Page 61 - Raffles09_March2022

NAM LE
Nam Le’s first book, The Boat,
was translated into 15 languages and received over a dozen major awards in Australia, America and Europe, including the PEN/Malamud Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize
and the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award. The Boat has been republished as a modern classic and its stories internationally anthologised, adapted and taught.
She was born in a stilted house on the slope of a creek bank, on the edge of the jungle. Her father was an engineer, manning the water pump; he restored local ruins for a foreign taskforce. It was a difficult time for them all. By her tenth year, her mother and two of her siblings had died, and one
had disappeared. They worked, they obeyed. Their father came home tired and closed his eyes to soak his feet and it was then they watched him with full gazes, drinking him in. The water in the plastic bucket steeping laterite red. The slow, hypnotic spasming at the base of his calves.
They were three children left and they must look after each other, that was the first rule. (You didn’t think about why it was the first rule.) So the jungle was dangerous: you didn’t go into it, and never alone: there were slave markets near the border that dissolved in rain; there were wild animals, some with achingly human eyes; there were humanoid figures whose wrists and ankles bent the wrong way, who knew which roots to crush into unguents that would smear their skin invisible – then they would shadow your every footfall, riding your breath as you lunged into green madness. The world was cracked, spewing aberrations.
Stories, too, that their father brought home. His working day was thronged by carven galleries of gods and demons, nagas, garudas – at night they cracked free from their ancient panels, rose out of their steles, romping his dreams – but he made sure to also relay to his children the ulterior stories: rows upon rows of Buddhas with their stone faces sloughed off, temple walls ruptured and dwarfed by the roots of giant strangler figs. The gathering power of a single seed transported somewhere and left alone.
It was really to her, the girl believed, that their father was telling these stories, and she was right. Because once, recounting the story of Muchukunda, the warrior- king born from out his father’s flank, he had seen in her face the exact expression which had haunted him on the faces of thousands of apsaras – smooth, knowing, unknowable, narcotic – and he was shocked into a vision of his daughter’s head as a stucco of slaked lime, tinged with ochre, capped with a golden head-dress, regarding him across the false expanse of bas-relief. In that moment he understood that hers was a soul not of this world. He never shared this terrifying vision with anyone.
− EMOTION −
RAFFLES MAGAZINE 59