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Humus-rich Food for the Soul: Karen Sedaitis' Soul Dark Soil

© Maggie Ball

Soul Dark Soil is a painful, confronting book. Many of the stories follow the contours of nightmares, those things we fear most. Snakebite; a lost child; car crash; insanity; a disabled child; children who are autistic, awkward, irritating; seriously bad parenting; selfish, sensual dreams of escape from parenthood; the ends of relationships, physical decay, disillusion, and everywhere death, misunderstanding, and destruction. The landscape is a domestic, and primarily feminine one - the kitchen, the nursery, shopping, the schoolyard, the garden, and the plot almost always involves love in one form or another, along with loss, desire, failure, or redemption. Sedaitis' work gets under the reader's skin; goes deeper than the details of her stories, and even when she is describing something ugly, like dismemberment, rot, abduction, physical, or emotional destruction, there is a kind of detached beauty in the writing, coming from something more eternal than the pain.

The characters are people we know well. They are ordinary men and women, watching their lives metamorphous, albeit temporarily, from banal to transcendent; from trivial to tremendous, and very likely, back to trivial again. In "Riding Along Singing", Mick is a grubby musician whose epiphany comes while sitting on a bus with his son, who he hasn't seen for two years. As the narrative voice moves delicately between father and son, playing their discontinuity in thought against that of the disapproving women on the bus, the reader is treated to the combined complexity of Mick's joy at his daydream image of teaching his son to play guitar, his son's dreams of television heroism, and the reality of real life against these scenerios. The effect is powerful, even sadly beautiful, layering the complexity of human emotions; our aspirations and pettinesses; dreams that will likely never be realised; the difficulty of communication, and the momentary peaks in these fragile, and lost lives.

A similar kind of transformation takes place in "Soul Dark Soil", where the protagonist moves from incessant activity: "swinging like a metronome from one distraction to the next in an effort to keep herself in perpetual motion", to a deep Buddhist inner calm. The complexity comes from the dizziness of her lethargy which prefigures her calm end, and the worry of those around her as she appears thin, shabby and pale. Her ending in the public wards, not happy, not anything, in a kind of living death: "She is the boulder in the moving river, life streaming around her immovable bulk." It is hard for the reader to know whether this is a positive or negative ending - the ultimate aim of all of us - that deep inner peace we all seek, or the ultimate horror. It is this tension once again, between horror and wonder, that makes this otherwise simple story great.

The copyright of the article Humus-rich Food for the Soul: Karen Sedaitis' Soul Dark Soil in Australian Literature is owned by Maggie Ball. Permission to republish Humus-rich Food for the Soul: Karen Sedaitis' Soul Dark Soil in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.