Apothecary Archive (2024)
Reviewed by Jane Frank, StylusLit.
This collaborative work, incorporating the ideas of belonging and home, is part memoir, part narrative and part mixture of image and text. The result is a moving short collection that interlaces the stories of two women—a poet and an artist—born on opposite sides of the horrific conflict of World War II, but who find, through creativity and collaboration, a way to unite behind common human experiences of family, dislocation and memory. This book is thus a testament to human connection.
Smith and Karl-Spence use the motif of weaving, naming the fictional characters that appear in the poems after different kinds of cloth. They are Muslin (representative of poet, Smith—born into a Jewish family after the War and who migrates to Australia as an adult) and Hessian (AKA artist, Karl-Spence— a German girl born towards the end of the War who migrates to Australia with her family when still a child).
The book’s Preface explains that the title Heimlich Unheimlich, despite translating as homely, unhomely, with hints of secrecy and hiddenness, also suggests both intersections and reconciliation. I was also interested that the relationship between Hessian and Muslin is at the heart of Sigmund Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) which is central to the aims of the creators.
Hazel Smith is a poet, performer and new media artist with five previously published volumes of poetry including, most recently, Ecliptical (Spineless Wonders, 2022), a startlingly original experimental collection that I reviewed previously. Originally trained as a jeweller, Karl-Spence’s work focuses on installation and performance and she has exhibited work both in Australia and internationally, being particularly active in both the Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art and the Adelaide Festival of the Arts.
In ‘Archive of the Evergreen,’ [8-9] about the experience of Muslin:
a family tree is a set of tags
it does not disclose
the lives of the people to whom the names belong
what they were like
the homes from which they were torn
Memories cascade through this poem including an account of a grandfather’s unpublished memoir, now on the internet:
archiving an extinguished way of life
…
how euphoric he would have been to know
his words were evergreen
I particularly appreciated the poem ‘From Rubble to Reliving’ [12-19] where
memory is
bricolage not reproduction
and over the course of seven pages, memories are rescued from the debris of war, the photographs reminiscent of découpage,
the city fitted out with carpets of rubble
the splintered remains of cups and saucers
the arms and legs of psychotic buildings
severed from their familial torsos
The poet uses the bricolage of anecdotes about, for example, the Baader-Meinhof gang, and 2015 satirist-posted quotes from Mein Kampf and other Nazi literature, substituting the word ‘migrants’ for ‘Jews’ [15]. This poem of lost histories, escape and entrapment laments ‘a home that can never be a home’ [19], concluding that
belonging has always
been a fruitless bedfellow
This poem’s collages evoke Post-War Germany and include family photographs and handwritten pages from the poet’s Tapa Notebook (University of Auckland, 2014) and like several other collages in this book, include the photography of constructed body parts made from muslin and hessian.
‘Walk to the End of Whistling’ [44-45] is a poem that appears is English on the left-hand page and is mirrored on the opposite page in a mixture of English, German and Yiddish, that required further collaboration with translators. Again, here, body parts are prominent in the dreamlike lyrics:
last night I walked to the end of whistling
fields menaced me on all sides
planted with severed thumbs
…
on the horizon a homeless man
was collecting figures
so that he could sew them into gestures
signalling rags of hope
…
a soldier ripped apart in an unnamed war
begged me to carry his
body parts home
In poems such as ‘Mill of Memory’ [28-37], there is fascinating intertext with a direct quote from Harold Macmillan’s speech to the South African Parliament on 3 February 1960 —
The wind of change is blowing through the continent
and again, in ‘The White Rose’ [20-25], the phrase ‘a raid on the inarticulate’ is from T S Elliot’s ‘East Coker’ from his Collected Poems 1909-1962 (Faber and Faber 1963, 203). These kinds of historical, literary and social/cultural references add thought-provoking layers of context to the work.
Emerald green reappears as motif in this poem, where
Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall and tried to put himself back together again
…
The water tanks. Sitting underneath them. Emerald-green
moss thriving from the drips; the joy in making her own
moss garden. The garden of Eden.
There are many other references to memories of food, household objects and daily life that make this poem so beautiful and moving.
Of course, the poem is about the White Rose Resistance Movement, founded by Hans Scholl in 1942 where intellectuals, mostly students, spoke out and distributed printed materials against the policies of the Nazis [52], many being executed.
This sumptuous hardcover volume, using photographs from both family’s albums, is only part of the collaborators’ complete project which involved a gallery installation incorporating an art-video that was exhibited in Sydney, Perth and also Dogwood Crossing in Miles, Queensland, between 2020 and 2023, as well as being selected for the Electronic Literature Organisation’s Virtual Gallery Exhibition (Un)Continuity in 2020 in Orlando, Florida.
The idea of bricolage—using what you can / doing it yourself— is recognised in the changing fonts throughout the volume. Each poem is given its own colour palette and design with artwork, text and emblems superimposed over a background of forest, stars, stone, flowers, leaves, cityscapes or family group images.
I was struck by the raw and personal experiences of identity and family shared in this exquisitely curated collection and would encourage every single reader to experience this weaving together of stories, of memories and of past pain to create an object that represents the casting aside of cultural differences and instead, focuses on the shared humanity of the collaborators at a time when this reaffirming message is being lost and is urgently needed in Australia and across the world.