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Textual migrations: South Asian-Australian fiction Tamara Mabbott Athique University of Wollongong
Athique, Tamara Mabbott, Textual migrations: South Asian-Australian fiction, PhD thesis, School of English Literatures, Philosophy and Languages, University of Wollongong, 2006.. http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/621
This paper is posted at Research Online. http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/621
Textual Migrations: South Asian-Australian Fiction
A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (PhD)
From
UNIVERSITY OF WOLLONGONG
By
TAMARA MABBOTT ATHIQUE, BA(Hons)
English Studies Program Faculty of Arts
2006
CERTIFICATION
I, Tamara Mabbott Athique, declare that this thesis, submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy, in the Department of English, University of Wollongong, is wholly my own work unless otherwise referenced or acknowledged. This document has not been submitted for qualifications at any other academic institution.
………………………………………………………………..
Tamara Mabbott Athique
31 August 2006
Table of Contents
Abstract vii Acknowledgements ix
Introduction: Filling the Gap 1
Literature Review I: On Postcolonialism 15
Literature Review II: On (South Asian) Diasporic Dynamics 41
Chapter One – Migrant Fictions: New Arrivals or Old News? 71
Chapter Two – Born Here: Second Generation Perspectives 97
Chapter Three – The Guru Glut: Ethno-Realism and Celebrity 125
Chapter Four – Going Back: Diasporic Depictions of the Homeland 159
Chapter Five – Writing/Making History: Cultural Memory and Amnesia 197
Conclusion: Summaries and New Directions 233
Endnotes 251
Bibliography: South Asian-Australian Fiction 265
Bibliography: Critical Texts Cited 269
Appendix: Interview Transcripts 285
vii
Abstract
This thesis responds to gaps in the scholarship of ‘minority literatures’ and makes a new contribution to diversifying the field of literary criticism. Given the prominence of South Asian diasporic fiction overseas, the study of South Asian-Australian fiction is now overdue. Given the growing recognition of multicultural and Asian-Australian literatures, the study of South Asian-Australian cultural production now requires attention.
Working from the premise that a fictional text is a storytelling device open to a number of interpretations and a commodity with a degree of cultural capital, this thesis examines the tactics employed in and around selected works of fiction. Literary texts are marked by the politics publishing and academic theory. This thesis examines some of the “invisible layers of intervention” that shape cultural production by indicating the placement of South Asian- Australian fiction within overlapping sets of academic, commercial and policy environments (Apter, 2001: 4). Having affirmed the importance of bringing a relatively invisible area of study into view, this thesis also considers the productive limits and limitations of literary categorisation. To this end, it draws on interviews with a number of writers who speak about their (self)-positioning.
It remains crucial to consider the narrative detail of South Asian-Australian fiction: what types of stories do South Asian-Australian writers choose to tell and how do they craft them, what are the effects of such narratives and how are their complex cultural locations conveyed? The majority of this thesis is concerned with fleshing out these questions through detailed textual analysis that focuses on the w/rites of passage arising from the act of migration. Testing the utility of concepts drawn from postcolonial studies, theories of diaspora and critical multiculturalism, this thesis argues for an integrated theoretical approach to a set of texts that operate across local, national and transnational literary contexts.
ix
Acknowledgements
Several writers participated in the making of this thesis by giving generously of their time and thoughts. Their contributions are appreciated and my thanks go to them. My supervisors, Paul Sharrad and Cath Ellis, who were unstinting in their encouragement and good advice, deserve a medal. Thanks also to Gerry Turcotte.
Pete Randles, Kate Bowls and Nicky Evans will always have my gratitude for their kindness, friendship, good food, brain-food and shelter. Many thanks go to Doug and Edwina Hill, to John Robinson, to Dora, Clementine and Harper Bowles (and to Harry the dog). I am also grateful to Melissa Boyde and Amanda Lawson for the loan of their home at a critical time.
I would like to thank David Kemmery, Tim MacDonald and the staff at the research office for their support. My candidature was made possible by the financial assistance provided by the University of Wollongong (UPA) and International Postgraduate Research Scholarship scheme.
Finally, thanks to my family and to Adrian for their infinite love and patience.
1
Introduction: Filling the Gap
South Asian diasporic literature has, in a relatively short space of time, achieved commercial and critical success: reviewers speak of ‘unprecedented attention’, scholars of a literature that has, ‘come of age’. This high profile is related to the diaspora’s visibility in other areas of cultural production, notably in film, music and fashion. India has ‘arrived’, so to speak, on the streets of London and the sidewalks of New York. Indeed, the market for fiction is apparently booming, as certain South Asian (always English-language) writers are reportedly paid six-figure advances for their work (with this type of often unsubstantiated literary gossip only driving the publicity machine on). Arnab Chakladar, for example, speaks of publishers taking risks with new writers on the back of “the Arundhati Roy factor; that every once in a while one writer will come along who will break the bank and return all the investments” (2000: 197-198). ‘Cool alterity’ and ‘Indo-chic’ and are just some of the trendy diaspora-terms in circulation (see Maira, 2002).
Although the love-affair between ‘East’ and ‘West’ has a far deeper history, changing conditions in the late-twentieth century have encouraged the South Asian diasporic fiction phenomenon in particular ways; it did not spring from a vacuum. Rather it emerged in tandem with the socio-political changes wrought by a series of migrations to the (mainly) Anglophone countries in the postcolonial era, the changing academic scene of the same period and the continuing ‘globalisation’ of the ‘culture industry’. Emily Apter remarks on “the current popularity of Indian English-language novelists” when speaking of the “specialized niche markets within the ‘global’ that contribute to fads and fashions” (2001: 2). These markets for global literatures interface with the education network where South Asian diasporic fiction circulates, particularly at the tertiary level, on courses named World Literatures, Commonwealth Literatures, Third World Literatures, Postcolonial Literatures. Each a variation of ‘global lit,’ these “courses tend to feature similar rosters of non-Western authors” (Apter, 2001: 2). The repetition results, in part, from the constraints imposed by a limited availability of translated works and the difficulties associated with book distribution in many parts of the world. The current prominence of South Asian diaspora writing does not map itself evenly across the globe, nor (in a world still modelling its post-modernity on the modernist nation) is it a uniformly accepted positive phenomenon. 2
This mixed response to and hybrid location of production/reception has resulted in a current flurry of critical activity seeking to establish the nature of relations between identity, nation, world and between postmodernity, postcolonialism and globalisation. Diaspora and multiculturalism are only two labels under which literary criticism now proceeds. What is clear is that, Australia as a ‘settler-invader,’ ‘multicultural’ nation- state, is a prime site for inquiries into the dynamics of diaspora. Moreover, Australian humanities scholars took a leading role in developing theoretical approaches to ‘New Literatures in English’ and postcolonial studies. Yet any survey of the extant critical work on the South Asian diaspora phenomenon would quickly prove that little attention has been paid to those who write from Australia. Emanating from the publishing capitals of the UK and US, diaspora theories consistently bypass Australia as a location for South Asian cultural production. Collections and comparative studies tend to straddle the Atlantic, establishing and drawing on the iconic reputations of certain authors as figureheads or founding fathers: Salman Rushdie and V. S. Naipaul have been iconic figures, subject to extensive study.
With few exceptions, authors of South Asian origin/descent are also sidelined in national debates on Australian ‘multicultural’ literature, debates that grew in response to the literatures of post-war European migrants and their descendents. Among other appellations, this work has been clumsily termed ‘writing by writers of Non-English- Speaking-Background’ (NESB) – a definition that sits uneasily in terms of those South Asian writers who have received an English-medium education. Furthermore, recent inquiries into ‘Asian-Australian’ writing typically follow a pattern set by scholarship into Asian-America and Asian-Canada which have emphasised East Asian, particularly Chinese, cultural production.1 My point is not to suggest that Rushdie and Naipaul are undeserving of the recognition they have received, or to disregard the status that London and New York command, or to suggest that the Greek and Chinese diasporas are unimportant, but to argue that writers in other locations continue to be pushed aside as minor players or overlooked altogether.2 Therefore, this thesis responds to a number of elisions in the scholarship on (Australian) multicultural and (Asian) diasporic literatures and my purpose is to begin a process of locating and filling the gaps.
3
Given the paucity of available critical work on South Asian-Australian cultural production, I approached this study in 2002 half-expecting to find little apparent literary activity.3 However, early research quickly exposed a wealth of primary material, making the evident theoretical gaps all the more intriguing. About forty writers of South Asian origin or descent have published creative works in Australia and if, as The Australian predicts, “The next big trend in immigration: [is] Indians”, then more writers are likely to emerge (Dale, 2005: 11).4 Although both this population ‘spike’ and South- Asian Australian fiction itself are relatively new, South Asian communities have been present in Australia in small numbers for more than a century. ‘Afghan’ camel-drivers, ‘coolie’ labourers under private contracts, and fortune seekers arrived in small numbers during the pre-Federation years, prior to the institution of the Immigration Restriction Bill (commonly known as the White Australia Policy) in 1901.5 There are some incomplete, official records relating to these early South Asian-Australian communities and a few recent historical works, but if creative writing was produced in this period, none of it has remained. The earliest literary works receiving public attention date from the late 1950s when Australia-born Mena Abdullah began publishing short stories (later collected as The Time of the Peacock in 1965). This first work is something of an exception, unusual because Abdullah is one of few writers to have a direct familial link to the nineteenth-century migrations mentioned above.
Four little-known collections of poetry written by Peter Scharen (a Sri Lankan Burgher) and published throughout the 1970s represent another inconspicuous starting point. It was not until the next decade, following the effects of changes to Australia’s immigration policies during the 1970s, that the promise of South Asian-Australian literature was indicated. ‘South Asian-Australian’ fiction begins to emerge steadily during the 1980s, and accelerates in the 1990s, with the work of Yasmine Gooneratne, Adib Khan, Christopher Cyrill, Christine Mangala, Satendra Nanadan and others. The new millennium saw South Asian-Australian fiction take-off as over fifteen texts were published (or performed in the case of radio plays and theatre) in 1999 and 2000 alone – amongst them work by Suneeta Peres da Costa, Bem Le Hunte, Michelle de Kretser, Chandani Lokuge, Chitra Fernando, Ernest Macintyre and Sudesh Mishra. A number of novels, three collections of short stories and at least one autobiography have been published in the last five years. Short pieces produced for a recent issue of the literary 4
journal Meanjin, also suggest that a number of newer authors, like Keith Butler, Sunil Badami and Chris Raja, are soon to make an impression.
South Asian-Australian writers work across a range of genres, including the novel, short-stories, poetry, historical fiction, ‘faction,’ children’s fiction, memoir, theatre, radio plays, critical-autobiography, ‘blogging’ and stand-up-comedy. Among South Asian-Australian writers there are those who have received very little recognition and less promotion, who have self-published works or published through specialist presses. Yet, even a cursory list would also include prestigious prize winners with major publishers who are building their reputations on (the interconnected) commercial and educational circuits. As such, I am using the term ‘South Asian-Australian’ to delineate an emerging body of literature that is substantive, and is set to expand further, but has yet to elicit sustained scholarly analysis.
The criteria that I have used to select the writers included in this study is based on South Asia as a geographical point of origin or descent for (English-language) writers now working in Australia.6 This simple delineation is far from neutral. Indeed, it is necessarily fraught. Asia itself is an unstable and artificial construct, as many critics have pointed out. Particularly at its western border-zone with Europe, Asia can expand (in terms of census categories) to include Turkey, Cyprus, Lebanon and Israel.7 In the opposite direction, the further East one travels, the less ambiguous this definition becomes: as Ien Ang notes, in terms of Australian popular discourse, “‘Asians’ are generally associated only with those coming from East, South-East and, to a lesser extent, South Asia” (2001: 113 my emphasis). Ang details how this geographical process of ‘eastward displacement’ serves to homogenise the ‘Oriental peoples’ on the basis of visible ‘racial’ characteristics. It is also a movement which simultaneously places South Asia(ns) on the periphery – as less authentically ‘Asian’. This schism between East and South Asia has a bearing on how hyphenated Asian texts are studied. For example, in the US, the South Asian-American ‘cohort’ is currently making its presence known within/without the more established category of Asian-American studies and a number of critics are now theorising the (dis)connections.8
Though the schism between (East) Asian and South Asian diaspora studies is of interest, this is not to suggest that either group is in any way homogenous. The opposite is true. 5
These diasporas can be infinitely differentiated along lines of national and region affiliations, as well as by language, religion, class, gender, sexuality, generation, political orientation and by distinct migratory histories. There are matrices of power arising here, no doubt, from the relative size and political purchase of these various forms of collectivity. By the same measure, however, the subjective, personal nature of identity construction should be kept in focus; a whole range of life experiences will determine an individual’s intensity of attachment to the multiple homes a diaspora contains. So in arguing for the recognition of South Asian-Australian fiction, I am not, therefore, implying a coherent or friction-free diasporic community. This is a literary grouping to be questioned rather than assumed, to be explored critically rather than defined categorically. In this thesis I adopt ‘South Asian-Australian fiction’ as a working term within which to investigate a subset of the national literary output and critique, keeping the category itself under question.
The cultural politics of recognition and representation, and processes of literary inclusion / exclusion are some of my central concerns. I will ask whether and on what terms South Asian-Australian fiction constitutes a ‘body of work’? Is the interaction between fiction and history the key, with shared histories and experiences of migration the determining factors? How does this play out in fiction, through common themes, an aesthetic, a type of cultural politics? In considering these and other questions, I aim to assess the dimensions of South Asian-Australian fiction without emphasising commonalities at the expense of differences. To a large extent I am using the category of South Asian fiction in order to map out its limits. The notion of the South Asian diaspora itself, and the idea that this group produces a unified body of literature, will be tested, qualified and contested throughout this thesis. In making space for South Asian- Australian literature through theories of diaspora it is crucial to leave room for alternative interpretations. And in filling the gap it is important to avoid reproducing or consolidating the conditions that governed its prior exclusion. Thus, following Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling in their pioneering work on Asian American literature, my intentions are not to establish a mini-canon within Australian Literature but rather to:
illustrate the range of […] literary texts, their diverse subtexts, the formation of traditions, the evolution of canonical criteria, the recuperation of neglected texts and writers, and the proliferation of commentary on all of these. (1992: 5-6)
6
Theoretical Frameworks
There were several moves during the late-twentieth century to globalise and diversify the study of literature, to ‘decolonise the canon’ by drawing attention to texts produced outside of the traditional English literary sphere. This thesis continues that project, given that the study of South Asian-Australian fiction is now overdue. Besides mapping out the broad contours of this work, and considering its (in)cohesiveness as a body of literature, I will also identify where and how South Asian-Australian fiction differs from, and what, if anything, it adds to extant theoretical frameworks. Commonwealth, Third World and postcolonial literary paradigms will be examined, as well as related theorisations of diaspora, hybridity, globalisation, multiculturalism, minority discourse and Asian-Australian cultural production. Given the breadth of the various discourses that frame this object, one of the productive difficulties in undertaking a study of this type has been to indicate the sheer ‘proliferation of commentary’ available.
Given the global prominence of South Asian scholars (such as Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha and Aijaz Ahmed) in contemporary literary theory, and the emergence of some as part of the Australian scene (Leela Gandhi, Vijay Mishra) it is impossible to discuss South Asian-Australian writing without also assessing categories such as postcolonialism within which it is discussed. There has, for example, been an intensive inquiry into the health of postcolonial studies right from its conception to the present, when, in a type of most-mortem retrospective, Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge ask: ‘What Was Postcolonialism?’ (2005). This, the self-reflexive pose of postcolonial studies, is a trademark of what is by no means a unified field or method of inquiry. The rise of postcolonial studies followed independence for many countries in Asia and Africa and offered ways of interpreting complex legacies of cross-cultural encounters, exchange and appropriation. Broadly speaking, postcolonial discourses seek to challenge the hegemony of European power/knowledge of/over (formerly) colonised nations, to ‘provincialise Europe’. However, the large-scale emigrations that occurred in the aftermath of decolonisation also set the scene for an academic shift away from a consideration of nationalist and indigenous movements/aesthetics within the post- colony, to a consideration of the apparently subversive cultural hybridity of migrants within the first-world. Paradoxically, this has perpetuated the status of the old 7
metropoles as privileged sites for the production of new literary cultures and, indeed, installed not a few South Asians as authoritative voices at those sites.
The shift towards theories of movement, to the “transnational dimension of cultural transformation” in histories of “migration, diaspora, displacement, relocation”, has formed part of a broader attack on the nation as the dominant conceptual frame (Bhabha, 1994: 172). Examining the world from the point of view of hybridity or difference does offer a necessary challenge to notions of cultural purity and assimilation. Yet, this (diasporic) ‘turn’ in postcolonial studies has been heavily criticised for promoting a celebratory and politically neutralising interpretation of cross- cultural exchange, in part due to its conjunction with utopic strands of globalisation theory and media studies, and extensive borrowings from post-structuralist and postmodern thought. The excess of diaspora appears in categories employed by travelling theory, such as nomadism or migrancy (Chambers, 1994) and is critiqued as examples of ‘happy hybridity’ (Lo, 2000) or ‘the postcolonial exotic’ (Huggan, 2001). The notion that diasporas do in fact work against the concept of the nation to undermine essentialised notions of ‘ethnic’ identities and static cultural traditions, whilst still frequently accepted, has also been challenged. Michael Roberts, for example, suggests that in the postmodern celebration of ‘routes’, borderlands and homelessness, theorists overlook the potential for expressions of long-distance nationalism and ethnic essentialisms which may flourish in diasporic communities (2003).
When assessing the relative merits of postcolonial and diasporic approaches for the study of South Asian-Australian fiction, I will indicate where and how they cross with issues of multiculturalism. Early arguments for the recognition of multicultural literature in Australia were put forward as a corrective to a perceived monocultural agenda, and in this sense are bound up with the national(ist) desire to achieve a new, more inclusive Australian identity. Thus, multicultural takes on literatures share with postcolonial/diaspora studies the drive to expose hidden hegemonies and diversify literary traditions, as well as risking the slippery complicity that comes from working within established power relations in order to destabilise them. As Sneja Gunew puts it: “[t]he reason for continuing to focus on critical multiculturalism is precisely because [state] multiculturalism is so intimately bound up in so many parts of the world with those practices and discourses which seek to manage (often in the sense of police and 8
control) ‘diversity’” (2004: 15). Accordingly, this thesis seeks not merely to add one more player to the field of Australian multiculturalism as a celebration of a more inclusive national unity, but to see what such an addition might do by way of opening up the game of multiculturalism to more complex analysis.
The Australian ‘multicultural literature’ umbrella initially sheltered NESB writers, with Asian-Australians at its fringes. Scholars worked on collating primary and bibliographical material, as well as developing theories of marginality and cultural difference to apply to this work. Such theories often drew on feminist and occasionally postcolonial frameworks, on Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of ‘minor literatures’, and on the Derridean supplement to investigate the relationship between mainstream and ‘ethnic minority’ cultural production (Gunew and Longley, 1992). Terminology is always problematic, and as with the debate on the naming of the post(-)colonial, multicultural literary production also goes under several guises. Gunew settles on “ethnic minority writing” because it moves away from the more common but misleading ‘migrant’ appellation (which is misleading in the case of third-generation Greek-Australians, for example) and also emphasises the fact that there is an “ethnic majority writing”, thus identifying and critiquing the unmarked neutrality of whiteness and its apparent universalism (1994: 23).
In this sense, the interventions of critical multiculturalism are similar to debates on centre/periphery relationships and the ‘writing back’ model applied in postcolonial studies. However, it is also important to recognise that in Australia, where cultural diversity is now a key part of contemporary Arts policy, migrant/ethnic minority writers may no longer be trivial, marginal and excluded but portrayed instead as typical, exemplary and at the cutting-edge of literary innovations.9 Furthermore, many critics are suspicious of or dissatisfied with the concept of marginality in terms of its utility and applicability to writers (and theorists) who are considered part of a highly mobile, well-educated and often affluent sector of society. The South Asian diaspora has been a particular target for these charges of elitism and many critics have suggested that the oppositional ‘edge’ to postcolonial fiction is undermined by theories which emphasise an easy cosmopolitanism. A related proposition is that the recent appetite of “Western market tastes” for certain writers has resulted in a privileging of the migrant aesthetic over “India’s native literatures” (Paranjape, 2000: 230). Cosmopolitanism and 9
desertion, displacement and betrayal; is this what happens when supposedly marginal narratives become part of mainstream mythologizing? Will the recognition of one type of fiction always obscure others?
South Asian-Australia offers the ground on which to consider the mutual entanglements of postcolonialism and diaspora with multiculturalism serving as the hinge between the two. In light of a review of existing theoretical frameworks, I will consider many of the various roles an ‘ethnic’ writer can, and is variously compelled to, play: representative ‘third world’ informant, Asia-expert, proselytiser, political writer, poet-pedagogue, guru. I will consider the role of the literary marketplace in positioning ‘minority’ and ‘ethnic’ writers and how particular(ised) authors are promoted to their readership. There is certainly agency here, but many writers of fiction see the preoccupation with marginality and labelling or categorisation along ‘ethnic’ lines as a method of placing them forever outside the national canon. Bharati Mukherjee, for example, has famously stated: “I am not an Indian writer, not an exile, not an expatriate […] I am an American writer, in the American mainstream, trying to extend it” (1992: 53). And in the Australian context, George Papaellinas claims that ‘multicultural’ writers are either pushed out of sight into the margins: “or sometimes exoticised, in spurious praise without any reference to a text’s critical value but with much reference to the writer’s ‘ethnic’ origins by a muddle of marketers, critics, reviewers and bureaucrats, as if ethnicity itself is grounds for congratulation” (1992: 166).
Method
Working from the premise that a fictional text is both a storytelling device open to a number of interpretations and a product subject to commercial concerns, this study seeks to assess the dimensions of South Asian-Australian fiction. What stories do South Asian-Australian writers choose to tell, how do they tell them, what effects do they produce? It is important to examine how issues of cross-cultural exchange are addressed at a narrative level, to consider how language works to reshape or reaffirm understandings of ethnicity and diaspora, to unsettle some categories and reify others. At the same time, literary works are not freestanding objects unmarked by the modus operandi of funding bodies, educational curricula, arts policy, publicity and publishing. 10
Any discussion of South Asian-Australian fiction should also engage with the question of how “these invisible layers of intervention” shape cultural production (Apter, 2001: 4). Thus, my intention is to study the narrative detail of selected works of fiction, whilst also considering how individual authors and this writing, as a potential body of work, are positioned within the Australian literary scene and the so-called global marketplace.
In order to address these aims I employ an integrated methodology; one that combines discourse analysis (of newspaper reviews, publisher statements, author websites and parts of government policy documents), with textual analysis, and excerpts from a number of interviews with South Asian-Australian writers.
Given that this thesis aims to explore the positioning of the (ethnic) author, I felt it was appropriate to converse with several South Asian-Australian writers in order to hear their views on the creative and commercial processes involved in the production of fiction. The interviews are loosely structured around a set of questions, some of which focus on the writer’s work and others that explore understandings of diaspora and diasporic fiction, categorisation and publishing. As such, these conversations were not designed to give me a ‘deeper’ understanding of a particular text by locating that knowledge in its author, but to gain insight, through dialogue, into the manner in which writers read and position themselves. The full transcripts to these interviews are presented as an appendix to the thesis.
Since there are now over forty South Asian-Australian writers, many with multiple publications, I will not be able to do justice to the entire range of writing available. Nonetheless, in making my selections I have attempted to demonstrate something of this range. I include analysis of works that are relatively well-known on the Australian and international literary scene, but also those works that have so far escaped scrutiny. A diversity of form – a particularly apparent feature of South Asian-Australian ‘fiction’ – is indicated in this thesis by an assessment of texts that straddle generic boundaries between fiction and history, autobiography and academic writing.
The first parts of this thesis offer a review of the theoretical frameworks introduced above, followed by five chapters. Throughout these chapters, I seek to attend to the texts themselves, to the perspectives of writers, and to contextual and extra-textual issues that 11
shape the production of this fiction. I will initially focus on the Australian context, moving on, in the third chapter, to images of ‘India’ and considering alternative ‘ancestral homelands,’ Sri Lanka and Fiji, in the final chapters. To conclude, I will assess the terrain revealed by research into South Asian-Australian literature, considering to what extent this constitutes a coherent body of work.
Chapter Outline:
Literature Review I: On Postcolonialism
In this review I present an analysis of the academic genealogy of postcolonial literary studies, focusing on the rise of ‘new literatures’ movements and the development of transnational frameworks for the study of literature. Tracking the debate over the utility of the nation as an organising principle for the understanding of cultural flow and transformation, I consider alternative and intersecting theories on globalisation, ‘migrancy’ and hybridity. As my intention is to illustrate the contested nature of paradigms for literary studies, I also assess a variety of critiques and counter-critiques, identifying the particular strands of the postcolonial weave that tie into a study of South Asian-Australian fiction.
Literature Review II: On (South Asian) Diasporic Dynamics
Ideas about diaspora, ‘diasporic consciousness’ and diasporic literatures are at large in the world. As with postcolonial studies, the ‘proliferation of commentary’ and theory- making in this area provides a rich archive to consider. I begin this review with a brief analysis of the concept of diaspora itself. Then I provide an extended analysis of three models that apply specifically to Indian/South Asian ‘global’ diasporas and cultural production. In doing so, I explore some of the many ways in which the South Asian diaspora is delineated historically and defined conceptually, considering notions of the ‘flourishing,’ ‘global Indian’ as well as theories which emphasise subalternity and trauma. I indicate the way diaspora theory has been criticised for promoting a reified, free-floating cosmopolitanism, unhinged from the realities of immigration; or alternatively, as a euphemism for ethnic ‘insiderism’ and long-distance nationalism.
12
Chapter One - Migrant Fictions: New Arrivals or Old News?
Chapter One shifts the focus from transnational to transcultural literary paradigms and takes the nation-state as one horizon for South Asian-Australian fiction. Australian multiculturalism, as a ‘new literatures’ project, seeks to contest, transform and repair the boundaries that define national literary canons. Has this project achieved success in the 21st century? Are migrant fictions already old news or are they perpetually situated as new arrivals on the literary scene? In this chapter I offer a reading of Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change Of Skies (1991) and Seasonal Adjustments (1994) by Adib Khan, engaging at a narrative level with their interpretations of Australia and issues of ‘Asia-literacy’. I consider how these texts are imbued with a certain ‘cultural capital’ and situated within agendas that were being set for multicultural fiction in Australia at the time of their publication. My purpose here, is to explore some of the pleasures and problems associated with being a ‘migrant writer,’ and to indicate how South Asian- Australian fictions support and/or subvert the pedagogic drive of state-based multiculturalism.
Chapter Two – Born Here: Second-Generation Perspectives
Chapter Two moves the discussion on from the operations of multiculturalism to the workings of diaspora on identity formation. If ‘diaspora’ refers to a dynamic of identifying elsewhere/outside in order to be here/inside, how does this dynamic play out in second-generation texts produced by writers who were ‘born here’ in Australia? My analysis centres on Christopher Cyrill’s The Ganges and its Tributaries (1993) and Homework (1999) by Suneeta Peres Da Costa. Here, I consider how multiple homelands are made real and imagined; how (dis)placement in Australia is negotiated, and the way in which a sense of (dis)comfort is constructed around notions of home, family, community and corporeal identity.
Chapter Three – The Guru Glut: Ethno-realism and Celebrity
The circulation of images and ideas about India, defined as a type of ‘soft power,’ provides the context for Chapter Three. The South Asian diaspora has conjured a plethora of ‘guru fictions’ which often display a heightened awareness of their 13
commodified status; my purpose is to investigate how Australian texts demonstrate this powerful combination of ‘creed and critique’. I focus on two little-known texts, The Firewalkers (1991) and Transcendental Pastimes (1999) by Christine Mangala and Bem Le Hunte’s considerably more hyped, The Seduction Of Silence (2000), discussing the mediation and marketing of spiritualism through the construction of an ethnographic aura and guru-like authority.
Chapter Four: Going Back: Diasporic Depictions of the Homeland
Chapter Four shifts the focus from ‘guru fictions’ in the ‘global India’ register to texts that explore Sri Lanka. Critics have affirmed and contested the ‘myth of the homeland’ as the central narrative for diasporic literatures; here such myths come into conflict, both with contemporary realities and with colonial histories. I this chapter I re-pose a question often raised about diasporic fictions: can writers who have remained abroad for decades or even generations adequately represent the contemporary realities of their former homelands? Taking a narrower Sri Lankan focus within a broader view of South Asian-Australian fiction, I ask: how does the civil war affect processes of representation? This chapter includes works by three novelists and a playwright: Michelle De Kretser’s The Hamilton Case (2003), Chandani Lokuge’s Turtle Nest (2003), Chitra Fernando’s Cousins (1999) and Ernest Macintyre’s plays, Rasanayagam’s Last Riot (1993) and He Still Comes From Jaffna (2000).
Chapter Five – Writing/Making History: Cultural Memory and Amnesia
Chapter Five focuses on the writing of ‘twice-banished’ Indo-Fijian-Australians, considering the distant past of indenture and the near history of the military coups that rocked Fiji’s multiethnic society in 1987, and again in 2000. Drawing on a collection of ‘faction’ by Brij Lal, Mr. Tulsi’s Store (2001), Sudesh Mishra’s prose poetry, ‘Diaspora and the Difficult Art of Dying’ (1999) and Satendra Nandan’s novel The Wounded Sea (1991), I consider themes of historiography, exile, death and cultural (re)generation. In this final chapter I also return to the issues of representation that are explored throughout the thesis, discussing the amnesia inherent in ‘shared historical memory,’ and the role played by writers when they seek to define or address or speak for a community. 15
Literature Review I: On Postcolonialism
It has arguably become more fashionable to attack postcolonialism than to defend it – a sign, perhaps, rather less of the conceptual inadequacies of postcolonial studies than of its increasing commodification as a marketable academic field. Critiques of postcolonialism, after all, add to the currency of postcolonial discourse: hence the paradox that postcolonial studies prospers even as its methods are called into question; that while the field grows rich on its accumulated cultural capital, it is recognised by an increasing number of its opponents as intellectually bankrupt. (Huggan, 2001: 3)
Introduction
Postcolonialism is a notoriously difficult term to define. It refers to a field of inquiry that has received intense scrutiny whilst remaining enigmatic, porous, eclectic, contested. In this review I examine some of the major debates generated by the emergence of postcolonial approaches to literary studies in the late-twentieth century. I use these debates to pose broader questions concerning the utility of certain theoretical frameworks for the study of South Asian-Australian fictions. In particular, I focus on the tension between taking the ‘nation’ as an overarching category for the analysis of literature and theories of globalisation, migration and hybridity which destabilise the naturalness of this given frame.
Precursors and Legacies: Commonwealth and Third World Literary Studies
Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have recently been satirised as the ‘holy trinity’ and the ‘three celebrity critics’ of postcolonial studies, due to their influence (in textbooks, on course reading lists, through citations etc.), (Sharrad, 2001: 47; Huggan, 2001: 4). Their ascendancy to an emblematic status – open to challenge – partly results from the new subject area having to quickly consolidate, throughout the 1980s and 1990s. A sign of arrival within the academy is presented in the emergence of the journal Postcolonial Studies in 1998. As the editors note, the first issue “coincides with the academic ‘highpoint’ of postcolonial investigations. Once counter-canonical and enablingly amorphous in its motivations, the postcolonial has now acquired institutional validity” (Seth et al, 1998: 9). By commenting on “the 16
seductions of canonicity and disciplinarity” that attend the moment of consolidation, these editors contribute to a number of timely warnings against reducing the complexity of the postcolonial field to the complex theories of just a few ‘star’ figures (Seth et al. 1998: 9).
Helen Tiffin is more specific when she highlights a profound ‘amnesia’ concerning work produced prior to 1978, under the auspices of Commonwealth literary studies, which proceeded in ways quite distinct from those set by the ‘new hegemony’ (1996: 156-160). Tiffin believes the “entry of a post-structuralist approach” (particularly associated with Bhabha and Spivak’s work) was responsible for “the dismissal of much earlier foundational work as untheorized and thus non-existent” (1996: 159). Ella Shohat also identifies an occlusion of earlier frameworks, pointing out that “[t]he ‘post- colonial’ did not emerge to fill an empty space in the language of political-cultural analysis” (1992: 100). To the contrary, Shohat argues that: “its wide adaptation during the late eighties was coincident with and dependent on the eclipse of an older paradigm, that of the ‘Third World’” (1992: 100).10
Commonwealth and Third World literary studies, took place across a divergent global terrain but with similar outcomes in mind. The motivating force driving both was a desire to draw attention to texts produced outside of the traditional English literary sphere. This constituted a demand for the recognition and recovery of literatures which, as Tabish Khair later recalled, were in danger of being “squashed out of existence under the squatting backside of that elephant, ‘the Western canon’” (2002: 67). Both drew on the momentum of anti-colonialism and the high-tide of decolonisation in the 1960s. Whilst it is true that the struggle for Independence had already been won in much of Latin America during the 1820s, and that neo-colonialism continues in many guises, a powerful global shift occurred with the rise of many new nations from the ashes of European Empires. Neil Lazarus underscores the ‘heady expectancy’ and ‘dynamism’ that reverberated around the world in the era of decolonisation; he points to the many successes that followed Independence in a number of countries, “however slender, partial, provisional, or unsustainable they proved to be in the long term” (2004: 34). The ‘settler-invader’ countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa) were a differently situated but connected part of the global picture at this time. Complex forms of self-assertion and social transformation took place during the 1960s and beyond, 17
including the struggle against apartheid and for the rights of Indigenous/First nations people. The pluralizing ethos of the Commonwealth and Third World literary movements, provides one contribution to the complex and on-going processes described by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o as ‘decolonising the mind,’ and Dipesh Chakrabarty as ‘provincialising Europe’. My thesis follows on from this project by adding to the ‘decolonisation’ of a long-dominant Anglo-Celtic canon defining Australian culture.
So a type of selective memory is often at work in processes of institutional validation, where the distinct intellectual trajectories of earlier inquiries are rejected, absorbed and forgotten. In this section I aim to counter the trend to ‘date’ the emergence of postcolonial studies from the publication of Said’s Orientalism (1978) by charting the development of ‘Commonwealth Literatures’ and ‘Third World Literatures’. There is a variety of critical work, loosely grouped under these banners prominent in the 1960s and 1970s, that engages with the early questions of postcolonialism, before the term had acquired institutional validation. Variously accused of naïve, outdated, totalising or essentialist methods by the postcolonial studies of the 1980s, they serve as an illuminating example of how a discipline cuts new ground. I argue that the range of perspectives on conceptual boundaries and methodological approaches, typified by Commonwealth and Third World literary studies, demonstrates considerable overlap but also reveals distinct trends emanating from different institutional locations. This comparison serves to illustrate that some of the contemporary debates within postcolonial literary studies, on dominance, resistance and incorporation, on the mismatch between subaltern histories and diasporic cosmopolitanism, on authenticity and hybridity, are clearly prefigured in the intellectual heritage of the discipline.
The commonalities between Commonwealth and Third World literary studies can be found in their shared motivations to ‘decolonise the canon,’ shaped in a period of ‘global’ optimism and dissent (which is as much part of the myth of the period as it is to do with the reality of social change). However, there are also clear differences between the two areas, most obviously signalled by the geo-political boundaries evoked in their titles. The Commonwealth grouping implies the new ‘family of literatures’ based on the imperial geography crafted by the (former) British Empire. Literary criticism often focused on how to resist and/or accommodate the highly ambiguous legacies of colonialism; in particular, the English-language education system which provides a 18
vehicle for literary and cultural exchange within and between ex-colonies but may also continue to instil notions of inferiority and derivativeness. Challenging the spectre of ‘backwardness,’ a notion which still haunts the social-studies ‘development’ paradigm, is also of import to the Third World grouping. The term ‘Third World’ has been attributed to French demographer Alfred Sauvy who suggested in 1952:
We speak all too willingly of two worlds and their possible wars, their co- existence, etc., often forgetting that there exists a Third, more important world, one which, in terms of chronology, comes first […] this Third World, ignored, scorned, exploited, as was the Third Estate, also wants to say something. (quoted in Gugelberger, 1991: 509)
So whilst Commonwealth literary criticism addressed a specifically British post- colonial context and/or inheritance, the Third World grouping was shaped by the logic of the Cold War. The notion of differential world forces was evident in the politics of the ‘Non-Aligned Movement’. This movement was instigated by leaders from a number of Asian and African nations who met at the Bandung Conference of 1955 and opted for neutrality in the superpower contest between First World capitalism and Second World communism. In doing so, they attempted to forge a new way of thinking about the ‘Third World’: as an alternative geo-political power and a Third ideological choice, rather than only the most ‘ignored, scorned, exploited’ sections of the globe.
One of the effects of defining the scope of a field of literary interaction through the limits of geo-political terms is the rather arbitrary limitation it places on the pluralizing, comparative impulses which drove the Commonwealth and Third World literary studies; each case excludes certain perspectives. Literatures not available under the Commonwealth paradigm (Latin American literature, for example) are available under the Third World rubric. Whilst some of the literatures found in the Commonwealth grouping (particularly those of the ‘white diaspora’ of the settler-invader colonies) are eclipsed in Third World arena, implicitly rejected as part of a broader ‘Western/capitalist’ bloc. South Asian literatures are one of the major areas of overlap. In either case, and as with ‘the postcolonial’ more generally, the scope is broad and sweeps over huge historical, cultural and socio-political variation. Australia has played an interesting game of aligning itself with post-colonial Third World movements as part of repositioning itself within the Asia Pacific region whilst at the same time asserting its 19
ties to Britain. This thesis to some extent shifts the Commonwealth / Third World balance another degree by inserting a ‘Third World’ element into Australia’s literary culture under the aegis of the Commonwealth connection.
Looking back at the inaugural conference of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS) held in Leeds in 1964, Stephen Slemon sees the ‘yoking together’ of disparate ‘new’ literatures as a strategic manoeuvre (1996: 185). It was designed to create ‘a coherent field’ in order to counter “the dominant view that very little literary activity actually took place outside the USA and the UK, and what few texts there were ‘out there’ weren’t very good” (Slemon, 1996: 185). Tiffin recalls that this conference set some of the key terms of engagement for work produced over the next decade, terms that were both “nation-based and determinedly comparative” (Tiffin, 1996: 159, 161). The nation based impulse was affirmative and reparative; in many ways, Commonwealth literary studies is merely a portmanteau term for the explosion of literary activity and literary analysis going on into aspects of individual canons and traditions during the post-Independence period.11 The ‘determinedly comparative’ impulse resulted from the shared conversations between various specialists enabled by the development of a specific set of institutions like ACLALS, which brings together a sizable membership of writers and scholars at its triennial conference, the Journal of Commonwealth Literature founded in 1965, and the ‘Commonwealth Writers Prize,’ established in 1987. Each of these forums is still active and as such it is misleading to speak of this field as merely a forerunner to the more popular postcolonial and more accurate to emphasise their overlap.
One distinctive strand of postcolonial analysis, attributable to the terms set by the Commonwealth literary paradigm, draws on the way authors themselves have defined the complexities of what it is to ‘write back’ from within a (post)colonial context. Here, the views and strategies, developed by several creative writers, like Chinua Achebe, Margaret Atwood, Wilson Harris, Subramani and so on, are a crucial part of the dialogue. One example, George Lamming’s The Pleasures of Exile (1960), a book of interrelated essays, is prefaced as “resituat[ing] the colonial writer as an active agent of decolonisation”: Lamming “makes his way of seeing the subject and method of the text” (Paquet in Lamming, 1960: x). This provides an early indication of the trend amongst later theorists to use experience as the basis for discussions of subversive postcolonial 20
subjectivity – in its many manifestations as ‘subaltern,’ ‘nomadic,’ or ‘diasporic,’ ‘cosmopolitan,’ ‘indigenous’. My broader point is that unlike much of the work produced in the decade of theory-making which often focused on precisely the ‘Western canon’ to illuminate processes of orientalism, those critics who came to postcolonial studies through the Commonwealth route were more likely to remain “primarily committed to the [non-Western] literary text,” perspective and cultural context (Tiffin, 1996: 161).12 This thesis continues the idea of ‘writing back’ to some extent while diverting the focus of the writing to an ex-colonial nation rather than the old imperial metropolitan centre.
However, Commonwealth literary studies have been criticised for the paternalism and flattening effect of their ‘determinedly comparative’ cross-cultural method. In early paradigms, the ‘new’ literatures were read in relation to ‘old’ models: comparisons emphasised continuation and similarity as well as divergence but not difference. Thematic patterns were identified by ‘the search for identity’ and ‘a coming of age,’ through metaphors of “trunk-and-branch” or “mother and growing child” (Goodwin 2000: 120-121). Drawing on Bart Moore-Gilbert’s summation, Ken Goodwin observes:
[Professor Derry] Jeffares, at the 1964 Leeds conference, “constructed British literature as the norm against which ‘local’ Commonwealth literatures were to be measured” and was guilty of “Anglocentrism disguised as an ‘ecumenical approach’” (2000: 119)
Ecumenism is a weak disguise for the charge of Anglocentrism, given its application as the principle of the worldwide unity of the Christian church through the transcendence of doctrinal differences and the close relationship between missionary activity and English-language education in many former British colonies. It does prefigure critiques also applied to/within postcolonial studies which warn against the subsumption of the socio-political, cultural specificities of the manifold local contexts contained within the broad sweep of its field.
Salman Rushdie expresses the many levels of his discontent with this literary grouping in his essay ‘Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist’ (1991). He argues that many of the writers being ushered ‘under this new and badly made umbrella,’ including himself, Shiva Naipaul and Buchi Emecheta find it “unhelpful and even a little distasteful”, 21
despite the ‘commitment to the text’ and critical focus on the perspectives and predicaments of the Commonwealth writer noted earlier (Rushdie, 1991: 61-62). For Rushdie, inadequacies are evident in the tying of conceptual, literary boundaries to real- world geo-political organisations. He asks why the UK, evidently a key political member of the Commonwealth of nations remained “excluded from its literary manifestation” whilst remaining an implicit benchmark (Rushdie, 1991: 62). He questions the arbitrariness of a paradigm that would discourage a comparison between Gujarati and Czech writers, ‘writing back’ to dominant Hindi and Russian centres. In contrast to Slemon, Goodwin and others who worry about the flattening of difference that the comparative method might effect, Rushdie is primarily concerned in this essay with the creation of a Commonwealth ‘ghetto’, and therein lies his distaste. Rushdie believes the nation-based emphasis is highly restrictive:
every ghetto has its own rules, and this one is no exception. One of the rules, one of the ideas on which the edifice rests, is that literature is an expression of nationality […] Books are almost always praised for using motifs and symbols out of the author’s own national tradition […] Books which mix traditions, or which seek consciously to break with tradition are often seen as highly suspect […] What we are facing here is the bogey of Authenticity […] ‘Authenticity’ is the respectable child of old-fashioned exoticism. It demands that sources, forms, style, language and symbol all derive from a supposedly homogenous and unbroken tradition. Or else. What is revealing is that the term, so much in use inside the little world of ‘Commonwealth literature’, and always as a term of praise, would seem ridiculous outside this world. Imagine a novel being eulogized for being ‘authentically English’ […] It would seem absurd. Yet such absurdities persist in the ghetto. (1991: 66-67)
It is surprising, in light of these criticisms, that Rushdie puts forward an argument for the consideration of ‘Third World literature.’ He sees a commonality between writers from a variety of “poor countries, or deprived minorities in powerful countries” who create a literature of ‘the powerless,’ and suggests that unlike the conceptually weak Commonwealth Literature, this may provide the ground for “a ‘real’ theory, bounded by frontiers which are neither political nor linguistic but imaginative” (1983: 68-69). However, Third World literary studies (as defined by Fredric Jameson, Georg Gugelberger, Peter Nazareth, Barbara Harlow, Benita Parry and others) places perhaps more emphasis than the Commonwealth paradigm on texts that are perceived to be nation-based, or even nation-building, in focus, whilst pursuing a comparative agenda that is trans-national but equally bound. The ‘attendant bogey of Authenticity’ remains 22
present in the need to define ‘all genuine “Third World literature”’ (Gugelberger, 1991: 513). This thesis, while being enabled by these theoretical constructs, tries to attend to local specificities and to problematise the notion of an authentic national culture in its inspection of one of many ‘minority’ literatures that also reaches out beyond a national boundary.
The differing institutional locations associated with Commonwealth and Third World literary studies, is indicated by Huggan who divides the early work of postcolonial studies into the ‘the Anglo/Commonwealth’ and the ‘US/minority’ paths’ (2001: 230). Arguably the former path privileges the white diaspora perspective of the settler-invader countries, and indeed many of the most distinctive contributions to assessing the general field of (post)colonial literatures, experiences and theories have taken Australia, Canada and New Zealand as their examples. Many key postcolonial concepts, on ambivalence, hybridity, mimicry, subversion, alienation, displacement and exile, later made popular by Bhabha in the 1980s, were first applied to the settler context. The specificities of First Nations/Indigenous perspectives on the postcolonial condition were raised by Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra in their Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind (1990), which argued for a distinction between ‘complicit’ and ‘oppositional’ postcolonialism.
This brings me back to the Third World literary grouping which is among the most obvious precursors for ‘oppositional’ postcolonialism. By yoking a ‘minority path’ – the ‘Third World within’ – to the broader socio-political domain of ‘Third World out there’ this area of study, like the Commonwealth paradigm, heralds a number of later trends. These would include the range of work produced on Indigenous and immigrant literary perspectives under the banners of identity politics, and the materialist, Marxist, ‘liberation’ strand of postcolonial theory that focuses on subaltern histories and uneven global power relations.13 Its intellectual heritage is found in the works of Franz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara; it draws eclectically from earlier theories of Negritude, the contemporary civil-rights movements of the 1960s and later ‘world system theory’ (Wallerstein 1974, Amin, 1976, Amin et al. 1990). The revolutionary potential of cultural production is emphasised by Gugelberger who claims, “that all genuine ‘Third World literature’ fights for the expulsion of all forms of colonialism and dependency and is therefore truly resistance literature” (1991: 513). Gugelberger 23
defines this literature as ‘a fighting’ genre: “an opposition literature, a literature which deals with nation building, a literature which negates oppression” (1991: 513).
The scope and purpose of Third World literatures are debated in an exchange between Fredric Jameson and Ajaz Ahmad over the terms the former sets in his essay, ‘Third World Literature in the Age of Multinational Capital’. Writing in 1986, Jameson begins with a remark on the ‘obsessive return of the national situation’ in ‘conversations among Third-world intellectuals’:
The name of the country that returns again and again like a gong, the collective attention to ‘us’ […] and what we do better than this or that nationality, our unique characteristics, in short to the level of the ‘people.’ This is not the way American intellectuals have been discussing ‘America,’ and indeed one might feel that the whole matter is nothing but that old thing called ‘nationalism,’ long since liquidated here and rightly so. Yet a certain nationalism is fundamental in the Third World […] thus making it legitimate to ask whether it is all that bad in the end. (Jameson, 1986: 65)
Jameson creates a division between First and Third World writing, readers and socio- cultural locations, in order to argue that the differing conditions of the separate ‘worlds’ produce distinct textual strategies and aesthetics. He observes a “radical split between the public and the private” in the First World, produced by the cultural workings of advanced capital, a bifurcation which he argues is absent in the Third World where public and private are intertwined. Jameson states:
All Third-world texts are necessarily, I want to argue, allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories…Third- world texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic – necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public Third-world culture and society. (1986:69)
Jameson and others acknowledge the manifold difficulties and totalising tendencies involved in such projects of definition. They indicate the provisional nature of the term; Gugelberger suggesting “an operational rather than analytical” usage, Jameson affirming that the primary features of Third World literary production, as communal, political and allegorical, “by way of a sweeping hypothesis” (1991: 510; 1986: 69).
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Ahmad’s well known response to Jameson’s sweeping hypothesis provides a strident critique of the three worlds theory (1992: 95-122). He identifies a transposition, in Jameson’s essay, of an earlier concept concerning the distinction between pre-industrial and industrial societies (with ‘the unity of the public and the private in one, the separation of the two in the other’) onto the difference between First and Third Worlds (Ahmad, 1992: 109). Working against the grain of Jameson’s logic, Ahmad suggests that if the Third World is constituted by colonialism then a split between public and private may be more pressing in the Third World than the First, particularly for the urban intelligentsia who are, in the main, the producers of English-language literature (1992: 107). In this observation, he prefigures the position taken by Partha Chatterjee who claims, in contrast to Jameson, that it is precisely in the ‘so-called Third World’ that the identities of public and private are irrevocably split by the legacies of colonialism (1993: 6).
Ahmad also argues that the economic rationale for the three-worlds division has no empirical basis in fact, commenting on the success of Asian Pacific Rim economies, pointing out India’s ‘first-world’ capitalist credentials, and noting that the Indian bourgeoisie is fully at home with “global American postmodernist culture” (1992: 101).14 Furthermore, he observes that many first-world texts display the political characteristics of ‘allegorization and organicity’ that Jameson sees as emblematic of an embattled Third World situation (1992: 122). The examples employed – the urban intelligentsia in the post-colony and feminist and Black American literatures – demonstrate the multiplicity of ‘imagined communities’ that may exist within, beyond and in-between nation-states and the larger First/Third world division. So, rather than accept the impermeable divide of the three worlds theory, Ahmad offers “a radically different premise: namely, the proposition that we live not in three worlds but one” – where all sides of the ‘global divide’ are constituted by, and in relation to, experiences of imperialism, capitalism, socialism, nationalism (1992: 103). The emphasis on cultural complexity and the proposition that we live in ‘one world,’ but a world that is multiply affected by differential power-relations, signals a key area of debate in the postcolonialism of the 1980s and 1990s
The transcendence of Third World and Commonwealth literary studies, through the consolidation of postcolonialism at this time, can be seen as an academic discipline 25
(re)inventing itself: those previously involved in cutting new ground shrugged off the limitations of outmoded paradigms, taking ‘the postcolonial’ in different directions. Shohat locates this shift in historical terms, noting that the progressive, ‘activist aura’ enjoyed by the term ‘Third World’ was significantly dimmed by the changing world order: with the end of the Cold War, the spread of global capital, “the realization that the wretched of the earth are not unanimously revolutionary (nor necessarily allies to one another)” (1992: 100). Looking back at the founding 1960s ethos, she states: the “period of so-called ‘Third World euphoria’ – a brief moment in which it seemed that First World leftists and Third World guerrillas would walk arm in arm toward global revolution – has given way” (Shohat, 1992: 100).
