from the editor's desk
Review of ‘The Swift Dark Tide’ by Katia Ariel
Ariel, Katia. The Swift Dark Tide. Sydney: Gazebo Books, 2023. RRP: $29.99, 230pp, ISBN: 9780645633719.
Fiona Wilkes
Katia Ariel’s The Swift Dark Tide is a marvel. Shortlisted for the 2024 Stella Prize, it is a miracle of poetry, memoir and essay. Ariel herself imagined the work, initially, as ‘a diary that doubled as a breathing exercise that tripled as a love letter’ (3). I do not think I can come up with a more accurate description than that. The entire book feels very much like a memory.
There is an edge to the narrative, an anxiety to the words, for Ariel is writing the story of how she fell in love with a female friend and began the slow process of leaving her husband. She has three children, all at an age where they can read and understand a story like hers. She worries about what others might think. Yet, each page is also heavy with love for all parties and an awareness of the pain that often comes when one follows their heart. For Ariel, there is no escaping this story. It yearns to be told, just as she yearns for her lover throughout its pages.
For a book that promises a tale of late-found queer desire, I was surprised to find, alongside a heartachingly beautiful love story, Ariel reflecting elegantly on her matrilineal lineage. The work is a profound exploration of what it means to be a mother, daughter, grandmother and granddaughter. Ariel often ruminates on the line of women leading directly to her, swinging from the branches of her family tree with such strength and elegance that you cannot help but love every one of them. This theme is not as out of place as it might at first appear. This is a book about relationships between women, in every form one can think of. Ariel writes that, in exploring her relationship with her lover through her writing, she finds herself becoming lodged in the stories of her ancestors, and their relationships.
The longer this goes on, the more I turn to the past, to stories entombed in the collective soil of you and I—the secrets of our ancestors. I walk through the dark garden of these unuttered tales, and the air before me is grimy, occluded by the density of faces. Mostly I see women. And these women are doing things that women do: they are conceiving and terminating babies, they are growing them and giving them away, they are running from brutes who force marriage, who have fists that fly at the belly, and the baby. They hide from their neighbours; they hide from their loved ones. (57–58)
Ariel focuses mainly on her mother and grandmother; her grandmother, she discovers, also fell in love with somebody else whilst married to her grandfather, but ultimately returned to the safety of the nuclear family structure when she became terminally ill. Ariel becomes fascinated by the story of this woman she barely knew, but wishes she could speak to her about her own romantic predicament: ‘I need a guide to surviving this vertiginous space’, she writes. ‘This space where there are so many rules, and sometimes none at all. Where the one governing principle is Also: I love him and also you’ (80). However, despite feeling at times lost and confused in her maze of love and desire, ultimately, Ariel decides that it is better to move through unguided. ‘The last thing I want is a guide to this space. The thrill, the compulsion, is of course in becoming my own guide’ (81). This freedom to explore is something that manifests in the ways Ariel navigates her emerging queer identity.
In wholly stepping into her queerness, she feels supported by the notion of queerness itself: ‘Perhaps every queer person who has ever lived their life out loud was holding the hope for me, holding the pride until I could hold it for myself’ (86). She writes about queerness in a way that I, living as a queer woman in 21st century Australia, understand. She talks about her lover’s body, their shared femme and/or butch characteristics, in language that speaks to Radclyffe Hall, to Virginia and Vita, and yet could easily have also cropped up in a Hinge D.M. And I promise I mean this as a compliment: the prose is both distanced and a smidge too close. Lost to history, yet close enough to touch, to caress, to explore. There is a particularly beautiful scene in which Ariel and her lover have met at a favoured bar and are seated at the only table where smoking is still permitted. Here, they play with gender and expression in a gloriously affirming way:
There is a mirroring that happens when we each take our first drag. I feel so perfectly butch when I do it. I look at you, and you are the perfect butch too. I notice my delicate fingers and the sense that if I have a femme, it’s in the tapered length of these digits. I notice how soft your eyes go, how they swim with sensuous pleasure and you are femme too […] I lean in to relight your cigarette and in that moment I’m all the masculine of Lauren Bacall in To Have and to Have Not […] Your mouth is a tulip as you exhale the smoke, but your open knees and the way you rest your elbows on the table is full gorgeous masc. (126)
This scene is also full of questions about how to express one’s identity in the modern world. For instance, does one even need to make a statement, with their clothes or the way they move their body, to tell the world they are queer? Instead of outright answers, Ariel offers pauses, beats and breaths, as if to say: it’s okay not to know.
In reading The Swift Dark Tide, I often felt that I, too, was entangled in Ariel’s knotted string of love and desire. My own chest was tight with anxiety. I became self-conscious, jealous and annoyed at the way almost every individual conducted themselves across the narrative, and I turned over my own fears and questions in response to it: fears about what it really means to be a human being; to be so capable of falling in love; of being limited by others and their attitudes towards my expansive heart; even of not having a limit.
As I write this review, I am at the centre point of my twenties—the point where, tradition dictates, I ought to be deciding who I will love, who I can build a life with, who, if anyone, will make me a mother. I am convinced that this is a book for this time of my life. Yet, in looking forward to the women I will be at thirty-five, forty-five, or, God-willing, ninety-five, I know they, too, will benefit from its poetic knowledge. I take pleasure in the idea that these women are waving at me, somewhere between shoreline and sea, just as Ariel’s mother waves to her, ‘with a mania that befits immigrants reuniting on a distant shore after a wearying separation. Which is really what we are, time after time’ (61). It is thanks to Ariel’s exquisite work that I feel ready to raise my own arm and start waving.
Fiona Wilkes is a current PhD Candidate at The University of Western Australia specialising in English & Literary Studies. Her work has been published or is forthcoming locally, nationally and internationally. Most recently, she was shortlisted for the Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction, nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and Highly Commended for the Katharine Susannah Prichard Short Fiction Prize. She is also a 2025 KSP Writing Fellow. Her debut novel I Remember Everything was shortlisted for the 2024 City of Fremantle Hungerford Award and will be published by Fremantle Press in 2026.
