God Forgets About the Poor by Peter Polites
Image: Hachette Australia (portrait)
Review by Irina Dunn
On the sixth day of Christmas, our reviewer sent to us a review of Peter Polites heartfelt novel.
Peter Polites has written a heartfelt tribute to his own, and every, migrant mother, who leaves behind a community life of hardship for a soulless existence in the suburban wastelands of Australia. As the protagonist Mother notes: “How we starved for food in Greece and starved for Greece in Australia”.
Much of this novel is a huge lament from the narrator, Polites’ mother, all Greek mothers, who is both Medusa and Medea, unable to escape the role she has been burdened with. She says, “A woman’s life is suffering and that’s why we like to read suffering. Why? Because it’s a woman’s story?”
And then she turns on her gay son. “Sometimes I don’t think you’re gay, I think you’re just an extreme misogynist. Gays have no temperament for the suffering of women.”
Polites weirdly calls all his characters by names that link them to the figures in a medieval allegory. Thus his mother is named “Honoured”, his aunts are “Open Sea” and “Very Foreign”, a couple is called “Shaken Woman” and “Dragon Mumble”, and others are called “Spirit” and “Torch Peasant”.
When Honoured describes her post-war life in the Greek island village of Lefkada and later her marriage to a violent man, a marriage from which she cannot escape, her story would touch our hearts more if she were called Anna, or Sofia, or Marianna, ordinary names we can relate to.
Honoured understands what happens to migrants from countries like Greece when they come to countries like Australia. “I will tell you why you should draft my story. Because migrant stories are broken. Some parts in a village where we washed our clothing with soot. Some part in big cities working in factories.”
The voice that Polites adopts in the latter half of the book is torn between trying to respect his mother’s memory, and his recollection of the cruel things she had done to him and his sister.
His gay distractions (to a man he calls “Lust” would you believe?) are an unwelcome intrusion into what is otherwise a moving account of a difficult life (his mother’s) and the difficult relationship he had with his very Greek mother.
God Forgets About the Poor by Peter Polites
Ultimo Press 2023
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