Purple Prose Review
“I imagine this dark center as unknowable, painted in shades of black…I invent and imagine (I ficitonalise) – what she sees. I conjure a corona of glorious colour, its elements mobile, ever changing: egg-white light split through a prism, a peacock all-in-one shimmer…a bruise unpurpling. With those rose-coloured glasses firmly in place, life unfocused holds the promise of universality; it is blurred, but bright and beautiful.” – Tracy Farr, ‘Do You See What I See’ in Purple Prose by Liz Byrski and Rachel Robertson.
Throughout the reading of every poem, in the anthology titled Purple Prose, you are asked to think of two things simultaneously: what you see when you think of the colour purple, and how the reimagining of colour by Western Australian writers resonates with you. Reflecting on my own response, purple is tangible through feminism, because we are all equal in our violent human experiences. What I mean by violent is the explosive nature of experiencing memory through active and conscious storytelling, which allows us to burst through our own inhibitions and limitations.
Liz Byrski and Rachel Robertson, echoing the mission of Freemantle Press to humanise the people of Western Australia through creativity, conceived Purple Prose. Appreciating the unique land and culture of Western Australia and translating its idiosyncrasy into stories of universal and meaningful purpose, contribute to the act of humanising in this collection. In this way, storytelling shatters the negative stereotypes existing in the words bogan, Australian women, race and Aboriginal.
Purple Prose negates stereotypes by igniting the experiences of Western Australian female writers. Liz Byrski and Rachel Roberston introduce the this kind of prose poetry as “an anthology of women writing about purple” (p.7) because “purple is associated with many different things across different cultures, including penitence, mourning, harmony, royalty, feminism, women’s suffrage, lesbian, gay and transgender rights, wealth, healing, and spirituality.” (p.7) This association, this feminism, is through the transformative theme of the colour purple, “as women change and struggle to change” in “their roles of mothers, sisters, daughters and granddaughters.” (p.9) The multiple stories told in this violet anthology, exist through that kind of history and memory, but also language. It is a stereotype that “‘purple language’ has been used to refer also to highly colourful swearing,” (p.9) and it is in the violent act of writing purple female experiences, that we create equality.
Purple, palpable in its many forms and shades, becomes most prominent upon reflection. Purple helped Liz Byrski accept the death of her ‘Maiden Aunts’ (p.22-36) by completely understanding Aunt Vi’s existence in mauve clothing, and eccentric hoarding of strange artifacts from a long lost lover. The duality of purple for feminism and identity became synonymous for Natasha Lester’s navigation of emotions as she reacts to her sibling’s transgender identity and his descent into mental illness. (p. 11-22) Purple is history and culture traced by racism in ‘The Trouble With Purple’ by Annamaria Weldon. Purple is Tracy Farr’s understanding of forgetting, age, and blindness experienced by her mother in, ‘Do You See What I See.’ (p.83-95) Peering into such diverse private memories, told in such powerful prose, reveals how intrinsically connected we are in a purple haze within the multiple layers of our existence.
The collection however, is not without some critique. Some writing seems too strained, unable to tap into the experience of ‘purple language’, because the theme itself is too universal, and therefore limiting in the construction of memory. What do you do if your memories are not strictly purple? Sometimes you simply recite. An example of this is the repetition of the history of the colour purple by the difficulty of its creation as an object, or purple as a symbol of royalty. This reoccurs so often, that purple risks becoming dull. As a point of research and creative writing, the factual history of purple seems too easy an option. When this happens, readers are left longing for violent diversity and disruption.
That being said, the anthology achieves what it set out to do: to give new meaning to purple by the conscious storytelling of experiences, which demolishes stereotypes. Every meaning is unique and interesting, a process sometimes difficult in the age of recycled information. Who knew one colour could shade so many tragic and beautiful memories for so many.
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You can read excerpts, media releases and even purchase your own copy of the anthology here.
Purple Prose (December 2015) is a collection of new essays by women writers edited by Liz Byrski and Rachel Robertson. It has chapters by established authors like Toni Jordan, Anne Manne and Hanifa Deen as well as chapters by emerging writers like Tracy Farr, Sarah Drummond and Jacqueline Wright. Rachel Robertson and Liz Byrski are colleagues in the creative writing department of Curtin University. Robertson was shortlisted for the National Biography Award in 2013 for Reaching One Thousand. Byrski is best known as broadcaster and as a writer of popular women’s fiction. She has just released a memoir: In Love and War: nursing heroes.
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Winnie Dunn is a volunteer at The Red Room Company. She is currently in her third year of studying a Bachelor of Arts Pathway to Secondary Teaching at Western Sydney University. She majors in English and sub-majors Modern History and Education. A sometimes blogger at winniereads.wordpress.com, she likes to spend most of her time reading books, people, and sometimes writing short stories, poems and plays if she's lucky.