Issue 3
Not long after we arrived in Australia, I drew a picture. I know this because my mother kept it and I have it now. Dusty it sits downstairs on top of a chest of drawers. A fading buttery card inside a simple square wooden frame.
I must have made this at kindergarten. Someone, whose idiosyncratic use of upper case I do not recognise, has written in blue biro at the top of the picture —
DisPlayed at sHow
ShaNe RowlaNDs
3 yEars
— to identify its maker and as a label for the children’s art display in the town’s local ag show, known far too grandly as the Royal Northern Agricultural, Horticultural and Floricultural Society Show.
*
This picture is of a figure / turquoise-faced beneath blunted black / pencil-hair thick / with my small hand’s effort / long-stroking this colour / over and over until lustrous.
Inside the turquoise lozenge / two yellow suns for eyes. Carved into / the negative space of background card / blue prison-barred teeth / sunken into lopsided / red crescent of bottom lip.
This figure balances / on orange diamond / foot peeping out / below vast swathes of erratic / crosshatching orange and pale pink dress.
Another foot appears / at the end of a long orange leg lifting / almost to horizontal / to touch toe to centre of left side of frame.
This lifting leg sweeps mauve / hemline of dress all the way up from diamond-foot fulcrum / a smooth arc ascending and growing dizzy into scribble / where it meets solidly dark cerulean horizontal / of fully arms extended / inside sleeves of multi-coloured verticals.
Above the right arm / within zigzagged cerulean / a yellow-flame wing flickers.
*
When I look at this figure, the overall effect—of eyes with neither irises nor pupils and the absence of nose—is of a farsighted-monster-toothed-and-winged-dancer in a very fancy dress with complicated sleeves.
This figure affects in me deep gratefulness to my mother for saving my small hand’s expression of a body expansive. Arms flung wide open. Preparing to leap.
Fifty years ago, when I drew this picture, we lived in a caravan with a tent annexe. Ours was the only van in the caravan park of red dirt on the outskirts of a small country town straggling beside the railway line.
I did not go to dance classes. I did not have fairy wings for dress-ups. But, for the end-of-year kindergarten party, my mother did somehow sew for me a white tulle tutu with a bodice of pink satin, tapering into pink triangle petals interspersed with smaller green triangle leaves.
In the many years since then, whenever I have happened upon this figure, its effect is immediate.
Unfettered. Joyful. Birdgirl.
*
I do not think this is a self-portrait.
When I was three, my hair was dirty blond curls knotted. And I squawked loud and fought hard against brush or comb.
The only person I knew with hair black as the crows was my mother.
I have a photograph of her from our lifetime ago in the caravan.
In it she is wearing an empire-line evening dress of deep cadmium yellow and pale sunlight chiffons. Under her small bust is encrusted a braid of sparkling glass beads. Her dark hair is threaded with a fine gold ribbon and spun high into a smooth dome of beehive.
Tonight she will go to the ball with my father. Tonight is the Dinner Dance for the Annual Quorn Races, and every woman there will be wearing some kind of fur. My mother’s stole is borrowed. It’s a fox and it prickles the back of her neck.
Against the drab green and white stripes of the tent’s canvas, she glows, the High Priestess of Honey.
*
When I was three years old, I am told I went through a phase: refusing to answer to my own name, I insisted I was only to be called Pookie.
This was the nickname of my aunt, my father’s youngest sister. She was christened Molly but no one had ever called her this. She was known always and only as Pookie—rhymes with ‘bookie’ not ‘spooky’—an affectionate term for a bushbaby, a small nocturnal primate native to sub-Saharan Africa.
Pookie is an Anglicised shortening of pokonyoni, the name that the Ndebele and the Shona peoples call the particular species of bushbaby found in the midlands of what was then the British colony of Southern Rhodesia and is now Zimbabwe. Pokonyoni is an Ndebele word; it means something like ‘maybe bird’ or ‘ghost bird’.