The recognition of cultural complexity is also apparent in work that supplants the ‘Anglo/Commonwealth’ tradition. In The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures (1989) for example, widely considered a formal starting point for post-colonial studies proper, the Commonwealth phase is described as ‘outdated’ and the ‘product of a disguised humanist reincorporation’ (Ashcroft et al., 1989: 180). This work takes a broad view, using the term post-colonial “to cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day”, thus maintaining a space for comparisons between ‘settler-invader’ and so-called Third World social contexts (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 2). The Empire Writes Back also continues to situate the post-colonial literary text and writer as actively engaged in processes of cultural decolonisation. It engages with the questions Rushdie raised about the essentialising tendencies of ‘nationalist’ paradigms for literary studies, proposing instead that “the strength of post-colonial theory may well lie in its inherently comparative methodology and the hybridised and syncretic view of the modern world which this implies” (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 36-7). The shift is made complete in The Location of Culture (1994). Here Bhabha argues that postcolonial criticism is concerned with “unequal and uneven forces […] within the modern world order” but “attempts to revise those nationalist or ‘nativist’ pedagogies that set up the relation of Third World and First World in a binary structure of opposition” (1994: 171, 173). While drawing on The Empire Writes Back’s sense of the long-term effects of a colonial past as they produce contemporary diasporas, and its attention to culturally ‘different’ voices changing language and genre standards, my own work is more indebted to Bhabha’s 26
less binary, more deconstructive models, such as his ‘third space’ of inside/outside diasporic negotiation.
My symptomatic reading of the critical conversations going on during the evolution of postcolonial studies has indicated the multiple positions taken. I have also identified a general trend in which nation-based frameworks for literary analysis and the reification of opposition are discarded in favour of an emphasis on cultural instability, heterogeneity and complex forms of uneven power. This shifting agenda was influenced by the intense borrowings between ‘the postcolonial’ to other theories and concepts popular in the 1980s and 1990s – globalisation, post-structuralism and postmodernism – and is also a sign of the common ground increasingly shared between postcolonial studies and cultural studies at this time.15
Destabilising the nation? Theories of globalisation, migration and hybridity
In this section I explore a selection of the critical work popular during the high-tide of postcolonialism, focusing on those theories that take a view of the world through the lens of migration and cultural flux. My purpose is to highlight the cluster of concepts most associated with ‘diaspora’ and to indicate another strand of debate within the field. I have divided this section into two parts: the first offers perspectives on the way culture operates under globalised conditions, the second considers a series of critiques which raise questions about the privileging of certain tropes through the hegemony of reigning paradigms.
Arjun Appadurai’s influential Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996), provides a good example of text that travels well between cultural studies and postcolonial studies. Appadurai connects mass migrations to global conditions to a specifically diasporic form of social change that, he believes, subverts the salience of the nation-state:
The story of mass migrations (voluntary and forced) is hardly a new feature of human history. But when it is juxtaposed with the rapid flow of mass-mediated images, scripts and sensations, we have a new order of instability in the production of modern subjectivities. As Turkish guest workers in Germany watch Turkish films in their German flats, as Koreans in Philadelphia watch the 1988 27
Olympics in Seoul through satellite feeds from Korea, and as Pakistani cabdrivers in Chicago listen to cassettes of sermons recorded in mosques in Pakistan or Iran, we see moving images meet deterritorialized viewers. These create diasporic public spheres, phenomena that confound theories that depend on the continued salience of the nation state as the key arbitrator of important social change. (Appadurai, 1996: 4).
Appadurai is signalling the rise of a qualitatively ‘new,’ specifically globalised, social imagination brought about by the proliferation of modernity and the production of (post)modern subjectivities. Yet, even in the deliberately hybrid exchanges he emphasises, the nation-state as an organising principle is very much to the fore. Appadurai’s sentences, if denuded of their reference to the nation (as workers watch films in their flats, as people watch the Olympics through satellite feeds, as cabdrivers listen to cassettes), would say little about social change. Appadurai recognises that: “no idiom has yet emerged to capture the collective interests of many groups in translocal solidarities, cross-border mobilizations, and postnational identities”, that the global is “still entrapped in the linguistic imaginary of the territorial state” (1996: 166).
While a number of postcolonial critics were retrospectively charting cross-cultural contact, appropriation, exchange and conflict within and across national/regional boundaries in an age without the internet, globalisation theory was debating the defining features of (post)modernity. Like Appadurai, John Tomlinson suggests that the experience of ‘complex connectivity’ is qualitatively different in the post-industrial period, though he sees this as an “axial shift” rather than a “rigid historical ‘break’” (1999: 43). For both critics, the forces of expansion, acceleration and compression are key to an understanding of something: conceptions time and space shift when once far off places become routinely accessible and the world shrinks to fit within our field of vision. Tomlinson notes:
The discourse of globalization is replete with metaphors of global proximity, of a ‘shrinking world’: from Marshall McLuhan’s famous ‘global village’ to the United Nations’ recent coining of the term ‘Our Global Neighbourhood’ to describe an emerging world-political context. (Tomlinson, 1999: 3)
These metaphors emphasise the inescapable fact that we all share one world; an ethos also reflected in popular social movements (such as Greenpeace or Amnesty International), which depend on global citizenship, responsibilities and rights. The most 28
utopic, and often technologically deterministic, advocates of the transformative potential of globalisation imply that it will bring equity, as suggested by Mark Poster’s notion of ‘Cyberdemocracy’ (1997).
The ‘homogenisation thesis’ is often invoked as the actual negative outcome to the good work that globalisation could do. Critics who support this view accept the premise of globalisation but explore its flip-side and underbelly. They suggest that its primary features, expansion-acceleration-compression, work in a reductive, alienating manner, lessening the quality and variety of the choices available to members of the ‘new world order’. In this dystopic reading, globalisation is just the name for Americanisation or Westernisation by stealth. There have been a number of convincing rejoinders to the ‘homogenisation thesis’ which emphasise both the mutability of cultural processes and the agency of those who enact them. For example, Shohat and Robert Stam suggest:
It is simplistic to imagine an active First World simply forcing its products [and ideologies] on a passive Third World. […] global mass culture does not so much replace local culture as coexist with it, providing a cultural lingua franca (1996: 49)
Ashcroft makes a similar point in his work on Post-Colonial Transformation (2001). He argues that “Western development models” (now largely defunct) “act to force the local into globally normative patterns”, but that these same patterns are acted on and transformed “to the requirements of local values and needs” (2001: 16). It is not an ‘either/or’ choice: “the modern can be ‘used’ and ‘resisted’ at the same time” (Ashcroft, 2001: 23). Ashcroft’s perspective on this issue is indicative of a broader strand in postcolonial studies – a strand which intersects with the challenge issued by postmodernism to shake up ‘grand narratives’ of progress, modernity, rationalism. As the editors note in the introduction to the first issue of Postcolonial Studies: “[d]ecolonisation was never the history of the European modern played out in a different theatre” (Seth et al., 1998: 7). Arif Dirlik extends this view:
the history of modernization appears now as a temporal succession of spatially dispersed local encounters, to which objects of progress made their own contributions through resistance or complicity, contributing in significant ways to the formation of modernity, as well as to its contradictions. (1996: 25)
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So a number of critics have emphasised the transformational powers of local agency in and on the global, drawing attention to divergent, discrepant, resistant or plural modernities. For many, fundamentally modern phenomena lie at the heart of their perspectives on globalisation. Dirlik is concerned with the structuring force of “new global capitalism” (1996: 28); Appadurai, Shohat and Stam believe, “the media are absolutely central to any discussion of […] globalization” (1996: 145); Ashcroft suggests that ‘globalism’, like imperialism, finds its origin, teleology, ideology and technology in the discursive and historical rise of a specifically European modernity (2001: 210).
Jan Nederveen Pieterse puts forward a very different perspective in Globalisation and Culture: Global Melange (2004). He prefers ‘a long view’ of worldwide social relations, one which includes ancient trade routes and the spread of world religions; in doing so he takes globalisation “beyond the radius of modernity/westernisation” (2004: 63). Instead the global is examined through the nexus of migration and cultural mixing, which are seen as the harbingers of social change and cultural flourishing. Indeed, Pieterse eulogises hybridity and his book provides a good example of the utopic/euphoric strand of globalisation theory in the social sciences/cultural studies. His central premise is that in a profound, global sense ‘we are all migrants’ because movement and “mixing ha[ve] been perennial”: hybridity is the truth and the (evolutionary) norm, purity the lie and impossible exception (2004: 52). This is not to suggest that Nederveen Pieterse completely dismisses the pertinence and purchase of socio-political boundaries. Yet, unlike those who avow the inherent newness of contemporary hybrid times, he maintains that: “cultures have been overflowing boundaries all along and that boundaries have been provisional and ever contentious superimpositions upon a substrata of mingling and traffic” (2004: 100). From this perspective “we come to see nation states as a grid that has been temporarily superimposed upon a deeper and ongoing stratum of human migrations and diasporas” (Nederveen Pieterse, 2004: 34). The paradigm-reversal that Nederveen Pieterse suggests, privileging movement and mixing over stasis and purity as the natural condition for humanity is compelling and borne out by the dynamic negotiations enacted in and around the texts studied in this thesis.16
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Iain Chambers also puts forward the view that movement and mixing are central rather than peripheral to discourses of human history in his Migrancy, Culture, Identity (1994). Like many other works on globalisation and hybridity, the focus here is upon the contemporary metropolis and new media forms: “from the computer screen to the Walkman and ‘World Music’” (Chambers, 1994: back cover). Chambers suggests that ‘migrancy’ and ‘nomadism’ (used interchangeably) are modes of thought, ways of seeing, that are brought into being by the transformative impact of postcolonial emigrations from peripheries to global centers. As a metaphorical experience, migrancy becomes a type of shared historical destiny:
In the oblique gaze of the migrant that cuts across the territory of the Western metropolis there exists the hint of a metaphor. In the extensive and multiple worlds of the modern city we, too, become nomads […] It is, above all, here that we are inducted into a hybrid state and composite culture in which the simple dualism of First and Third World collapses […] The boundaries of the liberal consensus and its centred sense of language, being, position and politics, are breached and scattered as all our histories come to be rewritten. (Chambers, 1994: 14)
Chambers is primarily concerned with the subversive affects of language and narrative on/as culture under globalised conditions. This represents a “move into dialogue, into a sense of language that does not merely reflect culture, history and differences but also produces them” (1994: 12). Chambers is prescient enough to respond to the obvious criticism arising from his universal, inclusivist, utopian metaphor and its potential clash with more dystopic realities. As he puts it:
the induced, often brutally enforced, migrations of individuals and whole populations from ‘peripheries’ towards Euro-American metropolis and ‘Third World’ cities, are of a magnitude and intensity that dramatically dwarf any direct comparison with the secondary and largely metaphorical journeys of intellectual thought. (Chambers, 1994: 5-6)
However, after stating that “analogy is risky,” Chambers persuades: “still, it is a risk to be run” and continues to use migrant metaphors as a route into “the nomadic experience of language” (6). In doing so, he twists actual migrant histories into the fabric of a new global order weaved with instability: “[t]hought wanders. It migrates, requires translation” (4). Like Appadurai who comments on ‘modernity at large,’ Chambers suggests that the “groundswell of modernity” produces a produces a process of rupture 31
by breaching and scattering once taken-for-granted boundaries (16). These critics see social-cultural transformation wrought by migration, and signalled by the figure of the migrant, as the grounds for an emergent post-nationalising global imagination. For Chambers ‘migrancy’ is both a conduit for change and the “irrevocable condition of […] world culture” (1994: 82).
Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994) is another key text which refocuses the image of ‘the postcolonial’ through the lens of uneven globalisation and migration in the 1980s and 1990s and in so doing, reveals the malleability of boundaries between cultural studies and literary theory at this time. The Location of Culture explores the “transnational dimension of cultural transformation”, drawing on histories of “migration, diaspora, displacement, relocation” (1994: 172). Bhabha agrees that ‘all forms of culture are in a process of hybridity’ but emphasises cultural difference over fusion and diversity. For Bhabha, “the ‘doubleness’ of hybrid voices is composed not through the integration of differences but via a series of dialogical counterpoints, each set against the other” (Papastergiadis, 2000: 183). Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s linguistic theories, Bhabha locates this conflictual ‘doubleness’ within language itself. He perceives a profound ambivalence in any act of utterance, caused by the disjuncture between the subject of enunciation and the subject of a proposition – where the ‘I’ speaking is split from the ‘I’ being spoken about (Bhabha, 1994: 36). Here, hybridity is deployed not to convey amalgamation (the unity of two ‘pure’ forms within a third) but rather to suggest splitting and contestation, a process that “destroys the logics of sychncronity and evolution which traditionally authorize the subject of knowledge” (Bhabha, 1994: 36).
So a variety of approaches to defining cultural complexity are evident in the work discussed above. These can be usefully summed up by way of Jacqueline Lo’s comments on different modes of hybridity. She also draws on Bakhtin’s work, identifying a distinction between ‘unconscious/organic’ and ‘intentional’ modes of hybridity (Lo, 2000: 153-155). The ‘organic’ mode tends towards fusion and is representative of the accretive nature of continuous cultural change in a global context (as defined by Nederveen Pieterse) (Lo, 2000: 154). Though attractive as a challenge to the dominance of the boundary as a conceptual tool, the difficulty with the organic or ‘long view’ of hybridity is that it foregrounds broad cultural flows only to obscure the 32
situated, specific power relations which structure them.17 Lo claims that ‘organic’ hybridity is accommodating, not disruptive, and “there is no sense of self-reflexivity […] no awareness of either the tensions or contradictions of history” (2000: 154). ‘Intentional’ hybridity is quite the opposite. This is a mode defined by ‘ironic double- consciousness’, collision, contestation, sharp politicisation and intervention (2000: 153- 155). ‘Intentional’ hybridity is purposeful precisely because it is not coded as a natural, irrevocable condition (2000: 153). As with the earlier differentiation between ‘complicit’ and ‘oppositional’ postcolonialism, the organic and intentional should be seen as two contradictory, competing forces that are tangled and co-exist as two sides of the same conceptual coin. I will return to these useful distinctions when considering the place of my selected texts within a multicultural national space.
Critiques
One of the primary criticisms of the euphoric strand of cultural studies/ globalisation theory/ postcolonialism with its excessive focus on hybridity is the way that the twinned tropes of city and migrant are read as the only site/conduit of contemporary change and resistance. Indeed, the logic that places the global/hybrid/cosmopolitan in opposition to the local/pure/national is based on the very partiality of this perspective. Many critics have pointed to the continued salience of the nation-state in our so-called global times. Pheng Cheah, for example, reviews several arguments about “the structural necessity of the nation-state in the global political economy” and concludes that they demonstrate the “untenability of postnationalism” (1998: 35-36). His perspective challenges the status of migration as the exemplar of globalisation. He states:
instead of producing large groups of deterritorialized migrant peoples who prefigure the nation-state’s demise and point to a postnational global order, uneven globalization makes popular nationalist movements in the periphery the first step on the long road to social distribution. (1998: 34)
Simon Gikandi, in his article ‘Globalisation and the Claims of Postcoloniality’, challenges both the euphoric strand of globalisation theory, and the contrasting view (outlined by Cheah above), of “counterofficial popular nationalism” in “the postcolonial South” (2001: 37). Gikandi argues that one consequence of the widespread failure of the nationalist mandate in the postcolony to deliver on the promise of independence, which 33
included “modernization outside the tutelage of colonialism”, is a reinvigoration of grand narratives re-centring Euro-America (Gikandi, 2001: 630). Gikandi suggests: “citizens of the postcolony are more likely to seek their global identity by invoking the very logic of Enlightenment that postcolonial theory was supposed to deconstruct” (2001: 630). Gikandi employs a confronting example to illustrate this process, a letter left by two Guinean boys who died in the cargo hold of a plane on route to Brussels: 18
Excellencies, gentlemen, and responsible citizens of Europe: It is our great honor and privilege to write to you about our trip and the suffering of the children and youth in Africa. We offer you our most affectionate and respectful salutations. In return, be our support and our help. We beseech you on behalf of your love for your continent, your people, your families, and above all your children, whom you cherish more than life itself. And for the love of God, who has granted you all the experience, wealth, and power to ably construct and organize your continent. We call upon your graciousness and solidarity to help us in Africa. Our problems are many: war, sickness, hunger, lack of education. We beseech you to excuse us for daring to write this letter to you, important people whom we truly respect. It is to you, and to you only, that we can plead our case. And if you find that we have sacrificed our lives, it is because we suffer too much in Africa. We need your help in our struggle against poverty and war. Be mindful of us in Africa. There is no one else for us to turn to. (in Gikandi, 2001: 630)
This type of ‘border-crossing’ is a world away from the melange moments of deterritorialized media use described in utopian narratives of a technologically driven ‘global village’. It presents an oblique challenge to the salience of the nation-state and affirms the dominance of the metanarrative of modernity. As Gikandi puts it: ‘[t]he boys were neither seeking cultural hybridity nor ontological difference. Their quest was for a modern life in the European sense of the word’ (2001: 630).
The horror of such quests is quite obviously elided in a relentlessly theoretical/textual discourse where migration and mixing become mere metaphors for everything, accessible to all. This is not to suggest that the letter left by the two boys (originally written in French and then translated into English and reproduced in a glossy magazine before being deployed by Gikandi in the academic arena) is somehow more representative of the ‘real’ and thus unmarked by processes of inscription and re- inscription. However, it is necessary to draw attention to the way agency-as-movement is limited (literally in this case by death) and to the way that the freedom of the market 34
and the opening up of commercial networks is matched by a tightening of control on the movement of the majority of the world’s people (Cheah, 1998: 34).
Such critiques act as a brake on the way that Chambers, for example, turns to producers of ‘world music’ and other hybrid cultural art-forms in order to “entertain the idea of homelessness” and migrancy as the “irrevocable condition of […] world culture” (1994: 82). John Hutnyk provides a dissenting view of the category of world music, examining the way it is marketed and disseminated:
The Womad festival in Reading offers the commercialisation of everything; stalls set up in a circle around the perimeter of the festival site sell a smorgasbord of multicultural fast foods (rapid ethnicities of the gullet), political persuasions […] Womad merchandise […] as well as sundry other merchandisers – often hardly distinguishable from the stalls and displays for various political causes – selling everything from oriental rugs to brass coffee pots, jewellery, candles, incense, anarcho and techno small-label recordings, and even a weird drumming puppet rhino ‘drumming up’ support to save soon-to-be-extinct species. (1998: 404)
This example demonstrates how commodity culture and the popular cultures of ‘alternative’ lifestyles intertwine with a sense of political protest. Hutnyk refers to the “double entendre, wherein space claimed for cultural expression becomes a constricted and restrained space within a wider system” (1998: 410). Or as he puts it: “[h]ybridity and difference sell; the market remains intact” (Hutnyk, 1998: 414). This, “the recurrent theme of cooption”, is a theme highlighted in numerous critiques of the way that ‘hybritidy-talk’ is globalised, nomad-ised and normalised (Hutnyk, 1998: 410).
Lo suggests this process is particularly pernicious in “eclectic postmodernism, where the term [hybridity] is emptied of all of its specific histories and politics to denote instead a concept of unbounded culture” (2000: 153). Here, hybridity is typified by the proliferation of consumables like ‘fusion cuisine’ and ‘world music’. And the notion of ‘unbounded culture’, apparent in the smorgasbord approach taken at Womad, paradoxically produces a flattening effect: “[t]oday the multiplication of differences has become repetitive to the point that diversity and difference as commodities seem to offer only more and more of the same” (Hutnyk, 1998: 401). Huggan, echoes these concerns when he identifies, referring explicitly to Migrancy, Culture and Identity, the way that Chambers fails to marry postmodern ‘travelling theory’ and post-structuralist 35
theories of displacement to a postcolonial cultural politics. He argues: “‘[m]igrancy’, finally, describes a project of conversion through which diverse histories of displacement – often highly painful to those affected – are to be assimilated to an aesthetic of pleasurable intercultural contact” (Huggan, 2001a: 121).
On the tension between political commitment and commodity culture, the critiques sketched out above, about cooption and diminishment, play the role of the homogenisation thesis in debates on the impact of globalisation. Similar counter-points can therefore be applied: Is it not simplistic, for example, to imagine that producers and consumers of ‘fusion-culture as commodity’ are simply and entirely passive victims of rapacious market forces? If postcolonial literatures, produced by either ‘national’ or ‘migrant’ authors represent a ‘reverse-current’ in global culture, then surely “to see commodity culture as necessarily compromising and/or imperialistic would be as absurd as to see all postcolonial writers/thinkers as heroic agents of liberation” (Huggan, 2001: 7). I would also argue that, paraphrasing Ashcroft, marketplace models act to force potentially disruptive literary products into commercially normative patterns, patterns that are, nonetheless, directed to the requirements of politically-driven values and needs (Ashcroft, 2001: 16).
These debates are canvassing a period during which postcolonial literary production has become increasingly defined by the presence of diasporic writers. Moreover, the institutionalisation of postcolonial theory, at this time, through the elevation of key ‘global critics,’ has provoked commentary. Dubbed ‘nomadic intellectuals’ (Asian stars in Atlanticland,’ in the title of one essay), many postcolonial critics remain suspicious of the way the postcolonial industry has taken “the name of diasporic ‘orientals’ to generate a disciplinary history resituating the circulation of scholarship around New York and England” (Sharrad, 2001: 47). If, as Elleke Boehmer observes, “[i]n the 1990s, the generic postcolonial writer [was] more likely to be a cultural traveller, or an ‘extra-territorial’, than a national” (in Huggan, 2001a: 120), then, as Rey Chow puts it: “we need to ask what it really means for any practice of writing to transcend national boundaries. Why is it such a good thing to transcend national boundaries?” (2004: 296- 7). She states:
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Is not such a transcending, which signifies a certain privilege of mobility, always part of a power structure, with those who can apparently transcend the boundaries (the ones who talk about the novel, for instance) setting the criteria for evaluation? And as is evident in the case of those who must not talk about the novel as such but about the Brazilian novel, the Egyptian novel, and so forth, the possibility of moving beyond boundaries is not exactly at everyone’s disposal. (2004: 297)
The privileging of mobility, transcendence and boundary-crossing is, as indicated above, part of the broader rejection of the nation as an adequate frame for the discussion of literary and cultural flows, a process I have situated within the intellectual heritage of the discipline. One of the important points to be drawn from Chow’s essay, is that the nation itself, as affected by migration, the legacies of (post)colonialism, the so-called ‘new global order,’ provides a level of complexity that already allows for, indeed requires, cross-cultural comparisons. However, Chow is phrasing these questions as part of a critique of the assumptions of ‘World Literature’ – a literary field with a history distinct from the one I have charted here. So to conclude this section I will turn to the critiques of ‘the postcolonial’ mounted by those who, very broadly speaking, draw on legacies of the Commonwealth and Third World approaches.
Benita Parry’s recent materialist critique of postcolonialism puts forward some of the concerns that might by shared by postcolonial critics of a Marxist/Third World persuasion, as loosely defined earlier. Parry takes particular issue with the way the nation is displaced in favour of the diasporic in recent critical theory. This move favours the already advantaged, those who can transcend boundaries: “urbane sophisticates voluntarily disconnected from their natal lands” (2004: 10). Echoing Cheah, Parry calls for the recognition of:
the import of liberation struggles conducted in the name of nationalism, an ideology and practice which prominent participants in the postcolonial discussion denigrate in the interest of valorizing hybrid, deterritorialized and diasporic forms of consciousness that are apparently uninflected and untroubled by ethnicity or class. (Parry 2004: 10)
Parry’s profound unease with the routes taken by postcolonial studies in the 1980s and 1990s is summed up in the following way:
When English and cultural studies departments took the lead in developing what was to become ‘a postcolonial critique’, the linguistic turn was in the ascendant 37
within literary theory, and cultural studies was in the process of relinquishing its materialist beginnings in pursuit of ‘an essentially textualist account of culture’ … At stake is whether the imperial project is historicized within the determining instance of capitalism’s global trajectory, or uprooted from its material ground and resituated as a cultural phenomenon whose intelligibility and functioning can be recuperated from tendentious readings of texts. (Parry, 2004: 4; 8)
The somewhat reductive critique often levelled at ‘the linguistic turn’ and the ‘cultural turn,’ suggests that there is little to gain from thinking in terms of disunity (split subjectivities, decentred narratives, deconstructive reading practices) and absence (rather than presence – ‘the death of the author’, ‘the loss of the real’) when faced with the complexities of real-world politics. For materialists like Parry, abstract theory leaves little room for the formation of fixed political positions from which to act. Indeed, Bhabha explicitly resists the ‘politics of polarity’, between a traditional right and left, and across the theorist/activist divide in his concern to discern a “politics of the theoretical statement” and, correspondingly, the textuality of the political subject as “a discursive event” (1994: 22, 23). Radhakrishnan also puts questions of representation at the heart of his discussions on the ethics of politics as such, both for minorities within nation-states and across the global divide. He suggests that the “dilemma then is not between two pure identities (western or indigenous) but between two different narratives and their intended teleologies” (1993: 758). For Parry, it is precisely the shift from a macro-view of actual social conditions to issues of language, discourse and textuality that rankles.
The recent perspectives of some of those who trod the earlier ‘Anglo/Commonwealth path’ during the emergence of postcolonial studies perform a similar but differently inflected critique of the trajectory the discipline has taken. As with the materialist position sketched out above, these critics track the shift in the postcolonial to the ‘essentially philosophical concerns’ of Euro-American theory; however they focus on the affects of this move on the role and fate of the postcolonial literary text itself (Griffiths, 1996: 167). For example, Tiffin suggests that the ‘Anglo-conservative’ nature of the ‘literary texts studied or used as illustrative material’ in post-structuralist writing results in a ‘revivification of the English canon’ (1996: 156). Similarly, Griffiths details how ‘the invasion of the study of postcolonial writings by theory’ works to diminish the quantity and diversity of post-colonial texts made available to readers; as he points out, Rushdie is celebrated, in part, because his form favours post-structuralist/post-modern 38
analysis (1996: 171).19 So there is a general discontent with the way the complex socio- cultural context of post-colony itself is sublimated by theories that focus on the cultural transformation taking place in the ‘global’, western metropolis.
Griffiths also aims a more specific critique at the debates going on within the US/Minority/Third World strand. He suggests that the popular dispute, between those who prefer ‘post-structuralist-inspired’ methodologies and those with a Marxist base, continues to maintain a trans-Atlantic orbit and marginalize the literatures of other places (Griffiths 1996: 171). Griffiths comments on the exchange between Jameson and Ahmad over the terms of the Third World, discussed earlier, to illustrate this trend. He is sympathetic to the latter’s rejection of national allegory as the only framework for reading Third World literary texts, and also commends Ahmad for detailing cultural complexity when deploying one of many examples, Urdu texts, in his response to Jameson. However, Griffiths suggests that Ahmad’s own analysis is severely restricted because the “dispute takes precedence over the recuperation of the Urdu texts he discusses” which become merely “ammunition in this essentially Euro-American critical debate” (1996: 171-172).
The multiple schisms over issues of methodology were part of the increased academic activity that took place as a new discipline reaped the benefits of institutional validity. As previously indicated: “[c]ritiques of postcolonialism, after all, add to the currency of postcolonial discourse: hence the paradox that postcolonial studies prospers even as its methods are called into question” (Huggan, 2001: 3). More specifically, the various critiques outlined above suggest that reigning theoretical paradigms have led to the loss of the ‘real’. Parry argues that the postcolonial project has been “uprooted from its material ground”, losing its political edge in the privileging of diasporic weightlessness (2004: 8). In his focus on ‘recuperation,’ Griffiths also implies that the actual socio- cultural and literary space of the post-colony is undercut by diaspora. Both critics share a discomfort with the way literature is used instrumentally and ‘tendentiously,’ thus denying any intrinsic value to the text itself, beyond being something to be recovered, contested, or abandoned. A useful summary of this position can be found in Reda Bensmaia’s comments “on the reductive tendencies in the Western reception of Maghrebi literature” (in Chow, 2004: 297). Bensmaia observes:
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Whenever these novels were studied, they were almost invariably reduced to anthropological or cultural case studies. Their literariness was rarely taken seriously. And once they were finally integrated into the deconstructed canon of world literature, they were made to serve as tools for political or ideological agendas. This kind of reading resulted more often than not in their being reduced to mere signifiers of other signifiers, with a total disregard for what makes them literary works in and of themselves. (in Chow 2004: 297)
These comments circle back to the questions on the comodification of cultural difference and the flattening effects of apparently global categories – world music, world literature. I would certainly agree that the literariness and cultural complexity of postcolonial texts may be overlooked and/or redirected by the ideological agendas and totalising theories sparked by the debates on postcolonial theory. One of the larger questions that needs asking, however, is why ‘theory’ as such, is seen as inimical to literary or political realities of former colonies/Third World arenas. I would contest the claim that metropolitan theory ‘re-colonises’ the East, as this reinforces the dubious notion that cosmopolitanism and globalization are First and only ‘Euro-American’ concerns.
Conclusion
It is clear that the clash over the utility, scope, purpose and practice of postcolonialism has been complex, heated and lengthy. At points it seems to boil down to sub- disciplinary turf-wars in which ‘the text’, ‘the city’, ‘the migrant’, ‘the media’ is either needlessly reified or rejected outright. The apparent schism, between materialists, those who seek to make sense of ‘the facts on the ground’, and those that focus on the social dynamics of symbolism through an examination of literary/cultural artefacts, is particularly reductive. However, a salutary consequence of the persistent refinement of the field during these debates has been that any definition of what postcolonialism does continues to functions as a provisional, working set of terms. This is what keeps the field critically alive. I would also argue that postcolonialism seeks to understand cultural production and praxis in concert with the socio-political imperatives which both enable and impede the consolidation of old ‘facts’ and artefacts alongside the emergence of new forms, in (or in relation to) areas of the world that have been traditionally ignored. Indeed, a significant benefit of the kind of approach imposed upon 40
postcolonial studies by its various practitioners-critics is that text and context have to be seen as mutually interdependent.
In writing this review with ‘South Asian-Australian’ fiction in mind, I have presented the rise of postcolonialism in a manner to deliberately emphasise the emergence of diaspora and trans-nationalism as influential categories within the discipline. Keeping questions of power in focus, I would agree with those critics that see the local, national and global as intertwined. Certainly, analysis of the literatures of regions like ‘South Asia,’ or into the seemingly singular ‘national’ literatures of countries affected by the legacy of colonialism, like Australia, inevitably incorporate cross-cultural, transnational points of reference. Taking a so-called ‘minority’ path, ‘South Asian-Australian’ narrows the frame whilst sparking off further questions. In the next review I will examine the paradigms of diaspora theory, considering the models they offer for literary analysis and the specific dynamics they add to the broader postcolonial debate.
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Literature Review II: On (South Asian) Diasporic Dynamics
[Diaspora] involves dwelling, maintaining communities, having collective homes away from home […] Diaspora discourse articulates, or bends together both roots and routes to construct what Gilroy (1987) describes as alternate public spheres, forms of consciousness and solidarity that maintain identifications outside the national time/space in order to live inside, with a difference. (James Clifford, 1997: 251)
The context of the diaspora has the capacity to exacerbate the disharmony between utopian realities available exclusively through theory and agential predicaments experienced in history. (R. Radhakrishnan, 1993: 763)
Introduction
South Asia refers to an area consisting of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, the Maldives, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Yet the deceptive concreteness of these national names belies the multiplicity of religious, regional, linguistic, political, gender, caste and class-based identifications which criss-cross and overspill the boundaries of nation- states. Indeed, the arbitrariness and impermanence of geographical borderlines is made powerfully apparent in the South Asian context, not only by annexations and partitions but by the imagining of several unrealised homelands: Kashmir, Khalistan, Eelam, Nagaland. Any theory taking ‘South Asia’ as a point of departure has to contend with multiple, often conflictual, histories and futurities. Whilst the heterogeneity of affiliations (and disaffiliations) within and between South Asian locations, and thus within South Asian diasporas, cannot be overemphasised, diasporas are not simply smaller versions of the places they have left. The a priori features of diasporic formations – multi-directional dispersal over great distances, long-residency and a sense of critical mass – indicate that the particular routes taken and the specificities of the way places are lived in, are perhaps more crucial to understanding the characteristics of any diaspora than a conceptual topography of origins (Clifford, 1997: 250).
In order to contribute to my ongoing project to develop a set of critical criteria appropriate to the study of ‘South Asian-Australian’ fiction, this review explores the conceptualising of diaspora, conducts a detailed assessment of theories relating to South 42
Asian diasporic formations, and considers the way certain schemata are applied to literature. I will also begin to indicate where Australia might fit into models of South Asian diasporas and the ways in which discourses of diaspora cross with those of multiculturalism. As it would be futile to attempt to cover the wealth of material produced on the subject of diaspora in general, and even on South Asian diasporas in particular, I focus primarily on the work of three critics. Vijay Mishra’s seminal and thought provoking ‘The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorizing the Indian Diaspora” (1996), and his later ‘Diasporas and the Art of Impossible Mourning’ (2001), form the bedrock to this review. Mishra takes a ‘global view,’ a historical and psychoanalytic approach to his analysis of ‘old’ and ‘new’ diasporas. Mishra’s formulations are built on and overturned by Makarand Paranjape and Monika Fludernik and their interpretations of a particular ‘ancestral homeland’ (India) and a particular host-nation (America) provide an interesting contrast. They also offer a theory (Paranjape) and a set of criteria (Fludernik) for reading South Asian diasporic fiction. In comparing these models I address interrelated tensions, grouped very broadly under issues of class positioning, the dialectic of tradition and assimilation, and the notion of ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ homelands.20
Defining the cultural characteristics of a diaspora requires attention to the typical and distinctive behaviours which propel the formation of the ‘alternate public spheres’ that Clifford, following Gilroy, affirms as a ‘home’ for diaspora (see epigraph above). It should be noted at the outset that cultural characteristics are always dynamic; a set of practices that are always unfinished, continuously changing, consensual at one moment, from one perspective contested at another, from another. For, in its most abstract sense, diaspora refers to a process: a process of identifying elsewhere/outside in order to be here/inside, where being here also shapes the tenor of identifications elsewhere. In Clifford’s view of this process, ‘here’ refers to the sphere of community within the ‘host’ nation-state (which for the second-generation and beyond may mean the place of birth) and ‘elsewhere’ includes prior homelands, diasporas in other places, and a sense of the world as an inhabited space. In this way, a diasporic ‘sphere’ may become as diminutive as a bubble and as large as the globe.
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Beginnings…and other departures
The range of work completed under the banner of diaspora studies, or transnational studies or transcultural studies is growing apace, supported by conferences, special issues and journals like Public Culture and Diaspora (Walsh, 2003). Accompanying this growth are two broad, contrary responses to diaspora theory that should be signalled at the outset and which correspond to the image of a diasporic sphere as either bubble or globe. On the one hand, diaspora theory has been rebuked for romanticising discrepant, often painful, experiences of relocation in order to promote a rootless cosmopolitanism as the ‘ideal condition’ to which all should aspire. This strand of critique (diaspora as globe) is bound up with debates on globalisation, misgivings about the utility of ‘happy hybridity’ and the metaphorical use of ‘migrancy’ (see previous literature review). A major concern is that ‘nomadic intellectuals’ may have constructed a false affinity between their own rarefied ‘lifeways’ and life as lived by the vast majority of migrant peoples.21 On the other hand, focusing on the world-view of minority communities leaves diaspora theory susceptible to all the afflictions of a theoretical ghetto: insularity, ethnic reification and essentialism, separatism and so on. This strand of critique (diaspora as bubble) is linked to a growing suspicion that ‘identity politics’ are inadequate to effect wide-ranging social change.22
I have simplified and somewhat exaggerated responses to diaspora theory in order to illustrate that the salutary warnings they contain – beware of utopian universalism, beware of dystopian parochialism – pull in different directions. This is not simply a theoretical matter of point and counter-point: ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ and ‘ghetto’ have a particular historical resonance to the Jewish diaspora which should be recalled when attending to the broader applications of such terms.23 In this way, the critique of theory is also a sign of how immigration and diasporic formations are interpreted. Thus, the tension between cosmopolitan/ghetto also emerges in contemporary public debate on multiculturalism, where the figure of the immigrant is alternately perceived as a locus of cultural diversity, enriching the nation-state, and a bastion of inimical cultural difference, threatening the nation-state.24 Following Ghassan Hage’s observation that an emphasis on multicultural ‘tolerance’ is built on our capacity to be intolerant, it is possible to argue that the negative connotations of the word ‘ghetto’ are, paradoxically, 44
as much to do with the long history of anti-Semitism as they are to do with the post- Holocaust repudiation of racism.
The term ‘diaspora’ (from the Greek diasperio) was first used from around the 3rd century BCE to refer to Jewish communities exiled from Palestine and settled in other lands (Braziel and Mannur 2003: 1).25 ‘Diaspora’ itself has been widely disseminated in recent times and may now be used to describe the situation of any transnationally displaced community. Nonetheless, the Jewish experience continues to be a paradigmatic point of reference for diaspora studies. This is partly the result of historical precedence, largely due to the impact of the Holocaust, which remains a most emotive sign of the vulnerability of diasporas to the excesses of nationalism, and also because of the influence of one particular article. In the lead article of the inaugural issue of the journal Diaspora (drawing attention to moments of academic precedence), William Safran defines the main features of diaspora and takes the Jewish experience as an ‘ideal type’. His schema has been widely reproduced over the years.26 Clifford summarises:
[Safran] defines diasporas as follows: “expatriate minority communities” (1) that are dispersed from an original “centre” to at least two “peripheral” places; (2) that maintain a “memory, vision, or myth about their original homeland”; (3) that “believe they are not –and perhaps cannot be– fully accepted by their host country”; (4) that see the ancestral home as a place of eventual return, when the time is right; (5) that are committed to the maintenance or restoration of this homeland; and (6) whose consciousness and solidarity as a group are “importantly defined” by this continuing relationship with the homeland (1997: 247)
Safran places great weight on the role of the homeland as a singular point of origin and centring force in diaspora: four of his six categories are to do with the diaspora’s attachments and obligations to the homeland. The trajectory of origin, dispersal, restoration and return apparent in Safran’s model of diaspora is clearly linked to the ethos of the Zionist movement (established in 1897) which realised its aims in 1948 with the foundation of the state of Israel. In this way the Jewish diaspora is atypical, in that no other diaspora has founded a modern nation-state. Yet the desire that Safran speaks of, the futurity of ‘eventual’ restoration/return, is perhaps a longing experienced by other displaced groups. Certainly, some ‘separatist’ movements within South Asia – the aforementioned series of ‘imagined communities’ waiting to be realised – are supported by members of South Asian diasporas (Anderson, 2000: 73). If as Benedict 45
Anderson, quoting Lord Acton, suggests, “exile is the nursery of nationality”, then diasporas may be as vulnerable to their own nationalist dreams/nightmares as they are to those of others (2000: 59).
Safran applies his schemata to a number of displaced groups so as to determine how closely they align to the ‘ideal type’ of the original Jewish diaspora (1991: 83-84). Several critics, finding this method too restrictive, have expanded or abandoned fixed criteria for defining diaspora (Tololyan, 1996, Cohen, 1997, Clifford, 1997). Cohen prefers to describe distinct modes of diaspora: victim, labour, trade, imperial and cultural, recognising that any one group may simultaneously dwell in and/or travel through multiple modes of diaspora in the course of its history (1997: xi). Alison Broinowski declines to use the term ‘diaspora’ at all, in her discussion of Asian- Australian literatures, because of its close association to the “dispersal of the tribes of Israel” (2003, 250 n.5). Broinowski utilises the term ‘hegira’ instead, an unconventional and rather baffling choice given her stated reluctance since this term derives from the Arabic word Hijra and refers to the Prophet Muhammad’s departure from Mecca to Medina in AD 622.
Without simply substituting terms, it is necessary to recognise that diasporas engage in overlapping, mixed and partial influences, attachments and obligations that are not always or entirely fixated on a singular homeland. As Clifford puts it: “[d]ecentered, lateral connections may be as important as those formed around a teleology of origin/return” (1997: 250). Paul Gilroy’s work on the ‘Black Atlantic’ (1993) offers a good example of decentred diaspora theory. Gilroy writes of the way in which routes encompass roots as a sense of shared history rather than origins: ‘It Ain’t Where You’re From, It’s Where You’re At’, a phrase from the title to another of his works, sums up this sentiment well (1991). In a similar manner, South Asian diasporas may be more inclined to refashion cultural dynamics, “orientated not so much to roots in a specific place and a desire for return as around an ability to recreate a culture in diverse locations” (Clifford 1997: 249).27 This is as true of the Jewish diaspora. “Jewish ‘homelands’, for instance, were constantly being re-created: in Babylon, in the Rhineland, in Spain, in Poland and even in America with varying degrees of autonomy” (Mishra, 1996: 423).
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Indeed, the most effective responses to Safran’s preoccupation with the homeland (as only Israel/ Palestine/Judaea) are not those that demonstrate how other transnational communities differ from the ‘ideal type’ but those that put forward significant variations on ‘the Jewish experience’ of diaspora. In an often cited article, ‘Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity’ (1993), Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin destabilise the interrelation between homeland, ethnic-identity and return. They designate a notion of Jewish cultural ancestry “that recuperates its genealogical moment – family, history, memory and practice” whilst rejecting an identity-formation based on autochthony and territorialism: the ‘ethnic’ base to diaspora is retained but only when the notion of hegemony over an ancestral homeland is jettisoned (103).28 In light of the two critiques mentioned earlier, their article certainly takes deterritorialized diaspora as the ‘exemplary’ condition of our times (Mishra 2001: 25) and is seen to make ‘provocative and postmodernist’ claims (Safran, 2005: 58n.22). By rejecting Jewish territory for cultural specificity, however, the authors also propose a type of ‘strategic essentialism’, in that they affirm ethnicity in order to intervene in the politics of Zionism.
John Docker takes an entirely different approach to achieve a similar end. Offering a broad view, he explores the transcultural histories of the Sephardim so as to destabilise the narrative of “a single Jewish experience” based on cohesive ethnic identity: “where all Jews are defined as closer to each other than to the cultures of which they have been or are a part; a mode of representation which denies overlapping or hyphenated identities, especially that of Arab-Jews or Jewish Arabs” (Docker, 2001: 210). Taking a very localised approach, Docker also details how aspects of his own family history are misconstrued in official historiographies, rejecting the projection of what he calls ‘ethnic history’ in Australia, which often recreates migration “as a narrative of progress, achievement, triumph” (2001: 171). By way of contrast to the singular, homogenous narrative, Docker signals the tenuousness and multivalency of “growing up a Communist-Irish-Anglophilic-Jew in Bondi” (2001: 171-173; 187 n5). This type of approach to diaspora theory requires critics to remain attentive to the fracture lines, disagreements and contradictions that feature in any community, to consider definitions of diaspora that do not depend on the solidity of consensus and solidarity. In addition, the sense of historical complexity that Docker evokes offers an alternative ‘beginning’ for modelling South Asian diasporas.
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A long historical view of South Asian diasporas would mention the cultural exchange that flourished along Indian Ocean trade-routes for many centuries prior to European expansion. Connections to Persia, the Levant and Moorish Spain enabled the formation of now long-established minority groups within India, such as the ancient Jewish community of Cochin and the Parsis (or Parsees) who fled persecution in the seventh and eighth-centuries.29 Many Parsis made an additional journey some ten centuries later, migrating to Bombay after it came under British rule in 1661; this route was travelled for roughly two hundred years until, in Nilufer E. Bharucha’s estimation, over seventy percent of this relatively small community came to reside in the one city (1995: 59). Several contemporary literary works make reference to the hyphenated communities produced by these histories of movement. Rohinton Mistry and Bapsi Sidhwa, prominent fiction writers based in Canada and America respectively, both detail how aspects of Zoroastrianism are produced in the lives of Parsis within and beyond India. Texts that draw on Jewish-Indian histories include a recent memoir by American-born Carmit Delman, Burnt Bread and Chutney: Growing Up Between Cultures (2003) and a collection of interconnected short stories, The Eye of Paradise (1998), by Moses Aaron who migrated from India to Australia as a young child in 1952.
I have paused to mention these particular journeys, writers and texts because most literary models of South Asian diasporas begin with the modern migrations propelled by British colonialism and therefore occlude the long history of diaspora across other axes.30 As a partial corrective then, I would suggest that South Asia is a ‘host’ as well as a ‘homeland’, part of the route that diasporas take and the space in which communities establish and cultivate roots, sometimes over centuries. The example of writers who migrate from cultural minorities within South Asian nation-states suggest it is possible to be already ‘dwelling-in-travel’ prior to arriving in Canada, America and Australia (in the case of those mentioned above). Theories of South Asian diasporas should not only imply a trajectory of travel away from a singular-ethnic past to a multicultural present/future. Sidhwa disturbs this neat linearity when remarking on her access to “a whole medley of identities”, she states: “I would describe myself as a Punjabi-Pakistani- Parsi woman, because all three societies influenced me” (2000: online). Like Docker, Sidhwa illustrates that it is possible to claim and be claimed by overlapping diasporas. Jewish-Indian narratives could be particularly illustrative in this light, given the 48
contested primacy of Jewish experiences in diaspora theory and the more recent critical spotlighting of South Asian transnational communities.
Facts and Fictions: Delineating South Asian Diasporas
So far I have highlighted decentred connections, dissenting voices and alternative beginnings in order to circumvent models that are reductive and limit the variety of actual diaspora experiences. This is not simply to affirm the heterogeneity of the ‘real’ over the mythic force of a ‘collective imaginary’; rather I would emphasise their necessary collusion. As Vijay Mishra puts it:
We need to keep the Palestinian situation in mind in any theorization of diasporas even as we use the typology of the Jewish diaspora to situate and critique the imaginary construction of a homeland as the central mythomoteur of diaspora histories […] To address [the] real […] does not mean that the discourses that have been part of diaspora mythology (homeland, ancient past, return and so on) will disappear overnight. (1996: 425-426)
Mishra divides the Indian diaspora into two stages of dispersal, the “old (‘exclusive’) and the new (‘border’) Indian diasporas” (1996: 422). The first stage formed under the conditions of “classic capitalism” when, between the 1830s and 1917, the British Empire facilitated the emigration of approximately one million indentured labourers to sugar plantations around the world.31 This system was designed to fill a labour-shortage created by the recent abolition of slavery.32 Therefore, the changing nature of global labour-relations at this historical juncture, as well as the “collective drama” of the long sea-journey and bonds forged in jahaji bhai (ship-brotherhood), of disembarkation, quarantine, plantation-work, segregation, regulation and systemic exploitation, provides a link between ‘old’ Indian diaspora and those diasporas produced across the ‘Black Atlantic’ (1996: 429). Mishra also sees a general correspondence between the ‘old’ Indian diaspora and Safran’s ‘normative’ description of the Jewish experience (1996: 427). It is the recollection of a collective trauma then, in terms of coercion and/or persecution, that provides the common feature applicable to each of these groups – Mishra claims that Indian labourers were often ‘tricked’ or lured into departure by the ‘false promises’ made by Indian recruiters who were “complicit functionaries of the Raj” (1996: 429).
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However, the level of duress or the ‘indenture-as-slavery’ thesis has been debated in historical scholarship.33 Many of the ‘old’ Indian diaspora would have departed willingly for it was after all, only a limited exile with the promise of a return passage to India following “ten years of ‘industrial residence’ in the colonies” (Lal, 2000: 42). With respect to the role of the recruiters in particular, some argue “there was deception […] but its magnitude has probably been overstated” (Lal, 2000: 85). This is Mishra’s point too: he refers to the way that stories of deception have been magnified over time to become “part of the narrative of a lost homeland” (1996: 429 and 445 n.31). Facts and fictions bleed into each other in collective memory. To offer another example, the sense of ‘the ancestral home as a place of return, when the time is right’ (an important feature of Safran’s model) is not entirely applicable to the case of the ‘old’ Indian diaspora, since when the time came, the majority of labourers did not in fact make the journey back.34 Mishra names V. S. Naipaul “the founder of a creative discourse for the Indian diaspora of exclusiveness” (1996: 431). He takes a passage from A House For Mr Biswas (1961) to illustrate the ‘old’ diaspora’s sense of ambivalent seclusion:
[…] there was already the evening assembly of old men […]They could not speak English and were not interested in the land where they lived; it was a place they had come to for a short while and stayed longer than they expected. They continually talked of going back to India, but when the opportunity came, many refused, afraid of the unknown, afraid to leave the familiar temporariness. (Naipaul in Mishra, 1996: 421)
Indenture created “diasporas of exclusivism” because small communities were divorced from the homeland and presumably, often segregated in the host-land in a manner that required the self-contained reconstruction of Indian social life (1996: 422). The invented sense of cultural continuity, fashioned through transplanted Indian icons and practices, made the precarious, provisional nature of life in the ‘old’ diaspora bearable. Mishra argues that “spatial displacement” and the “capacity for re-spatialization” did not result in a complete erasure of India even when localised, necessarily hybridised, symbols overtook those of the homeland (1996: 431-432). Rather it produced a paradox, a state where “everything ha[d] to be re-imaged through concepts of purity” (1996: 432). Myths of purity and exclusivity, the steadfast refusal of “contamination and hybridity” were directed against the actual facts of intense creolisation and cultural transformation that evolved in the sugar colonies over generations (1996: 432; 430).
