First Page

'The book' is sitting on a table in the next room, along with some scraps of blue thread I recently pulled from an indigo dyed kimono I was taking apart, a spool of red cotton thread, my new sharp snip like scissors, glue stick, crayons, pencil case and a large copper and bronze relief drawing on black velvet. The artwork is of a Phoenician ship. My parents brought it back with them from a trip to Lebanon in the 1970's. My mum and I were cleaning up a few months ago and she had all these relics in a box.

They were always in our formal living room, as I was growing up. I couldn't bare to see them go to the op shop (I probably would have gone & bought them back the next day) I have done that before. My mum donated a printed embroidery linen template (don't know their technical name) of The Last Supper, to Reverse Garbage (R.G.). It was my grandmother's, but she never stitched it. Months later, I kept coming across it as I did my usual rummaging in the piles of stuff at R.G. so finally I bought it back because I decided that I was meant to have it.

This is oddly all related to my book. I have Belinda's book, Herodotus ‘The Histories’. I started to read through it on my way home from Canberra a few weeks ago. Claire gave me the book at the Making Do 2 exhibition. So as Sally was doing her driving shift, I read to her. I was stumbling over all the names. The page I randomly chose made reference to the Phoenicians, Palestine, Syria and the Persians. I folded it in half and figured that was the first action in the artwork. However, two nights ago, when I sat down to seriously work on the book, for some reason, I unfolded that page again. So now I lost it, as it lost its kink.

This book was initially rather intimidating to get first. It's such a heavy (physically/conceptually) book. It has taken me a while to start working into it (approximately 16 days) and where did I start? The first page. The first line reads, "According to the Persians best informed in history, the Phoenicians began to quarrel." Going back to the first page I read from this book, I always find joy in historical references to Palestine. For our contemporary sources of information have managed to completely erase its existence.

As I searched "Phoenician ship" in an engine in between typing this, I opened a new browser, only to see the headline on The Guardian website,

Up to 150 kidnapped in Baghdad Gunmen kidnap scientists and staff from research institute.

We don't hear much about the regular assassinations of Iraq's university professors, intellectuals, philosophers, scientists, researchers, artists. It's been happening since May 2003 and continues more regularly. I only became aware of this after hearing Haifa Zangana speak at the Sydney Writer's Festival earlier this year. Her talk was entitled, "Death is Covering Us Like a Fine Dust."

I cannot escape the politics. I do not want to escape them. I think this book is a great first book. Maybe now I can feel more confident working into it.

Nicole