When he was seven, my father and his younger brother had kept a pookie as a pet. My father told me they had bought it from an old Shona man, who regularly cycled the road from Gwelo to the shoe factory at Bata, selling fruit and vegetables to all the families who lived in the outlying houses. On seeing the two boys chasing each other around their yard, he called out Kunjani in greetings and dismounted his bicycle. Kunjani Madala, the boys chorused, as he wheeled the bike over. On his handlebars was a headlamp, and he unscrewed the back of it. And there, in the chrome cup behind the bulb, a pookie lay curled, warm and sleepy.
When a bushbaby is born, its eyes remain half-closed and filmy for some days. The mother must carry the baby inside her mouth until the infant’s eyes open fully and it is able to move about on its own. Perhaps my father’s pet pookie was a newborn.
*
Inside my mother’s mouth lived songs as well as a language called Welsh, sounding sing-song, which we heard only when she went to the post office to talk on the telephone to our grandparents, mamgu and tadcu, on the other side of the ocean.
*
For night vision, a bushbaby has large ears that rotate independently like radar dishes and enormous amber-coloured eyes, ringed with black fur. More than a quarter of a pookie’s body mass is in the muscles of its hind jumping legs. With the help of its feathery tail, which is longer than the length of its head and torso combined, a pookie can leap great distances, and appears to fly among the treetops. In mid-flight, a bushbaby tucks its forearms and hind legs close to its body and only extends all four limbs at the last moment to grab hold of a branch.
At three, I knew none of this. Only that I was Pookie. Only that my father had carried a tiny flying monkey inside his shirt pocket next to his heart.
*
Each night when she tucked my little brother and me into the caravan’s kitchenette-table turned bed, my mother snuggled us in close to her body in a cwtch—pronounced ‘kutch’, rhymes with ‘butch’—and lullabied us to faraway sleep. With the music of snow-melt streams she sang: ‘I am a girl of the mountain / Away from home, making song / But my heart is in the mountains / With the heather and the little birds.’
*
My aunt was seven years younger than my father. She was the baby of the family, the little pet of her five older siblings. And when I was born, she was seventeen.
She is always laughing in the photographs I have. Her mouth wide open and toothy.
Here she is holding / me a butterball / six-months old in the crook of her arm / and my chubby little legs / pumping the air with glee.
And here long hair framing her face / she bends forward to cup one hand upon my shoulder / another beneath my elbow / finding balance / on the back of grandpa-horse.
She is here again / arms outstretched to lift me / fat little sun / high above her shining face.
*
When I was born, there were two grannies, two grandpas, five uncles and four aunties clucking over me, the first grandchild.
So what did my body remember of her?
Maybe a feeling of laughter bubbling up. From what the photographs tell me. But as the youngest still at home with all her siblings flown. Maybe a restlessness, a yearning for bigger and to be grown. Or maybe something wild and flying. That had gifted her a nickname.
I can only imagine.
But I am told / I went through a phase / lasting for almost a year after / we had flown faraway from grannies and uncles / to live in red dirt / in a lonely caravan with a green-and-white-striped tent flapping / underneath towering eucalyptus trees / when it was only / to her name / I answered.
*
When the time came for me to start school my mother insisted we move to a bigger town.
And a year later, at seven, I began ballet with Miss Kay—bone thin, black-eye-buttons, beak-nosed—103 years old and counting all the way through every class, she stamped her big wooden stick into the studio floor.
Attention Please Girls Assume First Position:
heels together
feet turned out
spread toes
pull up arches
lengthen shins
knees lifted
tummy in
long neck
shoulders down
ribs closed
chest open
elbows round
fingers soft.
Now hold. For a year of counting first, second, third, fourth, fifth position before pliés.
I wanted only to turn spinning top circles in a tutu.
But, for the end-of-year matinee concert, my costume was a tawny brown leotard studded down the centre front with snap fasteners for three bright yellow buttons. In the dressing room, a long row of mirrors, bejewelled with light bulbs. To wish ourselves good luck, every girl placed her lips against the glass to imprint a mouth made of lip-stick.