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The second stage of dispersal in Mishra’s model takes place during the mid- to late twentieth-century, under the conditions of advanced capital, with destinations in “the metropolitan centres of the Empire, the New World and the former settler colonies” (1996: 421). This stage is perceived as more complex and diffuse than the ‘old’ since it is not the effect of a singular system (1996: 432). However, the procedures of late- capital are considered systemic, constructing and containing the sense of hyper-mobility that is integral to the ‘cultural logic’ of the ‘new’ Indian diaspora. Terms like ‘flexible citizenship’ (Ong, 1999) and ‘permanent transit’ (Fludernik, 2003) have been used by others to link the discourses of transnational corporations to the identity-constructions of multiple-passport holders. The new fruits of modernity are also central to Mishra’s historical distinction between the two diasporas in so much as they allow members of the ‘new’ diaspora to stay-in-touch with the homeland more readily than the ‘old’. Mishra observes:
In the works of Bharati Mukherjee and Hanif Kureshi the schismatic break with India of the old diaspora is replaced by the idea of a homeland that is always present visibly and aurally (through video cassettes, films, tapes and CDs). The old diaspora broke off contact – few descendents of labourers know their distant cousins back in India – the new incorporates India into its bordered, deterritorialized experiences within Western nation states. (1996: 434)
Mishra focuses on “the hyphen itself” as the most potent metaphor for the experience of the ‘new’ diaspora, particularly for those born/raised in Western nation-states (1996: 432-433). The dynamic of the hyphen signals “the problematic situating of the self as simultaneously belonging ‘here’ and ‘there’” (1996: 433). As such, the increased access to the physical space of the (ancestral) homeland made possible by air-travel, along with the way trends and traditions are made available through media imports, is just one part of the hyphenated equation. The other axis requires the ‘new’ diaspora itself to become present, visibly and aurally, in the space of the host-nation. The plethora of fiction, film and music by ‘new’ diaspora artists is one sign of this contemporary visibility.35 Several critics taking a sociological view of South Asian diasporas have commented on the way possibilities for ‘cultural confidence’ and self-assertion are created through the use of certain mediums in certain spaces. Rajinder K. Dudrah, for example, sees British-Asian Bhangra as participating in “the notion of announcing oneself as here and now through popular cultural expressions” (2002: 372). Internet forums and American student associations are other significant sites for identity constructions based on the 51
performativity of ‘cultural expression’. Sunaina Maira describes how Indian-American youth often engage in a ritualised process of “going back” and “‘coming out’ as ethnic subjects in college” (2002: 110; 119). Cultural affirmation, in this sense, is not about passively inheriting/maintaining tradition, rather it involves the invention of ‘roots’ as part of an active politics of presence. My analysis of South Asian-Australian fiction will explore the ‘logic of the hyphen’ in some of the sample texts.
For Mishra, the distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ Indian diasporas in terms of their mode of experience is less a radical difference and more a matter of emphasis. In the latter case: the “ground of being for diasporic subjects is not only unstable but openly contaminated”, a state where “diasporic purities can neither sustain nor redeem” (Mishra, 1996: 441; 437 my emphasis). Mishra does not present a wholly celebratory view of the ‘new’ diaspora’s mobility and hybridity, drawing attention to the structuring affect of alienation as an important part of the logic of hyphenation. Thus, the ‘new’ diaspora may keep in contact with the (ancestral) homeland through air-travel, improved communication technologies and the South Asian inspired imagery they themselves produce. However, the desire to ‘return’ to a sense of home-as-oneness requires a rejection of the hyphen which constitutes the self: “belonging [there] can only function as an imaginary index that signifies its own impossibility” (Mishra, 1996: 433). Hanif Kureshi conveys the mythic quality of this longing well:
I know Pakistanis and Indians born and brought up here [in Britain] who consider their position to be the result of diaspora: they are in exile, awaiting return to a better place, where they belong, where they are welcome. And this ‘belonging’ will be total. This will be home, and peace. (Kureshi in Mishra, 1996: 436)
So the ‘new’ diaspora, like the ‘old’, creates ‘fictitious homelands’ in order to suppress a sense of alienation. An ‘openly’ defiant hybridity may be its primary literary characteristic (as in Mishra’s reading of the contaminated/contaminative politics of Kureshi’s works). Yet this does not prevent the ‘new’ diaspora from crafting a rhetoric of ethnic absolutism through the ‘old’ “semantics of exclusivism and separatism”, particularly at moments of crisis (Mishra, 1996: 442).
Mishra locates a precise relationship between loss, longing and fictitious homelands in his ‘theory of the diasporic imaginary’ which provides an overarching fantasy-structure 52
for both forms of the Indian diaspora, and for diaspora more generally. Here, the diasporic imaginary is predicated on a desire (for totality ‘and peace’) that revolves around an a priori trauma, triggered by the loss of the homeland, which in turn generates purist/racist mythmaking. Mishra states:
the moment of ‘rupture’ is transformed into a trauma around an absence that because it cannot be fully symbolised becomes part of the fantasy itself…the ‘absence’ is a kind of repression, a sign of loss […] To be able to preserve that loss, diasporas very often construct racist fictions of purity as a kind of jouissance, a joy, a pleasure around which anti-miscegenation narratives of homelands are constructed against the reality of the homelands themselves. (Mishra, 1996: 423)
The notion of trauma is developed, in a subsequent article, through tropes of mourning, melancholia and ‘hauntology’ via the work of Derrida, Freud, Lacan and Zizek (Mishra, 2001: 29-37). Mishra believes it is essential to keep the spectres of diaspora alive, as these spectral moments have a concrete history – in the drudgery of ‘coolie life’ on plantations or in sweatshops – and in terms of specific events in different places, often based on exclusion and expulsion.36 In the diasporic imaginary, such events operate as substitutes for the foundational ‘rupture’, they heighten and crystallise, “retrospectively endow[ing] the original moment of trauma with added meaning” (Mishra, 2001: 34; 35; 37).
Mishra’s work is insightful, not least because it builds on and moves past earlier theories of diaspora. Safran, for example, emphasises the actual presence of the ancestral homeland, its continuity, and the diaspora’s continuing connection to that homeland; indeed, the “ethnocommunal consciousness and solidarity” of the dispersed group is “importantly defined in terms of the existence of such a relationship” (Safran, 2005: 37). By contrast, Mishra focuses on absence and discontinuity, it is not the reality of the homeland itself but rather the moment of rupture/loss, the very ‘death’ of the homeland that structures the diasporic imaginary (2001: 37). It could be argued that the two approaches are more similar than not, that Mishra is speaking of an always present absence and Safran of a provisionally absent presence.37
Nonetheless, the centrality of trauma in Mishra’s work, as a unifying feature for the Indian diaspora, has been disputed by a number of critics. For instance, Brij V. Lal, a ‘South Asian Australian’ writer (and historian of the indenture period) recalls his 53
reaction to Mishra’s formulations during an interview for this thesis. Lal (re)stages the following conversation:
I was at a conference in Singapore where Vijay Mishra gave a paper and he talked about the ‘impossible mourning’ from Derrida’s idea… And I said, ‘Vijay, really?’ Vijay Mishra is a Brahmin and a literary theorist so he talks about [diaspora] in great abstract terms: ‘oh our severances, our ties to the motherland’ and all these things. ‘Vijay, that’s good. Good theory, but for a lot of people it was also liberation, mate’. He talks about ‘The Girmitya Ideology’.38 ‘Vijay, you know there are lots of ideologies. For the women, for the low-caste, for the high- caste, for the middling-caste, those who came first, those who came late’. So even within [the ‘old’ diaspora], I am conscious of differences. (interview: 09/06/2004)
As Lal argues, the psychic disturbance that may or may not accompany a potentially liberating loss is shaped by a number of forces. It is pertinent to note the way the language of psychoanalytic/post-structuralist literary theory is connected to the abstraction of high philosophical Brahmanism. Lal then stakes out his own position, as a sceptic (of literary theory), as a non-Brahmin, through the use of the word ‘mate,’ with its particular Australian inflection and the egalitarianism it connotes fully in play. Yet the opposition present in the faux-dialogue above is more a matter of deferral, and may be pruned back to the phrase: ‘Good theory, but…’.39 This then refers to one of the productive tensions within Mishra’s work, in terms of his harmonising of psychoanalytic theory with historical specificity – where the contextual, ‘agential predicaments experienced in history’ provide the exacerbating, qualifying, disruptive ‘but’ to an otherwise totalising (psycho)analytic of ‘the diasporic imaginary’ (paraphrasing R. Radhakrishnan, 1993: 763 see epigraph). My thesis will assess the balance of these terms in the particular circumstances of three groups of South Asian Australian writers: first-generation, second-generation and ‘twice-banished’ writers.
Flourishing Fragmentation: Re-reading Diasporic Facts and Fictions
Paranjape applies Mishra’s separation of ‘old’ and ‘new’ diasporas in the introduction to a collection of essays he edited, titled In Diaspora: Theories, Histories, Texts (2001). Paranjape initially divides “the entire South Asian diaspora […] into two distinct phases” with the original “settler” phase applying to “forced migrations” including indentured labour, and the contemporary, “visitor” phase, which encompasses “the voluntary migrations of businessmen and professionals who went abroad in search of 54
fortune” (2001: 8 emphasis added). However, by re-attuning the historical phasing to the issue of force and free choice, and focusing on the role of writers rather than the diversity of communities, Paranjape ultimately considers the blurring and merging of the two diasporas. A ‘second crossing’ takes the “literature producing elite” from original diaspora locations (old plantation colonies) to join others who arrive direct from South Asia in Western metropolitan centres: the once- and twice-displaced literati share the same “economic and cultural privileges” and are “ideologically” akin (Paranjape, 2001: 12). The penetration of globalisation results in another type of contemporary closeness, as the ‘old’ diaspora are no longer so cut off from the world. These processes do not completely override the differences between writers who focus on the original diaspora and those who detail its most recent manifestations, rather Paranjape comments on moments of superimposition and complex patterns of layering. V. S. Naipaul’s work is read as the fruition of his father’s thwarted literary ambitions and for Paranjape, this provides a metaphor of the relationship between the two diasporas, in which the “subordinate culture of the old diaspora can only be recognized if it reinvents itself in the image of the dominant culture of the metropolis” (2001: 10).
Focusing on free-choice also leads Paranjape to question whether trauma is applicable to the ‘new’ diaspora. He states: “I no longer believe that being a diasporan is necessarily to be in an anguished state […] we might actually be witnessing the birth of a new global Indian identity that is as comfortable in New Delhi as it is in New York” (Paranjape, 2001: vi). The ease of comfort this new global identity implies is a significant factor in Paranjape’s interpretation of the dominant logic of the ‘new’ diaspora vis-à-vis the homeland. He argues the non-traumatic relocations provoke a sense of ‘guilt’ towards the homeland. This anxiety (rather than angst) then results in ‘self-validating’ diasporic fictions which are designed to justify why the homeland must be escaped. What Paranjape perceives as the “decomposition of India” present in diasporic texts is “an outcome of the new diasporic consciousness which, because it lacks internal coherence, cannot see any cohesion in the object that it describes” (Paranjape, 2001: 11).
Global identities are also invoked in the introduction to Away: The Indian Writer as an Expatriate (2003), edited by Amitava Kumar. In contrast to Paranjape, Kumar suggests that the foregrounding of hybridity in ‘new’ diasporic writing is a method of forging 55
‘internal coherence’. He comments on this paradox, where hybrid lives become the epitome of global Indianness:
diasporic writers have crafted for themselves a script which allows them to be seen as more Indian than the Indians they have left behind. The recent onslaught of books and films around the theme of ABCDs – American Born Confused Desis – does not so much present mixed-up lives. Rather, the hybrid or masala self is held up as an essentially Indian trait, a trait which the Indian abroad is able to embody, and which the rest of the Indians on the subcontinent are supposed to emulate. (Kumar, 2003: xvi)
Paranjape responds to precisely this conceit, where the (self)importance of ‘Indians abroad’ is seen to overshadow ‘Indians at home’ in an essay that forms the afterword to another edited collection, Shifting Continents/ Colliding Cultures: Diaspora Writing of the Indian Subcontinent (2000). The title of Paranjape’s essay, ‘What About Those Who Stayed Back Home? Interrogating the Privileging of Diasporic Writing’, provides a synopsis of his approach. Paranjape makes his politics of location clear: as a “resident Indian” with “no diasporic pretensions” he takes umbrage at the “false, motivated, misinformed or harmful” representations of India found in the fiction of over-privileged diasporic writers (2000: 228; 230; 235).40 However, Paranjape goes on to argue that “civilisations” not nation-states “are our true homelands” and thus the “real”, geographical India is an intrinsic symbol of a “wider, deeper, truer India of the spirit” which exceeds physical boundaries (2000: 242-243). It quickly becomes apparent that Paranjape’s polemic is addressed not so much to the diaspora itself, but to the ‘West’ that stands behind it. The diasporic-native divide is thus mapped onto a broader distinction between a rapacious set of “Western media and publishing conglomerates” attempting to crush and re-colonise (through the fiction produced by diasporic emissaries) an enduring ‘Indian spirit’ (2000: 235).
Paranjape is correct to point out that literary works are not neutral objects. To an indeterminable degree they are shaped by the activities of publishing houses and their publicity machines, the policies of funding and prize-giving organisations, the objectives of educational institutions, the opinions of reviewers and literary theorists. It is unfortunate that he reduces this complex field of interaction to the dubious notion of the ‘good/East/native’ under fire from the ‘bad/West/diasporic-coloniser’. Spiritualism/materialism, silence/noise, majority/minority, legitimate/illegitimate are 56
some of the other binaries operating throughout the essay. The way these binaries overlap with a conspicuous sense of the Indian nation/al as a Hindu (civilisation) is also notable. For example, Paranjape reasserts his claim to speak for the ‘silent majority’ of Indians muted by a few noisy truants overseas in his conclusion (2000: 244). Earlier however, he locates the clamour of contestation within the nation-state itself, observing that post-Independence “India remains a contested site” (2000: 235). This political contestation is simplified and dismissed as a matter of, “various pressure groups and vested interests fighting for their share (or more) of it, while the neo-imperial powers watch from the sidelines” (2000: 235). Is Paranjape implying then, that minorities attempting to ensure that their rights are recognised within the democratic framework of the Indian nation-state are like ‘the diasporics’? That they too are somehow culpable, ‘deconstructive’ to the national imaginary, giving leverage to the continued dominance of India by the West?
If the notion of unchecked majoritarian cultural politics is implicit in Paranjape’s account, what is most obviously missing is any reference to the Indian government’s recent attempts to court the diaspora. Legislation has recently been introduced allowing NRIs (Non-Resident Indians) and PIOs (Persons of Indian Origin) the opportunity to hold dual-nationality, and the ‘Pravasi Bharatiya Divas’ (Overseas India Day) is now an annual event taking place in a different Indian city each year. An extract from a speech at the opening ceremony of the 2004 event, published on the official website devoted to the day, stands in direct contrast to Paranjape’s proposition that diasporic representations of India are harmful to the nation. The then Prime Minister of India, Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee, is quoted as stating: “You are our ambassadors in the countries you have chosen to make home. Given your links with India and your stature in your home countries, you are in a unique position to explain what India is, and what India can be”.41 This is definitely not a ‘South Asia-inclusive’ approach to the diaspora, as comments on the UK situation in another report make clear:
Indians are considered a disciplined and model community with the lowest crime rates among all emigrant groups, in marked contrast to the Pakistani community […] their distinct profile as compared to other, less successful and less industrious ethnic communities have guaranteed that old stereotypes about India have faded to be replaced by a new image of India as a dynamic nation. (Singhvi, 2000: online) 42
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The ‘old stereotypes’ are replaced with new ones, based on the Indian diaspora’s ‘model minority’ status vis-à-vis the national enemy. The notion of the ‘real’ India, as a masala of dynamism, spiritualism and exploitation-remedied-by-socialism, is also at work in the way Indian tourism agencies elicit diaspora dollars. As Maira observes:
Travel agencies that target affluent diasporic Indians and their children package and commodify the cultural authenticity recovered through the rite of “going back.” Johanna Lessinger notes, “Tourist agencies in India now use the Indian immigrant press to promote the educational value of family travel to the country’s historic sites, nature preserves and great temples” (1995, p. 56). […] Travel packages now include “off-beat” destinations of special interest to returning immigrants; the socially and politically aware can arrange tours to study the exploitation of women in carpet factories, while Guyanese and Trinidadian Indians are offered visits to Hindu pilgrimage sites. (Maira, 2002: 111-112)
Obviously, the celebratory perspective of the Indian government and the more pragmatic approach taken by the tourism industry are no less partial than Paranjape’s aggrieved point of view, and they support his assumption that the Indian diaspora is a privileged group. What this small detour does illustrate, however, is the way a variety of ‘cultural’ agencies (not just Western publishing outlets) seek to imagine, attract, service and define the diaspora for their own purposes – and that the ‘civilisational’ spiritualism of India is a lucrative part of the overall package. Of course, diasporic fiction does not operate in the way that governmental agencies might want it to – explaining to the world what a nation is and can be in a patently positive manner – and this is an insight to be drawn from Paranjape’s general analysis though it is somewhat submerged in his more obviously polemic pieces. It is worth considering Paranjape’s proposal that the driving impulse of diasporic fiction is to move away from the (original/ancestral) homeland and towards a sense of belonging in the new place of abode, where the apparent concern with Indian locations forms part of an elaborate, elegiac leave- taking.43 The debate between ‘resident’ writers and ‘the diasporics’ over the right to represent the (former) homeland, and the issues of authenticity it throws up, will be considered in this thesis.
Fludernik is less concerned with the relationship between South Asian diasporas and their ‘original’ homelands and she provides a model which is firmly located in the American milieu. Like Paranjape, Fludernik focuses on privileged relocations and responds directly to Mishra’s separation of the diaspora into two stages.44 However, 58
unlike Paranjape who largely conflates the categories upwards – bringing select members of the ‘old’ into the dominating logic of the ‘new’ – Fludernik proposes a downward merger in order to separate out a third form of diaspora. Thus, Fludernik sees the second stage of diaspora as a continuation of the dispersal of labour across the globe, just indenture under another name operating through the logic of late-capital. For Fludernik, the “really different, new diaspora” is based on a distinction of social class: she contrasts the simultaneous migration of ‘proletarian’ groups with the migration of professionals to “Anglophone industrial nations” (2003: xiii). This new category is then defended on the basis that the professional group “is the type of diaspora represented in most recent South Asian fiction and which mirrors the personal background of many expatriate Indian writers” (Fludernik, 2003: xiii).
An interpretation of the goals and requirements of American pluralism structures Fludernik’s conceptual definition of diaspora. She comments on a shift from ‘individualism’ to ‘communitarianism’ in the American context, summing up this shift as a stage beyond hybridity:
Diaspora consciousness belongs to a stage beyond hybridity, to what is now frequently called ‘identity politics’. This development is also one […] from American citizens’ understanding of themselves as unique individuals possessing rights and obligations to a newer conception of the self as situated within an ethnic and cultural community to which one belongs. This new type of (collective) identity therefore relies on a politics of difference, since the identity in question can arise only from a differentiation between groups, each vying for attention on the stage of American politics. (2003: xviii)
By foregrounding the non-traumatic dispersal of South Asian professionals, Fludernik aims to extricate diaspora from its association with “notions of victimhood” (2003: xiv). In doing so she implies the category of ‘diaspora’ is most appropriate for economically advantaged groups. However, according to Fludernik: “[a]s soon as this self- congratulatory label was first applied to immigrants from Asia, it also started to be used for African Americans and Hispanics, and immediately veered towards a reading of the diaspora as exile, exploitation and discrimination” (2003: xxi). This, for Fludernik, explains why “the hitherto readily forgotten history of indentured-labour settlements” is emphasised in theoretical models of the South Asian diaspora: it provides “a means of highlighting the community’s victim-status” (2003: xiv). Fludernik goes on to suggest this “was all the more absurd as most South Asians in the USA did not have a personal 59
family history of indenture but merely absorbed this background via writers like V. S. Naipaul or David Dabydeen” (2003: xiv).
The Jewish diaspora, perceived as the prototypical ‘victim diaspora,’ is also the most powerful ‘model minority’ in America. Fludernik suggests that the recent switch from the language of immigration to that of diaspora is a consequence of other transnational groups wishing to emulate the “the Jewish success story – to be the same but different” (2003: xxi). She believes the South Asian American diaspora has achieved this status within one generation of arrival, due to their educational and professional qualifications. Therefore, those “who belong to a cultural elite in their country of origin” also become part of a new ‘model minority’ in the host nation-state (2003: xiii). Fludernik observes:
(South) Asian Americans – despite being visible minorities within the USA and Canada – became ‘white’ in terms of their fast assimilation process and thereby repeated the much slower success of Irish and Jewish immigrants earlier in the twentieth century, while getting ahead of the non-immigrant minorities of Native Americans and African Americans as well as the recent arrivals of Hispanic, African and East Asian groups. (2003a: 262)
This transcultural assessment (African Americans are positioned as ‘non-immigrant’ in terms of their ‘non-voluntary’ dispersal) is complemented by a cross-national comparison, where Fludernik claims South Asians have “a greater chance of flourishing in the USA than in Great Britain” (2003a: 283). She believes this is due to “the subsumption of Indians among ‘blacks’” and also because of the greater presence of “the old diaspora” in the UK, which “with its social problems subsists” (Fludernik, 2003a: 262; 283). The analysis Fludernik provides of the American situation reveals that diasporas are always defined, and self-define, relationally – not simply in comparison to other majority/minority groupings or even across comparable ‘host’ nation-states (i.e Britain/America or Trinidad/Fiji) but according to a shifting register of ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’. Class positioning is evidently crucial to such (self)definitions. The recognition that diasporas may encompass the rich and powerful is salutary and necessary. However, the politically loaded qualities of phrases like ‘victimhood’ and ‘social problems’ remain under-theorised in Fludernik’s work.45 In fact, her emphasis on the South Asian American diaspora’s capacity to flourish seems to require the victimisation of other groups.
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The approach Fludernik takes to an analysis of South Asian diasporic fiction is far more concrete than the ‘exclusive/border’ and ‘fragmentary leave-taking’ theories offered by Mishra and Paranjape. Unlike the latter, she is fully focused on those texts that describe life as lived in the ‘host’ nation-state; the ‘original’ homeland is only present in terms of the ‘norms and traditions’ carried into the new place of abode and passed down through the generations. Therefore, Fludernik omits texts with South Asian settings from her analysis. Fludernik defines the ‘diaspora novel’ set in the ‘host’ nation-state as constituted by and submerged within four subgenres (2003a: 263). She differentiates the subgenres by way of the following chart:
(Fludernik, 2003a: 266)
The “collective identity” of the group “is at stake” in diaspora novels (2003a: 265). By contrast, the most atypical of the four categories, the ‘cosmopolitan novel’, shows characters engaging with rather than against the majority population and other minority groups and is in this way the most opposed to the diaspora novel. Fludernik explains that ‘cosmopolitan novels’ are those in which:
South Asian expatriates are portrayed as individuals (outside a diasporic community) and in which the process of assimilation either has been successfully completed or is not focused on the binaries of India vs. America/Britain. In these novels the main South Asian protagonist is frequently married to a Westerner or person from another (non-South Asian) nationality and ethnicity. (2003a: 265)
Fludernik’s theorising of diasporic communities depends on ethnic compartmentalisation and a high level of homogeneity. Correspondingly, she expects the most ‘authentic’ diaspora texts to be those that are exclusive, those that do not feature cross-cultural interaction. Thus, the flourishing ‘cultural self-sufficiency’ of the 61
South Asian American diaspora is both fostered by multiculturalism and threatened by the potential for mixture, “miscegenation and cultural hybridity” (2003a: 281).
Fludernik’s attempt to find fiction to match her theory largely fails. Fludernik comes closest to finding a “literary depiction of the South Asian diaspora” in Meera Syal’s, Life isn’t all Ha-ha Hee-Hee (1999), which she reads as “a panoramic picture of a happy diasporic community that is self-supporting and vibrant” (2003a: 279). What she does find is that “pure diaspora novels are extremely rare and most of them tend to focus on protagonists trying to break out of the ethnic and cultural fold of their expatriate community” (2003a: 266). She goes on to suggest that this prominent theme “may relate to the marketability” of such fiction (2003a: 266). So the task of the diaspora novel in Fludernik’s estimation is to represent the community to itself. However, as with Paranjape, she believes this process is interrupted by market forces and a ‘mainstream’ readership which act as a brake on the project of textual self- sufficiency:
The diaspora novel, whose claim to the reader’s interest relies on insider status, naturally speaks to the expatriate community itself; to the extent that it propagates a separatist ideology, it is therefore liable to antagonize a large number of readers. Adding a protagonist who is starting to break away supplies a figure to the text who can become a focus of empathy for the mainstream reader. (2003a: 266)
The ‘pure’ diaspora novel is unsurprisingly the least ‘popular’ (beyond the diasporic group) of the four subgenres in Fludernik’s model. All of the subgenres are outweighed by the high profile of diasporic novels set in South Asia. Her description of this ‘homeland’ literature as part of “the exoticist genre” is broadly congruent with Paranjape’s view on the preferences and values of the metropolitan literary marketplace (2003a: 261).46 But why proceed on the assumption that ‘mainstream’ readers are attracted by the exoticism of an ‘ethnic’ text, and diasporic readers to its familiarity, or that ‘mainstream’ readers may only empathise with diasporic conundrums via the viewpoint of a ‘break away’ figure? This assumption may be tested in several ways. Firstly, where does this leave other readers, those who are neither part of the Anglo- majority nor the South Asian minority? To perpetuate the idea that ‘minority’ fictions are consumed, (mis)understood and (in)validated only by ‘mainstream’ readers or ‘insiders’ of the same ethnic-type is to ignore the fact of multicultural societies. 62
Secondly, a significant English-speaking readership within South Asian nation-states might read diasporic texts as much for their evocation of an already highly mediated ‘West,’ as for depictions of the diaspora or the homeland. Finally, each and every reader is simultaneously both inside and outside of the text if we accept the notion that the purpose of literature is to ‘make the familiar strange’. Perhaps the most valuable aspect of Fludernik’s analysis is the way she points out the mismatch between rigidly defined theories of South Asian diasporas as socio-historical phenomena and diasporic literature. I will touch on issues of readership and the collective/individualist qualities of South Asian-Australian fiction over the course of this thesis.
Overview:
A feature common to each of the models of Indian/South Asian diasporas discussed above (by Mishra, Paranjape, Fludernik) is the linkage of time/space (old ‘peripheral’ islands versus new metropolitan centres) to different modes of diasporic experience. There is an obvious danger in simply equating the ‘old’ diaspora with restricted movement and the ‘new’ with freedom and advancement; this elides the agency of those who emigrated during the era of empire, as well as concealing the fact that contemporary success in Silicon Valley is supplemented by the migration of refugees.47 Thus, the general narrative offered by these models (in which the origins of the Indian/South Asian diaspora are situated in the subalternity of indenture, but its futures take place in a elite world of border-crossings) displays a rags-to-riches linearity that belies the heterogeneity of the diaspora at all stages in its history. Instead of the ‘radical historical break’ between ‘old’ and ‘new’ forms, or the separation of proletarian from professional diasporas, I would argue that migration to-and-from South Asia should be seen as a constant but incoherent process, where fluctuations in intensity, and particular trajectories, are the result of a potentially infinite number of socio-historical catalysts. Taking this point further, I would agree with Docker that diaspora theory is only useful when “it suggests that we can’t universalize and totalize, that each and every diaspora journey is individual, particular, distinctive” (Docker, 2001: 249).
It is not enough, however, to simply advocate illimitable multiplicity; the motivations that drive the need for categorical definitions deserve consideration. So much has been written on the concept of diaspora in general, and on South Asian minority groups in 63
particular, that it is common for each critic to respond, as I am doing, to the perceived shortfalls and predispositions accreted within an archive of theory. The very proliferation of theory-making leads Stathis Gourgouris to speak of a “generalized process of autonomous conceptualisation” in which diaspora is disjoined from its social and historical referents (2002: online).48 Mishra’s work clearly stands in opposition to this trend. He defends his proposition of a “radical break” between ‘old’ and ‘new’ forms of diaspora precisely because: “failure to make the distinction would mean conflating radically different historicities under one universal sign” (1996: 38). In their different ways, Paranjape and Fludernik also draw attention to social conditions, employing the notion of class-privilege in an attempt to overturn ‘powerlessness’ or ‘victimhood’ as the one sign under which South Asian diasporas are read. In each case, albeit to a different extent, the desire to differentiate and specify is matched by a need to homogenise for the purpose of analysis.
Therefore, the ‘rags-to-riches’ narrative in Indian/South Asian diaspora theories is just one part of the story: implicit in literary models that utilise discourses of subalternity and elitism are a series of questions to do with the issue of privilege.49 What types of experience does diaspora theory encompass and which are more visible? Who has the greater claim to speak for/about the homeland? Should theory reflect and promote the social standing of the diasporic community in the ‘host’ country? Does the West represent a freedom from diasporic anguish? Is the ‘global Indian’ comfortable in any location or only within the safe bubble of an ethnic community? Can diasporic literature exist within the parameters of its own world, or is it always accountable to and addressed to a specific ‘outside’ or multiple readerships?
A precedent for some of these anxieties can be found in studies of ‘Indian writing in English,’ which were initially conducted within Commonwealth/Third World literary paradigms (see previous chapter). They include a consideration of the most appropriate topic and style of writing for the development of post-independence literatures in the subcontinent (Iyengar, 1961). Realist narratives focusing on the village or the peasant were perceived as potentially more ‘culturally authentic’. Quite predictably, such national/ist conjectures prefigure contemporary claims about “the sweeping tide of migrant ontology that seem[s] to have taken over postcolonial consciousness” (Paranjape, 2000: 237) and “the hijacking of Indian literature by diasporic or 64
cosmopolitan Indian English novelists” (Khair, 2001: 38). In one sense then, Mishra’s focus on trauma and in particular the suffering of indenture provides, in response to these accusations, a method of re-authenticating the diaspora. The desire to find an ‘authentic’ migrant subject is illustrated in Kumar’s ruminations on his early career as a writer:
I had wanted to return to India so that I could begin work on a book. I wanted to write about the landless labourers in Bihar, the men from my ancestral village who migrated each summer to the rock quarries and wheat fields of Punjab. I had decided they were the real migrants, not I. What did I know about the pains of leaving home to work? (2003: xiii-xiv)
A similar process is at work in Mishra’s linking of historicity to subalternity. He states: “spectres, after Derrida’s spectres on Marx, as traumas are essential to an analytic of the Indian diaspora in that they draw us back to specific diaspora historicities, those moments that connect us back to our working class roots” (2001: 46). The productive slippage between ‘spectral traumas’ and concrete histories, the continuous slide ‘back to’ the past to ground an analytic of the present is not of concern to Fludernik. Fludernik rejects the emphasis on ‘proletarian’ diasporas in Mishra’s work and contests the way in which the fictionalisation of a traumatised subaltern experience is written onto the diaspora in its entirety. Nonetheless, she employs the same logic, simply reversing the class-location, when suggesting that the ‘mirroring’ of elite ‘backgrounds’ in contemporary diaspora fiction serves as an indicator of the achievements of the whole South Asian (American) community.
Couched in each of these models is the implication that ‘mobility’ means ‘upward- mobility’. Furthermore, although the dialectic of ‘tradition’ and ‘assimilation’ has been accurately challenged as “inadequate to live or theorise by” (Marangoly George, 1996: 187), it often resurfaces in distinctions based around stereotypes of social class. Thus, the exclusivity of ‘old’ diasporas of the past is mapped onto ‘proletarian’ diasporas of the present. Both are perceived as fossilised, in comparison to the ‘really new’ diasporas of professionals, as less able to integrate on their own terms – to be the same but different – thus more likely to have a ‘troubled’ relation to host-nations, to be more reliant on ethnic networks and more invested in the homeland (Fludernik, 2001: xv; xxii). In a highly schematic manner then, one form of diaspora is perceived as 65
remaining within the structure of tradition, as disempowered but incorruptible. The other is seen, by Khair and Paranjape for example, as morally suspect because of its professed cosmopolitanism. In a curious counter-reading of this schema, when flexible- citizenship and (upward) mobility “become practices to strive for rather than stability” (Ong, 1999: 19), the flourishing ‘global Indian’ emerges as the most ‘authentic’ ethnic figure due to his/her ability to create ‘mix-and-match’, cross-over cultures with ease.
Mishra, Paranjape and Fludernik each argue that globalisation is closing the gap between homelands and host nation-states. The ‘dream-world’ of middle-class, urban Mumbai is similar to that of middle-class, urban New York; a sense of cultural connection may be maintained in the journeys to-and-fro and in the shared consumption of the same media artefacts. In Mishra’s work, however, this new closeness produces discontinuities: the anguish caused by moments of rupture remains and is only inadequately sutured through claims to ethnic purity in evidently hybridised locations. For Paranjape globalisation is merely a veneer overlaying deeper cultural structures “rooted in thousands of years of history”: the new closeness between diasporas and homelands cannot “camouflage their divergent interests and politics of representation” (2001: 12). Paranjape’s suggestion that diasporic fiction displays an ‘out of India and towards the new homeland’ trajectory is echoed by Fludernik who believes that diasporic texts show characters: “converting their imaginary communities into real ones, transferring their imaginary homelands abroad […] emotional roots are now clearly in the transplanted culture without immediate reference to India” (2003: 283). This thesis examines the way that writers imagine the former homeland, considering whether the trope of the ‘global,’ cosmopolitan Indian emerges as a strong theme and its interface with ethnicity.
In contemporary diaspora theory, America (or certain urban American locations) often signifies globalisation, westernisation, techno-utopia, privilege and power, replacing London, the ex-imperial centre once so important to postcolonial theories of ‘writing back’. Mishra aims to rectify the general tendency to read diasporic literatures through the politics of either “Britain, America or Canada”, as he believes this results in the privileging (or a “fetishization” of the assumed privilege) “of the new diaspora and an amnesiac disavowal of the old” (1996: 427). As such, his emphasis on the pre-eminence of indenture experience in theories of Indian diasporas is intended to re-orientate the 66
‘global gaze’ rather than affirm ‘victimhood’ and I would agree that an “ethical relationship to the ghosts of diaspora is absolutely essential” (Mishra, 2001: 37). It is therefore crucial to recall legacies of indenture, as one aspect of the personal histories and literary works of particular writers, as a prominent part of the national imaginaries of various ex-colonies, and as a highly significant strand in the broader South Asian diaspora weave.
It should be immediately apparent that in the mantra of Britain, America, Canada, Australia occupies an uneasy position as a superfluous Anglophone space that is most often forgotten, or occasionally tacked on. Another way to counter the ‘disavowal’ of the ‘old’ Mishra sees at work in recent diaspora theory, is to decouple the association of the ‘West’ with the dynamics of late-capital and the presence of the ‘new’ diaspora alone. It is necessary to remember that during the period in which the ‘old’ diaspora emigrated to sugar-islands in the sea, others moved as part of labouring populations to work in ‘Western’ nations, including North American and the Australian colonies.50 Bringing the longstanding histories of South Asian diaspora communities in these countries into view counters another kind of amnesia, where it is assumed that policies of multiculturalism are causative (rather than responsive), giving rise to an entirely new ‘cultural diversity’. A related paradox is that restricting ‘non-Western’ spaces to the phenomenon of past indenture migration may further marginalize (make spectres of) writers still resident in their place of birth, such as Indo-Malaysian K. S. Maniam and Indo-Fijian Subramani, by preventing a reading of their work as in and of the present.
Furthermore, is it ethical to view contemporary traumas (expulsion from Uganda or the Fiji coups, for example) as only an echo of an ‘original’ rupture? This perspective can easily be twisted to support the coup-makers and advocates of repatriation, by suggesting that diaspora communities will never belong to the nations they have settled in, are always motivated by a stronger pull, even after generations of residence. As Clifford observes: “[p]recisely how long it takes to become indigenous is always a political question” (254). This question takes on specific and provocative dimensions in settler countries where majority diaspora-populations achieved political legitimacy, in large part, through the displacement of indigenous peoples.
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The language of diaspora is gradually replacing older terms and ideas associated with immigration; Clifford argues that, “diasporic identifications reach beyond mere ethnic status within the composite, liberal state” (1997: 255). This means that within settler- invader nation-states like Australia, contemporary diaspora politics will remind the majority population “about their own pasts, about their own earlier migration patterns, about their traumatic moments, about their memories” (Mishra, 2001: 28). Yet focusing on ‘migrant histories’ may work to suppress the traumatic memory of possession/ dispossession by deflecting attention from political struggles based on autochthony. In Australia, therefore, Indigenous groups often disassociate themselves from ‘multiculturalism,’ which implies the (hypothetical) equalising of different ‘ethnic’ groups, and “have generally refused to be treated as ‘another ethnic minority’” (Ang 102). Nonetheless, the continued bifurcation of ‘Indigenous’ and ‘multicultural’ issues in Australian historiography creates its own set of elisions, for instance, diminishing the potential for critical dialogue between Indigenous and minority-diasporas.51 Indigenous Australian novelist Melissa Lucashenko comments on the ambivalent status of other Others: “As targets of enormous racism themselves, other [people] of colour in Australia share an affinity with indigenous [people]; as non-indigenous people, however, they too are our dispossessors and must come to terms with their own colonial role” (in Stephenson, 2003: 67). So diasporas are fully entangled with what they are also defined against, nation-states and autochthonic claims (Clifford, 1997: 250-254).
Conclusion
Taking the concept of diaspora to the ‘South Asian-Australian’ context(s) requires the recognition of multiple frames of reference. As indicated above, the settler-invader setting of the ‘host nation-state’ means that the dynamics of diaspora are salient to the subjectivities, cultural histories and fictions of the majority community, as well as those of Indigenous communities, where diaspora also operates as displacement and the politicisation of identity, as well as those of a range of post-war minority groups. It becomes apparent when attending to Australian (multi)national imaginaries that discourses of (post)colonialism, state multiculturalism and diaspora necessarily coexist. Paying attention the specific ways these discourses overlap reveals interesting sites of convergence and conflict. Rosemary Marangoly George makes a similar point when she 68
observes, “[a] ‘national literature’ like that of contemporary US literature, it can be argued, is no more than a weaving of various diasporic narratives” (1996: 180).
This way of seeing ‘a national literature,’ as a woven mesh of diasporic narratives, recalls some of the critical approaches taken to concepts of culture discussed in the previous review. In particular, the palimpsestic quality is reminiscent of the views on an unconscious, accretive ‘organic’ mode of hybridity which takes cultural change as an inevitable and permanent feature of life. However, I am not endorsing the notion that ‘we are all migrants’ as proposed in the euphoric strand of globalisation theory (see previous chapter). Marangoly George goes on to note that “all diasporas are not identical: they do not share identical histories nor will they follow the same trajectory into the future” (1996: 180). And to be more explicit, all diasporas are not equal: the narrativising of national identity is premised on a highly selective process of revealing and concealing the various migrant and indigenous histories that make up the weave.
Sneja Gunew confirms this point when commenting on the shifting, relative status of whiteness in multicultural nations like Australia and Canada: “[a]ppeals to the facts of a nation’s history are not really at issue here,” she states, “since we are dealing rather with metaphors and signifying systems mobilized as part of a rhetoric of the national culture concerned with identifying insiders and outsiders” (2004: 27). Similar mobilising processes are at work in the symbolic sphere of the South Asian socio-political context. In Sri Lanka, for example, Rajasingham-Senanayake argues that the “history of migratory and hybrid routes of the Sinhalas, as told in their own historical chronicle,” the Mahavamsa, is actively forgotten in the process of post-colonial nation-building, where Tamil communities in particular are homogenised and positioned as non- indigenous, newer arrivals despite their equally long-standing claim on ‘belonging to’ the island (2003: 86).
The two brief examples outlined above indicate some of the issues and comparisons that are salient to ‘South Asian-Australian’ contexts. They are also indicative of the need to pay attention to the distinctiveness of each and every journey taken, whilst recognising that shared routes/roots form the metaphors and signifying systems that are mobilised as part of the rhetoric of collective in diasporic and national imaginaries. Diaspora-as- minority discourse may work to disrupt the ‘time/space’ of a given host-nation through 69
the insertion of alter/nation into its dominant, foundational narratives. And yet, notions of diaspora culture, like those of national culture, are produced by the relative positioning of boundaries; the imbrications of myth and reality are integral to this process in both.
Having reviewed the field of critical discourse that surrounds postcolonial studies and diaspora theory, this thesis now turns to the literary dynamics of ‘South Asian- Australia’. My contention is that fiction may function as a vehicle for the perpetuation of myths of ancestral memory, for the narrativising of ethnicity in relation to host-lands, for the activation of notions of community and cultural continuity, but fiction is also the arena in which the mythologizing of diaspora is tested. Issues of identity and difference, authenticity and empathy clearly take on a particular load when related to texts that are read, studied, grouped together, taught because of the particular origins/ancestry of their authors. Multicultural fictions, ethnic minority fictions, Indigenous fictions, diasporic fictions, hyphenated fictions; all of these categories turn on the much criticised notion of identity politics.
The question of how identity and literature align will receive greater consideration over the course of this thesis. The mythic construction of a shared ethnic identity that diaspora implies may well serve as “a source of protection from the fears of isolation, conflict, vulnerability and estrangement” brought on by relocation (Papastergiadis, 2000: 196). Nonetheless the concept of identity, and the related notions of ‘home’ and community, may prove to be unstable categories in diaspora. As Papastergiadis notes:
Communities are constructed today in a context where attachments are multiple and partial. People may feel a sense of belonging to more than one community, or they may participate indifferent communities in different parts of their lives […] What brings people together at one point may push them apart at another. Can there be communities without the guarantees of stability? (2000: 196-197)
It is crucial to recognise that not everyone fits neatly or with any permanency into a given community. Indeed, this is one of the key contributions of diaspora theory; though it is an insight which is obscured when origins are emphasised over localities. In the following chapters I will focus on the literariness of a selection of texts whilst also considering the self-conscious positioning of the ‘ethnic’ writer as the maker of 70
many fictions. I focus on a number of textual w/rites of passage that stem from acts of migration and the dynamics of diaspora, charting: arrival and engagement with a new society (chapter one), the lived hybridities arising from generational change (chapter two), the mediation and mythologizing of ‘Eastern’ spirituality (chapter three) and responses to former homelands (chapter four and five). At the same time, this thesis explores the (self)positioning of individual writers and the set of texts as a potential body of work. Indeed, one of my aims is to determine whether texts under consideration suggest a level of internal coherence which would allow me to speak of a ‘body of work’. In pursuing this objective I take a number of the concepts developed over the course of the two ‘Literature Reviews’ and test their utility in the South Asian- Australian field of literary practice. The two points that close this review are indicative of the broader questions I aim to keep in mind.
So many words are spent on discussing writers in ‘multiple locations’ as though there were something that simultaneously binds us together and separates us from writers who’ve lived in ‘single locations’. But really, how can any among us who read and, in reading, lose ourselves (and find ourselves) in countless worlds of fiction, pretend we’ve lived our lives in a single location? (Shamsie, 2002: 91)
One of the most urgent predicaments of our time can be described in deceptively simple terms: how are we to live together in this new century – this century that has begun so sadly, so violently? (Ang, 2003: 141)
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Chapter One – Migrant Fictions: New Arrivals or Old News?
the literary world has had to adjust its ideas in order to understand the literatures that have come out of the experience of transition, of immigration, of flight. (Yasmine Gooneratne in Rama, 1994: 15-16)
It doesn’t worry me at all whether I am in the mainstream or in one of the by-lanes. (Adib Khan, interview: 17/10/03)
Introduction
In this chapter I introduce two texts that offer fertile ground for an analysis of the issues that arise from the ‘turbulence of migration.’ Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies (1991) and Adib Khan’s Seasonal Adjustments (1994) chart moments of departure, arrival and return in a manner that is, as the titles suggest, cyclical rather than linear, emphasising change, exchange, adjustment, translation. Both bring the interlacing of literature, history, community and identity sharply into focus and each invites questions on how ‘migrant fictions’ are defined in national and trans-national literary arenas. They also break the general rule that South Asian-Australian fiction lacks a visible national and international profile. A Change of Skies and Seasonal Adjustments often appear among the examples employed in essays on multicultural, diasporic and Asian- Australian literatures; the former has also been set as a high school text. Both were short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers prize and Gooneratne and Khan are the only Australia-based writers to be included in a recent ‘global’ encyclopaedia of South Asian Literature in English (Sanga, 2004).
Gooneratne began her literary career as a poet in Sri Lanka prior to emigrating to Australia in 1972 to take up an academic post at Macquarie University (Sydney) where she founded the Post-Colonial Literatures and Language Research Centre. This migration caused a hiatus in her creative-writing process that lasted for almost twenty years until she reinvented herself as a novelist. The ‘academic connection’ appears to be a trend among South Asian-Australian fiction writers; many of whom ‘double’ as literature specialists, historians, biographers, cultural studies critics, creative-writing teachers, reviewers and journal editors.52 Khan also demonstrates this trend; he teaches English at Ballarat Grammar School (Melbourne) and came to Australia via the 72
educational route from Bangladesh as a student in 1973. For Khan, “the cupboard was absolutely bare; there were no short stories, nothing of that sort,” when he began to write Seasonal Adjustments in his forties. With hindsight, Khan feels that writing provided “a form of therapy…that brought some sort of consolation” to a certain sense of restlessness and world weariness he felt at this time (interview: 17/10/03). He is now the most prolific of the novelists considered in this thesis, having published four novels in the space of ten years. Indeed, his crisis, like Gooneratne’s hiatus, proved serendipitous, as the publication of their first novels in the early 1990s coincided with a growing interest in multicultural literatures and an increased public debate on Australia’s role in the Asian region.
The particular historical moment at which these novels entered the world is important. As I will illustrate, they engage with the zeitgeist of Australia during the 1990s at a narrative level, invoking and satirising official discourses on multiculturalism. This chapter begins by setting the scene, investigating the ‘academic connection’ in South Asian-Australian fiction through the theme of pedagogy, as it relates to ways of seeing the nation and ways of reading (and institutionalising) the multicultural migrant text. I then move on to a discussion of A Change Of Skies and Seasonal Adjustments, examining how they interpret Australia, the effects of immigration and the charge of ‘making Australia Asia-literate’.
‘Region’s tales should be brought to book’: making Australia Asia-Literate
When previously discussing the rise of postcolonial studies, I noted the debate over the displacement of the “salience of the nation state as the key arbitrator of important social change” (Appadurai, 1996: 4). Paul Carter makes a similar observation when he perceives a “tendency in recent cultural and political studies is to see globalisation as boosting the international and the local at the expense of the national” (1999: 150). I would agree with Carter and others that the actual workings of cultural activity, production and exchange take place across an interconnected local/global/local terrain in ways which often ignore, bypass, challenge or disoblige ostensibly ‘national’ concerns. But nonetheless:
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[t]he boundaries of the nation do make a difference. They act as a kind of ‘interference’ for both incoming and outgoing messages. They define one crucial and contested level in the circulation of meanings and values. They define one set of institutional structures which also help determine what happens above and below their own horizon. (Carter, 1999: 150)
The ‘new literatures’ movements of postcolonial studies, diaspora and minority discourse are some of the many activities that operate across, below, beyond, against and in concert with the horizon of the nation. These are literary projects concerned with the identification of patterns, processes and policies of exclusion/inclusion in order to recover writers, texts and histories marginalized by existing structures. They have, as Carter notes, the function of “repairing or completing the national history or culture, even when rejecting utterly the forms that nationalism had taken” (1999: 136). Thus, understanding “the literatures that have come out of the experience of transition, of immigration, of flight” may require a profound ‘adjustment of ideas’ about the horizon line of the nation, without implying its transcendence (Gooneratne, 1994: 15-16). Indeed, the pluralizing of literary canons is often perceived as part of a broader politics of presence for minority communities, in terms of ‘finding a voice,’ active participation, recognition and representation, precisely at the national level.
The dynamic of rejecting-adjusting-repairing the national literary sphere is present in Striking Chords: Multicultural Literary Interpretations (1992), edited by Sneja Gunew and Kateryna Longley. This is one of the first collections of critical work to take account of the fictions produced by post-war migrants and their descendents, and also includes critical work by Yasmine Gooneratne on Mena Abdullah and Satendra Nandan on the legacies of colonialism and the role of the artist in the South Pacific. Striking Chords deliberately contains a variety of perspectives on the utility and complicity of the multicultural literary project within/against the national framework of Australian literature. In one sense, complicity is evoked as an affect unsettling the nation: “the idea of ‘migrant writing’ as a dangerous supplement (in Derrida’s sense) that redefines [rather than adjusts] the whole domain” (Gunew, 1992: 43). Nonetheless, the editors also signal the reparative, aspirational tenor of multiculturalism: the broad aims of the book were “to move beyond an opposition between multiculturalism and Australian culture so that the latter is enriched by the inclusion of the former” (back cover). In arguing for recognition and inclusion, the editors affirm that the value of multicultural 74
writing “to the community is immeasurable” and they also anticipate “not only the contribution of specific works but also the collective effect of the body of multicultural writing on public awareness and national self-understanding” (1992: xix-xx).
This was a period in which Asialink – a Centre of the University of Melbourne – was also attempting to change ‘public awareness and national self-understanding,’ having been established with a mission “to help create a new generation of Asia-literate Australians” (in Frost, 1994: 35). In concert with the Federal government, Asialink supported the Asia Education Foundation (AEF established in 1992) to develop and promote the study of Asia across all curriculum areas in Australian schools. The AEF justified its objective as in the economic interest of the nation. This validation of education and arts through economic rationale is, of course, part of a larger set of issues, but has a particular resonance in the rhetoric of state-based multiculturalism, where policy is often perceived instrumentally – in terms of both readying Australian citizens to take an active role in the global marketplace/workforce, and re-imaging Australia abroad. There is a clear echo of the Hawke/Keating ‘enmeshment with Asia’ agenda, and its connection to cultural education, in a report produced by the National Multicultural Advisory Council:
[…] Products may thus be developed in Australia specifically for markets which may have quite different cultures to our own and marketed through international outlets. In such an environment businesses which are able to communicate in the languages of their customers and appreciate their cultural preferences will obviously have a distinct competitive advantage over those that do not.
