Big-eared rabbit-eared
BILBY, n. My toddler is passionate about the Australian animated show Bluey. There’s an episode where the kids bring home a stuffed toy “bilby” from school. Since Bluey stars a family of talking dogs and the episodes are full of magic xylophones and other imaginary play, I confess that I initially wasn’t sure a bilby was a real animal. But it is!
A bilby is a sort of rabbit-like marsupial. The scientific name is Macrotis lagotis. Macrotis means big-eared and lagotis means rabbit-eared, so biologists really wanted you to know about this animal’s ears. (Also: rabbits and rabbit holes, previously.) This species used to be, and sometimes still is, called the greater bilby, as distinct from the lesser bilby, which sadly went extinct in the 1950s. The greater bilby is also threatened. (I donated in honor of how many times my kid has watched and recounted the “Bob Bilby” episode of Bluey.) An effort to raise awareness of their plight has made them into a replacement for chocolate Easter bunnies in Australia, which is one of the cleverest environmental campaigns I’ve ever heard of.
Lastly, these funny little creatures can tunnel, and because of that, their pouch opens toward their back legs instead of their front legs. You can’t see that in the photo below, but isn’t it cool?
Source: DepositPhotos
Even cooler, the word “bilby” comes from Yuwaalaraay or Gamilaraay/Kamilaroi, in which it means “long-nosed rat.” These are two closely related languages spoken in the northern part of what is now New South Wales. In Western Australia, people also sometimes call this animal a dalgite or dalgyte, which is a borrowing from Nyunga, and in South Australia, it can be a pinkie, which is an Anglicization of a word from Kaurna. So many different indigenous languages having words for these animals shows how widespread they once were.
I want to go back to Yuwaalaraay and Gamilaraay now because I learned something delightful about these languages. Yuwaalaraay speakers used to say “yuwaal” for “no,” though apparently now they simply say “waal”; Gamilaraay speakers say “gamil.” The ending, -araay, is a form of the word for “having,” so these two languages are Yuwaal-having and Gamil-having, respectively. They are named after their word for no. “So this way of referring to languages is similar to saying that English is ‘No-having’, German is ‘Nein-having’, and French is ‘Non-having’” (Dr Hilary Smith, Winanga-Li).
I love this example of French as “Non-having” because in the middle ages, the languages of what is now France were named by their word for “yes.” In the north, the group of regional languages was the langue d’oïl, the language of oïl, oïl meaning yes and being the ancestor of modern “oui.” In the south, the regional languages fell under the umbrella of the langue d’oc. One modern descendant is Occitan (sometimes “lenga d’òc” to its speakers).
Smith adds, “Other Australian languages have different naming systems, e.g. using their words for ‘go’ or ‘this’.” I love knowing this. Basing a language-naming system on “the people who say ‘no’ like this,” or more generally “the people who say X word in Y way”—using an actual characteristic of the language itself—is so smart. Not perfectly futureproof, since words do change, and it only works if the words for e.g. “no” are significantly different (a shibboleth!), but it sidesteps the quagmire of territories, former territories, and ethnolinguistic ouroboros you find elsewhere in language names.
I’m currently writing a new novel set in a sci-fi/fantasy world, so I’ve been thinking a lot about how we decide what to call things. Previously on naming made-up places: Europe.
Here’s what I’ve read lately in small-r romance:
Something More (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary, young adult) by Jackie Khalilieh. If you are a YA romance reader or you have one in your life, this story about a Palestinian-Canadian teen girl trying to keep her autism diagnosis a secret as she starts high school is very sweet. Jessie navigates crushes, love triangles, drama in her friend group, drama on stage, frustrating siblings, strict but loving parents, and figuring herself out, and I rooted for her even when she made mistakes.
Fool Me Twice (m/f, both cis and het, historical) by Meredith Duran. I love Duran’s prose and how fearlessly wild her plots are—blackmail! conspiracies! assassins! prison! posing as a duke’s housekeeper so you can rob him!—and that she is not afraid to start out with a male character who is basically a monster. In his defense, he’s been wronged and is not compos mentis—his first scenes are written in a disoriented third-person present, as opposed the heroine’s clearheaded third-person past—but he does throw a bottle at the heroine when they meet. A lot of romance is about this Beauty-and-the-Beast fantasy that yes, we live in a violent patriarchal hellscape, but with love maybe you could tame one powerful man into treating you right. The best approaches to this fantasy know that they are about male power and violence, and the fear and fascination they engender. The success of the romance rests on whether you believe that the heroine has inspired the hero to change for good, and in this case I did. Mostly I was there for her: courageous, smart, forced to be conniving by circumstance, but really quite good at it, and tall. It is so rare to find a tall woman in a straight romance. Also, my specific pregnancy trauma forces me to report to you all that this is one of the many, many straight historicals where the characters pretend the pull-out method works, a writing choice that makes me wildly anxious. No pregnancy occurs.