With the troupe of gingerbread men, I danced stiff-legged, my thighs chafing as we hurried back-stage to pop off our buttons and put on bolero jackets of ruffled green tulle, before returning to sweat under the stage lights as birds, our wings itching our arms, heavy with having to hold them aloft.
After the clapping and curtsies, back in the dressing room seeing all the mirror mouths floating without bodies made my insides squirmy. Like when grown-ups on TV went all mushy and called each other baby.
*
Two more times I met her, my self-adopted namesake, when my parents travelled ‘home’ with my brother and me to Wales and Rhodesia to introduce us to all the story-people in our family.
On the first trip I was eight and bouncing, having quit ballet for gymnastics. Pookie was living in London on the third floor of a red-brick house with a little boy of her own. I remember the door into the front room was lozenge-shaped, a submarine airlock with a spinning metal wheel to open it. And the eyes of two peacock feathers staring at me from a wine bottle vase on the kitchen table. Later outside, in the courtyard, a stone-walled well with a winding winch to pull up a pail filled with water, tasting icy-cold and smooth as silver.
By the time I was eleven, Pookie was back in Africa in a bungalow with a baby girl on her hip, a golden retriever licking our ankles and a garden abloom with hibiscus, bougainvillea, agapanthus and aloes. Her husband, my uncle, hid his face behind bushy sideburns and a moustache shaped like the handlebars on a racing bicycle. To make himself taller, he wore shoes with platform soles.
*
Three years later, having just moved interstate, we were still unpacking our lives from the last of the cardboard boxes. It was Easter. Too teenage for chocolate eggs, I was fretting about pimples and how to make friends when the phone rang. My mother’s voice sounded thick and gurgled, calling for my father to come quickly.
Three years later, divorced and lonesome. In a bathroom cabinet at someone else’s house, Pookie found a handgun. Loaded.
Three years later, listed next-of-kin over seven thousand miles away. A hospital called my father to ask him. Please consider. When life support is switched off.
Her kidneys. Her corneas. For donation.
*
Some thirty-five years on, I hike in red dirt country with my beloved.
In the shimmering midday heat, we seek shade in a stony dry river bed, choosing a seat beneath one of the ancient river red gums. With our backs nestled into the fibrous grey bark skirt at the base of the tree’s trunk, we quench our thirst with oranges.
Tip back my head to savour the sticky sweet juice trickling down my throat. Blink.
Stare up into branching canopy of blue-grey eucalyptus leaves.
Blink. Air alive. Quivering.
Flash of yellow. Blink.
Vibrating above.
Air.
Branches.
Blink.
Leaves. Bursting into vivid lime green ear-splitting trill and swooping chitter as a flock of wild budgerigars take roost in song-trees to twig-dance and dangle-leaf-tango.
Blink.
No photographs no family-storying / this one my own / body-true remembering. Her / hair in loose pigtails / and the hem of summer / dress of apple-green / seersucker hitched into the elastic of her knickers / she is turning / cartwheel after cartwheel after / cartwheel with me across springy lawn and bright sky / top-and-tailing us / together still spinning.
Shane Rowlands is a writer and collage artist who lives in Brisbane, Australia on Yugara-Turrbal country. She has published two poetry chapbooks—rear vision (Spindrift, 1997) and cicatriced histories (Metro Arts, 1995)—and has written for theatre and live performance. Recent exhibitions include fall seven times, stand up eight (PF Studio, 2013) and Royals, Angels & Assassins (WAG, 2015). She has worked as an editor and dramaturge, public policy maker, arts and cultural strategist, and as a researcher, curator and writer for exhibitions and business story-telling.
Lori Lorion earned her MFA at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her work has been exhibited in California, Oregon, North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Vermont and Skopje Macedonia. Lori's paintings are dreamlike celebrations of the human body in motion. She creates a reality where imposing, large-scale figures quietly emerge from within a mysterious world. Her brightly colored, often richly textured paintings have a musical feel to them. Unabashedly bold, yet gentle and silent, these robust figures pulsate with life. Lori lives, works, and teaches in North Carolina.