The EconomistAugust 10th 2019 Books & arts 691S
arah broom’s moving memoir does
not belong to her alone. She shares the
story with her mother, Ivory Mae, and with
the house in New Orleans East—razed after
Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005—in
which Ivory Mae brought up 12 children, of
whom the author was the “babiest”. As
much amanuensis as protagonist, Ms
Broom weaves her memories and her
mother’s testimony into a personal, his-
torical and sociological study of African-
American life in New Orleans.
The house was modest, but the book’s
territory is broad. “The Yellow House”
ranges from Ms Broom’s grandmother’s
childhood in the Big Easy to the Californian
and Texan cities to which her siblings were
displaced after Katrina, and her own stint
working at a radio station in Burundi. It
combines the most personal details—a sis-
ter’s teenage lip-gloss habit, a brother’s be-
loved bike—with profound questions:
“Who has the rights to the story of a place?
Are those rights earned, bought, fought
and died for?”
Ms Broom herself left both the Yellow
House and New Orleans, though she re-
turned after Katrina. Her book reads less
like an assertion of rights than a declara-
tion of love: for her mother, her siblings
and their city. She adores the New Orleans
of her childhood—not the tourist-filled
downtown, but a majority-black, working-
class community that is often overlooked,
and which her vivid descriptions bring ar-
restingly to life. In Katrina’s wake, New Or-
leans East smells like “chitlins, piss, stale
water, lemon juice”. After the death of her
tall, thin, jazz-loving father, his full life
was, she writes, shrunk into an obituary
comprising “one short column of news-
print, enough to fit between your pointing
finger and thumb.”
Often she combines a childhood obser-
vation with adult awareness to disconcert-
ing effect. The police department’s disre-
spect for her neighbourhood is captured in
one stark image: “Our side of Wilson Ave-
nue, the short end, seems a no-matter place
where police cars routinely park, women’s
heads bobbing up and down in the driver’s
seat.” She introduces readers to an alterna-
tive urban geography mapped around her
family’s lives. “You will pass run-down
apartment complexes...where growing up,
my brothers made allegiances and
enemies...you will see Natal’s Supermarket,which is really only a corner store, where
Mom sent me as a kid to buy ‘liver cheese’.”
This tour of New Orleans stands in criti-
cal contrast to the “disaster bus tours” that
now haunt neighbourhoods flooded by Ka-
trina. “Imagine”, Ms Broom writes, “that
the streets are dead quiet, and you lived on
those dead quiet streets, and there is noth-
ing left of anything you owned”—and then
tourists appear “in an air-conditioned bus
snapping pictures of your personal de-
struction.” Those “yous” draw readers in,
before the bus reminds them that they, like
the tourists, are really guests.
A recurring irony in “The Yellow House”
is Ivory Mae’s refusal to invite outsiders
into her home. Once a proud host, she grew
ashamed of the Yellow House as it aged.
“You know this house not all that comfort-
able for other people,” she constantly re-
minds her daughter. The house itself may
no longer stand, but in her book Ms Broom
proudly opens its doors.^7Life in New OrleansLost in the flood
The Yellow House.By Sarah Broom. Grove
Atlantic; 376 pages; $26I
f ben quilty, one of Australia’s most
famous painters, had followed the advice
he was given as a teenager, he might have
ended up as an accountant. On a sweltering
day in Adelaide at the Art Gallery of South
Australia, he drew laughs when he dedicat-
ed the first major survey of his 25-year ca-
reer to a school careers adviser who told
him to study economics. “This one’s for
you,” he quipped.
Mr Quilty—who piles paint on his can-
vases with a cake-icing knife to make gutsy,
large-scale works that both charm and
challenge his compatriots—has followed
an unusual career path. “At a time when theact of painting was seen as having been ex-
hausted, he was one of the few people who
remained dedicated” to the craft, says Kit
Messham-Muir, a contemporary at Sydney
College of the Arts in the 1990s.
After graduating, Mr Quilty worked as a
builder’s labourer and took a course in
women’s studies and design, then became
a television news editor, splicing together
packages from war zones, suburban crime-
scenes and natural disasters. His big break
came in 2003, when a gallery in Sydney
showed a series depicting his car, an ljTo-
rana—much loved by Australian motor-
heads and first sold in 1972 (the year before
Mr Quilty was born).
The popular paintings gave him a wide
audience and a recurring theme—what Mr
Quilty describes as “the debaucherous, shit
side of masculinity”. The Toranas were a
kind of autobiography, capturing “who I’ve
been, my friends, the way I grew up”, and
“the crazy rites of passage”—cars, drugs,
booze—that young men go in for. “You go
flat out, high off your face, facing the wind-
screen, like you’re all watching a movie,
with this incredible danger.” Men need
help, Mr Quilty thinks, and a better form of
initiation into adulthood, if they are “to be-
come good people”.
A sense of moral duty has informed
much of his art. In 2011 he travelled to Af-
ghanistan as Australia’s official war artist.
Afterwards he invited returning soldiers to
sit for portraits in his studio in the south-
ern highlands of New South Wales. The
paintings are striking images that muse on
post-traumatic stress disorder and the psy-
chological costs of combat.
In 2012 Mr Quilty visited Myuran Su-
kumaran—one of the “Bali Nine”, a group of
young Australians convicted of smuggling
heroin—in prison in Indonesia. Sukuma-
ran and another man, Andrew Chan, were
under sentence of death. Sukumaran had
written to ask Mr Quilty’s advice about his
own painting; after they met, the prisoner
painted 28 self-portraits in a fortnight. Mr
Quilty became the public face of a cam-
paign to save the men’s lives. It failed: they
were executed by firing squad in April 2015.
But scores of Sukumaran’s paintings from
his time on death row have since been ex-
hibited across Australia.
In Mr Quilty’s new show, one wall is cov-
ered in paintings of life-jackets. The 12 haz-
ard-orange works (one, “Fereshteh”, is pic-
tured) have been layered thick with paint
using the same impasto technique that
Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon de-
ployed. Each square mountain of colour is
a memorial to a life lost at sea. “There’s a vi-
olence in the way he paints,” says Mr Mess-
ham-Muir, now of Curtin University in
Perth. Up close, he says, the canvases are “a
mash of different colours and textures and
paint so thick that you can still smell it.”
The series arose from a trip Mr QuiltyADELAIDE
An Australian artist confronts viewers
with violence, loss and “death jackets”Art and activismHigh vis