The House of the Red Balconies (m/m, both cis and gay, fantasy) by AJ Demas. A new AJ Demas book is such a cause for celebration. I rarely allow myself to reread books because I need to keep up with the genre and this newsletter, but I do reread AJ Demas. These books evoke their setting—broadly, an imagined world inspired by the ancient Mediterranean and more specifically in this book, the island of Tykanos, famed for its tea houses and their charming “companions”—so richly, and it’s easy to get swept up in them. Hylas, a shy, 40-something engineer who grew up in a militaristic and repressively homophobic culture, arrives on the island of Tykanos thinking he will build an aqueduct as he’s been hired to do, but getting anything done on the island is delicate and meandering social process, so Hylas ends up spending at lot of time at the tea house where he’s a tenant, the House of the Red Balconies. He befriends his neighbor, the beguiling young companion Zo. They take such good care of each other, in such wonderfully specific ways: Zo does a lot to set poor, nervous Hylas at ease, while Hylas fixes the house’s broken pipes and designs a new, improved crutch so Zo can get around more easily on bad pain days. This is a quiet, intimate romance that is beautifully written.
Not Here to Make Friends (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary) by Jodi McAlister. The first two books in this series about an Australian reality show called Marry Me, Juliet—reviewed here and here—are wonderful, both total gems that I never wanted to put down, but this one. This one is fucking astonishing. All three books retell the story of the same season of the Bachelor-like show, so we see familiar scenes retold from new perspectives. There is delicious dramatic irony throughout, and in this final book, we discover all the secrets that the show’s overworked producer, Murray, and this season’s villain, Lily Fireball, are hoarding. Murray has remained somewhat in the background in the previous books, while the magnetically compelling girlboss would-be influencer Lily Fireball has been center stage, keeping her real self—Lily Ong—just out of reach. Both Murray and Lily get to tell parts of the story, with Murray retelling the arc of the season and Lily revealing her mysterious past. They’re an extraordinarily well-matched pair of ruthless schemers, which is of course what makes them perfect for each other and also, for much of their story, what keeps them apart. Neither of them is afraid to get their hands dirty, whether in service of making must-watch television or in ruining the career of a racist, sexist executive. Whether they’re good guys or bad guys, they’re irresistible. Beautifully plotted, sharply witty, with big angst and secret romance and (de rigueur) dramatic reveals, and one line of dialogue that made me cry. A showstopper.
In things that are neither Romance nor romance, I read Vajra Chandrasekera’s science fantasy novel The Saint of Bright Doors. It’s a wild book, just bursting with ideas, chaotic but brilliantly managed. It will turn all your genre expectations inside out. The story follows Fetter, raised by his mother to assassinate his messianic father, as he leaves his mother’s training behind, goes to the big city, and joins a support group for unchosen or almost-chosen Chosen Ones. He gets a boyfriend and tries to figure out how to live in the absence of destiny, which takes him on a journey that goes from episodically picaresque to Kafkaesque. That’s my more or less true but absolutely inadequate description of this book, which is about how the world is made and unmade, and power and systems of violence—religious, state, parental—and how to live in defiance of those things. And every time I thought the plot would zig, it zagged.
It’s bleak and hopeful and funny and strange and so vivid. Chandrasekera has an amazing clarity with long sentences. He’s willing to take—and execute beautifully—big stylistic risks. It makes so much sense to me, in a novel about radically altering and expanding one's understanding of the world, that there would be some shocks in the prose. There is something that happens toward the end of this novel that is such a perfect marriage of story and style, and I found it genuinely surprising and artful. Also, there is an incredible sci-fi/fantasy illustration of how invaders erase and replace the history of the cultures they conquer that I will be thinking about for a long time yet.
(I also wanted to link this GoodReads review where an American Sri Lankan reviewer discusses the Sri Lankan Buddhist references in the book; you don’t need to know any of that to enjoy reading, but I liked learning a little more about it.)
I read Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest this week as well, which was such a pleasure. More on this later, maybe.
And I recommend this short story about lesbians running a printing press on the eve of the July Revolution (1830) in Paris, “The Font of Liberty” by Elizabeth Porter Birdsall. You can listen to it as a part of The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast or read the transcript. Lovely historical details!
And lastly, I recently discovered that Interlink Publishing is headquartered right near where I live? I didn’t know that. Nor did I know that they’re the only Palestinian-owned publisher in the US, but I do now! They opened a showroom at their warehouse and all their books are gorgeous. They publish a lot of great kids’ books and cookbooks, in addition to fiction and nonfiction. For my kid, who does like Bluey, but really, really doesn’t like parties, we bought I Really, Really Don’t Like Parties. Interlink is also raising funds for Gaza.
That’s all for this time! I have at last finished my current novel draft and now need to perform whatever mysterious rituals are necessary to make those 96k words into a book that anybody might want to read. I’m gonna take a short break from Word Suitcase and will be back in your inbox on September 8.