A Game of Polo with a Headless Goat

Zeppa presents her arrival in Bhutan through a language of sensory accumulation that places the reader inside the experience of encounter rather than offering a retrospective account of it. Her method is to show before she interprets — to give the reader the raw data of arrival before imposing any organising framework, which creates a text that enacts the disorientation of landing in an unfamiliar world.

Her language is predominantly sensory and specific. She does not reach for abstract summary or cultural generalisation; instead, she catalogues particular sights, sounds, and smells with the close attention of someone for whom nothing can be taken for granted. This precision has two effects: it establishes a narrator who is genuinely observant rather than merely impressionistic, and it creates a sense of vividness that pulls the reader into the experience. The details are unfamiliar enough to be interesting but concrete enough to be real.

The tonal movement of the writing is as significant as its content. Zeppa begins in a register of mild anxiety — the gap between the Canada she has left and the Bhutan she has arrived in is initially uncomfortable, and her language reflects this: she reaches for familiar reference points and finds they do not apply. But as the description continues, this anxiety modulates into something closer to wonder — not the tourist's wonder of finding things 'charming' but a more serious alertness to the fact that the world is larger and stranger than her previous experience suggested. The tonal movement mirrors the physical and emotional movement of arrival.

Most significantly, Zeppa's language is honest about what it cannot do. She does not claim to have understood what she witnessed, and the places where her description runs out — where the culture she is encountering exceeds her capacity to describe it — are left as gaps rather than filled with comfortable generalisation. This honesty about the limits of her perspective is itself a technique, because it makes the writing more trustworthy than a text that claims comprehensive understanding would be.

Macdonald uses structure to trace an emotional journey that does not move in a straight line — the text does not offer a conventional narrative of descent into grief followed by recovery, but something more honest: an oscillating pattern of engagement and withdrawal, control and loss of control, that mirrors the actual experience of mourning.

The most significant structural technique is the alternation between two modes of writing. When Macdonald describes Mabel — the hawk's behaviour, the technical demands of training, the precise physical details of the bird — the prose is long, accumulative, and richly detailed: these sections have the quality of refuge. When she describes her grief directly — the loss of her father, the disorientation of the months that followed — the writing shortens and fragments, the sentences becoming briefer and less syntactically stable. The structural contrast between these two modes enacts the psychological function of the hawk: Mabel's world is where Macdonald retreats from the disordered world of grief.

Macdonald also structures time in ways that reflect psychological rather than chronological truth. The text moves between the present tense of training Mabel and the past tense of her father's life and death, often without transition, so that past and present coexist rather than running in sequence. This temporal overlapping — the dead father surfacing in the middle of a description of the hawk — performs the way grief operates: it intrudes rather than proceeding.

The ending of the extract, importantly, does not resolve. The emotional journey traced in the text does not arrive at acceptance or closure — Macdonald is still in the middle of grief, still using the hawk as a way of being in the world without fully confronting what has happened. The open-ended structure is honest rather than evasive: it acknowledges that the journey is not yet complete, which is the most accurate thing it could say about grief.

The student's observation is a useful starting point, but 'pain and defiance' does not quite capture the full emotional register of Yen Mah's text. The account is more complicated than a simple combination of suffering and resistance — it also contains hope, confusion, tenderness toward the child she was, and a narrative pattern of resilience that is quieter and more ambivalent than the word 'defiance' implies.

The evidence for 'pain' is substantial and unambiguous. Yen Mah describes a childhood shaped by rejection: a stepmother who regarded her as unwanted, siblings who excluded her, and family structures that offered her no reliable security. The language with which she describes these conditions is restrained — she does not reach for heightened emotional vocabulary — but the restraint intensifies rather than diminishes the effect, because the controlled prose implies a mind that has learned to contain painful experience rather than a situation that is not painful. The pain is real; the control over it is the achievement.

The case for 'defiance' is more complicated. Yen Mah does not present herself as overtly defiant — she does not rebel, argue back, or resist openly. Her response to rejection is instead internal: she excels academically, she reads, she occupies an inner life that the family's diminishment of her cannot reach. This is a quieter kind of defiance than the word usually implies — survival through self-cultivation rather than confrontation. When she wins prizes and achieves recognition, there is something that might be called satisfaction at the gap between others' predictions and her own accomplishments — but it is not triumphant, and it is not directed outward as protest.

What the student's formulation misses is the tenderness. Yen Mah treats the child she was with a protective gentleness that is the text's most affecting quality. She does not blame her younger self for failing to understand what was happening; she does not wish the child had been stronger. The retrospective narrator looks back at the girl who didn't know she needed protecting and extends a kind of compassion toward her that the world around that child failed to provide. This is neither pain nor defiance — it is something closer to love, the adult writer caring for the child she was. To agree fully with the student's view would be to miss this quieter, more generous emotional register.

Macdonald and Zeppa both write about encountering something that exceeds their existing frameworks — something that their prior experience has not equipped them to understand. But the nature of the unfamiliar they encounter is radically different, and this difference shapes everything about how they write.

Zeppa's unfamiliar is external: Bhutan is a country whose culture, language, landscape, and customs are entirely other to her Canadian experience. Her method of encounter is observational and sensory — she catalogues what she perceives with precision, makes no claim to understanding what she cannot understand, and allows the strangeness of what she witnesses to remain in her text as strangeness rather than being resolved into familiar categories. Where she does not understand, she says so. This honesty about the limits of her perception is itself a technique: it makes her a trustworthy narrator, because a writer who claims to have understood everything has clearly understood nothing. The unfamiliar, in Zeppa's text, is respected rather than managed.

Macdonald's unfamiliar is internal: grief. She has arrived in an emotional landscape she does not know how to navigate, and the language and structures she has previously used to make sense of the world do not apply. Her method of encounter is not observational but experiential — she does not watch grief from outside, she lives inside it, and her text is the record of that living. Where Zeppa uses the tools of the travel writer (precise sensory description, honest acknowledgement of limits) to navigate Bhutan, Macdonald uses the tools of the falconer (technical vocabulary, the demands of care) to navigate grief. The hawk is Macdonald's Bhutan: a world entirely other to ordinary human experience, whose demands structure a period of life that would otherwise have no structure.

What the comparison reveals is that both writers respond to the unfamiliar with a specific form of disciplined attention: Zeppa with sensory precision, Macdonald with technical precision. In both cases, the precision is not merely descriptive but protective — a way of staying functional in the face of something that might otherwise be overwhelming. The encounter with the unfamiliar, these texts suggest, requires not the abandonment of frameworks but the finding of ones adequate to what is being encountered.