Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer > Books: 2020-republic-of-consciousness-shrt‎ (5)

Minoli Salgado was born in Kuala Lumpur and grew up in Sri Lanka, South East Asia and England. She was educated at schools in Penang Hill, Colombo (briefly) and North Devon before going on to study English Literature at the universities of Sussex, Manchester and Warwick. After gaining her PhD in Indo-Anglian fiction, she returned to the University of Sussex where she taught postcolonial literature for many years as Tutorial Fellow, Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader and Professor of English.

Though only some of the stories … engage with the war, all of them were written during or soon after the political conflict [the Sri Lankan civil war] and are conditioned by that time … Written between 1990-2011, they are also underscored by an exilic perspective that attempts to give meaning, pattern and shape to a home that appears to be torn apart … The book is divided into two parts – “Rumours” and “Ventriloquy and Other Acts” – that mark the permeable boundaries between public and private selves …. In everyday life, rumours occupy the place where public secrets congregate, They expand and grow in contexts if suppression where official facts are known to be lies. And ventriloquy is … an act of displaced speech … of finding a voice in a new guise.

“Can’t you just go, she thinks to herself. Find something to do, or play, or something”

“Can’t you just go, she thinks to herself. Find something to do, or play, or something”

I knew that one day all I would have was the memory of Jim and not Jim himself present in my peripheral vision making all my other senses go zing and now that time has indeed come and Jim is not present and has not been present for many years what I remember and want to record in long-hoarded words and word orders is not only the delicious presence of him Jim but also the delicious panic of that time during which I often told myself Calm down and take it all in but there was always too much world to take in because there was always more gorgeous detail than I had time or senses for and every caterpillar-of-a-When immediately became a butterfly-of-a-What and flew off into the flock of a thousand interplexing Whats whose air-dance of now being like this and now being like that was too delicate for anybody to remember but a god.

Of course at the time despite my word-hoard I didn’t think it this way with these sentences in this order because often I was just a mute panic and a fantastic feeler-of-feelings. Even so it turns out didn’t do a bad job of remembering this or that butterfly of present-moment Jim with his warmth and goodwill towards all men but particularly it seemed towards me. And though I do have more language now thanks to the unlocking by Dr Masters and the books I am able to hear and the questions I am able to ask people I still know that even were I time-travelled as I am now back inside myself as I was during the Jim-time I would remember it no better because at the same time as watching air-dances of Whats I would be putting together words I wanted to remember in a particular order with a particular resplendence of rhythm and crumple of sounds and so the world would become lost to me trying to get it right in words rather than simply being the world of deliciously panicked now now galloping now giddily giddily galloping.

Worship me mummy. Every child is Jesus for a while but every orphan is a single piece from a jigsaw puzzle the rest of which is somewhere else and so wherever it is is itself entirely ruined and frustrating … but the piece of the picture on that jigsaw piece may only be cloud-edge and sky or artificial blue and the orphan will spend useless hours of years of hours worrying over what complete painting or photograph they should form part of. I have seen in front of the doors of the lift as they finally closed I have seen little Jesuses be turned by the gap becoming a dark slit and a number counting down from 3 to 0 turned straight into jigsaw pieces I have seen and then heard them start crying as sons and daughters and finish crying as orphans

Animated by a fragile grace, his fingers race along the buttons like the tremulous legs of a moth, the death’s-head hawkmoths that eclose from chrysalides in the potato fields. Then he gets up, comes to the table and when the genetrix in turn sits down, raised his joined hands to his face, his proximal phalanges interlaced ….

Tegenaria spiders have woven and rewoven dense funnel webs, frozen by the sediment of time, swollen and made heavy as oriental hangings by dirt, sawdust, the husks of insects and the translucent chitin moulded by distant generations of arachnids.

Serge sits back in his chair, steepling his fingers in front of his face.

.. spiders in shadowy haylofts that weave webs .. that .. are still there a year, a decade, even a century later, the web a little dustier, a little thicker, a little more forbidding

Since birth they have watched killings. They have watched their fathers and mothers take the lives of animals. They learned the gestures and copied them. They in turn have killed hares, cocks, cattle, piglets, pigeons. They have shed blood and sometimes drunk it. They know the smell, the taste. But a Boche? How do you kill as Boche. Surely this would make them murderers, even if this is a war?

This coldness, this hard-won indifference to the animals has never quite managed to stifle in Joel a confused loathing that cannot be put into words, the impression – and, as he grew, the conviction – that there is a glitch – one in which pig rearing is at the heart of some much greater disturbance beyond his comprehension, like some machine that it unpredictable, out of kilter, by its nature uncontrollable, whose misaligned cogs are crushing them, spilling out into their lives, beyond their borders, the piggery as the cradle of their barbarism and that of the whole world.