‘White Hibiscus, a portrait in words’ by Loribelle Spirovski is set on a cruise ship as the world learns of the Covid-19 pandemic. However it is not anchored here, the memoir unfolds with poetic passages across a timeline from childhood to present day. Through these vignettes a linear narrative emerges.
Spirovski recalls her child-self in the Phillipines being cognisant of the smell and flavours of eating, enjoyment, and trepidation in play; the piqued but mundane observations you have as a little person in a big world. Splendour in the ordinary. Back on the boat as her adult-self she is an observer. She sketches, rests, wanders, and supports her partner, Australian classical pianist and writer Simon Tedeschi prepare for his recital at sea. His musical life and her recollections of sound are a good device which toggle us through time.
Spirovski writes about memory in the way that we experience it, truncated and fleeting but also searing, sensuous and exact. As in a dream there are gaps and at times more is communicated by evoking time and place than a spotless retelling. The artist’s hand, who is known for painting with her fingers, is obvious not only with the careful curation of words but in their presentation. Text waves down the page like an enchanting tide, or does the shape signify disquiet, of being unmoored?
Her publisher, Upswell confirm this feeling saying the book “is a meditation on how trauma casts stones into the strange waters of our lives, creating ripples that stretch on long after the stones have sunk.”
The sense of something amiss is explored in a few ways, through Spirovski’s nausea which she’s inexplicably had since childhood but which seems to ebb and flow later in life. Trauma is conveyed as an ominous shadow. Turn the page to a new recollection. There is comment on class, power, family, romance, the impact of war and borders, and abandonment. Connections are savoured, the deep bond between mother and child, the salve of romantic love, and comfort in cultural affinity.
Spirovski has a firm grasp of the ephemeral and elemental in her re-telling. We’re offered a banquet of detail. Simultaneously words hit with precision, like the impact of a droplet on still water.
You can purchase the book here.