The Government’s Productive Diversity strategy aims to capitalise on the linguistic and cultural skills, business networks and market knowledge of individuals in our diverse population […] This is to the advantage of all Australians and is yet another example of the benefits of our multicultural policy. (NMAC, 1999: online)
The emphasis on the benefits of multicultural policy to ‘all Australians’ is present in many of the report’s recommendations and responses, which is itself titled: ‘Australian Multiculturalism for a New Century: Towards Inclusiveness’ (a catchphrase of the recent Liberal-National Coalition governments). This report, and the founding of institutions like Asialink in the 1990s, indicates a completion of the gradual and uneven shift in policy-making away from an emphasis on the social-welfare issues of new arrivals and towards thinking of multiculturalism in terms of the national interest: “the 75
key to this shift lies in the new emphasis on the productivity of cultural difference” and hence the recasting of Asia-literacy as form of national capital (Stratton and Ang, 1994: 148).53 The perception that education/skilling would serve to broaden Australia’s economic horizon in Asia, is mirrored by an assumption that a multicultural education will broaden an individual’s horizons and, simultaneously, inculcate positive ‘Australian values.’ Thus, in the state-based imaginary, notions like ‘productive diversity’ have a dual symbolic purpose: to shape competitive cosmo-citizens of an increasingly global marketplace, and to nurture good, governable, citizens of the nation.
The connection between canonical plurality, pedagogy and citizenship is made explicit in a Federal government initiative on education, titled ‘Discovering Democracy’. This project, instituted in 1997, aims to “to prepare young people to become effective and responsible citizens” and simultaneously to “arrest a disturbing decline in the number of students studying Australian history”.54 The secondary school readers developed for this project included extracts from A Change of Skies, among other texts, under a section on ‘Equality and Difference’.55 In this sense, ‘migrant fiction’ takes part in what Kateryna Longley has described as the “barometer of change” (2000: 267). Echoing the ‘Discovering Democracy’ project, Longley suggests that texts by migrant and Aboriginal writers are now appearing on the Year 12 school literature syllabus and that this indicates the “democratisation of literature in Australia” (2000: 267).
The ‘barometer of change’ can also be read through the way outgoing messages are received above the horizon of the nation. If the inclusion of migrant fiction within Australian literature is the aim, then the fact that A Change of Skies and Seasonal Adjustments are now set on university courses in Europe and America, courses with titles like ‘Imagining Australia’ or ‘Narrating Australia’, serves as an indication of the distance covered since ‘marginal’ writers were introduced in Striking Chords.56 Another indication of this distance can be found in the editorial of an Indian journal dedicated to the study of Australasia. Here R. K. Dhawan, writing in 2004, states: “Immigrant literature, Aboriginal literature and cross-cultural studies are the burgeoning areas of contemporary Australian writing, and these truly represent the face of multicultural Australia” (2004: 6).
I recognise that the aspects of policy discourse, institutional frameworks and literary 76
politics described above create a very partial view of what multiculturalism does.57 My purpose is to isolate what I would call the reparative, pedagogic, corrective strand of multiculturalism where literature is seen, by various agents and for different ends, to broaden a range of horizons. There is, of course, something terribly utilitarian and didactic about terms like, ‘Productive Diversity’ and ‘Discovering Democracy.’ It is no surprise to note that the policy-making, institution-building aspects of this strand of multiculturalism operate on a particularly wrong-headed assumption that cultural change can be controlled (as the phrases, ‘to help create,’ to ‘arrest a disturbing decline’ suggest). In many ways, state-based initiatives are simply a reaction to the unpredictable and irrepressible cultural transformation that takes place at a banal and everyday level.
The pluralizing drive of the Australian multicultural literary project is, of course, more responsive than governmental educational directives to cultural complexity and transformation, which it seeks to understand, analyse, represent and prompt, rather than manage and control. Yet one potential pitfall relating to the reparative aspect of such a project – the notion that reading multicultural literature contributes to ‘national self- understanding’ – is that it may take on an uncanny resemblance to the universalist, anti- minority, value-laden belief, that “reading great literature would make us better people” (Gunew and Longley, 1992: xix). Several critics have pointed out the limits and limitations of multiculturalism as a pedagogic tool; in the way it “seek[s] to manage (often in the sense of police and control) ‘diversity’” or is seen not “to foster cultural differences but, on the contrary, to direct them into safe channels” or rehearses the well- known story “that multiculturalism holds about its own historical emergence” with “its fairy tale-like progression and ‘happy ending’” (Gunew, 2004: 15; Stratton and Ang, 1994: 152-153; Hage, 1998: 82-83).
The larger point here is that under the terms set by the pedagogic strand, multicultural literary politics have fulfilled their aims, with migrant fiction becoming both typical and exemplary at home and overseas. In this sense, texts with 1990s reference points, like A Change of Skies and Seasonal Adjustments, are now already ‘old news.’ The editorial to a recent special issue of Meanjin, titled ‘Australasian,’ supports the contention that Asian-Australian writing is no longer new. This issue contains work by a number of South Asian-Australian writers, including Michelle de Kretser, Chandani Lokuge, Shalini Akhil, Azhar Abidi, Chris Raja and Sunil Badami. The editor reveals that, “the 77
very idea of this ‘Asian issue’, as it’s been familiarly dubbed since its conception, has prompted equal measures of criticism and enthusiasm”; one of the criticisms being “that it would only add to an existing glut or perpetuate a ‘ghetto’” (Britain, 2004: 1).
One of the consequences of the reparative, pedagogic strand to multiculturalism, and the over-familiarity noted above, is that migrant fiction enters Australian discourse as an already read text. Gunew argues in Framing Marginality (1994), that ‘ethnic minority writing’ is most often read/valued for its sociological realism, read as a truth-statement. In a similar way to the reception of women’s and working class narratives: “minority writing is characterized by offering the authority and authenticity of the marginal experience” (1994: 53). A decade later she comments on the after-effects of the Helen Darville-Demindenko affair, one of a number of examples of Australian ‘literary fakes’ that have raised questions about interpretations of ‘ethnic’ identity and history. As Gunew observes: the “props by now are well-established for ventriloquizing ‘ethnicity’” (2004: 74). She continues:
What counts as ‘ethnic’ are: the foreign name; the ‘un-Australian’ history; the first person narrator delivering an authentic story, the alleged eye-witness accounts underpinning and mediating the foreign. The history is suitably simplified into binary oppositions in which the characters remain two-dimensional because this is, of course, not where the complexities of ‘real life’ are played out. The sense of a wider community is also absent because this would complicate the essential(ist) frame of reference. By now these spectacles have been rehearsed so many times that many of those designated ‘ethnics’ in the prevailing paradigm have internalized them. (Gunew, 2004: 74)
So does multiculturalism empower migrant writers and reject/repair the nation or does it simply perpetuate literary (self)ghettoisation? Before moving on to test this question in relation to the narrative detail of A Change of Skies and Seasonal Adjustments, I will briefly reassess the position of (South) Asian-Australian fiction in the ‘news’ today.
In contrast to the view put forward by Meanjin, a recent article (‘Region’s tales should be brought to book’) suggests that Asian-engagement, as measured through literary representations, is largely non-existent. Susan Wyndham, of The Sydney Morning Herald, recounts how soon after the 2005 Tsunami hit, she took up the task of finding “‘big-name’ Australian writers who had written books set in Indonesia, Thailand or Sri Lanka and might write a knowledgeable piece for the newspaper” (2005: 15). She 78
records her surprise at not being able to find many writers: “despite the number of Australians travelling to the south Asian or Indian Ocean nations, those places are almost absent from our literature….Readers turning to books for an understanding of the devastated countries will have to look elsewhere” (Wyndham, 2005: 15). Then Wyndham surveys the international literary arena:
There’s no shortage of international fiction from cross-cultural writers - the Asian diaspora comfortable with the English language and Western storytelling. A steady flow of Indian novels finds an easy market here. Michael Ondaatje has written from Canada about his native Sri Lanka. The Life of Pi, the bestselling 2002 Booker Prize winner by Yann Martel, a Spanish-Canadian, uncannily foreshadowed this month’s reports of survivors floating across the Indian Ocean on flimsy rafts. (2005: 15)
South Asian-Australian writing is perceived to have an affinity with this international brand: “[l]ook beyond the well-known writers and a similar literature is starting to emerge from Asian immigrants to Australia and their children” (2005: 15). Wyndham mentions Yasmine Gooneratne and Michelle de Kretser as amongst these writers.58 She states:
Chandani Lokuge’s Turtle Nest (2003) is set on the stretch of beach washed away by the tsunami, and she was there with the turtle farmers last month. Her book is already a historical account “of the peaceful times of one year before” (Wyndham, 2005: 15)
The understandable urge to read fiction as history and as an evocation of place, suggests a role for the migrant writer as conveyer of the “alleged eye-witness accounts underpinning and mediating the foreign” (Gunew, 2004: 74). The particular placement of the literature of ‘Asian immigrants to Australia’ as an extension of more popular international ‘cross-cultural’ writers and slightly beyond Australia’s ‘well-known’ writers (in 2005) indicates that ‘migrant literature might be far from ensconced in the Australian literary sphere; or perhaps, that the ‘interference’ between the national and the international makes these boundaries redundant. Wyndham goes on to affirm the role of Asialink and other organisations for promoting Asia-engagement. She mentions how publishers are reluctant to accept literary or historical manuscripts on Asia:
Allen & Unwin’s academic publisher, Elizabeth Weiss, confirms that it has been harder to publish on Asian issues since the region became less central to 79
Australian foreign policy and education in the past decade. Also, she says, “There’s been a massive shift in interest to the Middle East. We can only pay attention to so many places at once”. (Wyndham, 2005: 15)
Making history: ‘Are there any Asian writers in Australia?’
A Change of Skies centres on a Sri Lankan couple who migrate to Australia in the mid- 1960s. At one level, this is the classic migrant text, or novel of immigration. It takes up the story of departure, arrival and first perceptions of the new country, issues of culture- shock, adaptation, return, re-immigration, settlement and so on. The narrative depends on multiple points of view, including those of the couple’s Australian neighbours and colleagues, as well as Bharat’s grandfather Edward, whose journal extracts provide a perspective on the past, and their daughter, Edwina who is only given a voice in the epilogue, thus indicating the future. Through this multiplicity and through the interweaving of intertextual allusions, the narrative structure reveals both surface and deep connections between past and present.
At a plot level however, the ‘turbulence of migration’ is initially lessened for Bharat and Navaranjini Mangala-Davasinha, or Barry and Jean Mundy as they become known, by the mitigating factor of class. Both characters can trace their ancestries back to the fourteenth century and both have ancestral homes in addition to a house in Colombo. They come from different Sri Lankan ‘ethnic’ communities, Sinhalese and Tamil respectively, but are part of the same elite social strata and this makes their marriage conventional. There is certainly no hint of the ‘Third World’ in the depiction of high- society activities that precede their migration to Australia; nor does Bharat, a professional linguist, have to struggle to gain entry to Australia. As he puts it: “[e]verything was made beautifully easy for me by the simple fact that, unlike the anxious would-be immigrants in the High Commission lobby, I was invited to go to Australia” (Gooneratne, 1991: 33). The couple flourish in Australia, with Jean, in particular, capitalising on her ‘productive diversity’ by publishing a popular fusion cookbook, ‘Something Rich and Strange,’ and food outlet. This trajectory in the text, the ethnic-success story, “as a narrative of progress, achievement, triumph” is consistently undercut in A Change of Skies (Docker, 2001: 171). The ‘truth value’ of the migrant experience is displaced by a deliberately multiple, mobile, self-conscious and comic narrative strategy. 80
Gooneratne sets the sense of ironic distance by making her assumption of a knowing reader evident. The first few chapters canvas how ‘outgoing messages’ about Australia are received, emphasising the characters’ initial ignorance and then their rapid education about Australia, prior to leaving. Bharat can, at first, conjure only ‘curiously disconnected’ images and conjecture when thinking about Australia. The one shared link he does perceive between his own family traditions and an imagined Australia is a “doggy devotion to Britain” (Gooneratne, 1991: 11). Britain is what he really knows about: “the Dickensian fogs of London […] all the meadow flowers of Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespeare and Keats” (12). As such, the perpetuation of an imperial value- system, where Australia is ranked as a cultural back-water, is reflected in the reactions of the couple’s friends to their choice of destination: “America, yes. Britain, certainly. But Australia? Certainly not” (34). Jean is also warned that the ‘WAP’ (white Australia policy), “acts as a brake on the entrance of all Orientals” (19); and so is surprised to find that the Australian High Commissioner is travelling to America to give a paper on Asian writers in Australia:
‘Are there any Asian writers in Australia?’ I inquired. There was a little pause, and then Barbara said, ‘Australia is the most multicultural country in the world […] Unfortunately, this is not well known, and it is part of our […] brief to see that it does get known. (29)
A type of historical national evolution is indicated by this ‘new breed of Australian diplomat,’ no longer ‘fixated on the mother-country.’ The ‘barometer of change,’ is conveyed in condensed manner, so as to parody, from a postcolonial perspective, the well known story multiculturalism holds about its own historical emergence. The symbolic transformation rehearsed in this story, from colonial-fixation to new multicultural nation and Asian-engagement, is mirrored by the characters’ growth from innocence/ignorance to experience/knowledge, and to their own breaks with the past:
For generations my relatives had been either going to, or coming from, England. And so firmly had their gaze been focused on the metropolitan centre of a pale pink imperium that they had never so much glanced in any other direction. To do so would have been the grossest lapse of taste. (12)
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The parodying of both Australian multiculturalism and the imperial pretensions of Sri Lanka’s colonial elite is undercut by references to the Sinhala-Tamil conflict. In weighing up whether to emigrate, Bharat assesses the tensions of a brewing civil war against the unexpected welcome of a newly multicultural country: “[a]s the conversation of relatives and friends began to take communal and racist overtones, the idea of working with the Asianists of an Asia-literate society gained increasing appeal” (34). Bharat’s relative assessment of Sri Lanka and Australia is replete with meanings. There is a juxtaposition of utopic (post-racism) and dystopic (civil-war) multiculturalisms, as well as the suggestion that ignorance feeds racism and conflict which makes apparent the value of Asia-literacy as knowledge.
The sense of ‘happy hybridity’ that may be construed from the humour and the light- hearted tone of the A Change of Skies, is also undercut by the incorporation of stories which map out a less welcoming chapter of Australia’s history. Gooneratne is one of few South Asian writers to draw on the history of pre-Federation migration and Anti- Coolie agitation in her work. She takes the events and outcry surrounding the arrival of five hundred ‘Cingalese’ on the SS Devonshire in Queensland in 1882 as the impetus for Edward’s (Bharat’s grandfather) fictive journey; he is an ‘aristocratic’ character travelling incognito as a labourer. By re-writing this particular Australian historical moment, Gooneratne reflects a broader trend at work and in the histories and fictions of diasporic South Asian cultural production, where the exclusion and/or contention surrounding particular ships are primary flashpoints. Indeed, she fictionalises the ‘recuperation’ aspect of ‘new literatures’ movements, with Edward the lost migrant writer, and Bharat the academic who gives him a voice (Bharat edits and publishes Edward’s diaries as ‘Lifelines’ over the course of the novel). This in turn serves to illustrate that the reparative/pedagogic impulse of minority discourse formation depends on an awareness of the past and a recognition of historical antecedents – on learning as well as teaching.
It is Navaranjini who first stumbles on Edward’s account of his travels in Australia, and she reads in order to better understand the country she is about to visit almost one hundred years later, asking: “[w]hat can I learn from it? What can it teach me?” (64). She finds that Asia-literacy was not the priority of some in the decades prior to the 82
institution of the ‘WAP’. Edward records the reception of the SS Devonshire as a contentious, fearful moment of arrival:
When the Devonshire approached the wharf at Mackay, there was a considerable crowd assembled upon it (numbering, according to my computation through Dr. Dharmaratne’s telescope, about 400 persons), all of whom appeared to be waving their arms & shouting as if to welcome us. As we drew nearer, however, quite large stones fell into the water, & we cd not imagine that, however strange of outlandish the customs of Queensld might be, they wd include stone-throwing as a form of welcome. Accordingly, the Devonshire dropped anchor some distance from the wharf; & at daybreak, when the crowd had begun to melt away, our fellow passengers disembarked, many of the woman in an agony of fear, & crying out that they wished to return home to their villages rather than venture into this hostile land. (72)
By interweaving Edward’s story with the experiences of Bharat and Navaranjini in the twentieth century, Gooneratne is able to juxtapose incidents and events across the generational gap. For example, as the couple are settling into their new Australian house they hear the windows shattering and a loud banging on the door. Navaranjini immediately recalls Edward’s account of the reception of the SS Devonshire and decides that they are under attack. However, when Bharat bravely answers the door, he finds Bruce Trevally ready to advise him on how to deal with an Australian hail storm. This then, is a moment of redemption, where the ugly welcome of the past is displaced by an example of good multicultural neighbourliness. Not all of the historical interweaving and echoes are (re)negotiated with as much ease.
Furthermore, although Gooneratne incorporates pre-federation perspectives in her work, it was public debate of the time, on the increased presence of ‘Asians-in-Australia,’ that prompted her to write A Change of Skies. In an interview Gooneratne describes how at the time of the Bicentennial celebrations in 1988 a “full-scale ‘Immigration debate’ [was] conducted in the press” (in Rama, 1994: 3). This ‘debate’ was spurred on by comments from historian Geoffrey Blainey and the Liberal party leader John Howard (then in opposition) regarding the need to limit Asian migration in order to avoid the perceived undesirable outcomes of an ‘Asianised’ Australia. Gooneratne sees a clear connection between these views and the racist graffiti that appeared “in the streets and on university walls” at the time (3). She felt sad and disillusioned, on her own account and as an educator at a university that had a large Asian student population. She 83
connects the Australian immigration debate to her own experience of being a student in Britain during the early 1960s when Enoch Powell was making his infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speeches. Like Khan, Gooneratne found some consolation in writing. As she explains: “[l]aughter […] is a great medicine for all the ills of the spirit, and I wrote a story to get these feelings out of my system” (3).59
The story later became chapter fifteen of A Change of Skies and concerns the couple changing their image and changing their names to Barry and Jean Mundy. In this chapter the climate of the ‘immigration debate’ is conveyed through Professor Blackstone, who states on talk-back radio: “we Australians […] must be alert to the dangers involved for our society if we allow Asians in who cannot assimilate and accept our customs” (Gooneratne, 1991: 121). The rhetoric is familiar. However, Jean finds that actively trying to assimilate by engaging in “the time-honoured Australian custom of name-swapping” instigates its own set of problems (122). She dramatically declares, in an encounter with Mr Blackstone: “in Sinhala the word barri means ‘incapable’. It means ‘impotent’. And it was you who made my husband trade in Bharat for a name like Barry” (128). This encounter turns on the slipperiness of language; Jean employs her full arsenal of the racist name-calling she has dutifully committed to memory:
This was too much. ‘How dare you!’… ‘You have the impudence to offer me a sausage roll, you ignorant non-vegetarian racist? I am a Tamil Professor Blackstone, and a Hindu. Pure veg, and proud of it. What do you take me for? A pork eating Ching-Chong? And then I remembered the new words I’d learned from representative Australians on talk-back radio, and added, ‘A slit-eyed slope-head?’ The barbarian I was addressing seemed to emerge from a deep trance. ‘Madam,’ he said. ‘You call me a racist. I am forced to tell you this: You, madam, have put me completely to shame’. (128)
The moment is again by the humour of misperception and misunderstanding: Jean interprets ‘the barbarian’s’ reply as an admission of guilt and apology. Nonetheless, Barry’s image change is largely successful. It gives him an air of self-confidence and aids his entry into the public domain: “[a]fter Barry became happier with his image in Australia, he began to project it in print, on radio, and on television” (214). Barry uses the media to become a celebrity academic in Australia, the local ‘Asia-expert’. Jean shares his “enthusiasm for the task, especially if it was going to help change Australian perceptions of Asia in general and of Sri Lanka in particular” (216-217). Here, the 84
couple are shown to be actively engaged in the project of repairing/reorienting Australia. Both characters also take up writing projects; Jean, the successful cookbook mentioned earlier. Barry follows the publishing of Lifelines with a Guide For Asian Migrants To Australia, a project that remains unfinished at the close of the novel. When taking up the project, Barry realises that “[a]s the author of a Guide to Asian Migrants to Australia, it would…become [his] duty to explain and interpret one culture to another, the West to the East” (145).
Interpreting Australia: The Wayward Chaudhary
In contrast to the focus on polyphony and arrival in A Change of Skies, Khan’s Seasonal Adjustments offers a singular perspective and an opposite trajectory, depicting the emotional turbulence that accompanies a return-trip to Bangladesh. Khan takes the same ironic pose as Gooneratne, but in Seasonal Adjustments the humour is cynical and infuriated. The novel focuses on Iqbal Chaudhary, a teacher from Ballarat, who revisits his family in Bangladesh after an absence of eighteen years. Iqbal’s recent separation from his Australian wife provokes a period of soul-searching that leads him to make this long-avoided journey, accompanied by his daughter, Nadine. In Bangladesh, Iqbal confronts the past and witnesses the aftershocks of Bangladesh’s turbulent history. He also confronts his own place within the aristocratic land-owning (zamindari) culture that he has come home to, however temporarily.
As with Bharat and Navaranjini, Iqbal comes from an elite family, whose “surname bears the proud legacy of a Moghul title bestowed on chosen warriors” (Khan, 1994; 9). Of course, the mythic account of this illustrious family heritage is based, not on the power of feudal landlordism, but on the “[i]llusions of self-sacrifice and altruism” (185). Iqbal, who calls himself “the wayward Chaudhary,” knows that the reality is an “unthinking opulence” that is “chronically wasteful” and demonstrates a “foolishly dangerous mixture of self-gratification and lazy ignorance” (181). His father, the Chaudhary patriarch is equally critical of Iqbal’s self-imposed exile in Australia, and he berates his wayward son: “A tradition of 1300 years has shaped you. 1300 years! How can you deny yourself its richness? (249).
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Seasonal Adjustments uses memory as a device to move from one location and point in Iqbal’s life to another, gradually exposing the many contradictions that define him. At one level he has managed to become a “good Australian […] seduced by the common dream of a brick-veneer house on a quarter of an acre of land” (132). On the other hand, he is also a character who reacts angrily to misplaced assumptions about the inherent deficiencies of the ‘Third World’; he frequently ruminates on what he sees as the ignorance behind such views. However, as a returnee, Iqbal finds himself perceiving Bangladesh in a similarly stereotyped way:
From the air-conditioned comfort of the car, I view the third world with the critical eyes of an intolerant alien […] I am not plagued by guilt or tortuous self- recriminations about my reactions to what I see […] Everything appears to be dilapidated. Old. Dirty. I am relieved I do not live here any more. (46)
His very being in Bangladesh causes him to recall Australian differences and distinctions. Indeed, Iqbal undergoes a type of culture-shock upon arrival, causing him to pine for the familiar routine of his former life in Australia. This discontent finds expression in his choice of reading material. He picks up a week-old newspaper from Tullamarine that has travelled with him:
More bad news on the balance of payments and unemployment […] The polite concern over the growing level of Japanese investment continues […] I turn to the feature article inside. The warning is tinged with indignant hysteria. Our living standards will be overtaken by several neighbouring countries. It is the sort of speculation that causes communal consternation. What will they say behind the exclusive doors in Collins Street? What? Singapore? South Korea? Asian countries? Surely not! What a preposterous idea! There is a rectifiable flaw somewhere in the evolutionary pattern. That is not how it was meant to be. It shall right itself. Let us march on with the all-conquering spirit of Europe. We carry the world’s treasures of culture with us? Tradition! Tradition! Back to the basics. Loyalty to the crown. Honesty. Hard work. Christian morality. Let us not forget the pioneering spirit and those who built this nation. The digger’s courage and the spirit of Gallipoli. We must revive this great country of ours! Meanwhile, gentlemen, we must keep foreigners out of the club. Shall we drink to it? (31-2)
The passage rehearses some of the arguments for and against enmeshment with Asia that were being debated ‘behind exclusive doors’. In parodying the backlash against enmeshment, Khan also subverts the notion that being part of a reading public creates an imagined sense of belonging to a national community. Iqbal ‘reads between the lines’ in order to imagine an elitist response to the news item, one that excludes him as a 86
‘foreigner’ from the national club. Yet his sense of exclusion from a vestigial white Australia is matched by his feelings of constriction in an equally monocultural national climate in Bangladesh. Furthermore, the ‘ancestral’ homeland Iqbal describes is not part of the Asia of which Australia seeks to compete with. There is an air of backwardness and decay, the failed promise of democracy and progress, hanging over his account of Bangladesh; this is no ‘Asian tiger’.
Iqbal’s high status as a Chaudhary is known to his Australian father-in-law arch-rival and verbal sparring partner, Keith. Keith serves as a vehicle for the anti-Asian enmeshment ‘backlash,’ and the conservative white Australia values that Iqbal mimics in response to the news article above. His intransigent parochialism also provides an antipodean mirror for the narrow-minded smugness of the Chaudharys. Drawing on stereotypes of post-war migrant labour and refugees, Keith deliberately irritates Iqbal by suggesting he could be an ‘illegal immigrant’:
I represent most things that Keith thinks are going wrong with Australia. He really works to annoy me by claiming to be stunned by the revelation that I was not among those who had smuggled across in a boat and surreptitiously made my way to Melbourne to begin a cosy life at the expense of the honest, tax-paying Aussie battler. (86)
So unlike Gooneratne, who plays on pedagogic strands of Australia’s love-affair with Asia, Khan details the resentment of multiculturalism and explores the flip-side to economic notions like Productive Diversity. Iqbal ruminates on the affects of globalisation on the imagining of an idealised nation:
I cannot help but feel sad for the generous country I stepped into as a confused young man. Perhaps its generosity toward itself had been its greatest point of vulnerability. An unfamiliar spirit of meanness has begun to shadow the vision of a carelessly spendthrift nation. A Hobbesian instinct for survival has surfaced. Australia, as I once knew it, was too good to be true. It was a huge dream full of sharply defined rainbows and realisable wishes for those who cared to pursue them. The transition to an imperfect reality is painfully difficult (32)
Much later in the novel, Iqbal comes to the conclusion that the dream has shattered:
It was my mistake to think that Australia was nearly perfect. It was an ill-judged conclusion. Behind its ornate façade of wealth lay the weaknesses of any human 87
society. I soon discovered a broad streak of narcissism in its extraverted personality. But more recently it has become a very frustrated youth unable to see a clear reflection of its self to reaffirm its self-love. I don’t know if my criticism is an outpouring of disillusionment or whether it is an uncharitable comment on a tired society rapidly running out of creative energy and looking for someone to blame. (123)
Iqbal’s account of Australia is much less playful in its criticisms than A Change of Skies. Iqbal sees a moral decay and surrender to the reactionary forces of the past in both Australia and Bangladesh, and admonishes himself for the naiveté that shaped his earlier conceptions of Australia as a younger man. Iqbal juxtaposes Australia (a generous, if narcissistic, young society growing tired, angry and losing the ideals of its youth) with an ancient Bengali culture (where ideals have proved impossible to realise in the face of the bloodshed that has dominated the birth of Bangladesh, now falling back upon the continuance of old tyrannies). His notion of the nation as ‘unable to see a clear reflection of its self’ in the cross-reflections of history and geography is mirrored by his own self-professed alienation from his family in both Australia and Bangladesh. Iqbal is shown as clinging to an overtly liminal subjectivity, where his introspection and his confused sense of loss highlight his isolation.
The two countries, as historical currents, are drawn together through the character of Iqbal and his own mid-life crisis. As a teacher, Iqbal’s disillusionment extends to the education system of which he is part. As he tells his old friend Iftiqar: “I am a school teacher. I have no idea why I chose to teach. I sort of walked into it. I now feel as though I have undertaken an extended exercise in masochism, a desperately contrasting alternative to the unbearable privileges of a zamindar” (122). Khan employs an obvious pathos as Iqbal complains of the emptiness of the education machine and the dullness of academic life (122-3). Against this narrative of self-realisation, we are introduced to Iftiqar’s life. Iftiqar remained in Bangladesh during the 1971 war, is harrowed by his experiences of that time, is still classified as a subversive and is under constant threat from the Bangladeshi authorities. Iftiqar lives alone in a squalid flat with his books (112-115). He continues to work as a journalist, risking his life each time he goes to work in an office where government agents have already hanged a friend and colleague (274). For his part, Iqbal can only tell Iftiqar of the careful measure of polite distance/familiarity and the competitive lawn-mowing of an Australian suburb. In relation to his profession, Iqbal states: 88
Teaching has become a painful interlude between two holidays. There is little to recommend it. It is stressful and unrewarding. The idea of gentle scholars dedicated to the intellectual advancement of motivated students has been destroyed by the frightful realities of a pseudo-academic jungle where we are simultaneously the predators and the victims. (122)
The very idea of gentle scholars seems absurd in the face of the tension that occupies the offices of the publication for which Iftiqar works. Again, Iqbal is faced with weight of the past as it confronts Bangladesh and hangs over all his relationships there. Their mutual exchange illustrates the iniquity of their contemporary positions, an exchange that is routed through their shared, traumatic past, as former students of a university where the students were systematically killed in 1971. Despite the obvious opposition created in this episode, Khan also draws out a similarity: both characters, however disillusioned, also retain some faith in the humanist purpose of the professions they have chosen. This theme, of a specifically secular humanism, is central to Iqbal’s trajectory, through his eschewal of traditions and his ultimate espousal, however jaded, of epiphany and an acceptance of the liminal migrant position.
Subject to change are all component things
Like Iqbal, Gooneratne’s Barry has his image-crisis and suffers from disillusionment at points. He finds that his new image as an Asia-expert and academic celebrity is having a negative impact on the quality of his teaching. Moreover, Barry is unable to complete the Guide and explain ‘East’ to ‘West’. Struggling with a lack of direction, Barry decides to give up his university post and research ambitions in favour of setting up English language classes for migrant and Aboriginal children who have been sidelined by the secondary education system in Australia. He asks himself: “[c]an I call myself a language teacher and go on ignoring what’s right before my eyes?” (Gooneratne, 1991; 288). The slipperiness of language and storytelling is illustrated throughout A Change of Skies, with its emphasis on naming, puns, idiom and repetition. Here, however, the pragmatics and politics of language and the responsibilities of knowledge are referred to in more concrete ways. For Barry, the change in vocation signifies a new way of seeing, and is a practical outcome of his meditations on the “hazards and difficulties” as well as what he calls the “compensating rewards” of exile: 89
It is not simply that we become more knowledgeable about a new society, although that is certainly part of what we learn. It is something more, something that goes deeper than the mind alone can reach, an awareness that everything around us is caught up in a profound and inexorable process of change, and that we are not only changing with it, but being perpetually remade. Such a discovery can be discomforting, even terrifying […] it can be exhilarating too […] gradually, I began, without quite understanding how or why, to see the world about me as whole and not fragmented, to see myself and Jean as part of that world and not aliens it, and to perceive that in the enormous cracks, fissures and towering mountains which sometimes ennoble and sometimes disfigure the landscape that surround us, there are encoded images of human relationships (284-6)
Barry associates his new understanding with a similar realisation made by his grandfather, Edward, a century earlier, who writes the Buddhist precept: “Subject to change are all component things” upon the tombstone of a friend buried in Australia. He recognises that he could have “discovered this fundamental truth without so much as moving from [his] house in Colombo” (285). However, migration was the necessary catalyst: “[t]he fact remains that we did not discover this truth, Grandfather Edward and I, until the experience of exile opened our eyes to worlds beyond the limits of our education” (285).
As with A Change of Skies, which illustrates the affects of both historical continuity and irrepressible change, the closure of normative Australian nationalism and cultural privilege, in Seasonal Adjustments, is seen as subject to an eventual handling by the cycles of time:
History is slow and unfeelingly neutral in dispensing justice. It follows an unpredictable path of random selection in its choice of a few centuries of circumstantial favouritism. It tolerates abuse and misuse of it favours, making room for the fallacy of cultural superiority. It waits patiently until the pestilence of arrogance reaches an epidemic proportion. Then it strikes with a virulence which becomes an enigma to posterity […] It is history, as a subtle, living force, which taps in on our weaknesses and erodes cultures in a manner which is beyond the grasp of the generation it is humbling. (Khan, 1994: 33)
In both texts history functions as ‘a subtle living force’ producing uncanny echoes and juxtapositions. Barry finds exhilaration in the acceptance rather than resistance to change, and positions himself holistically in a world of disfiguring and ennobling 90
human interaction and exchange. Like Barry, Iqbal recognises that despite the “ordeals” of being “a stray from the forbidding darkness of the world” a migrant perspective can bring “bountiful riches” (149; 161). He ruminates:
Do you know what it means to be a migrant? A lost soul forever adrift in search of a tarnished dream? You live in a perpetual state of conflict […] But out of this deprivation emerges an understanding of humanity unstifled by genetic barriers. No, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I have had my prejudices trimmed to manageable proportions. You realise that behind the trappings of cultural differences human strengths and failings are global constants. That is a very precious knowledge. A Bangali can be just as indifferent, mean, egotistical, loving, creative, heroic, generous, humane, cruel and greedy as an Australian. It makes you appreciate the homogenous blueprint of human life. It is this impossible mixture which binds humanity, and I am a part of it. No better or worse than anyone but an equal. An equal because I know I am a composite of all those contradictory characteristics which are far stronger than any racial or religious differences. And that is worth celebrating. (143, original italics)
As a returning migrant, Iqbal translates his Australian life for the benefit of his Bangladeshi friends and relatives. At the same time, he narrates to his daughter the significance of local life in Bangladesh and, despite his own suspicions of traditions, Iqbal nonetheless remains hopeful that she will learn something. Iqbal negotiates the constraints placed on him and his daughter by tradition. The conservatism of his Australian father-in-law’s Catholicism is more than matched by his own family’s espousal of Islamic ‘values’. Both families try to (re)convert Iqbal and demand that he instil religious values in Nadine. Iqbal resists, in a manner that evokes the humanist tone of the epiphany above, by insisting that “[h]er most important identity is that of a human being” (250). He refuses to straightjacket her into a singular tradition, even whilst recognising that “cultural dualism” can exact “cruel demands” (161). Against the frequently bleak invocation of the past, Nadine appears as the recurrent positive strand in the novel. Although underdeveloped as a character, she is described with tenderness. It is through her that Iqbal appears to find hope for the future.
A Change Of Skies also comes to a close with a focus on the ‘second-generation’, through an epilogue in which Barry and Jean’s daughter, Edwina, speaks. Here, we learn that the couple have died unexpectedly in an air crash. Prior to their death, in the main body of the text, the escalation of armed conflict in Sri Lanka, mediated into Barry and Jean’s living-room and confronted in reality when they visit the island, disturbs the 91
equilibrium that the couple had established in Australia. They find themselves increasingly in conflict along Tamil-Sinhala lines and distanced from each other by the widening political gulf. With their sudden death, Gooneratne leaves several issues deliberately unresolved. Edwina functions as an inverse of her Asia-expert parents. The reflections of the epilogue are made as she is boarding a plane to visit Sri Lanka for the first time, travelling on a “fact-finding field-trip” (Gooneratne, 1991: 326). Some critics find the denouement offered through the migrants’ daughters in the two novels problematic (Tan, 2002: 244). They are used as a structural device. The parental, first- generation characters are unable to negate either the injustices of the past in South Asia or the imperfections of the present Australia. Their children then provide the possibility of resolution, reflecting the way that multiculturalism is articulated as a forever- unfulfilled promise, located on the always-imminent horizon of the future.
The Migrant’s Voice
Both Khan and Gooneratne craft knowing narratives which exist precisely at the interface of the pedagogic/economic multiculturalism they mock and parody, and the multiculturalism they serve to shape. Each has taken up the issue of the benefits and constraints placed on migrant writers. Gooneratne poses the following questions:
Given that immigrants generally alter at least the external aspects of their lives and behaviour if they do not wish to become isolated as the strange grotesque, or comic “other” in a society that is culturally homogenous (and quite possibly insular, not to say xenophobic), do immigrant writers have to do the same? If so, does this not endanger their integrity as writers, and as a result lessen the literary value of their work? How valid are immigrant writers’ views of their new countries? For that matter, how valid are their pictures of their homelands, given that they are no longer resident there and sharing in the day-to-day concerns of those homelands? Given also that these lands are presumably changing as fast in their absence as they are themselves changing, set adrift and free of their homelands’ stabilising influence. (Gooneratne in Thumboo, 1991: 232)
The anxiety about the effects of flux on an authentic writing practice, are reflected in A Change of Skies treatment of assimilation, change and identity. For Khan, the ‘double consciousness’ of the minority position is of benefit, since: “it is by no means an arid ground for the mind to discover a multiplicity of voices and what they have to say. The migrant’s voice tells me what it is like to feel a stranger and yet be at home, to live both 92
inside and outside of one’s immediate situation, to be permanently on the move” (Khan 2001: online).
At a narrative level, both texts (perhaps A Change of Skies more persuasively) create an obvious gap between the narrators’ views and the writers’ perspectives. However, it is not surprising that these novels have been read as fictionalised autobiographies. One reviewer goes so far as to use ‘Yasmine’ when describing episodes that relate to the female character in A Change of Skies (Hirst, 2001: online). Naming, of course, is a prominent issue in the novel and as such the slip is particularly revealing. For his part, Khan recognises that there “is a bit of you in every book, you can’t help that, it’s an expression of your views, your personality” but also asserts that he has little in common with Iqbal Chaudhary (interview: 17/10/03). Both writers also foreground their connections to (post)colonial histories. In this sense, Khan suggests that it is not simply ‘the migrant’s voice’ that speaks to him of cultural fragmentation and constructs his Janus-faced outlook on the world. As he puts it: “[m]y splintered life is not entirely the result of migration. It was a natural consequence of an upbringing that was strongly influenced by history” (2001: online). Gooneratne makes a similar point, stating that the “raw material for what writers of our time are presenting as fiction is, in fact, our life- experience, and the ‘colonial’ past they evoke is our family history” (2002a: 173).
The family history Gooneratne speaks of is no ‘ordinary’ story of witnessing decolonisation from below as an everyday member of the Ceylonese community. The Bandaranaike ‘clan’ to whom Gooneratne belongs was, and remains, an affluent and influential political force in Sri Lanka.60 However, the blurring of fiction and history also suggests a break with history, and breaking with convention is something that Gooneratne began to do early in her academic career. Her “thesis on Sri Lankan writing in English may well have been the first PhD. awarded by Cambridge University on a topic outside its Eurocentric orbit” (2002a: 169). As is to be expected, there is a high degree of cross-fertilisation between Gooneratne’s personal history, scholarship, pedagogy and creative-writing. Gooneratne believes her poetry, novels and criticism are part of the same “process by which an academic became a writer of fiction” (2002: 16). Her use of satire, as previously mentioned, is a reactive and strategic deployment designed to expose the absurdities of racism in Australia and Sri Lanka; but her commitment to this style of writing is related to her academic life – Gooneratne is a 93
specialist on Jane Austen’s fiction and counts Alexander Pope among her favourite writers. Furthermore, in her role as an educator, Gooneratne believes that Australian students benefit from being taught Eighteenth-Century English Literature by an Asian expert in the field. She is quoted in a review as saying: “[t]o wear a sari teaching 18th- century English literature is good for students. A woman in a sari, I would like them to remember it like that” (Susskind, 1991: 39). This implies that for Gooneratne, teaching was as significant a means of ‘broadening horizons’ as publishing research or fiction.
Khan is also an academic; however, he “didn’t particularly enjoy doing a Masters” (interview: 17/10/03). For him it came down to a choice between further study and creative writing. He opted for the latter because it “has that sort of freedom that you wouldn’t get in an academic setting”; he wanted to create original works rather than “writing on someone else” (interview: 17/10/03). In potential contrast to Gooneratne, Khan perceives the publishing world as much more receptive to ‘newness’ and inclined to ‘take risks’ than “the academic world in Australia” which he believes “is still fairly conservative”:
I think the publishers counter that; this push to make it more inclusive. […] I suppose as part of globalisation there’s more awareness of a wider world out there […] Especially in view of September the 11th and Bali, I think people are perhaps in a sense, forced to take more of an interest. (interview: 17/10/03)
On the one hand, Khan gives a more positive assessment than Wyndham of the potential for publishing outlets to increase awareness contemporary Asia. On the other hand, he supports her finding that publishers may be moving with the ‘global gaze,’ away from ‘Asia’ and towards ‘the Middle East’.
Both writers have gone on to publish more works of fiction. Gooneratne followed her first novel by satirising (post)colonial realities, including academic pretensions, in The Pleasures of Conquest (1995). Her most recent ‘work in progress’ suggests that a ‘campus novel’ set at a prominent university in Sri Lanka, will continue the academic theme. Khan has taken a different trajectory with his writing. As he explains:
you have twin landscapes to work from. It took me a long time to start feeling comfortable about Australia as my backyard. I wrote my first three books essentially set in the subcontinent and you can enter a comfort zone and stay 94
within it and that’s not me. I thought about it and I realised that Australia is not a foreign landscape. I have been here thirty years. I have the advantage of living on a double block, and they are both mine. (interview: 17/10/03)
Khan’s most recent novel, Homecoming (2003), is written from the perspective of an ‘Anglo-Australian’ Vietnam War veteran. He is unsure of how he would define his particular ‘voice’ and suspicious of definitions: “I don’t know where I sort of fit there, whether it is essentially South Asian or whether I am taking a more global perspective” (interview: 17/10/03). Nonetheless, he affirms the power of storytelling:
without being terribly didactic about it I do feel that, Christ I should have something to say about society, be it Australian or global for that matter, the human condition […] if you can’t provoke, if you can’t disturb –of course, literature has to have redemptive features, there’s no question about it – but if you can’t disturb and you can’t provoke I think [you have] failed. (Khan, interview 17/10/2003)
Conclusion
In this chapter I have explored some of the problems and pleasures and pitfalls associated with ‘migrant writing’ as described in text, as situated within broader discourses of ‘pedagogic’ multiculturalism, and as defined by Gooneratne and Khan themselves. Both would doubtless respond unfavourably to the notion of a multicultural ‘ghetto,’ given their insistent exposition of a universal address. Indeed, Khan is emphatic that it is within eclectic universal traditions, rather than particular niche literatures, that he seeks to situate his work. “I do not believe that it is possible for me to wear the permanent tag of a cultural stereotype. An unqualified identification with a single, mainstream tradition would be a denial of the composite that I am” (2001: online). A Change of Skies and Seasonal Adjustments self-consciously construct ways of uniting disparate places, periods and character traits by proposing an inclusive but particularised, composite type of humanism. Iqbal’s fundamental belief in the ‘global constants’ of humanity, though challenged at times, remains strong throughout the novel, perhaps because it is a reflection of Khan’s view that: “your identity as a human being is far more important than your identity as a Muslim or a Christian or a Jew or a Buddhist” (interview: 17/10/2003). Gooneratne makes a similar statement of her intent:
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If I were to ask myself whether there has been some single idea I (must have) wanted to convey to an audience through these different works, I would say that it is a belief in the worth of human beings as individuals, irrespective of all attempts to stereotype or categorize them in terms of class, race, caste, colour, intellectual ability, gender, or religious belief.61
So an equal right to nurture individuality seems to be one of the answers that both Gooneratne and Khan provide to the questions posed by the Discovering Democracy project: “[i]n what respects should people be treated as equal? When is it good to recognise and celebrate difference? Are there times when equality is absolutely essential?”62 In fact, they shift the parameters of these questions. In A Change of Skies and Seasonal Adjustments absolute difference and universal equality are not portrayed as polar opposites but shown to be mutually dependent. There can be no ‘respect for difference’ without recognising that this right belongs to everyone and, importantly, equality is not homogeneity – the idea of democratic equality is quite meaningless without the right to differ and dispute.
Ron Shapiro argues that applications of post-colonial theory, focusing on distinctions between Self and Other, East and West and the concept of hybridity, construct “a far too narrow and over determined model of human behaviour” (1996: 41). He believes that ‘theory’ (in general) has taken literary studies from its humanist base to a place where “all existential questions, the nature of human aggression, love, chaos…in other words, all the things that really matter in literature as distinct from sociological and political formulations” are disregarded (46). He asks, in a rhetorical manner: “[h]ow adequately can the post-colonial model help answer these more ‘personal’ or ‘human’ or ‘existential’ questions?” (45). I find the question problematic because it separates the concerns of postcolonialism from the ‘existential’ world. Surely sociological and political formulations are key to the way in which lives are lived, written about and understood, and to the way literature is created and disseminated. Throughout their novels, Khan and Gooneratne demonstrate how an engagement with postcolonial histories and multicultural identities does not diminish, but in fact enlarges, an appreciation of the human condition.
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Chapter Two – Born Here: Second-Generation Perspectives
There’s a book that had a deep effect on me when I was a kid its called Where the Wild Things Are […] For me that is one of the great prose poems of exile […] there’s the sense that this boy could always go somewhere else then return home. But I don’t have that comfort. (Christopher Cyrill, interview: 19/11/03)
We have this expectation that children are not fallen yet, that they’ll fall later, but the truth is the experience of childhood for so many people is that they can’t take for granted that their life will be stable and normal and that they’ll be comforted and have an explanation for why they are here. It’s an illusion that we’re born in a state of grace. (Suneeta Peres da Costa, interview: 29/11/03)
Introduction:
My discussion of first-generation South Asian-Australian migrant fiction, in the context of state/official discourses of multiculturalism and ‘new literatures’ movements, is followed in this chapter by an exploration of second-generation perspectives. I am emphasising the concept of ‘generation,’ in part, because ‘long-residency’ and critical mass are considered the very requisites of ‘diaspora’. Ranajit Guha puts it in this way: “[b]elonging is predicated on something that is already constituted. Would the first migrant then remain excluded for ever from a diaspora?” (1998: 155). Generation is also at the foundation of Monika Fludernik’s literary definition of ‘properly’ or ‘pure diaspora novels’. She suggests that protagonists “need to be at least second-generation immigrants” and that the wider community should “have established themselves in a new home abroad” (2003: 264). Underlying several paradigms for diasporic literatures is that notion that collective identity needs to be maintained/refashioned over the generations in order for diasporas to ‘flourish,’ or even function as diasporas.
This chapter considers the way in which second-generation fiction, in particular, configures issues of diasporic belonging. I will asses how concepts introduced earlier: the logic of the hyphen, hybridity, fictitious homelands, play out in Christopher Cyrill’s The Ganges and its Tributaries (1993) and Homework (1999) by Suneeta Peres da Costa. At one level, these novels are coming-of-age narratives that focus on Australian- born characters as they negotiate the perplexities of childhood. Both texts dwell on the 98
way the personal self is refracted and fractured by the structures of the family home, questioning the comfort, the stability and the illusionary ‘state of grace,’ that childhood implies. My contention is that these examples of South Asian Australian fiction unsettle the assumption of an easy acquisition of cultural collectivity in the second-generation.
Literary/cultural theory often examines processes of diasporic identity formation through the prism of generation. Postcolonial critic R Radhakrishnan, for example, begins an essay on the workings of ethnicity in diaspora with a question from his son:
My eleven-year-old son asks me, ‘Am I Indian or American?’ The question excites me, and I think of the not-too-distant future when we will discuss the works of Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Amitav Ghosh […] and many others who have agonized over the question of identity through their multivalent narratives. I tell him he is both (2003: 119-120)
Radhakrishnan is particularly concerned with the way the hyphenated identity is configured in the second-generation, where, for those ‘born here,’ being both disturbs taken for granted features of identity as authenticity, unity, oneness. Radhakrishnan continues:
I imagine the main problem that intrigued my son was this: How could someone be both one and something other? How could the unity of identity have more than one face or name? If my son is both Indian and American, which one is he really? Which is the real self and which is the other? How do these two selves coexist and how do the weld into one identity? (2003: 120)
He ends the essay with a utopian prediction:
For my part, I hope that his future and that of his generation will have many roots and many pasts. I hope, especially, that it will be a future where his identity will be a matter of rich and complex negotiation and not the result of some blind and official decree. (2003: 129)
This view of hyphenated identity as complex, doubled and negotiated is, of course, rejected by other critics. Feroza Jussawalla, for example, places the stability of ‘home’ in opposition to ‘hybridity,’ suggesting that grounding identity in the ‘ancestral homeland’ provides some protection against the deracinating effects of living in the new. She suggests theories of hyphenation and hybridity, dubbed ‘Bhabha Babooisms’, 99
are both rarefied and implicitly assimilationist. In Jussawalla’s view, both “older and younger generations of South Asian diaspora writers – the foreigner and the native-born hybrid Asian – agree on the immigrant’s desire to leave the door to home open” (1997: 25). Indeed, she believes that those of South Asian descent experience a “moment of “joy,” when “inscribing their hybridities into their indigenousness and proclaiming themselves rooted in the fixed tablets of their cultures” (30). And that: “even the most hybrid characters [in Kureshi’s work] seem not to want to express their hybridities but express their quintessential selves which are rooted in their ethnicities” (30). In making these conjectures, Jussawalla seems to dismiss the possibility that this might be an imaginary, impossible, ironic and often highly mediated form of longing for an essential self and home that do not in fact exist.
The interview-extracts I have selected to introduce this chapter hint at possibilities and experiences other than ‘moments of joy’ in the expression of ethnicity. They evoke loss, a sense of displacement; both Cyrill and Peres da Costa speak of the absence of comfort. Is melancholy and abjection an inevitable condition for the second-generation diasporic figure? Or – as with the predictions set by the texts discussed in the previous chapter – does hybridity offer a way of positively engaging with the world without the homeliness of a fixed cultural identity?
