FICTION
Where the Fruit Falls
Karen Wyld
UWA Publishing, $27.99
In Shelia Heti's short story, My Life is a Joke, a main character declares that the most important thing to have in life is a witness. In Karen Wyld's novel Where the Fruit Falls our heroine, Victoria, tells her twin sister Maggie after tragedy strikes: "… our mum needs a witness".
What does it mean to bear witness? What does it mean to be privy to someone else's life? What does it mean to carry someone's story? What does it mean to inherit intergenerational trauma? And why are we pulled towards stories documenting multiple generations within one family?
Karen Wyld's novel won the Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript earlier this year.Credit:
Expansive narratives that cross borders, barriers and time often seek to answer these questions and address notions of lineage, heritage, family and legacy.
Wyld's universe sees characters buoyed by stories bestowed from parent to child, grandparent to grandchild. Memory is a gift is a language is an enabler. The enabler is a kind of strength passed on from one soul to another — a transformative mechanism that has no colonial name.
It's a world where the women "fill their ears with maps, instructions and long-held lore", where the original inhabitants of Australia cross vast terrains to find safety, shelter, comfort — where yearning children comply with the demands made by a mother left widowed by the lacerating circumstances of time and skin colour.
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"Out in the desert, the line between now and forever is thinner in some places." They lean on the secret language of animals to find their way "using landforms, the sun and the stars". Their pregnant bodies carry "oceans within".
The sisters traverse the expansive land, feasting on quandong, bush currants, rock figs, pig melons, bush oranges, yams, lily bulbs, bush potatoes, sap lolly, honey ants. The land is a book that must be read. The land is a set of instructions. "They followed the eagle, which followed the winding river."
Victoria is the older twin — hardier, tactile, more resourceful and street-smartly-dexterous; Maggie is more cautious, bound by a weaker constitution, carrying herself with the feminine vulnerability that girls, regardless of skin colour, are groomed to value.
They spend their adolescent years traversing "undulating rocky outcrops" with their mother, Bridget, fielding celestial beings, large slithering masses, astral snakes and serpentine bodies of water. Ethereal serpents remind the women that the essence of being is rooted in an ability to still oneself and listen to the natural world around them — a truth modernity has extinguished.
We follow the family of three as they navigate the ugliness of racism and white supremacy in Australia during the 1960s and '70s. Their antagonists come in the form of white men who work in the arts and capitalise on brown bodies for the sake of their "ingenuity", reminding the reader of celebrated artistic "greats" such as Paul Gauguin, who in 1891 sailed to Tahiti to have sex with teenage girls and then paint them. (He married a handful of 13-year-old girls, calling them his "savage … primitive Eve”.)
Mother and daughters pitch themselves against the cruel reality of imperialism and colonialism, fuelled by an "ancient hunger" that carries them through horrifying episodes of violence and barbarity.
Fighting is the aftermath of abandonment. But who has abandoned these women? Why has abandonment become such an egregiously regular occurrence in this country? And whose perspectives are we willing to assume?
Wyld's rhapsodic language propels the movement of each scene, engaging us through deft descriptions, competent narration and a compassionate approach to the treatment of each character.
Though occasional awkward phrasing pales the novel at times, the portrait of the women is a necessary reminder to us all, especially during these times, that stories are our personal and private testimonies — proof that each of our lives matter.
"Stories need to be told or they'll turn to dust," Bridget tells her daughters. We are the witnesses to this earth and to our own lives.
Lives have meaning when we root them in stories, and stories exist through the act of telling. Telling is the ultimate expression of love. To witness something other than our own personhood. A life, a tree, a planet.
This review is supported by the Judith Neilson Institute and the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund
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