The Ganges and its Tributaries: ‘a river can’t just be a river’
Cyrill draws on a metaphor for India and the diaspora in his choice of title. The metaphor is played on in the opening gambit of a piece on the novel for The Australian Book Review. Steven Womersley creates a sense of literary fraternity between diaspora writers. “I came to this book straight from total immersion in Vikram Seth’s roman- fleuve, A Suitable Boy” he writes, “if that was the Ganges, then this is one of its tributaries” (1993: 23). The process of placing a lesser-known Australian work with diasporic themes in the orbit of a celebrated work/author is, as previously mentioned, an astute marketing technique. In this instance however, the distinction is apt. Unlike Seth’s magnum opus, The Ganges does not tackle grand historical themes or contain a multitude of characters. Instead, the reader is offered the musings of a singular character, Christopher Josephs, who speaks from one small rivulet of the diaspora. Cyrill would perhaps agree with such a humble placement. He states: 100
I can see that some writers are prophets; I am trying to write about certain images that appeal to me and trying to entertain on the level of language. […] I’ve got a couple of small insights to make and that’s it. […] I’d love to write some great big selling book with a hundred and fifty characters and a hundred and fifty different things happening, but it’s not part of my personality. (interview: 19/11/03)
The notion of a river continually splitting and spreading is not simply an indication of theme but is embedded in the structure of the novel, which takes a meandering, non- linear, associative form. There is no plot as such, and no chapter breaks. The narrator sifts through memories of people, places, conversations, observations; he incorporates stories told, secrets overheard. He recollects dreams. The free flow of imagination replicates the movement of water. Cyrill, who admits that he “is no plot writer”, and for whom “structure is the greatest detail”, would have gone further in this attempt to capture the flow of thought. His “original structure” was “initially much more like a river” (interview: 19/11/03).
I had wanted it to look like one paragraph and one sentence and I didn’t end up writing it that way because I knew no publisher would go for it. […] I wanted it to look like there were no distinct gaps between paragraphs and breaks, because all I was trying to do was recreate one man’s mind. (interview: 19/11/03)
Unlike its free-flowing structure, the language used in The Ganges is straightforward and sparse; aesthetic elaboration takes place through detailed symbolism, the juxtaposition of images and the recurrence of particular motifs. Many passages begin with the simple phrases, ‘I remembered’, ‘I imagined’, or ‘I have forgotten any time when’, indicating repetition as a feature of the flow of thought. Cyrill is concerned with the intimacies and luxuries of the imagination, the day-dreaming of one man’s mind. This allows him to shape a narrative that is fragmented, following the unruly pathways and tangled associations of a singular psyche, yet continuous and cohesive; each moment, however mundane, is made significant when remembered in the context of Christopher’s life.
The events recalled are, for the most part, taken from the stuff of everyday life. They are the small incidents of Christopher’s growing-up, entirely familiar in their acute ordinariness: he buys Indian sweets with his father, captains his school hockey team, meets relatives at the airport, attends an India–Australia cricket match with his uncles, 101
eats with his girlfriend’s parents, walks Brahma the dog, keeps a dream diary. There are few moments of high tension or drama in this novel, the mood is diminutive, thoughtful and introspective with little or indirect reference to broad socio-political currents. The foregrounding of an inner world of domestic, everyday and ordinary events may itself be seen as an essentially political move, in that it brings into focus moments that are undervalued or otherwise lost. The challenge for Cyrill is to sustain a reader’s interest in the very ordinary world of Christopher Josephs and the small insights it generates.
Makarand Paranjape also draws on the image of a river when discussing diaspora. He takes confluence as a metaphor for how first-generation writers are able to access, discriminate between and selectively combine elements from the old and new homelands. He quotes Uma Parameswaran, “[a]t the confluence, the two rivers are distinct, and one can see the seam of the two separate streams as they join” (in Paranjape, 2001a: 169). For second-generation writers, born here, the benefit of this particular vantage point is limited. The legacy of migration means that the process of self-identification for the second-generation is already complicated in childhood; they do not stand at the confluence but are submerged within it. As Paranjape puts it: “To them is given a different task, of disentangling or describing the features of their merged or hyphenated identities” (169).
Cyrill’s approach to the depiction of hyphenated identity resonates with Paranjape’s comments; he has his narrator attempt to disentangle familial history whilst also performing hybridity through the constant fusing of different cultural reference points. Thus, like many first-generation writers who create lives for characters roughly the age of their own children, imagining the social spheres they inhabit, Cyrill fictionalises parental figures. Indeed, much of the novel is based on Christopher’s relationship to his parents, particularly his father, and to the broader first-generation as represented by countless aunts and uncles. This impulse to relate parental histories is in keeping with trends in second-generation writing (Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake is a prominent example) and is a method of locating a character’s roots in the routes of migration. The immigrant’s story of displacement from an ‘original’ homeland, arrival and adaptation in a new land often becomes a primary aspect of identity formation for their children.
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The novel opens with Christopher as a young man, and his uncles, engaged in the process of moving the family possessions from Dandenong to a newly built home in Oakleigh. After moving house, the men settle down to drink, eat and play music. Here two classic features of first-generation migrant fiction, the journey – whether the long arduous sea-passage of indenture narratives or modern air-travel – and the moment of arrival, are transposed onto the short distance from one Melbourne suburb to another. Christopher leaves his uncles and father when they begin to sing in Hindi, a language he has never learned (1993: 14). “I walked upstairs to the third-floor bathroom, leaned against the sink and opened the window. I could see the Dandenong Ranges” (14). This deceptively simple statement ushers in twenty-four pages devoted to Christopher’s memories of a childhood in another house. Again, this could be read as a second- generation transposition of the immigrant’s recollection of the past in another place. In these pages we learn that Christopher’s mother was pregnant with him when she and father travelled from Calcutta to Melbourne in 1970, and that their first home was the rented “top-floor of a house on Zovem Street” (15). Christopher states:
they bought our first home in Dandenong in 1974. My farther worked three jobs, one of which was cleaning toilets at Dandenong Station, in order to meet the payments. He studied engineering at night school as a refresher to the degree he had earned in India. (15)
His father started work at General Motors Holden in the same year (23) and began sponsoring relatives to settle in Australia from 1976 (25). “By 1980 most of [his] uncles and aunts had arrived in Australia” (133-4), assisted by his father who, when drunk at family parties would blasphemously argue “that he had brought all [their] relatives to Australia without the help of God” (39). So this is also a story about upward mobility, which is another immigrant theme often debated in first-generation fiction. Snippets of information about the parental past are scattered throughout the novel. The detail they contain, the way they are dated by year for example, is evidence of the narrator’s attempts to decipher his own identity by disentangling threads of infant memory and hearsay. Christopher’s desire to know his parents’ stories of the homeland and of arrival may fit with Jussawalla’s theories of a second-generation homing instinct but is actually based on a paucity of actual information available. “I often wonder how my parents spent their first day in Australia”, Christopher muses. “I know that they arrived here 103
with four suitcases and seventy-two dollars and that they spent their first night in a Salvation Army hostel (39).
At one point Christopher cooks a curry under his father’s instruction and as he stirs he imagines combining the stories his father had told him about India. He then engages in an act of creative visualisation, placing himself directly into narratives of a past that is not his own:
I imagined smoking the blues, which is how he described smoking marijuana, while I sat across from my mother at the Blue Elephant bar in Calcutta where my father was playing Charlie Parker standards. I saw myself playing right inner for the hockey side of St Francis Boarding School the day Uncle Leon scored a hat trick against Le Martinier. I imagined going from door to door during Diwali and collecting ladus, jelabis and barfi moulded into the shapes of tigers, elephants and cobras. (69)
Cyrill admits to a similar fascination with the puzzle of his own heritage, prompted, in part, by the many gaps. And he does, in fact, broadly follow his own family line when writing about diasporic family structures in The Ganges, making changes where necessary for stylistic effect.
I was intrigued by it because it had been hidden from me. In a sense. I didn’t really know who my father’s parents were and my parents stopped speaking Hindi when they came to Australia so I had no access to their language, except swear words. […] But I went back and the funny thing I’ve found about Anglo-Indians is that they’re not really that big on family history. They don’t seem to keep the lines, they don’t create the large family trees. Something disappears at the edge of the map, which is what became intriguing to me: who are these people down here which no one seems to be talking about? It’s one of the reasons I wanted to go in and invent, but as I said I’m not a saga writer. (interview: 19/11/03)
‘as if all the doors of our home were epigraphed’: mapping hybrid histories
Connections between cultural heritage, family maps and mapping space run through The Ganges, as does the notion of the river as a bloodline and in the ability of water/blood to flow across borders, to subsume boundaries. Like Cyrill, Christopher’s desire to decipher family history also produces invention: he has to imagine (himself into) his parents’ histories. The deciphering drive is further undone by his habit of combining spatial concepts and cultural flows. In this sense, Christopher does not 104
attempt to untangle the separate streams of his life, for he cannot. Instead, he habitually indulges in fantasies that combine and transfer the cartographies of South Asia onto that of Australia:
I wondered whether my father could play a tune on his saxophone that would tear India and the Himalayas away from Asia. I imagined his tune guiding India across the Indian Ocean and into the Bass Strait […] and saw India crashing into Victoria and South Australia. I imagined the Himalayas punching into the Simpson Desert. I imagined living on the Ganges, which in my mind stretched from Lucknow to St. Kilda and down to the Gulf of Mannar. (167-168)
The imaginary act is one of superimposition. St. Kilda becomes a tributary of the Ganges. Kathleen Kirby’s comments are pertinent here: “It is, as if by foregrounding metaphors of space the gap between metaphor and reality narrows, the bridge is shortened, the inter-change takes place that much more quickly: space itself is the aperture through which discourse can effect reality” (in Hussain, 2004: 104). Speaking metaphorically, the bridge that Christopher seeks to cross, and re-cross, runs between an imagined India and the Australian real, arcing over all the mixing in-between.
In an early childhood scene, Christopher recalls his father building a model of India over three days and nights. His father personalises the map, marking places of importance to him. The model is not South Asia-inclusive, ignoring terrain beyond the border of the Himalayas. Christopher “believe[s] he omitted the neighbouring countries solely to banish Pakistan from the map of the world in his mind” (Cyrill, 1993: 20). When the model is finished it is placed it in a pond in the backyard:
He let the model drift in the water without securing it. It looked as if India had pulled itself away from Asia, ripping the Himalayas with it, and was powering itself through the Indian Ocean in whatever direction it chose. The Ganges would no longer flow into the Bay of Bengal but into all the oceans of the world. (21)
Cyrill considers this “the main scene of the book, where the father makes the map and the rivers then spread out to the diaspora” (interview: 19/11/03). In place of the father’s attempt to impose imaginative boundaries through exclusion, Christopher offers a utopian, cosmopolitan mind-map in which the Ganges enriches the entire world. The visualisation also enables him to bring India and Australia together:
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It occurred to me one day as I watched the model float around the mould that India had roughly the same outline as Australia. When the model turned in the water so that Nagercoil pointed directly east, I could transplant the Great Australian Bight onto the Gulf of Cambay and transplant Arnhem Land onto Calcutta (21).
The hybridity at play in scenes like this is subsuming, relinquishing recognised boundaries or realigning them, to deliberately emphasise the merged and tangled quality of second-generation thought-processes. Christopher employs methods of transposition, the reversal of images, and superimposition, the overlaying of images, in his spatial daydreaming. In one instance, he recalls a Grade Two notebook, its cover made up of “a faint map of the world, with a calendar printed over the map” (103). He had circled dates on the calendar. And, in contrast to his father’s manner of marking out places of importance on his model of India, the young Christopher chose to highlight particularly mundane moments in time: the date of “each morning before the eight-word spelling test” (103). The memory reoccurs in the older narrator’s consciousness: “I often think of that faint world covered in small circled numbers, with my Russian summer of January and February visible, but India disappearing in into the winter of June, and Australia hidden between October and November spring” (103-104). In an other example, a photograph taken of his mother as a young woman in Calcutta, “standing in front of a huge globe of the world with her beehive hairstyle fitting perfectly into the arc of the Great Australian Bight” (41), is echoed later in the novel when he imagines: “Lucknow sunsets dawning over 8 Cararas Street, the beehive hairstyle of my mother causing tidal waves on the shores of Adelaide and Alexandria” (76).
Photography is itself a form of map-making and pictures an aid to daydreaming, as they provide a window onto moments frozen in another space and time. And the relationship between mapping, genealogy and hybridity is made explicit though references to particular photographs and family albums in The Ganges. Albums hold the past between their pages and serve as highly selective pathways through family heritage. Christopher’s family albums contain articles in Hindi and English as well as pictures from India and Australia. One article was written by his paternal grandfather shortly before he died, concerning ghost-sightings in Goa. The article is removed from the album years later to make way for a photo of Christopher, but: “[p]hrases from the article remained stuck to the plastic overlay of the album, so that my cricket hat was 106
printed with the date of a sighting, September first, and my cricket boots were printed with my surname” (42). The ghostly remains of the article mimic another visual transferral, as Christopher has inherited his grandfather’s blue eyes and, possibly, his talent for cricket. Incidents like this, of over-writing, or ‘partially erased words’, of traces, remnants and faint suggestions, litter the narrative. One of Christopher’s earliest memories of the first family home concerns:
wet newspapers […] [that] had been laid out in front of the doors of all the houses. Later, when we peeled away the newspaper pages, fragments remained stuck to the doorsteps, and thresholds to rooms, as if all the doors of our home were epigraphed. (19)
Cultural hybridity in The Ganges takes the structure of a palimpsest, as these examples of transference, superimposition and the merging of space and time imply. The process suggests continuous transformation as cultural inscriptions are rubbed smooth and redrawn with traces of the past remaining in the present. The Josephs’ family photo- album serves as a modern example of a palimpsest, as a non-static medium, the history in its pages continually changing, growing, with certain stories excised and haunting newer images. Ashcroft captures this sense of transformation when he comments on Wilson Harris’s concept of ‘fossilization’. In his view it is not the constriction or freezing of cultural forms, as is usually implied by the term cultural fossilisation:
He regards the process as ‘fossilization,’ not as a metaphor for dead forms of the past but as a sign of the continuation of the forms of the past in the living present. No single feature of past or present can be singled out as an origin, since all are related to an endless and multiple set of processes, an ‘infinite rehearsal’ that never ends and in which ‘history’ is located as a transient structure. (Ashcroft et al. 1998: 175)
The notion of ‘infinite rehearsal’ is key to another method of mapping space in The Ganges. Melbourne street names are repeated throughout the narrative and Christopher often gives explicit details of the journeys he takes: “[w]e would drive past VFL Park, the aviary at Caulfield Park, and into Alexandra Street, where may father would drop me before driving onto Fisherman’s Bend. Alexandra Street runs across Inkerman Street and intersects with Balaclava Road” (117). Like the practice of dating information, this level of attention to detail borders on the obsessive. Much of Christopher’s daydreaming takes place as he is wandering around Melbourne; he maps the space with his feet and 107
his recollections are routed through the physical act of walking – an activity infinitely rehearsed. In this way, the novel illustrates Michel de Certeau’s notion of space as practiced place, “actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it” (1986: 117). For Christopher, an understanding of place is rooted by the significance of certain spaces, by the memories of activities which occurred in the skeleton of a house being built on 8 Caracas Street or at the cricket oval on Zovem Street.
Christopher forges a connection to Melbourne by moving through it, and although this physical method of mapping space is very different to the fantastical nature of his imagined cartographic collisions, and the phantasmal ambivalence of the palimpsest, there are resemblances. Christopher metaphorically overwrites public space with his own stories, adding to countless others. In contrast to his second-hand connection to India, he is able to know a small part of Melbourne in the detailed way that only an obsessive walker can. Thus the repetition of street names sets up a level of intimacy and ease between Christopher and his environment. Unlike the baffled tourist or the new immigrant arrival, he is familiar with the layout of the city, and its operations. He is the local who knows that “the number eight tramstop […] is to the left and across the road from the number three tramstop”. This insider status is implied by the way he notices other people inhabiting the peripheries of social space, “refugees laughing at bookspines […] old men sipping from green bottles” (116). The presence of alcoholics and the homeless reaffirms the myth of the suburban good-life and upward mobility suggested by the exchange of property which frames the narrative. Christopher’s urban knowledge is further demonstrated in his past work as a phone guide advising tourists on how to use the tram system (74). He would trace the journeys taken onto a table map leaving a ‘meandering blue line’ and this, almost inevitably, precipitates a little thoughtful creative visualisation:
I imagined transplanting the borders, mountain ranges and seas of all the maps I could remember over the glass map of Victoria. I could then detour a traveller from St Kilda through Taxila to Dandenong, or through Lumbini to Oakleigh (75- 76)
The deliberate indifference to the actual geo-physical border-zones of global space reflects the narrator’s desire to transcend local and emotive boundaries by taking control of the space he inhabits. Cyrill’s take on social space also runs counter to the way that 108
the nation is made homely through border-patrol or appeals to the myth of the stable, homogenous neighbourhood of the 1950s. The narrative mimics the process of diaspora on the social and physical space of the host country with the Josephs’ first family home becoming an epicentre for new arrivals who flow on into the suburbs. Christopher recalls continual movement in his early years: “it seems now as if I were always being displaced from my bed by an aunt or an uncle” (37). Later in the novel he realises that has “relatives in virtually every suburb” as well as overseas. In contrast to much first- generation migrant fiction, multiculturalism is a pre-existing fact of life in this second- generation text. Indeed, from within Christopher’s social world, (and it should be remembered that his is the only perspective offered) it seems that entire Melbourne suburbs are home to new Indian arrivals. Thus, the hybridity present in the irreverent ‘map of the world in his mind’ is reflected in this more material approach to mapping space in the novel: his family and the broader diaspora have overwhelmed the physical spaces of the city and the suburb, changing Australian social dimensions. This ties into the metaphor of the river, and the ability of water to exceed boundaries, to overflow, to subsume, to confound categories of inside and outside.
Bewilderment and (be)longing: ‘Well, he was born here, Uncle, naturally his taste is different’
There is a self-consciously hybrid quality to The Ganges, both in its stylistic juxtaposition of images and in their relevance to the legacy of migration contained in this one man’s life-story. Womersley concludes:
This is not a novel of migrant angst or inter-generational conflict; nor is it about a clash of cultures. There has been so much mixing in Christopher’s family that a bit more here and there is not a problem […] He is not displaced, as such; he is able to reconcile many elements within himself. (23)
In particular, the Anglo-Indian context of the family history suggests that cultural mixing is ingrained over centuries. This also implies a level of continuity as specifically Anglo-Indian traditions are passed on through the generations. Certainly Cyrill interweaves elements from a number of places: an India-refracted Catholicism is present among the symbols. In this sense, the cultural threads Christopher attempts to untangle and reconcile are multiple, always already mixed in their fibres. Being Australian-born 109
simply adds another strand to the story. The father makes the emphasis on mixing most explicit in the following statement. Here, utilising the river-as-bloodline, blood-as-water image, he predicts the obliteration of ‘racial’ borderlines:
I want you to mix your genes. You are an Anglo-Indian born in Australia. You are like a trinity. Marry, mix,’ Father said. I stared at him. ‘One race, soon there will be only one race. No more cousins marrying cousins. Pangaea. At the start there was only one country, now water separates us. Drift, you must mix. (146)
Yet I would disagree with Womersley’s conclusion, in part. Despite the homage to hybridity in The Ganges, there is a significant level of angst, second-generation self- conflict and displacement displayed. The territorial connotations of intimacy are explicit. To borrow Kirby’s phrasing: throughout the novel Christopher maps space, both physically and imaginatively in an attempt to shorten the bridge, to narrow the gap between metaphor and reality, to make the interchange between himself and the cultures of his environment and his history take place that much more quickly. But in a crucial way he fails to make the connection. For his assertions of hybridity illustrate the self- legitimating logic of the Australian-born outsider; the cumulative effect of the over- emphasis on spatial practices is to suggest a fragile sense of belonging. The obsessive mapping can be seen as an over-reaction, as well as an over-writing, to underlying angst: a coping mechanism for the second-generation.
Christopher’s displacement is prompted by his sense of being an outsider within the family circle. He is deaf to the language his uncles sing in, a relative stranger to a cultural sphere that beguiles and repels him, and the only Australian-born child amongst a group of cousins direct from India. In part, the angst is an expression of embarrassment. Christopher prefers his Australian self and its cultural codes to that of his relatives. He wants Australia to disrobe them of their ethnic clothes and to evaporate their telling accents before they step out of the airport (27). His relatives populate his house, displacing him from his bed and replacing his cricket posters with religious iconography; he has to escape from the smell of garam masala, the sound of the sitar, and of his own voice acquiring an Indian inflection (37). Christopher comes to be entirely alienated in the family home: “whenever I watched an uncle smoking a hookah, or heard an aunt talk about her ayah, or saw my grandmother turning slippers the right way up, I felt like the foreigner in their country” (38). This is a love-hate situation, 110
however, and therefore Christopher also feels moments of intense connection to an abstract India:
I feel as if something of India, which I have never understood, something that either my parents nor my grandparents could directly tell me of, has survived in me. Whenever […] a cricket coach nicknamed me Little Sunny, after Sunil Gavaskar, I felt elated, as if my breath had been freed by their words. (46)
Though intense, the link is actually tenuous and indirect, amounting to little more than a set of second-hand stories. Christopher can only access an India of the imagination. Indeed, he spends so much time there that he has a comparatively poor imaginative connection here, to Australia. When presented with a cousin’s tall-tales from India he has nothing to compete with in reply: “I only knew the stories my father had told me about India […] I invented stories […] I lied” (33-4). Curiously, when asked about the differences in the experience of being in Australia for first and second generation characters in the novel, Cyrill emphasises the narrator’s connection to India and his sense of exile from this unknown, unknowable homeland. He states, the “older characters had somewhere to go home to, but he had nothing. There is a country of story that he could return to, but that didn’t actually exist so he couldn’t physically go there” (interview: 19/11/03). The ethereal quality to coming from, or being of, a ‘country of story’ is captured by another writer, Farrukh Dhondy, who rephrases it as bewilderment:
the second generation, about whom I write, is bewildered. The central facet of these characters is bewilderment. They don’t know where they fit, because they have come from nowhere. They come from the outside of it. And they’re decultured by their parents and by the histories that they’ve dragged into the body politic […] And they don’t quite know where they belong because their parents always wanted to go back home. (in Jussawalla, 1997: 33)
The phrase, ‘they come from the outside of it’ reminds me of a comment Cyrill made: “I know I have gone from somewhere where I was supposed to be”. It follows on from his recollection of the discomforting effect of reading Where the Wild Things Are as a child:
there’s the sense that this boy could always […] return home. But I don’t have that comfort. I know I have gone from somewhere where I was supposed to be, in a metaphoric sense at least, but there’s no going back there because the place that I have come from is totally imaginary. India does not exist. There’s some place called India; it’s got nothing to do with me. (interview: 19/11/03)
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The concept of ‘home’ and homeliness is complex in The Ganges. On one level, the narrative frequently associates home with family, familiarity, habitual behaviours and contentment, suggesting that to have a home is to belong and to be at home is to be at ease. At another, it undermines this sentiment by positioning home as an insubstantial ‘country of story’ revealing an undertone of discomfort, displacement, longing and second-hand nostalgia. There is a multiplicity of homelands, homes and houses within The Ganges, including the new, half-built structures that Christopher plays in as a child (evocatively termed ‘my skeleton houses’) when escaping from a home overtaken by relatives. In this way, the novel illustrates the instability of being-at-home. People move; homes and houses are extended, renovated, abandoned, demolished, divided, haunted, recovered and contested. Feeling at home is equally fraught: Christopher is a foreigner in one home and an interloper in another. Yet despite, or perhaps more accurately because of, his ambivalent position Christopher is able to imagine himself at home in the world.
Alienation and disgrace in Homework: ‘Oh, it was the separation that hurt the most’
Issues of being and feeling (not) at home are also central to Peres da Costa’s Homework. It is, like The Ganges, a novel that is at one level about growing-up in the suburbs. However, the narrator Mina Pereira’s journey to adolescence is punctuated and shaped by her mother’s concurrent descent into a deep depression. It would be legitimate to expect a fairly weighty or intense tone to Homework given the theme of dysfunction, disorder and the Freudian subtext that runs through the novel, but this is not the case. The novel contains a great deal of humour and a heightened sense of play. Peres da Costa also puts the madness in the novel amongst the very ordinary. Mina: “makes her own drama out of the common facts of childhood – sibling rivalry, parental discord, holidays with the old folks, the boy next door, school friends and enemies, homework, excursions, sex education classes and so on” (Indyk, 1999: 28). This focus on the everyday is reminiscent of The Ganges, however the two novels have a very different style. Where Cyrill tells an understated, river-like story with few points of high tension, Peres da Costa takes a structured approach and conveys a young child’s perspective by imbuing even the smallest event with amplified significance. And where Cyril maps (dis)placement and challenges boundaries through metaphors of space, the 112
body is the mechanism through which alienation is experienced in Homework; corporeality the place where borders between inside and out are determined and undermined.63
Mina’s voice is one of the most interesting features of the novel. It is at once a knowing rendition of childhood experience containing insights, a sophistication and vocabulary appropriate to someone much older, and the epitome of childishness, with a liking for over-statement and heightened sense of injustice: “I was just a little girl! What could they possibly do to me? I ruminated. I was innocent and much abused” (Peres da Costa, 1999: 20). This tendency towards exaggeration is, of course, also a feature of Mina’s personality, ‘always a performance’ her mother complains. Mina is not fully in control of her voice; she spends a lot of time trying to extricate herself from the lies she has told. In this sense, she is a highly unreliable narrator and her untrustworthiness takes a particularly bodily form: ‘Mina the Mouth’ she is called. The use of exaggeration and embellishment also amounts to a form of magic realism in the novel. Deepa, the older sister, for example, is not just intelligent but preternaturally so, filling out tax-returns at three and reading Hegel at four. Mina is also outstanding, albeit in a less academic way. She was born with small protrusions on the top of her head which grow as she does and are interchangeably described as nodes, feelers or antennae. Though similar to Saleem Sinai’s influential nose in Midnight’s Children, Mina’s physical ‘spare parts’ quickly become a source of shame rather than power.
Mina’s earliest memory in the novel, indeed a memory from such an impossibly young age as to suggest invention, is of being singled out:
‘Look!’ I could even recall people having whispered aghast, indicating my innocent form as it lay, suckling a pacifier, in the King George nativity crib. ‘Can you see that kid? What are those small things on her head? Why, they look like antennae. Oh, how awful!’ (3)
Mina has two physically perfect sisters and her bodily difference causes her to feel isolation from both family and peers. In her fourth year the feelers become mobile and visibly attuned to her emotional state, slumping in despair, standing upright in distress. They become, as she puts it: “organs of a kind of self-determination”. Mina’s bodily difference, and the social alienation it causes, bring to mind two different but related 113
‘alien’ types. There is the imagined non-human being, the alien from outer-space; this staple of popular culture is immediately evoked when Mina mentions the feelers standing “straight as aerial antennae” (5). Secondly there is the very real alien immigrant who stands in opposition to the citizen; again a staple, this time of the news media, s/he is most often shown as an illegal alien – another non-person, bureaucratically speaking. And, given that a person without identity papers is technically a nonentity, this alien shares with the extraterrestrial the quality of being at the borders of the identifiable.64
Mina’s entirely unique bodily function is, at first, her “most formidable childhood weapon” (6). She merely has to point at her head and mention aliens to make infant enemies run: “‘Extraterrestrials,’ I’d repeat and then proceed, like a zealot, to explain the phenomenon of outer-planetary life forms” (7). This dynamic is reversed when Mina is six and her classmates bolder, more inquisitive. Their questioning culminates in a devastating moment of public humiliation when Daniel Hoolahan refuses to continue holding onto her hand in a game of ‘do-si-do’ during physical education. This moment hinges on touch and the skin. It illustrates what Sara Ahmad terms “the metonymic slide of touch; through touch bodies slide into each other, in such a way that aligns some bodies with other bodies, engendering the perpetual re-forming and de-forming of both bodily and social space” (2000: 49). Daniel’s bodily rejection of Mina demonstrates that touch can be granted or withheld in the marking out of social boundaries. “[T]ouch is economic” as Ahmad notes, “[f]riendship and familial relation involve the ritualisation of certain forms of touch, while the recognition of an-other as a stranger might involve a refusal to get too close” (49). Mina recalls that during the do-si-do:
his hand remained so dead in mine, his face contorted into an expression of disgust or lurid curiosity, I really could not tell. […] Daniel’s palm son began sweating like candle wax and, just as we were about to change partners, he let go and shouted, ‘You’re a mutant, Mina, that’s what you are!’ With this single act of alienation, I sank to an unprecedented low. (Peres da Costa, 1999: 9)
The skin of an alien is, like the antennae, a primary point of differentiation between human and non-human forms: “we imagine we can tell the difference, a difference that is registered on the green slime, that is almost, but not quite skin” (Ahmad: 2000: 2). In this particular economy of touch, Mina is not merely rated as a stranger to be avoided 114
but labelled a mutant. Her alienation is experienced through the touch of his skin on her own, ‘sweating like candle wax’. His repulsion is tinged with attraction, a lurid curiosity:
Encounters with aliens are bodily encounters, encounters in which slime and skin slide off one another: we are already touched by alien forms (we are touched in our very withdrawal from the slime of alien skin). Our disgust at the abjection of alien forms allows us to contain ourselves. We shiver and tremble and pull our hands away: it is a close encounter. (Ahmad, 2000: 2 my italics)
Containment is an important function of the skin, given that this is the “only unprotected tissue which has the living body on one side and the outside world on the other…it keeps out foreign agents; it keeps in bodily fluids” (Smith in Ahmad, 2000: 45). This ability of skin to mark the boundary between inside and outside, to signify the integrity of the human body, is often referred to in metaphors of national well-being. Nikos Papastergiadis notes that “policies have invariably been formulated according to the principle that the national community needs protection and regulation like a body. The national border becomes like the skin of the community” (2000: 53). The process of policing the border is directed both outward, in expelling foreign agents, and inwards. The skin functions: “to keep in, that is, to prevent the inside from becoming outside and to prevent the self from becoming other” (Ahmad, 2000: 46). In the cut-throat arena of playground politics the rejection of one child, on the basis of their bodily difference, allows others to confirm their own standing as the normative constituents of a cohesive group. Acts of othering serve to reinforce self and community.
The feelers themselves signify the fragility of skin as a container. Mina is alienated because her body does not conform to accepted norms and limits, has not contained itself. In fact, the feelers work in opposition to the skin by exposing Mina’s inner self, making her private distress visible: “the more abased I was, the more the feelers moved, drew attention to themselves, indeed, exposed my whole internal psychological anatomy, their sole pitiable function” (9). In the way her body challenges accepted boundaries, the rule of skin, and in her abasement, Mina’s predicament resembles Julia Kristeva’s deployment of abjection. Kristeva states at the beginning of Powers of Horror: “[t]here looms within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside; 115
ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable the thinkable” (1982: 1). And later: “[i]t is as if the skin, a fragile container, no longer guaranteed the integrity of ‘one’s own and clean self’” (Kristeva, 1982: 53).
Abjection does not ignore the rules; it mixes them up, conflating the orders of existence, turning the world upside down, putting below what should be kept above, failing to intern what should be buried, confusing categories that are normally kept apart, and challenging the normality that is thereby guaranteed. […] As such, it presents a challenge to the facility with which we like to separate good from evil, purity from impurity. As such, it destabilizes, challenges, perverts, offends, and frightens (Chanter, 2000: 144).
Abjection is caught up with an experience of the “in-between, the ambiguous, the composite […] the liar, the criminal with a good conscience […] a hatred that smiles […] a friend who stabs you” (Kristeva, 1982: 4). The idea that basic categories are confoundable, that evil can masquerade as good and purity dwell in impurity, is also referenced in Homework. Mina’s alien, indeterminate form, is compared to a devil. Indeed, the first memory of India that Mina draws into to the narrative, and her first metaphorical fall from grace, concerns her grandfather in Bombay deciding that her feelers “resembled the horns of Lucifer” (Peres da Costa, 1999: 8). He suggests that her “demonlike projections” might cause the keepers of heaven some “trouble in determining whether [she] was truly a Child of God” (8). Later in the novel, Mina worries that she will be kept perpetually ‘in-between, ambiguous, composite’ and is concerned that she might even come to find this abject state homely and comforting:
What of the Gates of Heaven, of that place were my soul was to be measured by St. Peter; what if he too, didn’t want to hold my hand (after all, he had a record for disavowals) and, on a whim, sent my soul to purgatory (24). And worse, imagine if I felt right at home there; purgatory – paragon of equivocality – where I would have to contend neither with the terrors of hell nor the pretensions and pressures of being a heaven dweller either. (24)
Rejection reoccurs in the familial zone in the evening following the Daniel Hoolahan event that saw Mina made abject in public. She seeks refuge on her mother’s lap and is pushed away when her mother indicates a pain in her abdomen. Mina feels ‘doubly rejected’ in a single day and in both cases the importance of touch in establishing relations of proximity and distance is emphasised. Mina wonders about her mother’s sudden frigidity: “was she sad?” she speculates, did her small complaints about the cold 116
conceal “a deeper longing”? (2). This childlike intuition prompts her to take an equally childish remedy when she steals a can of California Sunshine belonging to a classmate as a gift to cure her cold (hearted) mother. Mina passes the can off as a souvenir from a friend. When her misdemeanour is revealed Mina is again disgraced, sent by her mother to kneel in front of a picture of Jesus to demand his forgiveness until she is allowed to get up: “Oh, it was the separation that hurt the most” Mina recalls (22).
Peres da Costa has suggested that Homework “is about that fall from grace that one experiences” (interview: 29/11/03). This ‘fall’ can be understood as a process of separation, rejection, abjection when ‘grace’ is situated as the Imaginary (the time of connection to the mother). The novel invites such a reading given that the discourse of psychoanalytic is quite self-consciously present at the surface of the text itself. “The abject confronts us” according to Kristeva, “with our earliest attempts to release the hold of maternal entity even before ex-isting outside of her, thanks to the autonomy of language. It is a violent, clumsy breaking away, with the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling” (13). In this sense, abjection is a precondition for the fashioning of an autonomous speaking subject: the child has to leave “the natural mansion” in order to become (13). Thus “Even before being like, “I” am not but do separate, reject, ab-ject” (13). In Homework, the clumsiness of this breaking away is conveyed by Mina’s repeated attempts to hold on to her mother, to imagine non-separation and completeness, to recreate that lost moment of grace. Mina is released “from the stare of Christ” and comforted:
She must have sensed that my cheeks were wet and so put her graceful arms around me. I could feel her own tears splash onto my skin. The moon’s crepuscular shadow faintly outlined her face, a face I loved so dearly that it sometimes hurt, and I hoped that soon, one day very soon, I would stop my own reckless mastication and, having stuffed myself with all the small pieces of the world, metamorphose into such a beautiful creature as she. (22-3)
Later, her classmate’s father is hospitalised following a car-crash and eventually dies. Mina learns that hospitals are a place where people ‘slip away’ and is alarmed when told that her mother is also about to go into hospital. Mina’s mother has a hysterectomy and this precipitates the onset of her depression and ultimate estrangement from her family. The symptoms of Mina’s mother’s depression first manifest themselves through 117
the confusion of categories; she places non-perishables items in the fridge (41) and hoards food in suitcases under her bed (123). They are later displayed through a series of activities to do with eggs, nesting and birds: she covets unbroken eggs and buries broken ones, flies out of the house to steal nests and becomes increasingly bird-like in her mannerisms. The bodily logic of her depression is made explicit:
Mum’s estrangement from us was now all the more pronounced and, in stealing the nests of innocent September fledglings, I had to wonder whether she thought she was recuperating for herself the very thing that had long ago fallen away: those eggs that once arrived with solid regularity insider her very body. Her face acquired small lines, traces of waste; she aged not by years but in days and hours before my grieving eyes. (160)
‘Mina the Mouth’: oral matters and (m)other disorders
Apart form those associated with the mother figure, there are many other moments of erratic behaviour and a few outright transgressions as well as a number of disorders and phobias in Homework, from minor slips of the tongue and insomnia to Mina’s obsession with death. The references to key processes and personages of psychoanalysis is often overt, as with: “Procrastination had become the external designation for a secret inner impulse I had these last months been suffering: The Death Drive had taken over and not even Dr Freud could be of assistance” (131). They are also mirrored in the action of the novel, for example when nine-year old Mina is taken to see a therapist, Dr. Blaby.
His name brings me to another dimension of Homework related to order and disorder/s: the mouth and the oral sphere. The connotations of ‘blabby, blabbing,’ suggests a man with a mouthful of words, an irresponsible gossip and this circles back to Mina’s “own reckless mastication” (20). Her desire to stuff herself with the world demonstrates that the mouth, like the skin, acts as a borderline between inside and out, through its part in the rhythm of ingestion and expulsion. Mina compares herself to “the poor, famished caterpillar of Hungry Caterpillar fame” when she recalls how in her infancy she “had senselessly bitten the green tassels off the bedspread” and later “eaten the wallpaper off the wall in frustration” (20). This behaviour is a response to the pressure placed on her to excel. Only four months old and Mina’s parents expect complete speech from her; she has read encyclopaedias more often than fairy-tales. The high expectations and recriminations that first-generation parents heap on their children is a favoured theme in 118
many South Asian diaspora texts. Though clearly satirised, Peres da Costa draws on her own experience when detailing this theme. She concedes that her parents were motivated by the tough work ethic and over-investment in education that is the common (dis)order of immigrant family dynamics: “push or perish in other words” (interview: 29/11/03). She suggests that “it’s not only the fact that you will not do well and then screw up your life that one’s parents threaten you with, but that you’ll fall out of their favour” (interview: 29/11/03).
Mina repeatedly falls out of favour in Homework. On one occasion, for example, she brazenly tap-dances in the Casualty department whilst waiting for news of her injured sister and suffers yet another public humiliation when smacked on the back of the leg by her overwrought father. She then catches sight of her mother, and the more knowing narrator offers an intimation of the future when her mother’s disorder has become more apparent:
Mum, whose mouth now seemed as tight as a ravenous caterpillar; she could not fly, at least not yet, and I myself would have to quit waiting for her transmogrification. Her words would no longer give way to her heart and her kisses would now come to me only involuntarily. (48)
Mina’s continual falling (away from the mother or into disgrace) despite her efforts to ‘hold on’ is diametrically opposed to her mother’s attempts to escape the family home, to fly and to flee. The mouth in the passage quoted above serves as a link back to the Hungry Caterpillar and thus to the hunger/food/starvation, desire/satiation/denial set of associations that run throughout the narrative. The mouth is also used to fashion words and kisses, it is the mechanism through which inner thoughts and emotions are expelled and withheld; the passage also indicates the ability of the mouth to confer (grace) or deny. Another stage of the mother’s gradual estrangement from the family is marked when she, a palliative physician by profession, takes up a second, weekend job in Casualty (53). In her absence, basic homely tasks are poorly executed; Mina’s father, for example, uses the stapler to take up the hem of a school uniform. This method of stitching, of closing or keeping in what has come open or undone is related to the body when Mina wonders: “How…could my mother suture a stranger’s flesh when she couldn’t even mend my own wide and gaping wounds?” (54). Mina resents the 119
separation: “could she not see the depth of my own suffering? Oh how I longed not to be cast away from her!” (58).
Further elements of ‘mouthwork’ in the novel revolve around language and food, placing Mina’s lack of discipline in opposition to her mother’s exercise of authority. As mentioned earlier, Mina often cannot control her mouth, revealing things she “didn’t even mean to disclose” and repeatedly lying her way into trouble. “She hates us” Mina “lets slip” to the neighbours, almost against her own volition, making public a family affair (67). The mother’s response to Mina’s repeated misdemeanours is to exercise “dietary reprisals” and “taste-bud totalitarianism” (104; 105; 158). In one episode, within a chapter titled ‘False Consciousness’, Mina is agitating to be allowed to join the Brownies. She tries to wear down her mother’s resistance to the idea by repeating a robust ‘yes’ to her own request whilst the latter is making samosas, but despite her commitment to this tactic all she receives is “spurning and negation”, a resolute ‘no’. Mina responds by turning her back and whispering ‘suffer the little children’. Her mother, a “sonic panopticon” asks her, in effect dares her, to repeat and Mina does so with “the calamity of filial insolence” (103). Her punishment is culinary and the “delicious pyramidal feats that seemed to be works of the highest oragamic workmanship” (the effort involved an obvious indication of mother-love and nourishment) are removed from her plate that night:
‘If the Mouth wants to enjoy the privileges of all the children her age, she’ll have to be more respectful.’ ‘The Mouth! That cruel, cruel cognomen that, for reasons of a happy appetite and a tendency toward mendacity, had for some weeks now been employed as a means of maternal torture! (105)
At eight years old Mina still hasn’t broken into the inner circle of school friendships; she associates with others like herself, “the ordinary and the despised, the ostracised”. Joining the Brownies with its secret handshakes and strange rituals would allow her a degree of social capital: “I want to be a member!” she pleads to no avail. Mina’s mendacity displays itself again when she attempts to elicit information about the group from two members who are sworn to secrecy: “they were firm and resolute, stood before me pityingly, shaking their heads, spurning and negating me. It was the same old routine” (116). She has already effectively bribed these girls to come to her home with 120
stories of a glass eye and a lie about a puppy. When neither eventuates, she decides to trade in a ‘secret’ of her own for their disclosure. Then comes the ‘weighty revelation’: Mina tells them she is adopted. The falsehood is revealed and she is punished once more: “Mina the Mouth. The Mouth. Against every wish of mine…this was the epithet, so lacking in maternal tenderness, that was bestowed on me and fixed here after” (117).
The situation is reminiscent of the conflict between first-generation parents who may wish to maintain tradition and their children who may want to assimilate as quickly as possible. Yet it is not a culturally specific issue that prohibits Mina from joining the Brownies, rather the objection is due to an ideological standpoint on the “perils of copying fools” (106), and “the corrupting influences of group dynamics, the conspiracy of crowds” (109, original italics). What Mina is unable to admit to her politically- minded father is that she is fully prepared “to be a fool to fit in”. In response to Mina’s pleas that she must become a Brownie, her father asks: “[i]sn’t it enough that you are Daddy’s daughter and Mummy’s daughter and the sister of you sisters and Miss Anderson’s pupil?” (107). The implication of this rhetorical question is that family-love and mentorship should provide an adequate sense of belonging; that the safe space of the home offers a haven from the ugliness of the world beyond, where political action is necessary. However, it is precisely this easy equation of home with love and security that the novel systematically undermines.
The social practices that shape the home environment fragment as Mina’s mother becomes increasingly irrational. She starts to ‘split’ mentally and literally, fleeing the family home for extended periods. Elaborate Indian meals, once regarded as “gifts of the greatest maternal munificence” are replaced by half-frozen beef-burgers and chillied meat-pies (45; 178). A form of segregated occupancy develops with the father semi- permanently retreating under the house, ostensibly ‘to fix the wiring’ and the mother roosting above. As Mina explains: “There was no blood in the partition of our own house. When she was present at all these days, Mum despotically occupied all rooms at once; he, in dissident fashion, refused to be territorial”.65 The dimensions of the house itself are transformed through disorder: “We could barely move in the rooms of our house without tripping over, falling onto, or bashing into things” (233). Mould eats its way into food; unwashed crockery encroaches on the kitchen space. (157). The home becomes a “barren house,” a place to “harbour and conceal an escapee parent” (188; 121
147). This unhomeliness is apparent on one fraught occasion when Mina invites a ‘friend’ over. “Now we were moving inside the house” she states, suggesting a bodily dis-ease in the physical space of the home (184). Indeed, Mina is compelled by visions of suicide to break off her conversation and continue moving stealthily from room to room.
‘What are you doing?’ I pushed the door forward, waiting now for this ogre to pounce and gorge us. ‘I’m looking for Mum.’ The creature had escaped. Silence that dreaded, unaccommodating room of sorrow, was all that was left. (189)
In the exchange outline above, the mother is ab-jected, made an ogre, a creature, and the home situated as a highly fragile shell, skin or boundary to keep in or release this all- consuming (gorging) figure. In other instances however, self-identification with the mother results in aspects of her disorder transferring to Mina. This dynamic is noted early on: “the more I envisaged myself the Stranger, the more deeply I felt bound to the condition of estrangement and the more I, too, wanted to flee” (18). As her mother beings to regularly repeat the phrase: “I want to die” Mina develops morbid tendencies and an obsession with death. And, almost mimicking her mother’s ornithological fixation, Mina “presid[es] over” a dead currawong chick, keeping it in her bed until the “smelly cadaver” is found “buried beneath [her] doona” (138). Mina’s final disorder coincides with the onset of puberty and takes the form of a nascent anorexia.
As Susanne Skubal points out ‘disordered’ eating most often refers to the two extremes: eating too much, as with Mina’s prior ‘reckless mastication’, or eating too little: “living on the tart acid of a Granny Smith apple for a whole school day” (245). She falls “in love with [her] own relinquishment” and makes “suffering an aesthetic of the highest order” (244; 245). This refusal of nourishment in Homework can be read in two related ways, first as an identification with suffering, ravenous mother – “by the time my mother took flight, I would have become as inconspicuous and wraithlike as the ghosts I saw and that kept me awake” – and secondly, as a rejection of this figure who is so heavily associated with food in the novel (149). The anorexic erasure “of the (female) body” takes with it the possibility of motherhood, according to Skubal and “points to […] an irrepressible ‘no'” (2002: 76). As such, it is, metaphorically speaking, part of the process of ‘falling back under’ and ‘breaking away’ from the sway of a maternal power 122
(Kristeva), “accomplished and signified by refusal at the primary, oral site” where the pleasure of self-denial is predicated on the repudiation of appetite itself (Skubal, 2002: 76; 73).
The end of the novel is cataclysmic. Mina’s sees her older sister kissing the boy next door, the one person who had been a dependable friend, and her feelings of betrayal and loss of innocence send her running out of her home and into the world. As she runs her conceptual boundaries collapse and the fragments of her life pour out in chaotic associations:
I was running in Rain Hill, but in the passport of my soul I was encircling the city of Sydney, crossing whole continents and vast tracts of land. I had spoken all the idioms and minor vernaculars that are lost in the blood that is shed when you lay yourself down at the borders of the world.
The blood that is shed is the blood that stains Mina’s hands as she pulls the feelers from her head, changing the borderlines of her body and losing her “umbilical cord to the world” (254). Another transformational event occurs simultaneously as Mina returns to find her home on fire. Mina loses both her father who dies trapped under the house and her mother who assumes an unnameable, “glorious phoenixlike form” and finally flies away. This narrative of loss is interrupted by a final epiphany which occurs when Mina looks at her mother with new eyes and sees “a great shadow sloughed off from [her] own reflection” (259).
Conclusion
In both The Ganges and its Tributaries and Homework the assumed stability of self- identity, as refracted through family networks, peers, school and spatial familiarity is unsettled and contested. Christopher and Mina’s accommodation of and survival in the routine habits of the everyday is disturbed by the flow of imagination and by the reality of daily disorder. Two of the questions I used to introduce this chapter, posed by Radhakrishnan, relate well to each of the texts under discussion. Christopher attempts precisely to puzzle out how his ‘two selves coexist and how they weld into one identity’. He finds a level of insubstantiality, in the proliferation of information about India and the parental past, in the layering of fact and fiction and in the bare bones of 123
his skeleton houses. Assertions of hybridity in The Ganges, serve as a coping strategy for discomfort; hybridity in Homework is conveyed through splitting, abjection and ‘impossible longing’. Mena could be seen to pose the question: ‘how could the unity of identity have more than one face or name?’ For both characters the ‘logic of the hyphen’ requires the construction of ‘fictitious homelands,’ embellishments and lies; identity is shown to be deliberately crafted through language and selective, second-hand memory.
This may not indicate a broader theme of anxiety and disorder in second-generation fiction. I would argue that the introspective quality to both Cyril and Peres da Costa’s novels, and the highly individualised predicaments Christopher and Mina face, work against a reading of either the texts or characters as representative of ‘the second- generation.’ In this way, they also disprove Monika Fludernik’s contention that the “collective identity” of the group “is at stake” in diaspora novels (2003a: 265), which may itself indicate a broader trend in South Asian-Australia fiction – to question the way ‘community’ is taken for granted and fixed in multicultural discourses and theories of diaspora.
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Chapter Three – The Guru Glut: Ethno-Realism and Celebrity
some travel extensively to spread their gospels and tend to their spiritual (and commercial) assets, while the other expect the faithful to track them to their ashrams. (Srinivas Aravamudan 2001: 26)
During the festival season […] I recall being woken up and watching the proceedings bleary eyed, not knowing fully whether I was awake or dreaming. In a sense I feel that the devotees in Madurai bazaar were in a similar state. (Christine Mangala Frost, 1994: 8)
Introduction
This chapter focuses on texts with predominantly Indian settings. Several critics have shelved this strand of diasporic fiction of/on the ‘homeland,’ as part of an ‘exoticist genre’ that perpetuates false representations of India and depends on super-hype of ‘global’ literary marketplace, where it has found a profitable and popular niche. My interest here is not so much with the counter-discourse of image correction, but with the way in which images and ideas of India circulate and spread. In the political domain, for example, the Indian External Affairs Minister has been recently presented, in an a opinion piece for The Hindu, as speculating on the nation’s “ability to influence other societies through such real but intangible elements as culture” (in Mohan, 2003: online). He sees culture as “soft power” in global politics. The reviewer continues:
India could always count itself among the few nations with strong cards in the arena of soft power. Thanks to the spread of religion and culture from India to the neighbouring regions over the millennia, India has exercised a measure of “soft power”. The spiritualism of India has attracted people from all over the world, and its Gurus have travelled around the world selling yoga and mysticism. Bollywood has done more for Indian influence abroad than the bureaucratic efforts of the Government. From classical and popular music to its cuisine, from the growing impact of its writers and intellectuals, India now has begun to acquire many levers of soft power. (Mohan, 2003: online)
Here, ‘writers and intellectuals’ are placed amongst Bollywood, bureaucracy, gastronomy and gurudom as just another point of leverage and growing export market. The India Tourist Office plays on similar tropes of consumption and exoticism when marketing India abroad: 126
This millennium, India offers a mouthwatering menu of attractions. Try these for starters. […] To commemorate the forthcoming millennium, we’ll be staging some very special festivals, fairs and events throughout the country. As if our traditional selection of monumental forts and palaces, dramatic wildlife and dazzling beaches wasn’t enough already (in Huggan, 2001: 82).66
The spectacle of ‘live culture,’ implied by festivals, fairs and events, is implicated in my central concern in this chapter: the figure of the guru and the production/reception of guru fictions.
There is a wider sphere for global guru-images, ranging from invoking the sober “image of Gandhi as the quintessential guru,” to summoning Sai Baba, the scandalous Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh or the always slick, Deepak Chopra (Mongia, 2005: 73).67 This is matched by a well established literary niche – including works by Rao, Narayan, Jhabvala, Bhatacharya etc – and a number of films, for example the recent ‘The Guru,’ that focus on this theme. The first known Indian diaspora writer, Dean Mahomet/Din Muhammad (1759-1851), described “as someone who was ceaselessly inventing himself and his world,” made a Chopra-like move when establishing Mahomed’s Baths in Brighton (Kumar, 2003: 59).68 He advertised the benefits of his ‘medical’ approach in the popular Shampooing (1822) which ran to three editions.69 There are two other prominent historical antecedents signal the movement of Indian ideas into new spaces; the inauguration of the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875 and the World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in 1893.70 As Aravamudan notes, the latter:
was most likely the first occasion when South Asian religious leaders were actually showcased in a Western context […] The great attention gained by Swami Vivekananda’s uninvited performance shot him into prominence and resulted in the establishment of the Ramakrishna-Vedanta movement in the United States as well as in other countries. (2001: 31)
So processes of mystification, ‘media’ tactics and travel are already a significant part of the late-19th century model of gurudom, alongside a flexibility and/or eclecticism in the interpretation of key religious and philosophical idea(l)s. Nonetheless, “the real guru glut, and also its saturation of global media” occurred post-1965, facilitated by the greater use of international air travel, the growth of the South Asian diaspora in Anglophone countries, the adoption of “aggressive marketing” strategies and the 127
‘mainstreaming’ of varieties of ‘New Age’ philosophies and products (Aravamudan, 2001: 32).71 My contention is that South Asian-Australian fiction takes part in and responds in various ways to this global guru glut.
In this chapter I compare the work of a small-press novelist, Christine Mangala and a well-hyped but relatively new novelist, Bem Le Hunte. My major themes are the construction of authenticity and aura, the mediation of spirituality, and the consumption of ‘India.’ To greater and lesser degrees both Mangala and Le Hunte critique the way Indian symbols and goods are fetishised in the global arena, whilst trading on their value. Does the intangible, unpredictable quality of cultural exchange undermine the imperialising drive of soft-power? My other major questions relate to the promotion and reception of diasporic texts. How do publishers play on the cultural capital of guru writers as a source of wisdom? How is the ‘ethnic author’ (self) marketed as a purveyor of this knowledge? To explore these questions, I will begin this chapter by examining ethnographic writing/reading tactics and close with a discussion of cross-cultural internet marketing and reader–writer dialogue.
Gastropoetics and ethnic aesthetics: the author as ethnographer
Mangala’s debut novel, The Firewalkers (1991), opens with a sound:
Ekk Dum…Ekk Dum. Up–down. Up–down. The steady sound of iron hitting the pappadum-dough on the granite slab. (1991: 1)
A pappadum party is being prepared in honour of Lakshmiyamma’s newly-returned daughter and her husband. They have travelled from America to small country-town Kuchchipuram to get their ‘foreign-bred’ daughter married and these preparations mark the start of a series of food-requiring celebrations. Mangala’s focus on food at the start of her novel immediately links it to other South Asian-Australian fiction.72 Indeed, the treatment and symbolism of cooking and eating could be said to be a feature of diasporic literature more generally, given the amount of analysis the subject has generated.73 Parama Roy, for example, has written of the great figures of “subcontinental gastropoetics”, observing that “food and cooking have become, in several texts, the favored optic (or more properly, trope) to filter questions of national- 128
diasporic filiation and affiliation and their economies of taste and consumption” (2002: 471).74 Food is marked by difference and specificity at a range of levels; personal preferences and specialities, secret family recipes, local ingredients, regional dishes, religious taboo, national and even continental cuisines. Food plays a role in the culture- clash that many immigrants (and travellers) face; it may be linked to nostalgia, to idealizations of community and home, particularly (but by no means exclusively) under conditions of diaspora.
The Firewalkers puts food in the personal register, not through NRI memories of childhood flavours, but by dwelling on the practice of making of food:
With her bare arms raised high, clutching the mallet, biceps tightening, blue veins knotting like a boxer ready for another round, she stares at the dough. Rukku grabs the shiny slippery creature and feeds it to the descending mallet. One slip and her fingers will be gone, her delicate wrists pounded to powder. Yet Rukku continues, risking all. (Mangala, 1991: 1)
The bodily quality of this passage provides another way of comprehending food, through an appreciation of the challenge, skill and craft of cooking. Here, this emphasis on craft is filtered through notions of third-world authenticity: the pappadum recipe is very simple but time-consuming and labour-intensive (in opposition to the flair and complexity associated with French cooking for example). Authenticity is achieved through effort – ‘risking all’ for that elusive ‘melt in the mouth’ sensation. The entire opening scene, running over three pages, evokes a spectacle of hand-made, ethnographic food that is reminiscent of an Oxfam advert for embroidered cushions.
The combined sense of simplicity, solidarity and bodily effort required by the recipe, is ultimately used to assert a regional and religious identity that is tied to concepts of purity. Lakshmiyamma praises her handiwork and states: “[n]one of these over-spiced, hot, not-to-be-endured-garlic-stinking-northern-nonsense you get in your biriyani hotels, but pure Brahmin, melt in the mouth variety only made here!”(3). In an ethnographic article on ‘gastro-politics,’ Arjun Appadurai (1981) comments on how food is used to mark out boundaries and transgressions in South Indian Tamil Brahmin households, wedding feasts, and temples. The ‘gastro-politics’ of the kitchen are clearly at play in Mangala’s depiction of the making of food: “every stage has to prepared with 129
great care, with great sraddah [religious dedication] – and there is such protocol to be observed” (3). Authenticity-as-orthodoxy is extended in a looser, more pragmatic way to the pecking order established by the community of women who have gathered for the occasion. The chain of command operates through a scale of effort/risk, giving “[d]eaf Rajam-mami from next door […] pride of place with the best of the rolling-pins” and putting Rukku in the lowliest position, ‘feeding the slippery creature to the descending mallet’ (3). She is placed in close proximity to the centre of power, Lakshmiyamma, but is shown as submissive, tentative; “Rukku knows her place” as an in-between figure in the family home. She is neither an orphan (her parents live in genteel Brahmin poverty), nor technically a servant but has served Lakshmiyamma since childhood (3-4).
The prominence and explication of cultural detail in the first four pages of The Firewalkers, made possible by the spectacle of the pappadum party, invites an anthropological reading. Indeed, the ‘simple/simplifying’ labour of ethnographic realism serves here as the literary mode of homemade food. The novel certainly satisfies the “minimum requirements” set for “ethnographic realism as a written anthropological form” by George Marcus and Dick Cushman, which include “the contextualisation of “indigenous concepts; and the emphasis on daily events that represent the reality of a particular way of life” (in Huggan, 2001: 42). It is also true that the novel displays an “avoidance of authorial intrusion,” their first criteria, in the sense that Mangala takes an omniscient position and doesn’t play narrative tricks on the reader. At the extra-textual level, however, the writer is constructed, not as an objective observer-participant, but as an auto-ethnographer whose authority is based on the authenticity of impeccable cultural credentials. The author notes begin in the following way:
Christine Mangala was born in Tanjore district, Tamil Nadu, South India, into a Brahmin family distinguished for five centuries as devotees of Shiva, as Sanskrit scholars, writers and composers, and tracing its descent from the sixteenth century scholar Appaya Dikshitar, a noted commentator on the ninth century philosopher and saint, Shankara. (inside cover)
This excerpt is just part of a range of other explicatory material that confirms the author’s standing as a particularly knowledgeable insider. Framing the story in this way, with peripheral extra-texts, is indicative of a broader trend/tension within postcolonial literatures. Huggan, for example, comments on the way African literature is promoted 130
through ‘a formidable battery of prefatory notes’ and read through the optic of the ‘anthropological exotic’.75 Mangala not only provides the familiar glossary words and phrases; she provides a substantial supplement of ‘South Indian Cookery,’ with an index that links each recipe to the page the dish is cooked or eaten in the story. In the instructions accompanying the recipes, she supplies information on Tamilian ways of ordering meals, and on the symbolism of different foods. Some dishes, like the author, have a long and illustrious ancestry:
Pongal (sweet). This sweet rice has a long ancestry: from Vedic times, rice cooked in milk with sugar and ghee seems to have been regarded as fare fit for the gods. In the South […] the making of pongal in a specially sanctified bronze-pot is central to celebrating the harvest festival in the month of Tai. (Mangala, 1991: 237)
Mangala dismisses modern shortcuts and Western approximations. She elevates the “subtle flavour of the home-made product” over “the commercial brands” and describes a Southern Indian Rasam recipe as: “the original of ‘mullingatawny’” (238). So in the local colour and cultural flavours, depicted at the narrative level and in the information that brackets the story, effort, purity and descent signal a level of authenticity maintained in an era when ‘India’ is globally available. In this way, The Firewalkers demonstrates one aspect of diasporic fiction, where the text-author collusion is “made to stand in metonymically for India itself as an object of conspicuous consumption” (Huggan, 2001: 81).
Another minor character who provides a perspective on ‘that special touch of Indianness’ is Mr Gautam, ‘Cultural Counsellor to the Festival of India committee’.76 He arrives in Kuchchipuram looking for cultural artefacts to use in an Exhibition that will be shown in Delhi and London. When asked if he is interested in viewing a recently found Chola bronze, he replies: “[y]es, yes. I am certainly keen on anything rare. Next to erotica, go for rarity and novelty, I say” (91). The ‘soft power’ mode of cultural imperialism is alluded to as Mr Gautam eats:
Enthusing over his plate of rice, sambhar, rasam and curries, Mr Gautam regained his self-importance, and held forth. ‘This I call the “cultural politics of food”. When the Indians colonized South-east Asia, what did they do? They spiced up Chinese food; so we have a culinary extension of culture into Singapore, Malaysia, and even Thailand’ (94) 131
However it is not food and statues that hold Mr Gautam’s interest. He considers himself akin to a composer or choreographer in his arrangement of the parts of the Exhibition into a cohesive whole. He is driven by an aesthetic desire to get to the essence of Hindu culture through the ‘aura’ of the “unselfconscious, primitive artist” (92). And he wants spectacle: “[f]olk-art is all the rage these days in the west, especially live folk-art! Makes good import-export. I am here to capture and transport live-culture!” (91). Mangala lampoons Mr Gautam and his methods of promoting Indian culture. She demonstrates an awareness of the dangers of trading in images of India, indicating the bogusness of commercialised cultural ‘art’. In doing so, however, Mangala takes on Mr Gautam’s role by implying that there is a truer cultural ‘essence’ hidden beneath the trappings of commodity culture.
Insider/Outsider: ‘passing over and coming back’
The Firewalkers begins, as previously mentioned, with preparations for an NRI- returned wedding (a theme made famous by Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding), but it is not a novel about diaspora. The action is entirely situated within India and by the end of the first chapter the focus has shifted from the NRI-bride to her cousin Aparna.77 Aparna is a young widow who has taken up the austerities of widowhood as orthodox Brahmin custom requires. Her acceptance of this status, and the equilibrium she attempts to find in seeking detachment from worldly pleasures, is disrupted by the arrival of Raghavan, the new District Collector. A familiar East-West divide is created primarily through the opposition of these two ‘local’ characters. Aparna is dutiful and conformist, devoted to her father and to Shiva. Raghavan, is an ‘agnostic Hindu,’ and ex-historian. He is sceptical, rational and progressive, desperate to “clear the haze” and “sweep aside […] the holy clutter” (17; 157). The rest of the novel concerns his trying to win her over. The ‘love-story’ is perhaps the least interesting and most predictable aspect of the novel: she resists and resists and resists and resists, then suddenly surrenders to Raghavan’s advances (another Bollywood echo). Any tension that could be derived from the ‘will she/won’t she’ question, which runs over many pages, is squandered. Readers already know that: “[t]ogether, they defy society and the demands of a life-denying philosophy” (back-cover). So this is not really a love-quest as such, for the outcome is assured before the reading begins; rather it is a story where ‘love’ forms 132
the ground for a mediation between faith and faithlessness, between and within one faith and another.
By focusing on the plight of young Hindu widows, and Aparna’s dreams of immolation, Mangala broaches an issue that has long served to motivate criticism and debate.78 Nancy Phelan, in her review of The Firewalkers, refers obliquely to the debates on and prohibitions of sati which took place during the colonial period.79 “Many westerners” she states, “writing outside Hindu life, have described the treatment of Hindu widows. Christine Mangala has an insider’s knowledge, but where her novel is concerned this advantage becomes a liability” (Phelan, 1992: 20). In keeping with my previous reading of The Firewalkers as an example the ethnographic realism, I would agree with Phelan, that the conspicuousness of the insider position, made evident in the surfeit of contextual material within the narrative, serves as an encumbrance throughout. However, Mangala is not entirely constructed as an informant, the speaking-female- subaltern reporting on her culture; the author notes also promote her in a mediating role. They state: “[s]ince 1968 Christine Mangala has largely lived in the west […] [where] she has put her unique experience of eastern and western religions to promoting a better understanding of both – through lectures and broadcasts” (inside cover).
What the notes leave unsaid is that the writer has officially converted to the ‘Trinitarian Christian faith’. This is made explicit in Mangala Frost’s Australian Festival of Light Resource Paper titled, ‘From Hindu gods to Jesus Christ: a personal journey’ (1994: 11). Here, she also casts herself as a mediator, as a former insider to Hindu traditions. The paper begins with a diaspora story about returning to South India (in order to gather material for The Firewalkers). Mangala comments on her husband and children’s fascination with a Hindu temple procession and their sense of the “worship of idols [as] alien and disturbing” (8). What surprised her is that she found herself reacting in the same way. Even though the spectacle is a familiar she felt “as much of an outsider as they did” (8). With “no regrets” about abandoning false teachings, she states:
I have no doubt at all about the sincerity and strong feeling with which devout Hindus pay homage to the gods: offering flowers, incense, coconuts, fruit and money. Yet I could not but feel sad that such religious fervour should be lavished on mere dream-images conjured from the primordial swamp of Hindu mythology. (8) 133
In recounting her conversion, Mangala explains how she was once enthused by the teachings of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, key figures of ‘Renascent Hinduism’ but troubled by the lack of “meaning and purpose” in a world-view which “preaches a metaphysics that severs the body from the soul” and places “mystical experience… above and beyond everyday concerns” (10). In trying to find a way of “making earthly life significant”, Mangala turned away from the impersonal Brahman and towards the Christian idea of a personal god, which she describes as a ‘living god,’ a ‘loving god’ (10). So Mangala is in fact more of an insider, as in devotee, to ‘western’ religious thought than the majority of her implied addressees: the “spiritually- jaded Westerners of all ages and persuasions” who feel “a disenchantment with, if not downright hostility to, the claims of Christianity” and an affection for a non-threatening Hinduism (8). Mangala perceives the commercialised spiritual marketplace, “aura portraits, Tarot readings, astrology, yoga, TM and the like” as a modern ‘primordial swamp’ – a form of ‘paganism’ prevalent in Australia, and amongst the readers she is attempting to re- enchant.
Mangala explores the issue of mediation, and indicates her perceived audience for The Firewalkers, in another paper titled, ‘‘Fleshing the Bones’: Conducting Inter-faith Dialogue in Fiction’ (1996). Here, she compares the representation of advaita-vedanta in Raja Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope to her own treatment of this theme. Drawing on John S. Dunne’s concept of what is “essential to true dialogue, a passing over and coming back”, Mangala constructs mediation as a type of ‘spiritual empathy’ (1996: 216 original italics). She sees the story-form as a perfect vehicle for ‘the life that feeds belief,’ – the narrative flesh on the bones of proselytising. The mediation takes place by the reader who is seen to be: “‘passing over’ into other belief-systems and cultures and ‘coming back’ home” (217). Thus, Mangala hopes that the (implicitly, non-Hindu) reader of The Firewalkers will be “sufficiently hooked” on the human drama of the story to undergo this transition and will return to their own culture and faith (implicitly, Christian – and also her own ‘home’) enriched by the experience.
The play on mediation enters the narrative through the opposition/overlap between one cluster of concepts around the fleshy, bodily, earthly, everyday and another signifying the mind, spirit and soul. In The Firewalkers, Hinduism is depicted with a degree of 134
complexity; as stratified and contested by regional and caste-based politics, and as both an esoteric philosophy and lived tradition. The ‘classical’ or ‘textual’ forms, exemplified by bharatanatyam and Aparna’s father, whose “very rafters belch out vedantam”, are contrasted against ‘folk’ or ‘practical’ customs, such as the fire-walking ceremony (1991: 172). There is a definite hierarchy between the two, with the former depicted as closer to the spiritual essence of Hinduism than the bodily “clamour and colour of pujas” (155).80 Mangala maintains this common divide between two forms of Hinduism, the Great and Little traditions, in her critical resource paper, ‘From Hindu Gods to Jesus Christ’. Here, she defines “primitive Hinduism” as little more than “luck, fate and astrology” working in similar ways to the “spirit that guides the Australian Lotto machine” and “Higher Hinduism” as the philosophical views held by “educated Hindus” (Mangala Frost, 1994: 9).
The Firewalkers explores the personal cost of attempting to live by the precepts of philosophy. Aparna, the widow, was formally a bharatanatyam dancer of some skill. She expends considerable effort sublimating her desire to dance and then, after taking part in one local performance, is burdened by self-recrimination. Aparna’s guilt is augmented by her orthodox father’s disapproval; she aims to match his spiritual devotion and become entirely detached from the physical. The extreme nature of this ‘life-denying’ quality is represented through her repeated references to sati. Her desire for self-cessation is described as: “the common Indian disease –disassociation, suppression, denial, elevated to a spiritual status” (196).81 When Aparna’s father becomes a sadhu and cuts his earthly ties, Aparna, after a period of intense depression, is finally able to dance again and aspire to love. Aparna and Raghavan’s relationship is resolved through the symbolism of ‘journeying together’:
he would lead her forward, out and away from a painful past into a fresh future; and she, she would guide him back through the paths he had hacked himself out of, and help him recover all that was precious and living in the traditions he had discarded as wayside rubble. (201)
This is potentially the moment of ‘passing over and coming back,’ when jaded, pagan readers consider what they too have left behind. The synthesis, for Aparna and Raghavan, however, strikes a false note, in part due to the pacing of the novel; the last scenes are rushed, almost tacked on to a love-story that has taken a long time to resolve. 135
Synthesis and Authenticity
By rejecting ‘higher Hinduism’ and affirming the value of living tradition, Mangala unsettles the accepted hierarchy. South Indian Brahmin orthodoxy, is depicted as a caste-bound, highly patriarchal, life-denying, ‘holy cult of nothingness’ – an entirely negative force that the rationalising Raghavan has to conquer. Living Hindu traditions, on the other hand, which cross the classical/folk divide – found in the preparation of food, dance, ceremonies, artisanal activities and the hand-crafted objects of worship – are shown to be inspiring, in their ‘original’ forms, in the authenticity acquired through bodily effort and in the genuineness of village life. One example of this potency is signalled during the preparations for Mr Gautam’s Festival of India Exhibition in Delhi. Both Raghavan and Aparna reject the Exhibition’s commercialisation and freezing of ‘live-culture’ as a ‘tawdry sham’. But each appreciates the sense of live spirit Mr Gautam is aiming to tap at its cultural source. Thus even the sceptical Raghavan is moved when comparing a twelfth-century Chola bronze original to an eighteenth- century replica. He states:
You can tell at once which was the inspired artist. The Chola Shiva is ecstatic; and the latter one, though still a magnificent bronze casting, is just that – a casting. Something vital has gone. And as for the modern versions produced in our workshops and co-operatives, they are dead as dolls. (204)
Aparna agrees, adding that she feels as he does when “young movie mad upstarts” butcher bharatanatyam after six months training: “[u]nlike the great masters of the past, we have become cheap – our spirit goes easily out of tune” (205). So the ‘aura’ of the original, produced through the authentic moment in which body/effort and inspiration connect, is diminished by reproduction. It is significant that Aparna’s transmogrification is symbolised by a ‘live-culture’ exchange with a traditional village potter modelling clay horses, during the preparations fort the Exhibition. His acceptance of living with his horses, and ‘heart,’ in the kiln, being perpetually shattered and remade becomes her motivation for change.
The Firewalkers highlights the powers of certain classical/folk traditions in their living forms, rather than dismissing them as simply part of the continuum of ‘luck, fate and astrology’. One strand of the novel, an alternate plot-line, concerns the discovery of the 136
Chola bronze statues and canvasses the way caste-politics are configured in and over issues of worship. The (mostly outcaste and low-caste) villagers want to erect a shrine on the site where the statues were found. However, the dikshitars (the ‘consecrated ones’, a sub-group of learned Brahmins, including Aparna’s father) want the figures ‘returned’ to their rightful place in the temple (77). This dispute extends to the naming of the gods. As an exchange, between Raghavan and Aparna’s father illustrates, Hinduism’s ability to absorb other/prior traditions, is matched/ threatened by the ‘soft’ power of subaltern cultural resistance:
‘But Kumaran is a perpetual brahmachari. These ignorant folk have taken over an Aryan god, and, not content with calling him Murugan, have given him wives!’ ‘I thought it was the other way round. I’d read that a powerful tribal deity could not be suppressed, and so had been Aryanized.’ ‘Where did you read that? That’s just anti-brahmin propaganda.’ (67)
Muniya, the villager who discovers the statues, is more devout than the ‘caste Hindus’ but has little actual power.82 When he finds that he has damaged one of the statues, Muniya declares himself a God-killer and decides to undergo the purifying rite of fire- walking. Echoing Aparna’s spiritual trials, here the ‘fire-walking’ ritual represents an arena of contest in which the potency of ‘primitive Hinduism’ is controlled. So Muniya initially comes through unscathed and inspired, having achieved control of the body through faith – much to the surprise of Raghavan and the local ‘Padre’. A few days later, however, Muniya approaches the temple with an infected leg looking “to see his god and be healed”; the dikshitars drive him “out with sticks” (160). By the end of the novel, the Padre has converted Muniya to Christianity, just as Raghavan has rescued Aparna from her “father’s cult of holy-nothingness” (197).
The Padre offers another sign of synthesis at the end of the novel, when he asks Aparna to cast the story of Christ into a dance drama and she accepts. The Padre asks because he is troubled by the lack of pleasure that even the most faithful and devoted of his new converts, such as Muniya, take in the practice of Christianity:
The mainspring has gone. There’s no joy in his heart […]. He is pining […] for all the innocent beauty and joy of bhakti that he gave up when he became a convert. I feel like a robber. I want to see him sing and dance, with the same mad joy as when he walked that fire. (215-216)
137
If folk faith is perceived as ambiguously malign, why imbue Christianity with the joy of bhakti? Because, according to the Padre, “it would be a real victory over suffering, not some hypnotic overcoming of false guilt” (217). This ‘victory’ then represents not an easy intermingling of faith, but the arrangement of truth over falsity. To Aparna, the Padre states:
Even your Shiva swallowed poison to save the world, and retained it in his throat. Christ, the son of God, died on the cross to save mankind. One is an image, the other reality. They must cohere, somewhere in our imagination, in truth. (217)
Finding faith/joy in the suffering of Christ negates the need for the ritualised, reproduction of suffering by the believer, through fire-walking for example. In this way, the authority (and aura) of the ‘original’ is restored when the difference (and allure) of the image is made the same.83 By making Shiva and Christ cohere in the imagination, through the dance, the Padre can craft his own truth.
‘India is the Guru of the world, or she is not India’
As I have demonstrated, The Firewalkers cannot be read as simply an ethno-realist ‘insider’s’ view of the difficulties facing Hindu women. Mangala’s ambiguous position as a ‘mediating’ figure between two modes of spiritual philosophies that she feels are in conflict also has its affects. The text poses a series of questions about the ‘original’ source of joy, suffering, inspiration, and god. The symbolism of religious ‘soft-power’ persuasion, combined with cultural faithfulness, provides a form of spectacle and as well as performing the critique of commercialisation. Taking Mangala’s second novel, Transcendental Pastimes (1999) and a first novel by Le Hunte, The Seduction of Silence (2000) as my examples, I will now examine how the production and consumption of ‘guru fictions’ evokes similar tensions of ambiguous authenticity and mercantile cosmopolitanism. The subject of guru fictions shifts the discussion away from the contest over the third-world speaking subaltern woman and into the sphere of the ‘global Indian’ at ease in all locations.
One of the antecedents for a type of ‘guru aesthetic’ can be found in the reception of Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope (1960). Rao (like Mangala) claims a long and distinguished South Indian Brahmin heritage. This and other biographical details have 138
led many critics to view the novel as a vehicle for the author’s beliefs. As Paul Sharrad points out, the “critical orthodoxy” has been that the novel is “an autobiographical philosophy expressed as fiction” (1987: 105). Rao himself supports this view, describing the novel’s “conception and execution in terms of traditional spiritual discipline” (Sharrad, 1987: 31). In Rao’s theory of literary production “[w]riting itself is Sadhana (prayer) and the writer an upasaka (disciple) who aspires to the role of sage (11).84 In the Serpent and the Rope Rao broke from the convention of social realism that was (and still is) a popular aesthetic for the Indian English-language novelist, signalling the turn to magic realism that was to become a feature of the genre in the eighties (after the publication of Midnight’s Children).85
‘Spiritual realism’ or ‘mystical fiction’ are two of the contemporary terms for defining a genre of fiction – potentially less austere than Rao’s notion of writing as prayer and not as excessive/inventive as magic-realism, that is currently quite popular in diasporic South Asian literature. Kai Friese takes a random sample of three books by South Asian writers living in America and finds that two “are framed in tales of souls in the throes of rebirth […] with walk-on parts for the indifferent Gods” (Friese, 2001: online).86 Le Hunte reveals in her web author-notes that she finds ‘magic realism’ inadequate to describe The Seduction of Silence and has created a category for her novel that: “fits it closer: spiritual realism. A kind of magical, mystical genre that’s soulful, inspiring and heartfelt” (Author notes, 2000: online).87
The Seduction of Silence provides the reincarnation framework that Friese identifies in other diasporic works. The novel proper is divided into five parts, focusing on the successive generations of a wealthy Indian-British family. It is preceded by a prologue that introduces an event that occurs at the end of the novel – Rohini is told by a spirit- medium that her dead grandfather is about to be born again into her family: “[a]n enlightened soul returns to the world as an avatar. And Aakash will return with the wisdom of the ancient seers” (Le Hunte, 2000: 7). So Le Hunte signals her intention to tackle spiritual matters at the outset of her novel, in fact, even prior to the prologue. In her preface she thanks, amongst many others, “Swami Ramachandra for prayers and fires” and closes with an expansive dedication: “[f]or the great rishis and yogis of India. For Guru Dev, for Maharishi, for everyone who supports the evolution of consciousness and shares their inspiration with the world” (ix-x). 139
Mangala’s Transcendental Pastimes has also been situated with the “category of occult and mystical fiction” and is equally up-front about its subject (Sarmiala-Berger 2000: 102). The novel begins with a page of verse, ‘A Song-Invitation from the Guru’, which comments on cycle of birth and re-birth using nature-imagery:
what you were then and how casts and brands you as who you are here and now, etched in the memory-plates of akasha, of sky, sea, star and moon, water, wind, sand and silt, rock and reef (Mangala, 1999: 2)
The global address of Le Hunte’s rallying cry and the strangely familiar register of Mangala’s ‘Song-Invitation’ are part of the lingua franca of the contemporary guru glut. The ‘mainstreaming’ of ‘New Age’ spiritual movements and alternative medicines has been accompanied by recent an upsurge in an interest in ‘Indo-Chic’. ‘India’ as a type of easily recognised brand-image, is as Aravamudan argues, implicated in the “links between guru English as a literary language, and the larger questions of cosmopolitanism” (2001: 21). He situates ‘guru English,’ as the medium through which the spread, borrowing, circulation and exchange of ideas on South Asian spirituality, both historically and in terms of the so-called ‘cults’ that depend on modern methods of marketing, and global banking. These “modern religious movements of South Asian origin, represent to their worldwide adherents cosmopolitanism and heterotopia at once: escape and homecoming, materialism and spiritualism, critique and creed” (26). The categories of spiritual realism, mystical fiction, ‘guru English’ are doubled and contradictory. They correspond with auto-ethnographic textual tactics – not necessarily in a preponderance of information about the customs of a particular group, but through the conspicuous use of coded sub-cultural vocabularies that create the same effect of authenticity. As Aravamudan observes that “the Sanskrit etymology of guru presents this figure as “a dispeller of darkness,” but a parallel etymology of guru as “heavy” may be just as relevant” to the obvious cultural coding of guru fictions (21).
Transcendental Pastimes is both a fictional expression of and warning against the false lures of this contemporary ‘guru glut’. The story begins with the arrival of Jonathan 140
Bexley, “producer, director and chief interviewer for NAF (New Age Films)” and his film crew in Hemagiri, South India (Mangala, 1999: 12). They have travelled from Australia to make a documentary on Guru Chinnaswami and have been given a brief that is reiterated by the guru’s secretary:
so long as you stress the ancient roots of what they call “New Age”. You couldn’t find better material than the guru: he is the quintessence of the wisdom of the East. Traditional Hinduism in a traditional ashram (99)
The secretary is himself not an example of an ‘ordinary’ follower. Formerly known as Mr. Spencer, now Tiggerswami, he was a particle physicist before joining the ashram. The use of science to validate contemporary guru-movements is widespread, and perhaps best illustrated by an organisation named the “Science of Creative Intelligence”, headed by the Maharishi and based on the practice of ‘Transcendental Meditation’. The SCI place an enormous emphasis on scientific documentation in ways that are at once quiet different and curiously similar to the blind faith required by followers of regular religions (Aravamudan , 2001: 33-35). Tiggerswami is a good example of this contradiction; he believes (without question) that the guru has the “key to the Superforce that scientists were just jawing about” and instructs the film crew in the similarities between ancient knowledge and modern science through a series of comparisons, suggesting, for example, that “Eddington’s theory of selective subjectivism” is found in The Dhammapada (Mangala, 1999: 104). Another devotee is presented as a stereotypical ‘hippy’ traveller: Jill, from Sydney, who says, “[y]eah, man! – Doing an ashram-crawl. Been there, done that: Katmandu, Calcutta, Poona, Bangalore. –Gee, that Baba got too hot for me. This guru’s cool, calm and cool” (105). Yet, Mangala also suggests that the guru is held in high esteem by the people of Hemagiri and that seekers come “from all over India” as well as beyond. By using the documentary as a device, she imbues Chinnaswami with the charismatic attributes of “the travelling guru [who] operates in a number of media-saturated contexts” while maintaining the mystique of “the guru in a single location who attracts clientele from many locales” (Aravamudan, 2001: 40).
Place and travel are integral to The Seduction of Silence, and both are made sacred through the metaphysical journeys that certain characters undertake. Part One begins with the implied suggestion that India is the spiritual gatekeeper of the world: 141
Of all the mountains, the Himalayas are the highest. They sit like a prayer table on the plains. The soil is closer to the Gods, the air purer, the mind clearer. There’s a potency in the earth here – a quality of the Divine in everything that takes life […] the land he [Aakash] had been given was part of a mountain range whose tributaries trickled down to both the Ganges, river of Immortality, and the Indus, river of Civilisation. In fact, if a tear was shed at the top of one ridge, it could have seeped through the soil to either of these two destinations. It was left to the Fates to decide. (Le Hunte, 2000: 13-14)
Aakash uses the sacred land to build an Ayurvedic farm, naming it Prakriti. Le Hunte suggests that Aakash is fated to become a guru and gives him an appropriate personal history for such ‘an enlightened being’. He is described as an unusually, self-contained, poised, silent, intense and detached child; there is a sense of mystery that surrounds him and everything he does (16). For example, his (and subsequently his family’s) wealth derives from a boyhood miracle. Aakash is given the land as a reward for his healing of a Maharaja’s haemophiliac son through the laying on of hands (13). The wonders continue at Prakriti: there “was no explaining why rain clouds would hover over his farm well before the monsoons broke” (14). The narrative makes light of these mystical events, describing the healing “an act of no consequence” and the productivity of the farm ‘luck’. It is the “superstitious” villagers who believe that he has “powers or sidhis”, not Aakash himself (14). In this way, the suggestion that Aakash may put his mystic powers to use for personal gain is avoided. He is able to “reap a handsome profit” while remaining untainted by the business of making money (15).
Vertovec comments on the idealisation of India’s geography. He observes that for many “committed Hindus”:
India is a sacred space abounding with sacred places, from local shrines venerated by castes and clans to sites described in central religious texts like the Mahabharata, where the most widely recognized gods and legendary humans are believed to have undertaken some of their most significant deeds. (2000: 3)
Le Hunte associates the ‘sacred space’ of India with a key Hindu text, as she models some of her characters and their relationships with each other on elements of the Ramayana. The presence of this meta-story is made explicit early on; the birth of Aakash’s son Ram is “celebrated with almost as much spectacle as the birth of his namesake in the Ramayana” (Le Hunte, 2000: 23). Loose connections to this text are 142
peppered throughout the first part of the novel. In one scene, Ram’s teacher brings his grandson, Bahadur, to the farm and “unfold[s] the story of the Ramayana as told by Valmiki” (34). The two boys take off into the fields to re-enact the tale and are disturbed by Jyoti Ma, the matriarch of Prakriti, who is incensed at the sight of her son playing with a village boy – “she went to meet [them]…like all the armies of Lanka combined” (36). Jyoti Ma attempts to sack the teacher but Aakash intervenes. Bahadur (the “ever loyal Laxman”) joins Ram’s lessons and eventually comes to live in a shed built on the outskirts of the farm (36). Years later, circumstances force the two young men to leave Prakriti and they venture into the unknown. After fourteen years of ‘exile’ Ram returns to his father (126). He tells Aakash of his spiritual development under the tutelage of Guru Dev. Aakash, inspired by his son’s example, becomes a renunciant and travels back with him to learn from the Guru. There are many gurus in The Seduction of Silence; the term is applied in the literal sense to Ram’s teacher and gurus abound in the sages, rishis, swamis and Great Souls that the men meet on their travels.
There are also two gurus and two ashrams in Transcendental Pastimes. Guru Chinnaswami’s crowded, dilapidated ‘traditional ashram’ is set against “CCC – Pooran Baba’s multi-million rupee, ultra-modern Cosmic Consciousness Complex” (Mangal, 1999: 195). The charisma of Guru Chinnaswami, his image-consciousness, and his philosophising on the concept of “sex-love” are vastly exaggerated in the depiction of the activities at CCC. 88 In contrast to the thin-featured, ochre-robed solemnity of the Guru, Pooran Baba is a “very unpredictable” and “quite sensational” showman. He wears dark glasses and a flowing red satin robe, has a “curly black mane” that resembles a wig, and makes brief appearances flanked by two bikini clad women before being whisked away by bodyguards in his electronic buggy. The commercial nature of CCC is made explicit. Devotees have to buy a “Baba-Blessing Card” in order to enter the Meditation Grove – the cost covers an entry fee, “a seat, a towel, a cushion, and two hours meditation” (217). “Poolside tickets” and “grandstand tickets” for the “Radha- Quest” ceremony are hawked as if for a sports match. In this extraordinary scene, disco- lights and stage smoke illuminate Pooran Baba (as Krishna) as he sits on a pedestal in a swimming pool. Naked women swim in the pool (representing the gopis – female cowherds – from whom Krishna stole clothes) begging Baba for their clothes back. Clothes are thrown into the pool and fireworks set off as Baba vanishes with the woman (Radha) of his choice. Jonathan Bexley is part of the crowd at this event because he is 143
looking for his runaway daughter Miriam. As he suspects, she has become one of ‘Baba’s Babes’ and is deeply under his spell. Part of the novel concerns the film crew rescuing Miriam, who goes “into convulsive fits” when she is not in a “trance-like coma” (261). They end up at a church where Father Solomon, without flashiness or excess, rids Miriam of “evil influences” by “anointing her with holy oil” (259).
The contrast between Pooran Baba and Guru Chinnaswami appears to be that of the dangerous fraud versus the genuine philosopher; an opposition that is reinforced since Pooran Baba is always described by others whereas Guru Chinnaswami periodically speaks. The (real) guru’s teachings are represented through his private conversations with characters (which often incorporate didactic parables), his public discourses, invocations and ‘meditations’. As with the ‘Song-Invitation’, the meditations employ the natural elements. Thinking of Tiggerswami, the Guru believes:
his bright, white, antiseptic mind will never know what it feels like to be soiled by the world. He may reach out to the heavens, but carries too much of earth nature to hear of the water-self. And the call of the waters is coming…
At three o’clock in the morning when all are lost, lost in deep, deep sleep, that is when it comes, the call of my water-self […]
Strip, strip, strip to nothing, Still the mind, still the body, still all senses; Too much the world, too much the misery, too much the burden– (242-243)
Aakash explains the relationship between movement and stillness to the young Ram in much the same way:
If you feel the stillness inside you, it is like the feeling of an ocean. The waves come and go on top, but the vast ocean remains unmoved. We are like the ocean. The water may go into a katori, or into a thali. It may go into any vessel and take any shape, but in truth we are both vehicles for the same substance. (Le Hunte, 2000: 29)
Like Mangala, Le Hunte works with contrasts and reversals, some of which are needlessly emphasised by the author who appears not to trust the reader to make the 144
connections. For example, Ram as a very young child is perceptive enough (as befits a future sage) to sense “that his mother’s intense materialism was only a polarity of his father’s isolation in matters of the spirit” (25). Unlike her husband who overflows with generosity to all beings, Jyoti Ma is miserly and mean to those she considers inferior. Her greed is displayed through ‘gastropoetics’: when Aakash declares his household vegetarian, Jyoti Ma’s “craving for flesh” takes on “obsessive proportions” and she cultivates a secret habit of eating meat outdoors (25). She reduces the amount of food allowed to the servants to less than they require: “because that was all they deserved” (20). Many years later, in a neat reversal, the household servants treat Jyoti Ma’s dead body as a piece of meat. They ‘preserve’ it in snow and ‘defrost’ it after three weeks of feasting and having the run of the house (271). The Seduction of Silence also operates through cycles and recurrences. Each generation in some way mirrors the one that precedes it and, of course, the story comes full circle with Aakash’s return. Some of these generational echoes are similarly overemphasised by Le Hunte: “Like her mother, Rohini was going to grow up an only child, with a brother lost to the world” (original italics, 263).
The integrity of true gurudom in The Seduction of Silence is never challenged. However, the opposition Mangala creates, between bogus and bona fide guru, is ultimately undone. Guru Chinnaswami walks out of the safety of the ashram on his first ‘visitation’ in ten years but is unable to give solace to all those who beseech him and he faints. Back in the ashram the clamour of humanity remains in the laughter, voices and ‘roaring’ he cannot dismiss. He is haunted by:
that question he dare not voice… At the zero realm of infinity Who can tell what you will find – Brahmic bliss or blank inanity? (Mangala, 1999: 205)
An epilogue to the novel reveals that the guru has entered a ‘supreme retreat’. He sits in silence, no longer engaging in the day-today workings of the Hemagiri ashram. Brian, the sound-man from the film crew, muses on “the truth about the guru” (283). He is one of the Australian characters that got most “hooked on”” that “play-talk, guru-talk” (284; 282). Brian wonders whether the director will have the courage to expose the guru’s ‘enlightenment’ as an illusion: “dare he spell it out […] that the guru was a wreck, a 145
raving schizo?” (284). Like her debut novel, Mangala’s Transcendental Pastimes disappoints as a work of fiction. Again, the pacing of the novel is such that early scenes are drawn out while the end is very rushed. All of the characters are under-developed and there are too many sub-plots. These plot-lines run concurrently so that the story feels like a film, cutting from one scene to another, reflecting the documentary-making theme in the novel. As with The Firewalkers, Mangala mocks the commercialised spirituality touted out to the world but also explores the residual power of a faith that she believes destroys equilibrium.
‘The magical, mystery tour is waiting to take you away’
In The Seduction of Silence, by comparison, Aakash is the embodiment of all that is noble about the virtues of ‘higher Hinduism’. His only failing is that he is too ‘otherworldly’ to attend to the earthbound requirements of everyday life, including those of his ‘all-consuming’ wife. The plot is much more straight-forward due to its saga quality and, as such, the reader has time to get to know most of the characters in his expansive family. The Seduction of Silence covers almost the entire twentieth- century in its time-span. Le Hunte maps out the changing relationship between India and Britain over this period, though historical and political details are scant and always subordinate to the development of the each key character’s life-story. In the Part One of the novel, the colonial presence is muted due to Prakriti being “a place too isolated to matter” (Le Hunte, 2000: 80). The first British characters introduced are two soldiers who viciously beat Aakash’s son, Ram and his friend Bahadur for attempting to travel in a first-class train-carriage. Clothes are used as a way of marking difference and an attempt to ‘cross-over’. Lily (a ‘London girl’ who travels to Prakriti to become a governess to Aakash’s daughter, Tulsi Devi’s) arrives in a salwar kameez and is greeted by an Indian child in a pinafore who dutifully performs the curtsey she has been practising (104). She is one of the few British-in-India characters that is presented sympathetically. Aakash, for example, responds positively to her gesture, suggesting that “if all the English took to Indian culture as quickly as Lily, there would be peace and prosperity throughout the land” (104).
His wishful thinking is negated, however, by the both the train incident and an echo of this event which occurs later in the novel when Tulsi Devi’s young son is wounded by a 146
lady who pushes him off the pavement with her umbrella (214). Le Hunte displays little nuance in her depiction of the imperial project in India and these, now commonplace, ways of indicating the conflict over public space are made to symbolise a wider oppression. They also provide Aakash’s children with the ammunition they need for the development of an appropriate Indian nationalist sentiment, despite their years of privilege and, in Tulsi Devi’s case, marriage to an Indian Anglophile. Tulsi Devi displays contradictory responses to the colonial presence: on the one hand she hopes that her son will be let “into the British inner circle” and on the other she wants to scream “about the insanity of British rule” (224). The pavement incident occurs during the height of the Quit India Movement and this seems to galvanise her, though she is unable to express her solidarity:
The rest of the nation may have been wearing homespun garments to protest against the British monopoly on cotton, but she was condemned to wear saris shipped to India from the Lancashire mills. (218)
Le Hunte’s presentation of the end-of-the-Raj-era inverts the terms of ‘Raj nostalgia’: Tulsi Devi’s incipient anti-colonialism is made all the more subversive because of the implied disapproval of her husband. Unlike Tulsi Devi, Ram joins the non-violent demonstrations and is imprisoned as a result. The connection between the spiritual questing of the first part of the novel and the political protest of the second, is implied through Ram’s actions and the naming of figures like Gandhi and Shri Aurobindo: “they realised that it was a spiritual struggle. The very soul of India had to be freed” (219).89
By this time Aakash has become a sadhu and is only present in the narrative as a disembodied voice. The integrity of his ‘spirit’ is maintained in Ram. However, the latter parts of the novel, set in 1960s and 1970s Britain, focus on Tulsi Devi’s spoilt daughter, Rohini and here notions of cultural authenticity are tested. It can be argued that ‘spiritual realism’ demonstrates a second-hand nostalgia for the 1960s and 1970s in Anglophone, ‘new diaspora’ locations, more than it does any desire for ‘India’ as such.90 The counter-culture certainly drew heavily on the capital of ‘live culture,’ exemplified by the Beatles’ pilgrimage to the guru Maharishi in 1968. This anti- establishment, anti-materialist strand of ‘counter-culture Indophilia’ can be set against the more conservative ‘Raj nostalgia’.91 Neither term reflects the way that ‘Indian’ 147
cultural forms have become part of the very ordinary abroad: yoga and meditation are just one of many lifestyle choices and are hardly differentiated from aerobics.
In the second half of The Seduction of Silence, issues of cultural opposition and exchange are primarily represented through the relationship of Rohini and Gordon, an English boy who stays with the family during his travels around India. Gordon is a member of the ‘Beat generation’, busy reading Jack Kerouac and Herman Hesse rather than studying for his university courses. Like Lily, Gordon arrives at the family home in Indian clothing, and then wins over Rohini’s Anglophone father with his genuine English, middle-class credentials. However, Gordon resents the conservatism of his class; he follows the lead of a friend who he believes is “working class and […] free” and rejects his parents’ offer of an “all-expenses-paid round-the-world holiday” upon graduation, wanting to ‘do the journey’ not ‘go on holiday’ (291-2).
There is a certain irony to the way that Gordon’s adventures are presented. Le Hunte self-consciously reproduces all the clichés that accompany travellers’ stories of ‘finding themselves’ in India. Gordon tells Rohini that he travels light because he could never be prepared: “[t]his is a country where anything can happen”. Rohini nods “knowingly. Fully aware that nothing had ever happened to her in India” (293). Similarly, the “exotic traveller” surveys the landscape “with the familiarity of one who’d seen it all before” whereas Rohini is able to see her country anew through Gordon’s eyes (302). He is almost able to relegate “his adventure with an Indian woman” to the same category as “the stories of the beggars, the trains, the sweepers and the crows” – just another “tale to be told to his mates back home” (305). However, Rohini finds that she is pregnant and her parents force the lovers to marry. They then travel back to Britain overland on a painted bus full of other travellers. Rohini is the group’s “living souvenir” (318).
Eventually their marriage breaks down, due in part to their experimentation with free- love and, in different ways, their ‘return’ to a more conformist outlook. In a moment of contemplation, Rohini realises that she feels “very Indian about [her] marriage” only when it is too late (368).
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Rohini thought of Gordon, and how they had each been drawn to the culture of the other. She thought about how she stretched her own culture like an elastic band until it had snapped back in her face. (365-6)
This culture-stretching is shown in the way that Gordon and Rohini profit out of the “Age of Aquarius” in Britain, setting up market stalls to sell Indian goods: “[e]verything Indian was hip, and they were the pedlars [sic] of the new era” (342). In exchange for their merchandise, they try out all that is offered by “the counter-culture and its people” (343). This commercialisation of Indian stuff is prefigured at an earlier point in the novel when Ram and Bahadur pass through the Kumbh Mela in search of a guru. They realise that they could easily go “shopping for spirituality […]. Everywhere they looked there was something on sale” (83).
As ‘true seekers’ Ram and Bahadur find spiritual sustenance (“Silence”) in the very midst of the Mela. None of the deified figures in the novel ever leave the sacred shores of India, though they do travel within its boundaries. The characters that travel to the West are either confused about their religious orientation (Tulsi Devi with her convent education), or dismissive of Indian culture (her husband, Colonel Chopra, supporter of the British Raj), or are ‘spiritual’ in other ways. Rohini, who has never read the Vedas, becomes a clairvoyant. Her daughter, Saakshi, laughs at her mother’s supernatural abilities, suggesting that the fillings in her teeth must be “acting as receivers for radio signals” (7). Saakshi makes her own metaphysical journey, exploring the guru texts kept at her grandmother’s house when visiting Delhi and briefly becoming a Hari Krishna in London. Yet, ultimately her spiritual “birthright” is reduced to a simple meditation practice and her desire to have an ‘alternative’ birth-experience in India.
The last part of the novel is written in the first person and gives Saakshi’s perspective. Le Hunte makes up for her pessimistic take on the failure of a post-colonial marriage between India and Britain (through Rohini and Gordon) by marrying Saakshi to an Australian character. They travel to India together, visiting Delhi and Prakriti. Her view of India swings between “pure bliss” and extreme irritation: “[s]ometimes India is so hard to love” (396). She comments on nuclear testing, heavy traffic and the “wobbly skyscraper” that has replaced the farmhouse and the rubbish that spoils the place – presumably now that her family no longer owns “the entire valley” the villagers are free to litter as they please! (404). Saakshi is ironic about her new-age upbringing when 149
trying to persuade Indian doctors that home-birth is safe, and her ‘realist’ view provides a contrast to the idealised version of India previously put forward:
‘No, no, I mean…like an alternative birth.’ But how can I explain the sort of experiences I’ve been brought up on? The soft lights, the music…Who here would want to burn incense at a birth?! In India, of all places? Or give birth in the living room with all the servants watching? (395)
Despite all Saakshi’s misgivings (typified, for example, by her insistence that her unborn child is “not some kind of recycled person”), Le Hunte provides a happy ending (407). Saakshi’s doctor turns out to be Rohini’s missing brother – given up for adoption earlier in the novel – and is reunited with his mother, sister, niece and nephew-in-law who are all present for the (re)birth of the new baby.
The focus on culture-clash, and consumption in The Seduction of Silence, through tropes of clothing, music, the overland trip, free-love, clairvoyance, alternative choices, reincarnation, functions as a smorgasbord display, as well as a self-conscious critique of the global guru glut. Whilst playing with a knowing, subversive and at times sceptical point of view, the novel never quite loses its faith in the purposefulness and fullness of ‘spirituality,’ often signalled by the evocative theme of divine silence that runs throughout the text.
Cross-cultural Fanfare: the construction of Bem Le Hunte
As previously mentioned, there are many ways in which authors are actively constructed ‘outside’ of the text; author notes, published interviews, autobiographical essays and the like provide access to another carefully constructed persona, public readings and literary festivals add the ‘live-culture’ element with connotations of celebrity, spontaneity and direct communication. Although The Firewalkers made the short-list for two prestigious literary awards, Mangala’s work has received scant attention.92 There was very little publicity and only a handful of (generally positive) reviews. Despite the (self)construction of the author as an auto-ethnographer and diasporic/spiritual mediator, Mangala is an unlikely candidate for anthologies of or essay on South Asian diasporic writing because of her low profile. This is partially the result of her publishing with a small independent press: Aquila Books. It “was founded 150
in 1990 with the aim of independently publishing a small range of quality fiction” (online).93 Their list is small, with only ten items currently available, and it has a strong religious theme, containing Liturgies, a Psalter and a ‘Pastoral Guide to the Holy Mysteries’. The two novels listed (apart from Mangala’s), The Deed’s Creature and Psychic Wallah also tackle ‘spiritual’ ideas.94
In closing this chapter, I focus on the way in which the notion of ‘guru fictions’ may be stretched to include “processes of celebrification” (Ommundsen, 2004: 50). Wenche Ommundsen has commented on the role of writers in contemporary public culture, providing a list of features usually found in such celebrity-making. They include:
a tendency to confuse art and life, and to see writers as seamless extensions of their texts; an intense investment in the body of the writer…in the details of their daily lives; a desire to recreate the writer as national icon or as representative or spokesperson for particular cultural groups; […] a willingness to elevate the writer to the position of spiritual guru, but also to see him or her as the most intimate companion. (52)
These features are particularly heightened in Le Hunte’s case, due to the subject matter of her novel, as well as her personal styling and choice of publisher. In fact, the ‘niche’ qualities of Mangala’s situation couldn’t be further from the hype surrounding the release of Le Hunte’s The Seduction of Silence. This debut novel was given a ‘bells and whistles’ promotion by HarperCollins who put it forward as “the publishing event of the year” (Press Release, 2001: online). In a prominent review for The Weekend Australian (available on the author’s website), Murray Waldren reveals that Le Hunte’s settling on this publisher took “much negotiation (and help […] from the tarot)” (Waldren, 2000: 10). The reference to tarot is just one of the many titbits revealed about ‘Bem’s’ habits, carefully constructed and disseminated, that link the author’s life to her work. In their press release, HarperCollins draw heavily on notions of India and the author as spiritual and exotic. It comments on “the magical element inherent in Indian everyday life” and states that:
A large selection of her encounters are scattered through the novel, as are stories from her own family. Many of the more bizarre and mystical events actually occurred […] in the land of sages, eunuchs, sacred animals and magic, anything can happen. (Press Release, 2001: online)
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HarperCollins utilises biographical details to authenticate its product, though it is important to point out that Le Hunte also describes herself as a “cultural hybrid”, and as both an Australian and diasporic writer. Unlike Mangala, who derives ethnographic authority from her Brahmin ancestry, who writes of discreet cultures and religions facing off against each other, and of ‘passing over’ and ‘coming back’, Le Hunte is promoted as east and west merged. As the press release puts it: “Bem Le Hunte is as cross-cultural as her novel: she was born in India to an Indian mother and English father, grew up in England and, after emigrating to Australia ten years ago, is now an Australian by choice” (Press Release, 2001: online). There is an implied progression in this statement, of Le Hunte becoming (a New) Australian, which demonstrates how cosmopolitan cultural diversity is coded as a positive national attribute.95 In a similar manner, Waldren, creates a vivid portrait of the (body of the) author and connects her vibrancy to national aspirations:
In her silks of many colours and with hair cascading down her back to mid-thigh, Bem Le Hunte manifests in the inner-city coffee shop like an exotic whirlwind. For a twice-daily meditator and yoga practitioner, she emanates an electricity that is doubly disconcerting, given her precise English accent and serene politeness. In many ways, this adoptive Sydneysider epitomises our cross-cultural aspirations. (Waldren, 2000: 10)96
Reviewers certainly cash in on the celebrity status accorded to other South Asian writers in their depiction of Le Hunte. Suzanna Clarke mentions Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy and Gita Mehta (2000: 4). A Sydney Morning Herald reviewer talks about the “new wave of subcontinental fiction” stating that the “names include Lahiri, Mishra, Roy and above all Seth, among many” (Reviewer, 2000: 10). The review portrays Le Hunte’s journeying, from India–through Britain–to Australia–and back to India to write the novel, as a classic example of the cosmopolitanism that is inherent to the genre: “this is the kind of life story that reveals an indifference to national boundaries […] and is relaxed about fluidity and frequency of movement between places, if not rootlessness” (10). As before, this reviewer relates Le Hunte’s personal and fictional migrancy to a broadening of national (literary) horizons:
When a longer view of the state of Australian fiction becomes easier, novels such as The Seduction of Silence may seem symptoms of an end to parochialism, with the losses as well as the potential gains that this entails. (10)
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The idea that Le Hunte’s work enriches the Australian canon, with its cosmopolitan connections and vision is at the positive, affirmative end of a continuum which also criticises diasporic writers, like Salman Rushdie, for having “catered, or even pandered, to the exoticist predilections of his Western metropolitan reading public” (Huggan, 2001: 72). Yet, as Huggan points out, this “view of a ‘target public’ is inevitably reductive, falsely implying that” Indian English-language fictions are “primarily or even exclusively directed at a Western metropolitan audience” (72). Speaking of Midnight’s Children, he states:
It should not be forgotten that the novel enjoyed […] a large readership in India, nor should it be imagined that responses to his novel are culturally and/or geographically determined in any simple way. […] it cannot be assumed that audiences are neatly separable by ethnicity, class, gender, location – still less so in an age where reading communities, as well as individual authors, are products of an increasingly diasporised world. (72)
The reminder is crucial, and a corrective to the tendency to homogenise audiences in critiques of the (neo)Orientalist practices of the literary marketplace. Nonetheless, it has been argued that the English-language reading community in India is ‘neatly separable’ by class, and The Seduction of Silence is certainly promoted in gender-marked ways. Furthermore, an increasingly diversified audience does not necessarily result in the slackening of ‘exoticist predilections’: are Indian readers living in Western metropolises really any less voracious than their neighbours?
Big in India and available online
The Seduction of Silence was released by Penguin India in 2001 and made No.1 on the Asian Age’s Indian Top 10 in May that year. Namita Gokhale, writing for India Today, provides one of the few highly critical reviews of the novel, suggesting it is simply “the latest in the stream of easy Indian exotica which seems to have become a cottage industry” (2001: 7). In general, the reception of Le Hunte in India has been positive and both Australian and Asian reviewers position Le Hunte as a ‘seamless extension’ of her text by focusing on her parentage, migrancy, lifestyle, belief-system and appearance. The same ‘intense investment’ that Waldren makes in ‘the body of the writer’ (when commenting on her silks, her back to mid-thigh hair, her precise English accent, in the opening sentences of his review) is apparent in Valerie Khoo’s review for the Straits 153
Times (Singapore): “With long dark hair and a wide smile, this 38-year-old exudes the exotic charm of an Anglo-Indian parentage, complete with the kind of cosmopolitan accent you cannot quite place” (2001: np). A reviewer for The Statesman (India) inexplicably gives “the tall, saree-clad writer” blond hair: “she gathers her thick golden tresses cascading below her knee” (2001: np). The press release and some reviewers extend this emphasis on the author’s (exotic) female body to reveal the fact that Le Hunte was pregnant when she left for India to write her novel. Unsurprisingly, The Seduction of Silence abounds with pregnancies (one of the key characters is a midwife) and ends with a “contraction-by-contraction account” of childbirth (Gokhale, 2001: 7). Le Hunte herself invests heavily in ‘the (pregnant) body of the writer’ when commenting on the process of writing:
most of the writing for The Seduction of Silence took place over 9 months. About the time of a gestation, with a particularly painful period just before final delivery! […] I started writing it while I was pregnant with my second son, and completed it while I was still breast feeding. (online)97
Curiously, these thoughts on the body writing are made available through the most (apparently) disembodied medium: the internet.
The website is a key publicity tool and falls in-between ‘textual’ and ‘live’ modes of author-construction, as it provides printable material but also allows for (in)direct communication.98 The ‘Community’ area of the site is primarily a message board and place where readers can leave their thoughts on the novel. So what do ‘ordinary’ (web- savvy) readers think of The Seduction of Silence and how does ‘Bem’ respond? Her opening ‘Welcome’ message greets “all travellers who have arrived here” and reinforces the notion of community and communication as “a two-way process”, stating that she wants to hear “your stories, your experiences”. The ‘reading community’ takes up this invitation and are willing, as Ommundsen puts it: “to elevate the writer to the position of spiritual guru, but also to see him or her as the most intimate companion” (2004: 52).
In just about all of the messages, readers refer to their own experiences when describing their enjoyment of the book. There are many travellers who appreciate the book, both those who have “just returned from my first trip to India” and “those of us who have 154
gotten to know and love Indian people on their home ground”. Journeying is also represented as a form of spiritual search in the novel and there are many seekers (“as a TM meditator myself”) who connect with the book. One reader creates a narrative of mystical intervention in her discovery of the book and directly asks ‘Bem’ for advice. She states: the “book fell off the library shelf into my hands. I feel as if I am being guided towards something and would like to know more about Spiritual churches and mediums”. Those readers who identify themselves as of Indian and/or mixed heritage often go further in this overlapping of text, author and audience. One reader states that in “an uncanny way it felt like my family’s story that was being written” and, after describing the traumas of growing up between cultures, apologises for digressing “so deeply into my own story”, mentioning that she is “working towards putting down my own story one day”. Another hopes that her children will read The Seduction of Silence “so they can have some understanding of some aspects of my life and background”. And another states that he bought the book “while roaming in the streets of Adelaide” because being “a half Indian myself, your profile and the subject of the book attracted me” (online).
Unlike Mangala who directs her “inter-faith dialogue” primarily to audiences in ‘Christian societies’ and (over)explains indigenous concepts, Le Hunte writes for a highly dispersed reading community and prefers to leave things bare. Words like yagyas, shoklas, tapasya, bhakti, bhajan are unitalicised, visually undifferentiated from the rest of the text, with no glossary to explain them (Le Hunte, 2000: 82). In either case, this over/under-statement constructs the author as an authority on her subject. Le Hunte seems to presume that the reader will bring a certain level of knowledge about India to the novel, and in doing so creates the impression of an audience ‘in the know’. Referring to the ‘Indian expressions’, one reader asks: “how can the non-Indians possibly get the total gist of what is being conveyed [?]” She goes on to say: “they would be missing out on the bits that give it that Indian quality. In such moments I felt I got that little extra secret hidden to other readers” (online).99 ‘Bem’ replies:
In response to your question about the ‘Indian bits’ – yes I put Indian bits in consciously for those with Indian backgrounds […] it was always important for me to make a connection with the Indian audience (without losing the universal qualities in the storytelling). I wanted to capture the flavour of India. The 155
responses that are peculiarly Indian. The concerns and thinking patterns of the Indian mind (online)100
However, when challenged by another diasporic reader, who accuses her of “not represent[ing] India in its true dimension”, ‘Bem’ changes tack. The reader asks: “Do you think, India is only about repressed women, magic-healers…tyrant husbands, melodramatic people [?]” She replies:
readers often require us to provide some kind of ‘social reality.’ However, as a writer I prefer to subvert this expectation. I truly believe that if we want social realism then we should get on a plane. If we want to be taken somewhere mythical, we should open a book. […] I guess with over one billion Indians there is room for every possible combination of personality. (online)101
So much for the ‘patterns of the Indian mind’! In an interview Le Hunte emphasises India as a point of inspiration whilst simultaneously distancing her work from other Indian fiction. She responds negatively when asked how she compares herself “to other writers writing about the India experience?”:
I don’t. I feel as if my writing has more Latin American influences if anything. […] I feel I am a product of my own experience, which is not geographically expressed. I don’t intend to write only about India in the future. Neither did I ever intend my book to be some kind of ethnic experience. Actually, it isn’t a typically Indian story, and I don’t write in an Indian voice. (interview: online)102
Le Hunte assumes a universalised diasporic tone, when describing her sense of self as unconstrained by national boundaries, rather than a specific (realist) ‘Indian voice’. By associating her work with ‘spiritual realism’ she neatly sidesteps the contradiction inherent in her desire to “capture the flavour of India” while avoiding ‘social reality’.
Conclusion
In this chapter I have tracked the differing (self)constructions and mediations of two South Asian Australian writers, exploring how the notion of an authentic aura is produced both by, within and outside of the text. Indeed, a feature of guru fictions is the way they seem to depend on the clustering of extra-textual elements which reinforce (and also unsettle) the authors’ constructed persona. In comparison to the small splash Mangala made with The Firewalkers and Transcendental Pastimes, Le Hunte’s The 156
Seduction of Silence certainly benefited from its global publisher, hyped promotion and use of interactive media forums. As a marketing strategy ‘process of celebrification’ are by far the surer strategy to achieving a global/multicultural presence than the mediation of an author through the rather dour and serious format of anthropology.
Whilst Mangala’s work, in particular The Firewalkers, might find an (ambiguous) place on the list of a feminist publishing house like, Kali for Women and is actually published through a small, alternative theology/spirituality orientated publisher, the rather mainstreamed, ‘Indo-Chic’ of Le Hunte’s alternative lifestyle is mirrored by the influence of her publisher. The Seduction of Silence, as a guru text backed up with the requisite promotion, is at the literary end of a scale that includes a far less self-conscious but rapidly growing genre of popular work (most notably in the US), that also draws on the familiar themes of arranged marriage, Bollywood and pseudo-spirituality. So ‘guru fictions’ sit along-side texts with titles like, Goddess for Hire (2004), Bollywood Confidential (2005), Serving Crazy with Curry (2004) and For Matrimonial Purposes (2004). On a South Asian diaspora orientated web forum, named Sepia Mutiny, frequently accessed by so-called ‘second-genners,’ this fiction is dubbed ‘brown chick- lit’ and ‘mangotarian’.103
By offering ‘escape and homecoming, materialism and spiritualism, critique and creed,’ guru fictions have a certain flexible, subversive quality, where oppositions are made stark, transferred and/or collapsed. As I have demonstrated, despite their differing levels of promotion, Mangala and Le Hunte each use elements of ‘auto-ethnography’ and ‘spiritual realism’ as a literary tactic in their novels. In keeping with other guru fictions, like Gita Mehta’s Karma Cola (1979) and the more recent Holy Cow (2003), by Australian writer, Sara MacDonald, they employ irony to indicate the current and historical fascination with all things Indian, of which they are a part. These writers may, as with ‘Bem’ above, disassociate themselves from the hyper-promotion of ‘India’: ‘I feel I am a product of my own experience, which is not geographically expressed’. Some critics have argued that this sometimes subtle and more often overt (self)critique of the commercialisation of culture, at a narrative and extra-textual level, is now itself more a marker rather than a repudiation of the popular ‘postcolonial exotic’ mode (Huggan, 2001). Nonetheless, having to balance creed and critique itself produces friction around issues of authenticity in Mangala and Le Hunte’s literary work. 157
Furthermore, the rapid ‘globalising’ and dispersal of spiritual India into the earthly realm of the ordinary and routine indicates a proliferation of images without an original. The imperialising force evident in the notion of ‘soft power’ and in the apparently homogenising operations of the global market place, is held in check by the intangible, unpredictable dynamic of cultural change: influence is by definition immeasurable.
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Chapter Four – Going Back: Diasporic Depictions of the Homeland
I suppose that all activity in the final analysis can be classified as political; when you say ‘political theatre’ it means [an] involvement with the human condition. (Ernest Macintyre, interview: 28/09/03)
I think that having grown up in a recently decolonised country and then leaving for political reasons, you are really aware of the way history brushes up against people’s lives. (Michelle de Kretser, interview: 25/05/04)
Introduction:
In this chapter I narrow the focus of ‘South Asian Australia’ to examine diasporic depictions of Sri Lanka. Shelagh Goonewardene explains that many factors “underpin the growth of the Sri Lankan diaspora in countries throughout the world, but one of the most significant reasons for the single largest exodus from [Sri Lanka] is the conflict that erupted between the Sinhalese and the Tamils in July 1983” (2000: 143). Tina Faulk takes an alternative position on the composition of the Sri Lankan diaspora. Starting her an article with an allusion to Paul Gilroy’s work on the Black Atlantic, she suggests that it differs from those based on forced displacement. According to Faulk, emigrants from Sri Lanka were not fleeing political persecution, poverty or the communal tensions of the country’s civil war, but migrating to improve already privileged circumstances:
Uniquely, Sri Lanka’s diaspora was not composed, as diasporas usually are composed, of poor people; this was a diaspora of the middle and upper class, those least disadvantaged and most accomplished in terms of education and ability to succeed elsewhere. (1996: 6)
This is a highly selective view. Faulk ignores the large migration of domestic workers to the Middle East, for example, when implying that this diaspora is entirely populated by English-speaking elites. In Australia, however, the transition from a race-based immigration policy to one that gives preference to ‘skill’ has certainly provided an avenue for the type of migrant she identifies. Similarly, Faulk is right to point out that the writers of this diaspora generally come from an advantaged social background. This is entirely unsurprising given that, in the main, they are writing in English and thus 160
drawing on the cultural capital an English-language education provides. Her more contentious claim is that the fictional “preoccupations […] of elites, the affluent middle- class […] offer an imperfect, even misleading perspective of the political realities which actually existed” in Sri Lanka (Faulk, 1996: 6). Faulk is not alone in this view. As previously mentioned, Makarand Paranjape, in his provocatively titled, ‘What About Those Who Stayed Back Home? Interrogating the privileging of diasporic writing’, also suggests that representations of a former homeland produced in diaspora “can be harmful and misleading” (2000: 238). Monika Fludernik is broadly in agreement. She believes that “exoticist treatments of the Indian subcontinent”, such as we have seen in the previous chapter, have become a staple feature of diasporic writing (2003: 261).104
Are there ways of writing about former homelands, apart from ‘guru fictions,’ that do not simply repeat and/or rework the spectrum of familiar stereotypes associated with the Indian subcontinent? Can writers who have remained abroad for decades or even generations adequately represent the contemporary realities of their former homelands? Or is it the assumption of accuracy, the ‘bogey of authenticity’, underpinning these concerns that is ultimately misleading? For perhaps the purpose of fiction is to destabilise rather than approximate ‘truth’ and certainly the notion of national residency as a marker of authority is no better than ‘the privileging of diasporic writing’. Issues of accuracy and accountability are, however, heightened in the Sri Lankan context by the civil war; resident reviewers have accused expatriate authors of “gleefully min[ing] tragedy for literary mileage” (Fernando, 2001: 26). How valid is this point of view when applied to Australia-based writers who return to moments of political/ethnic conflict in their fiction on Sri Lanka?
The first half of this chapter will examine two recently published novels that provide very different depictions of Sri Lanka. Michelle de Kretser’s The Hamilton Case (2003) dwells on the drawing-room world of the English-speaking elites and depicts the passing of an era as Ceylon gains Independence. Chandani Lokuge’s Turtle Nest (2003) describes the impoverishment of a fishing village on the south coast, buckling under the contemporary pressures of a changing economy and the fluctuations of mass tourism. Both deal self-consciously with postcolonial and diasporic issues: in the former, the key character is a colonial mimic and, in the latter, a second-generation returnee searching for her roots. The second half of this chapter looks at how specific political moments in 161
Sri Lanka’s postcolonial history are addressed by diasporic writers. Chitra Fernando’s Cousins (1999) culminates with the 1971 Insurgency. Playwright Ernest Macintyre has written a pair of plays on the civil war: Rasanayagam’s Last Riot is set during the 1983 riots and He Still Comes from Jaffna (2000) explores the current period of terrorism and ‘anti-terrorism’.
Imagining Ceylon/Sri Lanka
As I mentioned when reviewing theories of postcolonialism and diaspora, there is significant debate between writers resident in South Asia and expatriates in western locations over representations of the homeland. In this section I will briefly return to Makarand Paranjape’s views on diasporic fiction and will consider Pradeep Jeganathan’s situating of The Hamilton Case in the Sri Lankan context, before examining how the text responds to the claim that diasporic fiction engages in ‘misrepresentation.’ At times, the dispute borders on the vitriolic. Paranjape accuses “many of the diasporics” of an unprincipled engagement with the literary marketplace and its attendant sensationalism (2000: 240). “I can detect only a ferocious lust for riding success ratings, a fatal passion for the rewards that fame confer, a sad craving for more and more power and glamour” he states (240). The charge of self-aggrandisement is grave, given that he believes diasporic fiction contributes to “a continuing ‘colonization’ of the Indian psyche by pandering to Western market tastes that see India in a negative light” (238). With sweeping statements he claims:
The dirty job of India bashing need no longer be performed by a white man; non resident Indians will do it equally well, if not better. The demand for such ‘insiders’ who are actually outsiders is truly so great in the West that India turns out to be the only marketable commodity they have as writers. The position of such diasporics is akin to that of African middlemen who sold slaves to the white traders. (239)
For Paranjape, diasporic representations of the homeland are ‘harmful and misleading’ because they threaten to overwhelm and disfigure ‘native’ realities (238). He states, the “diaspora not only opens up a certain gap between the real and the imaginary, but also inserts an epistemic distortion into its narratives […] India seen from afar can never be the same as India seen from close up” (240).
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I find it difficult to accept the meagre role Paranjape assigns to the imaginary in literature, or to agree with his presentation of any competing, diasporic perspective on the homeland as necessarily exoticist and exploitative, or indeed, to concur with his claim that “[o]nly a devalued and abused India is marketable in the West” (239). It is perhaps too easy, however, to dismiss his sentiments as merely typical of a narrowly nationalistic view on literary tradition. He speaks from a beleaguered position, the defensive tone a reaction to the displacement of ‘native’ texts by diasporic fictions, and there are some grounds for this complaint. The relative power of publishing houses in the UK and US, when compared to the opportunities to publish in English in Sri Lanka, is hegemonic for example and certainly advantageous to diasporic writers.105 The lack of publishing infrastructure in Sri Lanka – a situation not uncommon to other former colonies – means that resident writers often have to bear the cost of printing, publicising and distributing their own works (Gooneratne, 2002: 5). The uneven terrain of the so- called ‘global’ literary marketplace keeps many potential works out of circulation. As Apter observes: “[t]he difficulty of book distribution in many economically beleaguered countries remains an insuperable impediment to transnational exchange” (2001: 2).
Jeganathan also takes up the stance of ‘those who stayed at home’ in his review of de Kretser’s The Hamilton Case. He examines the academic sphere rather than the literary marketplace when comparing the hyped reception of diasporic fiction to the lack of recognition received by writers located in Sri Lanka. This criticism relates to a broader shift in the development of postcolonial studies, from an initial engagement with the national literatures of newly independent states, to a preoccupation, after the publication of Midnight’s Children (1981), with texts written by migrants and minorities in Western locations.106 Jeganathan suggests that the failure of ‘metropolitan’ literary criticism “to re-constitute its canon and, more importantly, its rules of canon formation, in a post- orientalist way” invalidates the postcolonial critic’s apparently progressive agenda (2005: 446). He states:
However radical or ‘political’ metropolitan critical practice is claimed to be, the field of Sri Lankan creative writing in English continues to be marked with the publication of Romesh Gunesekera’s Monkfish Moon (1992) or Reef (1994) and then simply followed through Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy (1994) to the present, marked always by some recent metropolitan publication, like The Hamilton Case. What might be published in Sri Lanka, or produced by actual 163
residents of the country, does not count at all, it seems, even though every such critic is determinedly ‘political’. (446)
He illustrates the point with an anecdote about a visiting critic who remarks on how the sexual politics of Funny Boy would finally have an ‘impact’ on the general public of Sri Lanka following its translation into Sinhala, overlooking already published resident fiction on questions of sexuality (446). Jeganathan sees this as a “[j]ust another example of a novel that metropolitan critics have staged as something new and innovative that natives in the native land need to absorb pedagogically” (446-7).
Although primarily opposed to the practices of the “non-located reader”, writer and critic, Jeganathan also distances himself from an “odd preoccupation” amongst “Sri Lankan reading communities”, that of attempting to “identify ‘real’ people in novels” (447). He believes The Hamilton Case will seduce many with its allusions to the Bandaranaike family (a major political force in Sri Lanka). And this simple readerly pleasure, he fears, supports the notion that novels ‘set’ in a particular postcolonial place can be read in an evidentiary manner, which renders and the “creative terrain of Sri Lanka” an “ethnographic landscape” and characters “native informants” (447). This then “catalyses the metropolitan understanding that informants cannot do very much more than be natives; they wouldn’t for example, be mistaken for writers, who might in turn, have been reading and writing in a rich, located literary tradition” (447). So here is another view on the way ‘global’ ethnographic reading practices are interwoven into local trends.
In order to counter the failures of metropolitan literary criticism, Jeganathan chooses not to position The Hamilton Case as new and innovative. Instead, he wrests the novel from the diasporic archive and ‘re-locates’ it firmly within a Sri Lankan tradition of writing in English, by reading it as “an echo and elaboration” of an earlier work (447). Importantly, the ‘original’ work is not S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike’s personal biography but his lesser known fiction, and there is an interesting web of connections between the former Prime Minister’s two short detective stories and The Hamilton Case. However, Jeganathan does not convincingly consider how some of the key themes of the novel – such as mimicry or the debate on the pleasures of the English language and its suitability as a medium for the constitution of a canon of Sri Lankan fiction – might 164
intersect with his reading of it. There are important questions left unstated, that arise from a comparison of Bandaranaike’s creation of a ‘Holmes-like character’ and de Kretser’s subversion of generic boundaries. Both Paranjape and Jeganathan’s disapprovals of the hegemony of diasporic writers and the skewed vision they present could just as easily be applied to the cosmopolitan, Delhi/Colombo-based English- educated literati. How are literary and other traditions located and dislocated within the ‘homeland’? Who can claim to be a ‘located’ native? What are the repercussions of such a claiming? These are crucial questions in The Hamilton Case.
In speaking of ‘echo and elaboration’ however, Jeganathan touches on perhaps the most important aspect of de Kretser’s complex, four-part novel. Imitation and duplication are integral to both the structure and content of narrative – in a way that exceeds its debt to Bandaranaike’s crime fiction alone. The first part parades as an incomplete memoir; the second poses as a ‘whodunit’ and here de Kretser affirms that she “tried to mimic a crisp kind of 1930s Somerset Maugham type of diction of the colonial murder mystery and keep it very cool and very ironic” (interview: 25/05/04).107 Part three switches to a contrasting style of prose becoming dense, cluttered, lush and languid; the style mirroring the emotive and physical landscape the characters inhabit. Part four takes the form of a letter which ultimately denies the reader a sense of closure. The narrative is self-referential, each part unravelling ‘truths’ already established in another.
An example of this process of unravelling is offered in microcosm at the very start of the novel. Sam begins his memoir with a rumination on his name (Stanley Alban Marriot Obeysekere) and parentage. The middle parts refer to his godfather, a former British Governor of Ceylon who was besotted with his flirtatious mother. He deciphers the past as if it were crime scene, reading mementos as clues: “[a]n egg [cup], a mistress, a bastard son: their message seems unequivocal. But the testimony of signs is unreliable” and the mystery is quickly dispelled (de Kretser, 2003: 5). The proof is in the pudding so to speak, his “branch of the Obeysekeres being famously black” (5). This highly eccentric opening to Sam’s life story is just the first of many “ambiguous legacies” to come. It also anticipates two major thematic concerns; firstly that of the past repeating in the present, of echo and elaboration as a fundamental feature of the making of history and secondly, the tension between appearance and reality, between the genuine and the fake. 165
The memoir reverts to convention, with accolades to Sam’s grandfather who, as a mudaliyar, held “an office that placed a man at the pinnacle of [the] island’s social system” (7). Sam’s parents are entirely frivolous and profligate, almost caricatures of the aristocratic classes. In both form and content this part of The Hamilton Case mirrors other South Asian Australian texts, particularly Gooneratne’s Relative Merits: A Personal Memoir of the Bandaranaike Family of Sri Lanka (1986).108 Both contain details of the mudaliyar system, the ancestral seat, cameos of family figures and feuds, episodes at Oxford, trips to the continent and ‘whatnot’. They also contain similar speech mannerisms; characters of a particular generation call their parents ‘Mater’ and ‘Pater’. De Kretser mentions Relative Merits in the Acknowledgments to her novel but states that she drew this particular affectation from life, for her father, a former public school boy, used the terms. As she explains, Gooneratne “would be writing about people who went to exactly those same schools. One of the things about it is that they produce these people who are completely interchangeable with each other at some level” (interview: 25/05/04).109
This notion of the institutionalised and seemingly infinite reproducibility of colonial identity is a central feature of Sam’s character and the social strata he represents. When taunted with the catchphrase, “Obey by name, obey by nature” he reflects: “I could have pointed out that […] [this] was equally true of all our leading families” (37). They are colonial copies, manufactured at ‘Neddy’s’, collectively typifying the Ceylonese version of that “class of persons” so memorably described by Macaulay as: “Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” (in Bhabha, 1994: 124-5). A level of accuracy in the use of idiomatic English, and knowledge of English literature are two of the ‘tests’ used to measure the quality of the colonial copy. Sam draws attention to speech mannerisms in an assessment of the variation between himself and his less than perfect sister:
I had forgotten my sister’s trick of twisting commonplace sayings into unexpected configurations. The whole family picked up her coinages. It’s a long worm that has no turning became an Obeysekere standard. […] I was faintly irritated […] I was word perfect. No one noticed. That was the point in a way: to have the fluency to pass unremarked. (de Kretser, 2003: 45-6)
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Claudia’s ‘unexpected configurations’ are an aural example of the slippage Homi Bhabha identifies as essential to colonial mimicry: “in order to be effective, mimicry must continuously produce its slippage, its excess, its difference” (1994: 122). For Sam, the incongruity is visible: “I was painfully conscious of the discrepancy between my unprepossessing appearance and the subtlety of my mind” (de Kretser, 2003: 58). In his memories of England he recalls yearning for just one English girl to see beyond the surface: “I am not what I seem, I wanted to cry. I am no different from your brothers. We have read the same books” (58).
Sam’s “unravelling of the Hamilton case”, a case concerning the death of a white planter, owes much to “a mind steeped in the stratagems of detective fiction” (52). He models himself on Holmes and Poirot; his intervention is “variously described as masterly and a dazzling piece of detection” (52). Yet in his commitment to ‘truth’ Sam makes a serious career-path blunder. By diverting initial suspicion from Tamil workers to Taylor, the dead man’s friend, he unwittingly puts “a noose around an English neck” (134). As Bhabha observes, there is a fine line “between mimicry and mockery” (1994: 86). The mimic mocks the very subject it imitates and in so doing threatens the boundaries on which that subject is based: mimicry “is at one resemblance and menace” (86). By demonstrating his intellect, Sam endangers the ‘natural’ political order of colonial rule and is consequently punished – he is passed over for promotion to the judiciary (de Kretser, 2003: 134).
De Kretser also disturbs the boundaries of the narrative modes she mimics. As she observes, 1930s detective fiction often supports “very conservative values to do with class and race and so on. It speaks from a position of great certainty about what is right and what is wrong” (interview: 25/05/04). In contrast, her own exploration of truth and proof, guilt and justice is riddled with ambiguity. Moreover, she deliberately mocks the rules of the classic whodunit by undoing the resolution to the Hamilton case.110 Towards the end of the novel, Sam stumbles on a collection of short-stories written by an acquaintance, Shivanathan, whose ‘Death of a Planter’ puts forward a radically different explanation for Hamilton’s murder. Sam dismisses the “preposterous” story but eventually recalls a missed clue which adds weight to the new theory (333). However, the last part of the novel (a letter from Shiva to Sam’s son) explains that the story was “quite unconsciously” modelled on Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot’s 167
Christmas (351). Then, in a final “turn of the screw”, Shiva reveals that he stands accused of furthering his own desire for plantation reform by covering up the fact that the original suspects were responsible for the crime (353). As Shiva suggests: “[t]ime never simplifies – it unravels and complicates. Guilty parties show up everywhere. The plot does nothing but thicken” (364).
The notion of plots becoming ever more complex and inconclusive is also evident in the approach de Kretser takes to the mapping of history:
history is a little bit like a whodunit too. Who’s guilty and who’s innocent? If you think of somewhere like Sri Lanka, who’s responsible for what has gone on? Obviously colonialism played its part, even in what is happening today. But at the same time you have to acknowledge that nationalism has not exactly helped. So the questions of guilt and innocence become very blurry in postcolonial countries. (interview: 25/05/04)
The nationalist figure in The Hamilton Case is Donald Jayasinghe, also known as Jungle Jaya. He is Sam’s nemesis, a childhood contemporary who later becomes his brother-in-law and a leading politician. Jaya’s fictional career is mapped out by references to key moments from Ceylon’s actual postcolonial archive, including the repatriation of ‘plantation Tamils’ and the institution of the Sinhala Only bill.111 Sam draws attention to the way he manipulates notions of ethnicity to service his own ambition:
with his talk of the Aryan supermen that pandered to the vanity of the villagers […] Calling us the Lion People, telling every Sinhalese lout with a chip on his shoulder that he was the rightful master of the land: what arrant nonsense the man came up with to wangle his victories at the polls. (33; 39)
Jaya’s claim to be ‘of the people’ is entirely spurious. He is also a member of the ‘Cambridge-inflected’ elite but, unlike the stultifying Sam, he moves with the times to become the “champion of Sinhalese” while unable to “read or write the language” (33). The following exchange demonstrates the contest over the role of English:
When I remarked on the beauty of our surroundings, [Jaya] snorted. ‘A grove, a glade – why use words designed for an English forest? They have nothing to do with this jungle of ours.’[…]‘The British occupy our imagination as well as our country,’ he intoned, drawing on his foul-smelling pipe. 168
I recognised the prelude to a sermon. ‘English is our inheritance too,’ I interrupted. ‘Why Shouldn’t we mould it to our needs? Grove and palu in the same sentence – isn’t that distinctively Ceylonese?’ (87)
Several such sentences are scattered throughout the novel: “mallung heaped on cracker biscuits […] Sambol spooned onto a Limoges plate” and there are many references to the type of mix-and-match mimicry that Sam advocates (193; 367). There are also moments where ‘native’ codes actively displace the outgoing colonial culture; sarongs replace trousers, hands are brought together “in the traditional way” in lieu of a handshake (127). The inconsistencies and implications of the pro- and anti-colonial positions these two characters occupy are well demonstrated. Sam’s plea for the equality of English in Ceylon in no way disturbs his belief in the inherent superiority of that language and its speakers: “[i]n Sinhalese he always used the lowest form of address, suitable for animals, because anyone who deserved respect spoke English” (268). This acute form of colonial mimicry displayed by the elite classes is shown to be inherently flawed given the exclusivity, self-loathing and myriad hypocrisies that accompany it. Yet, de Kretser also suggests that the populist nationalism of postcolonial politics that surpasses/suppresses the age of the colonial mimic man depends on a dangerous fabrication of an indigenous, majoritarian ‘ethnic identity’. Jaya lives “to see his theorems of national pride codified into a geometry of racial hatred” (356).
The ‘political’ strand of the novel operates as a subtext, running beneath and between the main, frame-story. As de Kretser notes, to look back over “the last fifty or sixty years of Sri Lankan history, politics suffuses every aspect of life, in one sense” (interview: 25/05/04). But she wanted to eschew the trend to write (postcolonial) history from the point of view of the victors and made a conscious decision not to focus on:
the Jaya type of character in whose life political change and political choice would be everything. I wanted to write about lives that are ordinary in that sense, people to whom politics happen rather than people who make politics happen. […] These people are acted upon by history rather than seeing themselves as actively creating history. (interview: 25/05/04)
The complex conflicts between Sam and Jaya, in terms of their relative status and agency in a changing political context, the opposing views they espouse, and their fraught personal relationship, are reflected in a tension over narrative space. Like the author, Sam rejects by silencing: “I refused to listen to talk about Jaya” (de Kretser, 169
2003: 79). The repressed returns nonetheless; Sam is repeatedly irked by the way that Jaya’s story interrupts and upstages his own (39, 323).
Literature as souvenir?
To return to the issue of the integrity of diasporic perspectives on former homelands; de Kretser takes up the challenge that ‘located’ critics like Paranjape and Jeganathan extend by seeming to agree with their negative assessment. Through Shiva, who migrated to Canada before becoming a writer, she offers a self-conscious critique of the way that diasporic fiction so often produces a series of clichés. In his letter, Shiva re- evaluates his own work, describing his attachment to Ceylon as a type of love:
I tried to write about that love. You have seen the result. Pretty little tales, tricked out with guavas and temple bells. It seemed a way forward. I persuaded myself that a girl with oiled hair threading her way barefoot through a paddy field was more authentic than a man downing a cocktail, one glossy shoe resting on a polished rail. After all, the girl stood for a life uncorrupted by the West. That fixation on purity! It branded me a creature of my age. In its service I perfected a rhetorical sleight-of-hand as slick as any magician’s patter. Coconut oil. Paddy field. Hey presto (366)
Shiva identifies a literary longing for authentically ‘ethnic’ natives in suitably exotic environments, and suggests that the desire is driven by the demands of the postcolonial age. His ruminations call to mind Salman Rushdie’s statement that “‘[a]uthenticity’ is the respectable child of old-fashioned exoticism. It demands that sources, forms, style, language and symbol all derive from a supposedly homogenous and unbroken tradition” (1991: 66-7). Rushdie is, as mentioned earlier, intervening in the debate on the utility of Commonwealth Literatures and the study of national literatures in decolonising countries. He feels that books containing native ‘motifs and symbols’ are praised, and those “which mix traditions, or which seek consciously to break with tradition, are often seen as highly suspect” (1991: 66). This is a point emphasised in Sam’s reading of Shiva’s work: “[h]ere I am, thought Sam, with my orange jelly and my Collected Works of Shakespeare, I’m part of it all too, like it or not, I’m as authentic as any bally mango” (de Kretser, 2003: 327).
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The ‘pretty little tales’ achieve market success and the particular type of academic respectability Rushdie dislikes, as his “books went into fourth and fifth printings, and students wrote requesting interviews for their theses on New Literatures in English” (367). In a moment of epiphany however, Shiva (recalling Paranjape) sees that ethnic authenticity has become a commodity, and diasporic writers simply middlemen plying their trade:
my stories proved very popular with readers in the West. They wrote to tell me so. Your work is so exotic. So marvellously authentic. When the flatulent rumbles of self-satisfaction subsided, I saw that what I had taken for markers of truth functioned as signs of exoticism. The coloniser returns as a tourist, you see. And he is mad for difference. That is the luxury commodity we now supply, as we once kept him in cinnamon and sapphires. […] Literature as souvenir: I confess I traded in it. (366-367)
De Kretser is aware that the process of commodification she describes above could be applied to her own work. In conversation, it becomes clear that (in contrast to Paranjape and Jeganathan) her argument is not with diasporic fiction as such, but with stories that deny hybrid realities to produce an ethnic-authentic picture of native national traditions. This tendency, as she points out, may be equally apparent in ‘non-diasporic’ works (interview: 25/05/04). In agreement with the resident critics she points to the faddish behaviour of the literary marketplace and to the connection between trade, travel, literature and conquest. De Kretser was formerly an editor for the Lonely Planet series of travel guides and her views on contemporary, popular travel writing inform her critique of the way ethnicity is traded: “I’m not saying that these writers do these things consciously or cynically but I think there is a certain kind of promotion that panders to the Western craving for difference and exoticism” (interview: 25/05/04).
De Kretser distances herself from such promotion; she chooses not to present herself as a ‘migrant’ or ‘ethnic’ writer:
It’s not that I think it’s limiting, but I don’t think I see myself [like that]. I never go around thinking to myself ‘I am a migrant writer’ […] because my first novel was set in France it really just never came up […] I don’t think my publishers promote me anyway as a Sri Lankan […] And I don’t turn up to writers festivals wearing a sari and presenting myself as an Asian writer or marking my difference in that way. (interview: 25/05/04)
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De Kretser’s first novel, The Rose Grower (1999), traces the impoverishment of an aristocratic family as they adjust to changing political currents in pre-revolutionary France. This unconventional choice of subject matter serves as a necessary reminder that not all of the texts produced by the writers canvassed in this thesis are to do with South Asia, or based on experiences of diaspora in Australia. De Kretser affirms that she is unlikely to write about Sri Lanka again in the near future (interview: 25/05/04). Despite the difference in setting, the thematic connection between the two novels is strong. Both focus on pivotal historical moments, on the passing of epochs:
I am really writing about a place and world that no longer exists. In fact when I did the first draft I used names like the Island, the Colony, the Place because I wanted to suggest this almost imaginary place. It’s almost a place that’s not real anymore. (de Kretser in Scott, 2004: 101)
These comments provide a response to Paranjape’s disapproval of the ‘epistemic distortion’ he feels that diasporic fictions insert into representations of former homelands; de Kretser quite deliberately seeks to open up a ‘gap between the real and the imaginary’. This ‘gap’ or sense of distance is maintained in her approach to the writing process. De Kretser emigrated from Sri Lanka at the age of fourteen and did not go back to research The Hamilton Case: “I had vivid, detailed memories of things […] I didn’t want to go back. I thought that reality would impinge too much. It was a way of distancing myself again” (in Scott, 2004: 101). Nonetheless, she felt a greater degree of ‘responsibility’ when writing of Sri Lanka because of the authority minority status confers.
In a manner reminiscent of Jeganathan’s comments on ethnographic reading practices, de Kretser suggests that, due to a lack of “access to writing about Sri Lanka in the West it is read in a more representative fashion than writing about France, for instance” where there is a wealth of literature in English and translation (101). So “people read you as a sort of representative of this place and your book as containing a kind of truth about this place. This is not necessarily so. It is only one kind of truth; there are many” (100-101). As I have shown, The Hamilton Case works at a textual level to illustrate the relative truths of imagined lives, thus destabilising any ethnographic reading.
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Lokuge’s Turtle Nest (2003), published in the same year as The Hamilton Case, offers a radically different picture of Sri Lanka – another ‘kind of truth about this place’. The two writers also have diverging views on issues of categorisation and differing approaches to the writing process. For example, Lokuge did return to Sri Lanka and “lived in the location” on the south coast to research Turtle Nest (interview: 22/05/04). It is her second novel and third book of fiction; all three are primarily about Sri Lankan experiences and each incorporates emigration to Australia.112 Thus, in contrast to de Kretser, Lokuge respects the ‘write about what you know’ maxim. To the suggestion of setting a novel entirely in Australia, she responds:
perhaps I’m still not comfortable enough in Australia to get it right. […] if you are writing about a place you have to know it like the palm of your hand otherwise you’re doing an injustice to yourself as a writer, being false to yourself and being false to the reader. […] with Sri Lanka I write about what I know and love and understand. (interview: 22/05/04)
Lokuge was thirty-five when she emigrated in 1987 and, as her comments demonstrate, is more certain in her sense of being Sri Lankan rather than de Kretser, who left the island as a child in 1972 and feels ambivalent, more or less foreign in both places (de Kretser, interview: 25/05/04). Lokuge does, quite unaffectedly, present herself as a Sri Lankan diasporic writer, often wearing a sari to writers’ festivals (as one assumes she would on many other occasions unrelated to her persona as a writer). She is also perhaps more comfortable taking on a representative role. Turtle Nest is set in a place that was badly affected by the recent Tsunami; when participating in a fundraising event Lokuge, as a Sri Lankan, thanked Australians for their generosity.
Following a panel session at the Sydney Writers Festival, where Lokuge spoke of drawing from a subcontinental literary and philosophical tradition of strong female figures, I asked her whether she thought that theories on diasporic writing are useful:
Yes I do. I think that [the] migrant’s ‘double vision’ is one of the most energetic areas of the creative process because you have two cultures or three cultures from which to draw, and you know each one quite well. So you are not really a stranger to it but at the same time you are a little distanced, even from the Sri Lankan culture in which [you] have grown up. (interview: 22/05/04)
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She recalled reading a story by Romesh Gunesekera when she was still living in Sri Lanka and being surprised at his description of a shoeflower.
But now when I go back I can see what he was doing because you look at it differently. You don’t take it for granted anymore. The homely shoeflower becomes something beautiful. So that objectivity, that observation is sharpened by the fact that you are not living in the country. (interview: 22/05/04)
So for one writer, the distance necessary to suggest an ‘almost imaginary’ place is maintained by staying away; for the other return provokes the realisation that a sense of objectivity is sharpened by distance.
With this brief comparison of methods and personae, I intend to indicate the variety of positions and points of view on issues of diasporic writing that South Asian-Australian writers may take. My intention is not suggest that Lokuge’s work is in any way more ‘literal’ than de Kretser’s, or that her greater emphasis on a Sri Lankan identity precludes the ability to write from other perspectives. To the contrary, each of the three key characters in Turtle Nest presents her with a writer’s challenge.
In crafting Aruni, a second-generation returnee, Lokuge imagined Sri Lanka as her young adult daughters might see it. Her concern as a parent is evident:
when I think of how dangerous it could be, because they don’t know the country as well as I do, for them to walk around by themselves. They are such daring [people] and their terribly Australian adventurousness, what trouble it could get them into. (interview: 22/05/04)
Adopted as a baby and raised in Australia, Aruni returns to the island wanting to find out about her birth-mother, Mala. The narrative switches between the life-stories of these two women, seamlessly interweaving past and present. Mala’s family life is marked by hunger, servitude and loss – a world away from the writer’s own connections to the south coast. The third character, Paul, is an Australian photographer who stays at the same hotel as Aruni. For Lokuge, who has previously written from a male point of view in short stories set in Sri Lanka, “to get into the consciousness of a man from Australia” represented “a leap” for her (interview: 22/05/04). She spent part of her time when researching Turtle Nest showing the island to an Australian colleague, and states: 174
“it was interesting to see the location, the people, through his eyes” (interview: 22/05/04).
Paul becomes Aruni’s confidant and eventually her lover. Their holiday romance is set against the harsher realities of Mala’s story and the exploitative nature of sexual transactions in an impoverished, tourist-driven setting. Mala’s first child, a nameless half-caste baby, seen as a ‘pariah’ by her family, is sold to a beggar colony. Her second, Aruni, is fathered by the middle-class, Sinhalese ‘master of the house’ at which she works. So there is another connection between Lokuge and de Kretser’s work; the latter’s experience of editing travel writing, and her consequent discomfort with the way that “poverty and degradation are made spectacle” for readers in the West, is pertinent to Turtle Nest (de Kretser, interview: 25/05/04).
De Kretser’s discomfort brings to mind Tabish Khair’s reading of Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1997) as “a Babu-socialist valorization of the ‘poetry of poverty and suffering’” (2001: 144). Khair dedicates his Babu Fictions (a work that examines both resident and diasporic writing) “to family servants, village relatives and those friends […] who could not read Indian English fiction but whom Indian English fiction often claims to have read” (inside cover). It “is not that the ‘caste other’ is completely ignored in Indian English fiction,” he suggests, “but that his/her presence – in most cases – has been subsumed, rewritten and marginalized” (137). Sheetal Majithia makes a similar point about South Asian-American literature. Taking two of Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories as examples, she observes that the ‘fluidity’ of diasporic lives is only made prominent by its opposite, the backwardness and stasis of the resident community:
While the immigrant characters possess depth and a keen self-conscious interiority, the Indian characters’ responses are represented through a communal voice and experience that remains untouched by the global flows that have produced the conditions for all of Lahiri’s stories. (Majithia, 2001: online)
Lokuge is one of very few South Asian Australian writers to step outside of the middle and upper classes when writing about former homelands.113 In significant ways her Turtle Nest contradicts the claims made above. For example, the novel indicates how local, national and global forces intersect to produce poverty. And Lokuge challenges the travel-guide stereotype of the Sri Lankan beach paradise by refusing to 175
sentimentalise the village life described.114 Moreover, Mala’s story is not subsumed beneath or marginalized by Aruni’s but conveyed in greater detail.
On one issue Turtle Nest confirms Majithia’s expectations, however, as Lokuge states that she cannot over-emphasise the importance of community to her work and in Sri Lanka:
the western notion of individualism does not count so much in our families, it’s the role, it’s the daughter, it’s the wife, it’s the mother, it’s the father, it’s the husband or the grandmother. It’s not outside [the family and community] that you live, and you have to accept it if you are a person in that culture. (interview: 22/05/04)
She believes that at the “foundation of the society is the family” but does not view Sri Lanka as static or undifferentiated. Rather, she speaks of many communities: “each one has its particular features and characteristics. I think it is within that difference that people are moulded and shaped” (interview: 22/05/04). Nor does Lokuge valorise the family or community as a necessarily positive force. Both of her novels depict women who have transgressed social conventions and are ostracised: Mala’s neighbours tar the door of her family home with excrement to punish the entire family for her promiscuity (Lokuge, 2003: 100). And, unlike Mistry who creates a family of outcastes in A Fine Balance, Mala is utterly alone when she gives birth to Aruni in an abandoned shrine/cave beyond the boundary of the village (193-5). The ‘communal voice and experience’ of the diasporic Sri Lankan-Australian community in Lokuge’s first novel is also shown to be constrictive, their gossip the verbal equivalent of tarring.
Although Lokuge believes in the creative potential of the migrant’s ‘double vision’ for the writing process, her depiction of Aruni’s experience of diaspora is also uncompromisingly bleak. Aruni spends her childhood as the outsider within family and wider social circles. She is desperate to ensure a sense of belonging upon return to Sri Lanka and repeatedly affirms her right to kinship: “these my people […] this my land, my home” (9). She attempts to be a local, to make her “worlds meet and cross” (42). But the ‘beach boys’ call her ‘missy’ and ‘kalu suddhi’, meaning black-white woman. Aruni also comes to self-depreciatingly define herself in this way: “‘[d]o you know what I am, Paul? I’ve worked it all out,’ […] ‘A coconut,’ she says, laughing wildly, 176
‘brown on the outside, white on the inside’” (71). As with The Hamilton Case, there is no decisive resolution to Turtle Nest, no ‘happily ever after’ for Aruni: at the close of the novel she is tricked on to the beach at night and raped by boys she considers her friends and relatives.
Lokuge was advised by some of her draft-readers to change the ending. She too wanted a happier outcome for Aruni, one where she returns to Melbourne as a fuller and more confident person, enriched by the experience of unravelling her past. However, as she recalls: “the more I read those endings the more they didn’t work for her, or for me” (interview: 22/05/04). Australian critics have praised the novel, describing it as shocking and powerful, but in resisting an easy resolution Lokuge has risked the wrath of resident Sri Lankan reviewers.115 As she explains: “I got into bad books with the country on this one. Quite a senior academic got hold of me and said: ‘how do you write about the country like that? You can’t write about Sri Lanka like that!’” (interview: 22/05/04). Lokuge had a newspaper article in mind when she wrote the ending, and feels that she “was writing the truth”. Just one kind of truth however, as she emphasises that “there is no way one can say that [Sri Lanka] is corruption personified. It is not. It is just below the surface, sometimes, in some places”. In response to the reprimand, and inverting Paranjape’s formula, Lokuge suggests that the resident academic’s attitude reveals harmful and misleading “preconceived notions” (interview: 22/05/04). She argues that the distanced diasporic perspective of the homeland may if fact be more perceptive: “because they’re within the country; perhaps we see, from outside, the dangers” (interview: 22/05/04).
Writing Conflict: ‘What you do with words, we do with bombs and bullets’
Suvendrini Perera differentiates between ‘alternative’ and ‘mainstream’ diaspora novels when examining ‘narratives of coexistence in recent Sri Lankan fiction’. The “counter- trend” she identifies is constituted by texts produced “outside major conventional publishing circuits” – those which “have not been published under what is becoming a very familiar marketing brand name, namely that of ‘Postcolonial literature’ (Perera, 2000: 14; 16). In defining the mainstream ‘brand,’ Perera indicates a series of successful contemporary novels by the usual suspects (Ondaatje, Selvadurai and Gunesekera) that “have opened out questions of Sri Lankan cultural identity” (16). She warns: 177
Their publication in the West, and packaging under the increasingly depoliticising label of ‘postcolonial literature’, however, often enables their recuperation into disembodied, ahistorical celebrations of ‘hybridity’ or ‘multiculturalism’. Equally seductive is an uncritical nostalgia that reads these texts as invoking the cosmopolitanism of better times, forgetful of the fractures of class, caste, region and language upon which that rested. (16)
Lokuge and de Kretser are well known Australian novelists developing international reputations. Their novels are produced by major publishing houses and have won or been nominated for prestigious literary prizes.116 The Hamilton Case and Turtle Nest could easily be situated within a mainstream, “recognisably – even self-consciously – postcolonial genre of writing on Sri Lanka” as they assertively explore issues from the postcolonial archive: mimicry for example, or diasporic longing (14). Yet, these Australian texts differ considerably from (Perera’s assessment of) their transatlantic counterparts as they deliberately resist a reading that celebrates hybridity and they both offer highly critical explorations of nostalgia and its effects. Lokuge and de Kretser’s novels may lend themselves to the market/reception models of a postcolonial/diasporic kind, but at a narrative level they engage critically and self-consciously with ideas of authority.
In this section, however, I am concerned with those texts and writers that do fit within the parameters of the positive counter-trend that Perera has identified. There are many South Asian Australian instances of writers whose work is self-published or produced by small, independent publishing houses. Not all expatriate literary activity is subject to the dominant market/academic forces the ‘located’ critics vilify and de Kretser mocks. My examples here, Ernest Macintyre and Chitra Fernando, have each made a prolific contribution to the South Asian Australian corpus. Their work is relatively unknown in Australian and broader ‘metropolitan’ literary circles but has been well situated within Sri Lankan writing in English.117
Indeed, playwright Macintyre is “hailed as the most prolific and successful of the Sri Lankan English playwrights,” his name synonymous with the English-language theatre revival of the 1960s and early 1970s. He studied under Lyn Ludowyk at the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya before forming his own company, “Stage and Set”. His direction of The Death of a Salesman and The Caucasian Chalk Circle “virtually set the 178
standards for producing, directing and selecting plays in Colombo at that time” (interview: 28/09/03). His own plays revolving around Sri Lankan themes and issues drew a particulary appreciative response. As Ruwanthie de Chickera recalls:
Treated to the sophisticated craftsmanship of his productions and provoked by the thematic relevance of [Macintyre’s] plays, the expanding English-speaking audience developed a taste for political and social drama and grew to proportions that could easily sustain a play for several days at the Lionel Wendt Theatre in Colombo (1999: online).
More recently, in 2003, Macintyre travelled back to the Wendt with two new plays to take part in the theatre’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations. He received an enthusiastic promotion by the local press who described his arrival, after three decades of absence, as ‘The Return of the Godfather’.
Unlike Macintyre who had already established himself as a playwright prior to leaving Sri Lanka, for Fernando (who died in 1998) emigration played a crucial part in enabling writing. She explains: “Sri Lanka gave me my soul, but Australia gave me my freedom… Without that freedom my soul would have shrivelled” (Fernando in Gooneratne, 2002: 123). More prosaically: “having a place of my own and an income from my academic career has made it possible for me to write on a modest scale and create modest works” (Fernando, 2000: 12).118 Her creative medium was primarily short fiction; Cousins, her only novel, was completed during a protracted period of illness and published posthumously by the author’s estate.
Fernando “was not ambitious for a large reading public and the labels of famous publishing houses”, choosing to publish most of her work at her own expense instead (Goonewardene in Gooneratne, 2002: 123).119 With Cousins, she felt “the book should be made available for a wider readership in Sri Lanka” and her sister fulfiled these wishes by publishing a second edition (2004) there (Fernando in Fernando 2004: online). Despite the lack of an international readership, and the author’s belief in her own ‘modest’ scale and sphere of influence, Fernando has used her writing career to good effect.
I have a much clearer idea of what those whom I have helped in practical ways have gained … A simple thing like the royalties from my books saving a man’s 179
job by being used to provide him with a bicycle is a source of great satisfaction to me. Besides, I have involved others in the business of social justice and equity, so the pleasure has been shared (2000: 12).
1971: the Insurgency
Under the guise of a ‘domestic’ or ‘campus’ novel, Fernando addresses the complex question of just how to achieve social justice and equity in postcolonial Ceylon. In doing so, she maps out a series of oppositions; between two social classes, between words and action, between small and large revolutions – ensuring a man’s livelihood (above), versus the bloody impact of the uprising with which the narrative ends. Throughout, the political significance and ‘epic reach’ of Cousins is anchored in the intimacy of everyday concerns, in the “choices between love and work, marriage and singledom” that face Amitha and her cousins as they age (Perera, 2000: 18). The novel is primarily set in the 1960s, during Amitha’s university years (first as a student and then teacher). Here she witnesses a protest that functions as a sign of the turbulent times to come:
There were cries of “Kaduwa! Kaduwa!” Someone shouted, “What do we want?” A forest of hands with fists clenched shot up, a chorus of voices responded: “Our language.” “What do we want?” shouted the voice again. “No privilege,” came the choric response. “What do we want?” thundered the voice for a third time. A pause. “Just carnage.” It was a single voice. A moment’s silence followed by a wordless roar (Fernando, 1999: 73).
Fernando provides a glossary of Sinhala terms used in her novel. She defines kaduwa as a colloquial term “for someone who likes to show off their knowledge of English” (182). Faulk takes it to mean ‘the weapon of the English language’ and quotes Gehan
Wijewardene who describes the term as a sword, cutting both ways:
It is truly a two-edged sword, it cuts to preserve position and status and also stands between the one who possesses it and the community at large in the hinterland … The English-speaking elites of Sri Lanka not only divorced themselves from the creativity which lay in the community that surrounded them[,] the language they had come to think of as their own was grounded in an environment they would never see, in someone else’s history, in someone else’s society (in Faulk, 1996: 6).
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This is an apt summary of the socio-political divide Fernando explores. In Cousins, the rural populace, who are just gaining access to elite institutions, are set against the English-speaking metropolitan bourgeoisie who have long claimed this privilege. Amitha fraternises with the latter group. Her ‘Colombo cousin’ and room-mate Veerani, for example, is keen to emphasise her difference from manual workers, the ‘driver class’. They befriend the extravagant Kushlani, a rich ‘Colombo Tamil’ who speaks French but cannot “even pronounce a local name without coaching” (Fernando, 1999: 69). The women share a balcony with two others, disparagingly described as “rural belles”. The cultural gap is made evident: tins of powdered charcoal toiletries for cleaning teeth sit next to a range of expensive toiletries in the shared bathroom, ‘native food days’ at the canteen interrupt the usual bacon and eggs, Nanda and Hema sing songs from a successful Sinhala play whilst the ‘Dram Soc’ perform European works. Veerani recognises that the singing is a form of assertion: “They resent us” she states, “[a]s if it’s our fault they’re different” (63). Amitha reminds her: “[a]ctually, they’re more in keeping with the country’s real culture than we are” (43).
Amitha represents a type of middle ground between the competing social forces characterised in the novel, due to her connection to small-town ‘Kalutota’. She attempts to mediate between the cliques, suggesting that cultural ‘alienation’ does not preclude political commitment:
Oh, look, just because some of us live in Colombo and speak English at home that doesn’t mean we support inequality. We want social justice as much as you do. When I finish my degree here, I want to do something to help. I want to help at least one person. My former ayah she has a niece, I want to educate her. I want her to come to ’Varsity (67).
She is briefly elated by her idea, then immediately deflated when Hema reinstates the gulf between them: “You had an ayah?” (68). Like the author, Amitha actively seeks ways to intervene in, to change, the (someone else’s) history of which she is a part. She comes to see however, that the brand of ‘urban, leftist’ Marxism espoused by some of her peers, that she attempts to defend, is largely an ineffectual pose. A disagreement over the best route to social change forms part of the tension between Amitha and another character, Amar. She wants him to put his Marxism to use within the island: “Aren’t you running away to England like a bewildered, helpless child to Mamma?” she 181
thinks of his impending departure. Amar emphasises his disconnection: “What can I do?…I don’t speak the idiom of the worker, I don’t feel comfortable with him” (19). He continues:
There’s a new kind of person evolving…the cosmopolitan, the person whose arena is the world, the true world citizen with a grasp of global affairs committed to social justice and freedom. Working for Amnesty International or the International Labour Organization would suit me down to the ground (121).
Whilst others emigrate in search of all-encompassing ideals Amitha remains, pursuing her small revolutions. In addition to educating others, she also resists “the terrible temptation to conform” to a life of domesticity by following an intellectual path instead. She becomes a historian; her thesis topic is: “Post-colonial Ceylon: Class Consciousness in the Middle and Non-Middle Classes” (109). The thesis remain unfinished though, as Amitha’s creative muse takes over; she turns her research into a book of case studies and begins to write short stories. Amitha tentatively explores her potential as a creative writer, wanting “to do something more substantial than rural vignettes” but lacking direction: “Maybe I need some shattering experience to pull things together” she states, in the weeks immediately prior to the 1971 Insurgency (145).
This ‘shattering experience’ is the culmination of the social tensions that have been brewing in the decades after Independence. As a small child, Amitha hears an uncle predict that free state education would bring about “a bloodless social revolution” (18). Throughout the novel she displays her faith in the power of education by teaching others, actively working for social change. But the rising unemployment that awaits the increasing number of graduates creates the conditions for a bloody protest, giving the lie to the belief that “Education brings money and independence and power – it removes inequalities” (87). For Amitha the uprising serves as a catalyst for her creativity. She decides to give up her job to write full-time and chooses, finally to ‘be done with History’. As she explains: “I want to write about the dynamic, explosive present, I want to portray history in the making. I am no longer interested in the fossilised past” (164). Her first novel, on the life and death of a village boy, is a testament to the slogan she sees graffitied on buildings in Colombo: “We can be killed but we can never be silenced” (166).
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In one passage from the Coda to Cousins, which takes place almost twenty years after the Insurgency, Amitha is confronted by two JVP party members. They recognise her as the author of several novels that have been unofficially translated into Sinhala and identify with her “social conscience”, stating “you feel for the downtrodden and the oppressed” (169). She tells them that she attempts to understand the forces that drive “people to revolt but [is] not [their] sort of revolutionary”, that she has “no stomach for violence and disorder” (169). They remind her that she has “no reason” because she is protected by her social class. They state:
When your intellectual powers have been awakened, can you go back to the mammoty and the plough?”…We too have talents, we too have gifts to give society. But society spits in our faces, kicks us in the guts. What you do with words, we do with bombs and bullets (169).
Amitha replies:
But I don’t stop with word bombs and bullets. There are also other experiences that concern me – those things that are inescapable, that’ll always be there whatever forms society may take (169).
In Cousins, these inescapable things, “meetings, partings, death”, the universal themes that form “the very pith of” life, are emphasised in the Buddhist Jataka tales and sermons included in the narrative. The Buddhism of Cousins is not the exotic “beating drums and thumping elephants” variant alluded to in The Tribal Hangover, but a familiar living tradition, a moral code and set of practices. The JVP men acknowledge Buddhism as an alternative to their action: “Monks accept such things in withdrawing from the world. You have reconciled yourself through your writing. We can reconcile ourselves only by fighting for a just society” (170).
I would agree with Yasmine Gooneratne that Cousins is “flawed in literary quality” when compared to Fernando’s short stories, “the best of which stand as testimony to her eminence as a writer” (131). The novel was completed under the pressure of illness and the Coda, in particular, has a fragmented, unfinished quality. It is the work however, that best captures the author’s “thoughts and ideals,” her personal philosophy, intimated in earlier stories and developed in the set of journals that she kept for many years. Some 183
journal-extracts have been posthumously published. In one, Fernando comments on the connection between Leonard Woolf’s ‘creed’ and her own:
The yielding to unreflecting outbursts on a mass scale – outbursts of dreadful physical violence as well as the denial of freedom of thought and speech – are the very antithesis of the kind of civilisation envisaged by Woolf. Justice, mercy, tolerance, compassion and generosity are at the very heart of Buddha’s teaching. Buddha generally addresses the individual, but then society in the final analysis is a collection of individuals and if individuals behave as they ought a civilised society is the result (2000: 11).
This extract also indicates Amitha’s aversion to violent modes of protest (her decision to write, rather than fight), and provides a response to the question of whether “society [can] be restructured on the basis of personal feelings and individual acts alone” (Fernando, 1999: 120). Fernando also notes in her journal that, in contrast to Amitha, emigration was the catalyst that made her “fully conscious of [her] own class…in socio- economic terms” (in Gooneratne 2002: 134). “My perception”, she writes “has been greatly sharpened by my leaving that society” (134-135).
Cousins could easily be situated within – or compared to – an already established range of resident literary responses to the 1971 insurgency.120 Some, like the short poems below, ruminate on the guilt and blindness of the urban middle classes:
April, 1971
I do not know the thin reek of blood, the stench of seared flesh, the cracked irreducible bone; I know only the thinner reek of pity, the harsh edge of self-contempt, the ashy guilt of being too old, salaried, safe, and comfortable. (Ashley Halpe in Goonetilleke, 1993: 143).
Vesak 1971
Did it take spouting blood and tongues in guns to strafe our minds awake? (Suvimalee Karunaratne in Goonetilleke, 1993: 194).
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Other resident texts, according to Thiru Kandiah, reinstate the status-quo by disparaging, caricaturing and condemning the rebels and their cause (1995: 396-400).121 Fernando takes a sympathetic view of the motivations for insurgency by repeatedly returning to the issue of social justice. Through Amitha’s fiction, Cousins also hints at an alternative mode of writing. Amitha manages to step outside the boundaries of her own milieu, to bridge the gap and creatively connect with realities other than her own: she writes from the perspective of a Tamil suicide bomber, for example. This is explicitly not the type of novel Fernando has produced, however, as Cousins is primarily about the elite, metropolitan classes, in relation to the now educated and revolutionary rural worker.
Black July, 1983
Ernest Macintyre has also written of the Insurgency. The last play he produced prior to migration, A Somewhat Strange and Grotesque Comedy (1991), dwells on issues of violence and responsibility. Unlike Cousins, it was conceived soon after the events of 1971.122 It operates as an allegory, making no direct mention of the uprising.123 A reviewer has enquired:
Is it a bitter indictment of the apathy of our middle class? One can never be sure as to whether Mr MacIntyre is playing some sort of game or whether he is deadly serious. However one does certainly feel a bit uncomfortable or is it guilty at the end of the play (in Silva, 1982: 37).
In interview Macintyre responds to this statement by stating “that it is not a game”, that indeed, the apathy of the middle classes “toward the 71 uprising… where a large number of youths were killed, where brother killed brother” is what prompted him to write the play (interview: 28/09/03). He goes on to say:
the middle classes is the class that I know. I could never write of the village people because I am not able to write about them. Even when I did He Still Comes from Jaffna [2000] somebody said, ‘that is the civil war seen from the middle class’s point of view’: it is precisely that (interview: 28/09/03).
Rasanayagam’s last Riot is also about the middle-class perspective on the civil war. The play has just three characters and the action takes place over a few days, giving it an 185
intimacy and intensity appropriate to live performance. Macintyre explores issues of ethnicity through the ‘mixed’ marriage of Sinhalese Philip and Sita, who describes herself as a culturally deracinated, ‘nominal Tamil’. The play begins with this middle- aged couple preparing to emigrate to Melbourne; sounds of riot outside filter through as they pack boxes in their Colombo home. They also prepare to receive Rasa, Philip’s Jaffna Tamil friend from his university days. Sri Lanka’s history of conflict is defined by the times they have provided shelter for him. Philip jokingly rationalises the drinking they do with: “Don’t exaggerate Sita, how frequent is that, ‘56, ‘58, ‘61, ‘74, ‘77, ‘81” (Macintyre, 1993: 4). Despite the violence outside, riots are happy occasions for Philip. The routine is that Sita retires for the evening while the men get down to drinking and reminiscing. It is the night of the 25th of July 1983, this is to be Rasa’s last riot before they leave the country.
There is an acute sense of realism created by the play’s references to the actual events of ‘black July’ and to the history of violent riots that precedes it. Yet this sense of the ‘real’ and of history-as-chronology is undermined by Macintyre in his introduction to the script:
Theatre is not this life, it’s another one, a made up one, lies. Wonderful lies…plays are trips to the land of pure imagination, a liberty that can never be taken away by any dark and constricting real world. It is the other world, a fictional world, always different from the one fate has given us. In July ’83 fate gave Sri Lanka and particularly its Tamils, a large slice of real life, which this play brings to the theatre…But the sense of order and a plot, which the bewildering complexity and unpredictability of real life is supposed to lack, and which dramatic arrangement gives it, was not found wanting in those days of July and August ’83…Where then, the room for playwriting? (xi).
In clearing room, he crafts a fictional response to real events by having his characters talk about the civil war. In doing so, he reveals a crucial gap in the consciousness of the elite classes, their actual inability to address the issue when faced with conflict:
[The] performance is a total lie in the context of Colombo’s upper middle classes in relation to July ’83… For soon after the riots, Colombo’s mixed society of westernised Tamils and Sinhalese tacitly settled on an agreement that would enable it to continue functioning. …Those crucial seventy-two hours or so were discussed as if it had been a ferocious event from nature…hence the central fiction in this play; getting people from that society talking about subjects that had to be avoided in real life (xi-xii). 186
So on this last occasion, Sita unsettles the established order of events and disrupts the chronology of nostalgia Philip has sheltered in. Prior to Rasa’s arrival she challenges her husband to discuss the Sinhala-Tamil ‘problem’ with his friend. He repeatedly refuses, stating their relationship ‘transcends’ politics, and she continues to press him. Gradually it is revealed that her motivations are personal. She feels, on the brink of retirement and emigration, to have left something “unresolved” (7). With the deepening of the conflict she realises that she wants to reassess herself, to “express communally [that] which she never knew existed” (8). She wants to discuss the Tamil cause with her husband and won’t settle for the “Rasanayagam technique of ‘transcendence’”. As a concession to her plea for their marriage, Philip suggests that if she successfully broaches the topic with Rasa he will join in the conversation.
The second act opens with Rasa’s arrival. He is initially more interested in reliving old memories and is soon engrossed in a Peradeniya university story. He recalls how during ‘ragging’ a group of seniors, including the infamous ‘Bucket Dias’, roamed the corridors singing a popular ‘Colombo schools’ song’ that included ‘Rasanayagam! Rasanayagam!’ in its chorus (23). Rasa, who describes himself as a ‘country cousin’, was unaware that the name “in that context was generic for Tamil” and had nothing to do with him in particular (ibid). Philip shelters him at the time and teaches him to pronounce the Sinhala word for bucket (baldiya) correctly (23). This knowledge saves him on his journey to Philip and Sita’s house some thirty years later:
a mob stopped me, showed me a bucket, and asked me what it was! With the scholarly confidence of Ariyapala or a Sarachchandra I shouted “BALDIYA! BALDIYA! BALDIYA!”, the romance of Peradeniya ringing in my ears! They cheered me patriotically on my way!…As I went on my way with the crowd at the Milagiriya Junction behind me, still cheering, I imagined them singing, “Not only is he Sinhalese, but a Prince, like Dutugemunu! (24).
The theme of language politics and language use in the play is drawn out at many levels. Sita is a retired English professor, for example, who connects the postcolonial downgrading of English to her decision to emigrate. Primarily however, it serves to illustrate that the visible difference between ‘ethnic’ communities is so slight that, paradoxically, the pronunciation of one word will serve as an identifier.
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During the course of the evening, as the riot worsens, Rasa opens up to Sita and then Philip. The three begin to talk about their different attitudes towards the civil conflict and its causes. They are interrupted by news that a close friend of Rasa’s has died in a massacre of political prisoners at a government jail and that house-to-house searches are about to occur. Arrangements are quickly made for two policemen to escort Rasa to a nearby refugee camp. This is to be done under ‘special instructions’ (42). The policemen will remain unseen and only approach at the sign of danger. Furthermore they must be satisfied that Rasa can fool a bucket-brandishing mob with the correct pronunciation of the word baldiya. Sita voices her outrage at these conditions. Rasa leaves in shock and when so confronted chooses not to ‘pass’ for Sinhalese. Philip who had followed his friend with a forgotten briefcase provides the last statement of Act 2. It is worth quoting at length:
Sita listen, You listen carefully. Listen, how Rasa died. When I got there, he was already, a stiff burning log, on the ground. Just like a log, burning. And in the darkened street, there was no one else, only I was there at his funeral pyre, no one else, his cremators had fled. And as I turned around to return, after the pyre was spent, I saw a policeman, weeping, coming towards me. He told me it was not their fault, he told me they were blameless. That as they entered Madangahawatte Lane, a huge mob confronted them, with a BUCKET held in front. The policemen walked quickly to Rasa’s side, and stood confidently, waiting for the question and answer. And the mob pointed to the bucket, and asked, “What is this”? Rasa’s chest heaved, a big heave, and the two policemen thought he was preparing for the password, “BALDIYA”. At the top of his heave he slowly deflated, his head went limp, and bowed. 188
He didn’t, he failed, to use his knowledge. The huge crowd went beserk, the policemen lost control they clubbed him on the head, he fell. They poured the petrol, they struck the match, the policman weeping, fled, back to his station. He couldn’t understand, why Rasa had DISHONOURED the contract (45-46).
These lines are followed by a blackout and a ‘whole minute of silence in the dark after’. Let me return, briefly, to the notes Macintyre provides in the introduction to the script. Here he comments on the particular quality of the theatrical performance: “[t]he enigmatic nature of performance adds another dimension to he creation of fiction, where, strangely, it begins to lose it separateness from truth…Actors and audience, merge for a time, regardless, in the real world” (xii). By turning on a lie, the play enables the audience to enter into an alternative or parallel world “different from the one fate has given us” where violence and the causes of the civil war are acknowledged by the elite classes.
Macintyre appreciates that the power of live performance makes political theatre a potentially disturbing art-form. He illustrates this point by referring to the self- censorship of a play on the subject of torture, by a Chilean writer in exile, which was available in Chile as a published text but not performed there. Macintyre states, “one understands why” he wanted to let the country “gradually return to democracy without digging up the past in the enigmatic form of art that performance is” (xii). In the case of his own play, Macintyre states:
for a long time people refused to produce it in Sri Lanka saying that audiences are too close to that event and won’t take it. So then I thought, well damn good thing I wrote it because at least people can read it. Now, inside universities only, it is being directed and produced but [it is] not [yet] in the public [arena]. But I am taking the risk this time of taking He Still Comes from Jaffna to Colombo which is also pretty close to the bone (interview: 28/09/03).
In this sense it is Macintyre’s location in Australia and as an Australian playwright that allows him to produce work ‘close to the bone’. Furthermore, when I asked Macintyre 189
whether he sees his work fitting into a broader literature of the South Asian diaspora, he replied: “in Australia, not so much the South Asian diaspora but, the non-anglo-celtic migration spectrum; the Greeks, the Italians, they have all done plays” (interview: 28/09/03). He compares his Let’s Give Them Curry (1985) to Richard Benyon’s The Shifting Heart (1960), a play about the difficulties facing an Italian family in Melbourne, and affirms that he has more connections to other migrant Australian writers than he does to South Asian writers working in dispersed locations. Yet he recognises that this role results in a more minor positioning of his work in the Australian cultural sphere:
in Sri Lanka we were what is clichetically called the mainstream. We were the mainstream so the big press, The Daily News, The Observer, The Ceylon Times, Sri Lanka Times all regarded us. Here, of course, we are not considered the mainstream theatre and we don’t get covered like that. So unless you believe that you are in the act of doing something that you have to do for your own sustenance, and not for connecting up with the big society, then it is pointless doing drama here. It is like going to church: you don’t only pray at St. Peters in Rome you can pray in any village church (interview: 28/09/03).
Terrorism and anti-terrorism: 2000 and beyond
Macintyre explores the complexities of the civil war for a second time in He Still Comes from Jaffna. The play is subtitled with an alternative: or the Novelist and the Terrorist: a play about certainty and ambiguity and it builds on many of the themes explored in his earlier work. It opens in a similar way to Rasanayagam’s Last Riot, with a middle- aged Tamil couple, Chandran and Sarogini, waiting for a guest while hearing of explosions at strategic targets in the city. They are expecting Pathmanathan, a powerful merchant banker from Toronto, who is coming to marry their adopted daughter, Maya.
Macintyre gives his play a contemporary edge, firstly by focusing on the (now adult) children who lost parents to the civil war (Maya in the riots of 77 and ‘Paths’ in 83), and secondly, through his reference to the breadth of Tamil diaspora networks, made possible by services like the ‘Tamil International Matrimonial Net’. His summation of the political situation – “two tracks are kept going at the same time; the war moves on while peace is trying to overtake it, the peace negotiations go on while the war is trying 190
to keep ahead of it” – is also an accurate description of the current state of affairs in Sri Lanka (Macintyre, 2000: 2).
As with his other work, Macintyre integrates the domestic with the political. The parents in the play are surprised their daughter agrees to an arranged marriage so readily. Orphaned as a baby, Maya’s ethnic identity is undetermined; she asks her parents why, even if they assumed she was Tamil by upbringing, they didn’t “arrange a marriage” for her to “a Sinhalese in Colombo” (12). Her father replies: “Mixed marriages come only from love affairs. The motivation of parents for arranging marriages is for a greater stability than love; it is deeply embedded in cultural self- preservation” (12). Maya points out that her Tamil uncle is currently aiding the government in their attempts to crush the Tamil terrorists:
Maya – Oh? There doesn’t seem to be much cultural preservation in your brother helping to supply helicopter gunships to the Government! Chan – No. Because that’s a love affair Maya – Love for money? Chan – That’s only the superficial part of it, its really a bristling military manifestation of the love affair between members of the same cosmopolitan English speaking middle class, incidentally categorized in different ethnicities (12).
These doublings and ambiguities are also central to the character of Pathmanathan. He is a ‘disembodied…body for Maya’, found in cyber-space, presented in a ghostly photograph (4). Chandran believes that he has chanced upon the son of an old school- friend, “a high up civil servant” who was killed with his wife in a terrorist attack (10). Thus Pathmanathan, though Tamil, has cause to work for the government; he has agreed to deliver “some documents to do with arms supplies” to the Defence Minister when he arrives in Colombo (10). As it turns out however, he is not an ‘anti-terrorist’ but a terrorist who has stolen Pathmanathan’s identity and used the occasion of access to the MoD to plant a bomb. The CID ask the Rajasinghams to house ‘Paths’ so that they can keep him under surveillance and crack the network that stretches from Colombo to Canada. They reluctantly agree, telling Maya that her marriage ceremony has merely been delayed.
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Maya is a novelist. She agreed to the arranged marriage only because she was captured by Pathmanathan’s story. As she explains: “It was not your unmarried anxious daughter as you thought who reacted with excitement; it was the novelist and writer in me” (13). The fiction she is working on is influenced by the ‘raw material’ of his life and sounds much like a classic ‘rags-to-riches’ story of immigration and diaspora:
The Claymore mine that made Pathmanathan an orphan like me, the perilous sea journey to Madras, life in a teeming refugee camp, the freak chance that gave him Toronto, the difficult and vengeful lives of about two hundred thousand Tamils in Canada, his great work at the University of Toronto, his regret at the loss of the Tamil Language as a precious personal possession, then the power and influence of Merchant Banking (14).
She quickly realises that the man in her home is not the real Pathmanathan but, intrigued by the turn of events, agrees to continue with the charade for the benefit of her novel. He too has a motivation for his choice in opposing the government: his father was among eighty-one Tamil civilians killed, mostly at bus stops, by the army in 1983 (30). Maya, seizing on the opportunity to ensure that her novel will be multidimensional, decides to include both possibilities, alternatives, positions in the one character: her fictional Paths is both terrorist and anti-terrorist. This particular doubling is also made explicit in the ‘code names’ the man chooses to travel with. They are changed every three months. Maya asks him to reveal his current name:
Man – It will expire in two days so I can safely give it to you… Maya – What is it? Man – Menachem Maya – Menachem…Menachem…Mena…rings a bell…somewhere…yes. Menachem Begin, one time Prime Minister of Israel… the Nobel Prize for Peace… Man – That was much later…sometime after he blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem (38, original ellipses).
He continues to list his previous names which also refer to political figures with ambiguous pasts.
He Still Comes From Jaffna connects with contemporary world politics, in particular, the issue of how to define terrorism and ‘a war on terror’. Macintyre comments on how often you hear a “single catch-word used…globalisation, terrorism” to simplify a 192
complex set of issues (interview: 28/09/03). In the play, the man does not resist the description of ‘terrorist’. Indeed he believes “that language is their most powerful weapon” and that “the only way to overcome the linguistic trap of our enemies is not to oppose it but to accept the description of terrorist, quite unconcerned” (39-40).
He states that he has learnt something from Maya during their earlier literary conversations. Here, she had expounded the proposition that life serves art, and that form is more important than content. Her mother, a former English literature professor, offered “the opposite view…famously propagated by George Bernard Shaw, that the only purpose of art is to serve life, that the only good art is didactic art, propogandist art” (34). The Man, drawing on the latter position, states that terrorism “is the form, not the content” (40). Maya feels he has “hideously misunderstood” (40). She believes that “if a form cannot hold the raw material in beauty, it is not acceptable” and that to be effective even the most didactic of works cannot be “entirely a slave to realism, to the raw material” (40; 36).
The play does not iron out these philosophical and political ambiguities as the action reinstates itself and culminates in a farcical shootout. The Man, no longer of use to the CID, is shot even though the Government have just ordered a “freeze of all armed activities” due to concessions brokered in an on-going peace deal. Then Maya, reinstating the power of fiction, brings him back to life just before the curtain call: “this is not the way my novel ends. So…whoever…you are, stand up and join us in a bow to the jury” (51).
As Goonewardene observes, He Comes From Jaffna is a much more cerebral play than the “emotionally charged” Rasanayagam’s Last Riot, “dealing as it does with the raw material of life so harrowingly manifest in the riots of July 1983” (2000: 145-6). Yet there are innumerable connections between the two plays. Both explore the instability and fluidity of ethnicity, the indiscriminate nature of violence, the interplay of fact and fiction, peace and war. They emphasise coexistence, complexity, culpability and choice in their depictions of the love-match and mixed marriage of the elite classes, and in the pairing of terms: terrorist or anti-terrorist? Vaaliya or baldiya? “[E]ach has the manifestation of the other in it” (Macintyre, 2000: 40). And although Macintyre dwells on ambiguity, he does not deny the potency or tenacity of the ethnic categories the drive 193
the Sinhala-Tamil conflict, or their brutal effects. Both plays also demonstrate Macintyre’s distinctive style of using comedy as a vehicle to explore the tragic aspects of life. He suffuses the tragedy of a continuing civil war with laughter and, in so doing, challenges his audience to think about the conflict’s deeper structure. Macintyre, like Amitha in Cousins, ‘doesn’t stop with bombs and bullets’; his political theatre is driven by the same ‘inescapable’, universal themes: “all activity in the final analysis can be classified as political; when you say ‘political theatre’ it means [an] involvement with the human condition” (interview: 28/09/03).
Conclusion
William Safran comments on the power of a sustaining ‘myth of the homeland’ in the formation of diasporic communities. In his theoretical model, an attachment to, even idealisation of, the former homeland and the possibility of eventual return are determining features. Several theorists have challenged this particular formulation by emphasising ‘lateral connections,’ ‘routes’ over ‘roots’ for example (Gilroy/Clifford). Nonetheless, in the literary sphere of the South Asian diaspora, a preoccupation with the subcontinent is certainly in evidence. There are countless writers who go back to ‘the raw material’ of their former homelands; a trend that is repeated in the Australian ‘branch’ of this literature, as this and the previous chapter have demonstrated.
In responses to the ‘form’ their ‘raw material’ takes, diasporic writers often stand accused of gross manipulation, of twisting ‘resident’ realities to serve ‘Western’ market pleasures. This particular grievance is a variation of an anxiety within postcolonial studies. Elleke Boehmer puts it starkly:
In summary, then, postcolonial migrant literature can be described as a literature written by elites, and defined and canonised by elites. It is writing which foregrounds national and historical rootlessness – what the migrant Czech writer Milan Kundera might call lightness…weightlessness could also be interpreted as an evacuation of commitment. (1995: 239-240)
Each of the examples of ‘migrant writing’ offered in this chapter contradicts or disturbs, in its different ways, such claims. There is no ‘historical lightness’ for Aruni or Rasa in the end. The use that Fernando puts her royalties to does not, to recall an earlier 194
statement about ‘diasporics,’ seem “akin to that of African middlemen who sold slaves to the white trader” (Paranjape, 2000: 239).
The dispute staged in this chapter, between ‘located’/resident and diasporic/non-resident over representations of the former homeland has provided a framework through which to tackle issues of ‘authenticity,’ in terms of both subject and writing practice. My purpose is not to argue against one and for the other. Instead, I would emphasise the complexity of ways in which South Asian Australian writers go back to the homeland. Paradoxically, narrowing down the field and bringing literary works together under the banner of ‘Sri Lanka’ only sharpens this sense of complexity: a myriad of ‘truths about this place’ are proffered by de Kretser, Lokuge, Fernando and Macintyre.
There is an interesting series of binaries in these texts – colonialist/nationalist, local/tourist, bourgeoisie/proletariat, terrorist/anti-terrorist. De Kretser and Macintyre emphasise the mutual contamination of terms, their interchangeableness. For both writers notions of ambiguity, uncertainty, echo and elaboration are central to the form and content of their work. They both emphasise the imaginary when commenting on the creation of fiction. Lokuge and Fernando, in contrast, write about places they have vividly observed.124 Each of the writers, for different reasons, avoids a tidy or easy resolution and they all steer clear of exoticising or sentimentalising the homeland. In fact, Lokuge and de Kretser offer warnings on the perils of second-generation and literary nostalgia. And the highly self-conscious romanticising of university days in Fernando and Macintyre’s work, is undercut by references to unemployment or by the gently mocking epigraph to Rasanayagam’s Last Riot: “This book is for all those of Peradeniya who shared rooms, met on corridors and did so many things, of lasting effect…” (Macintyre, 1993: inside cover).
When taken together, the texts explored in this chapter look back over seventy-five years of Sri Lankan history. There are strong thematic connections between them. Each is deeply concerned with unravelling the past, with making sense of political events and personal memories. The returnee characters (Paths and Aruni) are burdened by their particular diaspora histories. The Hamilton Case and Cousins focus on moments of social change, on “the way history brushes up against people’s lives” (de Kretser). These texts, and Macintyre’s plays, examine the composition of the elite class, its fault- 195
lines, mimicry and blindness. The politics of language and/or language use are of importance – in terms of what can and cannot be spoken, in the changing value attributed to English and as a method of identifying who comes from which community. The issue of ‘cultural alienation’ as applied to the elites is also key to a reading of the very Australian Aruni in Turtle Nest. In several cases, a key character is a writer of memoir, history or fiction.
Finally, the writers considered here have displayed a number of views on the production, purpose and purview of diasporic fictions. Having identified how Macintyre perceives his work as situated within the local sphere – in relation to the ‘non-Anglo- Celtic spectrum of community theatre – it is curious to note that in a a moment of self- categorisation Macintyre also positions himself as speaking beyond the boundaries of the nation:
I would like to be promoted as myself – Ernest Thalayasingam Macintyre – because I am beginning to see that the meaning of countries is disappearing very fast. It’s just vanishing, the boundaries are vanishing very quickly. It will take some more time but it is now becoming very very doubtful that a person’s identity is so much dependant on his or her country of birth. I would say that a country is an administrative convenience for everyday life and not necessarily part of your soul (interview: 28/09/03).
In the following chapter I investigate how a group of writers deal with (shape and escape) the way stark boundaries are drawn around ethnic groups following the Fiji coups. There are clearly resemblances between Sri Lanka’s postcolonial situation and Fiji’s. My interst lies more with some of the other thematic convergences, around issues of rteading and writing the past.
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Chapter Five – Writing/Making History: Cultural Memory and Amnesia
for a very long time the Pacific imagination was shaped by European intellectuals … and a conscious effort was made, I think, by travel writers and scholars to edit the Indian experience out of the Pacific consciousness. J. C. Furnace has a book in which he describes Indians as interlopers. James Mitchner described us as mynah birds, raucous, ugly, never smiling (Brij V. Lal, interview: 09/06/04).
After the coup my memory had become self-editing: recalling names was difficult. I had begun wearing glasses to read. Something was happening inside my system and I found no release. Then I began writing – fiction …And it is through…fiction, in fact, that I could grapple with the truth, as I saw it (Satendra Nandan, 2001: 13).
Introduction:
One of the defining features of contemporary South Asian-Australian writing is its incorporation of work by Indo-Fijian writers. In this chapter I consider texts by Brij V. Lal, Sudesh Mishra and Satendra Nandan who together have produced a rich and complex set of narratives well suited to an enquiry into the operations of cultural memory in relation to History and histories. My analysis focuses on the way in which personal memories are used to craft and contest collective histories. Memories are actively shaped. Recollection and remembrance always involve a process of cutting away, of forgetting, displacing, repressing certain memories to recall others. Indeed, this process of selective memory is evident in the approaches taken to theorising South Asian/Indian diasporas. As Vijay Mishra argues, the particular experiences of the ‘old/exclusive’ or plantation Indian diaspora (to which the Indo-Fijians descendents of indentured labourers belong) are passed over – perceived as past and over – in the current celebration of a ‘new/border’ literary aesthetic associated with the metropolitan Indian diaspora located in Western (read UK/US/Canada) nation-states (1996: 427).
The first known Indian migrants to travel to Fiji crossed the kala pani (dark waters) in 1879. Ultimately, over sixty thousand Indians were transported to Fiji. Many came from the most impoverished regions of India, entering into a contract that promised “medical care, regular wages, proper diet, adequate housing, government supervision” in return for nine hours of plantation work a day, six days a week, for a minimum period of five 198
years (Lal, 2000: 42). Whilst today the global exploitation of low-paid and unpaid migrant labour proceeds largely undocumented due to the ‘illegal’ status of many of the workers involved, those indentured during the colonial period worked within a system that produced an abundance of records. In fact, the provisions and degree of accountability required were “truly remarkable” for a time in which “the very notion of a contract between employer and employee” was far from universal (Lal, 2000: 174). However, the profound gap between the guarantees of a contract and the realities faced during this ‘dark period’ may be gleaned from the way indenture came to be known as narak (hell).
The name these indentured migrants claimed, girmitiyas, is a creolised form of the word agreement, indicating the material and symbolic importance of the contract that governed the first years of their lives in the colony. As Lal notes, this term was only re- introduced into popular discourse during the centenary celebrations (in 1979) of the arrival of Indians in Fiji. He explains that until then, “the word was synonymous with shame” and evoked a sense of “cultural and social chaos, altogether a dark period best left unexplored to the obscure pages of a fading history” (2004: 3). Each of the writers considered in this chapter is the descendent of a girmitiya and the narratives I explore here draw on Indo-Fijian indenture histories. These texts humanise the enormous paper trail produced by the official archive of records on indenture. They frustrate the collective desire to forget, delaying the stories of indenture from fading from memory in Fiji, preventing contemporary Indian realities from being ‘edited out of the Pacific imagination’ and retaining an awareness of the ‘old’ as more than just a marginal footnote to the narrative of the ‘new’ Indian diaspora.
The ‘old’ colonial system of indenture is often claimed to be the original or founding moment for the Indian diaspora (see Mishra 1996) and as such, placing this chapter at the end of my thesis may seem counter-intuitive. I have chosen this arrangement for two reasons: firstly, precisely to disrupt the neat linearity between ‘old’ and ‘new’ in order to indicate the connections between Australia and Fiji; secondly, because it allows me to use these texts as a lens through which to extend and reformulate some of the themes that have emerged in the South Asian-Australian fiction studied so far. As previously discussed, diaspora is predicated on travel over long-distances. Rebecca Walsh comments on how in theories of human migrations “spatial distance”: 199
serves as a barometer, as oceanic displacement tends to be privileged over more neighboring, land-based forms of migration and movement, a trend that appears in [Robin] Cohen’s work but is by no means limited to it. The use of the term ‘diaspora’ is least likely to encounter objections when it is applied to populations that travel great distances, whose spatial sacrifices can easily be measured by the vast bodies of water that separate them from their points of origin (2003: 5)
The sense of spatial separation as sacrifice described above applies well to the ‘original’ crossing of the kala pani by indentured migrants. However, in this chapter I consider how the effects of political upheaval in Fiji have serve as a catalyst for both a ‘second- crossing’ to Australia and the reinvigoration of indenture (his)stories. Therefore, it is important to indicate the geographical proximity between Fiji and Australia as well as the dense historical connections between the two countries and more generally, to consider how time and generation intersect with space and geography when defining diasporic dynamics.
The predicaments faced by second-generation migrants when attempting to lay claim to a nation in which they but not their parents/ancestors were born and the instability of ‘home’ in diaspora (discussed in chapter two), have been exacerbated for Indo-Fijians by the turbulence of three coups (two in 1987, one in 2000) and a series of constitutional rearrangements in Fiji. In the aftermath of this disruption (as for those affected by the civil war in Sri Lanka) many Indo-Fijians are leaving Fiji to settle around the Pacific Rim. Sydney has become a major centre for this ‘twice banished’ diaspora.125 Given that Australia continues to define itself as a ‘centre’, a moral force and power in the South Pacific region, contemporary migrations from Fiji to Australia may be interpreted (via Louise Bennett’s well-known poem on Jamaicans in Britain) as a form of ‘colonization in reverse’. Moreover, these recent, post-coup migrations are just one dimension of a longstanding relationship between Fiji and Australia. Nandan argues that “early traders, whalers, adventurers, missionaries, escaped convicts, fugitives and planters” from Australia were “involved in Fiji long before the islands were ceded to Great Britain” in 1874 (2000: 82). In the early years, some shipments of indentured labourers intended for plantation work in Queensland were rerouted to Fiji due to immigration restrictions (Nandan, 2000: 82). Influential Australian companies, most notably the Colonial Sugar Refining company (CSR), were primary employers of 200
Indo-Fijian labour within a few years of Fiji becoming a British colony and remained so into the post-Independence period.
In this chapter I continue to focus on “the way history brushes up against people’s lives” (Michelle de Kretser, interview: 25/05/04), exploring how cultural memories are shaped and national histories written. Issues around class are also developed here. The emphasis on ‘subaltern’ theories, realities and characters provides a contrast to the elite and/or professional standing of many of the protagonists in the texts examined in the preceding chapters (suggesting an exception to the rule forming around the privileged status of most South Asian-Australian characters). The writers themselves are, like most of the other writers considered in this thesis, involved in the academic sphere.126 Each has studied and is now a senior lecturer or professor at an Australian university. The attention to history requires slightly more contextual information than found in the preceding chapters. So to begin with, I introduce another aspect of the writers’ lives – their direct intervention in Fiji’s political processes – before considering the manipulation of discourses of race, naming and indigeneity in the context of membership to a ‘multi-ethnic’ nation.
My concern in the rest of the chapter is with the interface between autobiographical fiction, political rhetoric and poetry in Lal, Mishra and Nandan’s creative writing, and with the particular strategies they employ to assert presence and negotiate the ‘logic of the hyphen’. I also consider how concepts of diaspora, Oceania and the Subaltern Studies project relate to these narratives. To conclude, I return to the issue of representation, considering the role played by ethnic minority writers when they self- consciously seek to define, address and speak for a marginalised community. I have chosen to focus on atypical works by each of these writers. Lal has actually produced very little explicity creative (as opposed to academic) writing in comparison to Mishra and Nandan, who are both primarily poets (and Mishra has also written a play). A further distinction may be drawn between the latter writers. Mishra has carved out a place for his poetry within Australia, whereas Nandan’s work circulates more readily within Fiji. I have chosen to focus on their fictional/non-fictional writings in order to reflect on the range of writing that might count as South Asian-Australian ‘fiction’ Moreover, it is my contention that the generic disturbance displayed in these texts reflects something of the ‘twice-banished’ contexts of the writers’ subjects. 201
Coups, Constitutions and (Post)Colonialism
Acting as representatives of parties or individuals, the three writers considered in this chapter have each directly participated in shaping Fiji’s post-colonial politics. Satendra Nandan served as minister in the Fiji Labour Party which, in coalition with the National Federation Party, was elected to power in April 1987. Nandan was present in parliament on the 14th of May of that year when Colonel Rabuka entered the building and instigated the first coup. Armed guards held the coalition government hostage for six days. Mid- way through the coup the ministers were forcefully separated, not on party lines but according to ethnic group.127 In the months that followed Colonel Rabuka prevaricated, first bending to international pressure and negotiating with the main political parties about returning to constitutional stability, then staging a second coup in September and withdrawing Fiji from the Commonwealth. Military rule ultimately failed and Rabuka allowed an interim administration to step in. A new constitution was drafted and put into place in 1990 in time for the forthcoming elections.128 The deposed coalition forces agitated for its immediate repeal, describing this constitution as “authoritarian, undemocratic, militaristic, racist and feudalistic” (Robertson and Sutherland, 2001: 110). Sudesh Mishra, then a lecturer at the University of the South Pacific, was charged (along with six others) with sedition “for burning a copy of Fiji’s new racially-biased constitution” (1st November, 1990, Reuters News: np).129
The highly contested post-coup constitution contained a clause that allowed for its review within seven years. Brij V. Lal was part of the Fiji Constitution Review Commission responsible for this carrying out this process. He was nominated by the Opposition to work with Tomasi Vakatora who was appointed by the Government.130 Put together by two competing forces, Lal describes their relationship as that of “chalk and cheese” (interview: 09/06/04). They each brought radically different personal histories to the Commission. Vakatora had a limited formal education but was well schooled in public service as a “former minister, senator, businessman”, whereas Lal was known in Fiji as a scholar without direct experience of politics (interview: 09/06/04). Together they were required to analyse the 1990 constitution, facilitate public debate and submit a report of recommendations. It was a difficult task – some thought impossible – given the apparent differences between the two men as representatives of political parties and communities so often defined as irreconcilable. 202
But the Commission found considerable agreement on basic issues and a sense of common ground where there was assumed to be none.131 The new constitution was passed in parliament in July 1997 and contained a Compact ensuring the rights of indigenous Fijians and all other communities in Fiji.132
In one decisive moment the coup of 2000 negated the decade of work that had gone into bringing Fiji back to democracy. The perpetrators of this coup maintained that both the new 1997 constitution and the policies instituted by Fiji’s first Indo-Fijian Prime Minister, Mahendra Chaudhry, had failed indigenous Fijians. On the 19th of May (one day prior to Chaudhry celebrating a year in office) George Speight and a number of armed men entered the parliamentary complex. They took the People’s Coalition government hostage and allowed the Opposition to leave. In a repetition of 1987, the coup was racialised through the separation of Fijian and Indo-Fijian ministers. Although the support that Speight assumed would flow from the Fijian establishment did not materialise, hundreds of Fijians congregated in parliament to support what he was calling the ‘Taukei [indigenous] Civilian Coup’ (Robertson and Sutherland: 2001: 20). The hostages and sympathisers gave Speight a strong position from which to negotiate. People were encouraged to riot and loot in Suva; Speight threatened more violence each time his demands were not met and the negotiations continued for a staggering fifty-six days.
Speight failed to achieve all his demands but the 1997 constitution was abrogated and with it the possibility of reinstating the People’s Coalition government. Once the hostages were released, however, the army moved quickly to round up the ‘rebels’. Speight and a dozen others were charged with treason and imprisoned on Nukulau Island to await trial. A small irony here is that Nukulau had been used in colonial times to quarantine indentured labourers before they took up their contracts. Many Indo- Fijians were gravely affected by the descent into lawlessness and violence that marked the 2000 coup. Chandrika Prasad, a farmer from Muaniweni (south eastern Viti Levu), was threatened with death, forced from his home and had his livelihood destroyed. Receiving no help from the police, he turned to the courts and instigated charges that simultaneously challenged the legitimacy of the interim administration and the dismissal of the 1997 constitution. Prasad had little formal education and Sudesh Mishra, who was then working at the University of the South Pacific, became his media 203
spokesperson. The courts ruled in favour of Prasad and the 1997 constitution was reinstated.
A complex range of socio-political and commercial factors motivated the political upheaval that marks Fiji’s post-independence history. Yet the coups are often simply represented as the ‘logical’ outcome of a pre-existing ethnic discord. Discourses of ethnicity (and the term ‘race’ is more often used in writings about Fiji) are often the means used for primarily political ends. As Frank Harvey observes:
[e]thnic identities are evoked in certain structural circumstances to advance the material and political interests of actors whose primary purposes are not ethnic. Subsequent myth making and the dredging up of past events become symbols around which ethnic groups coalesce. These symbols make inter-ethnic violence appear just, honourable and legitimate (in Ramesh, 2001: 122)
The few key players who were set to benefit most from the overthrow of elected governments in Fiji spoke of a disadvantaged indigenous people rising up against ‘Indian’ domination (see Speight in Lal, 2001: 151-152). This type of rhetoric aimed to subsume power differentials within communities and to counter the potential of class- based alliances being forged across communities. It cast Indo-Fijians as outsiders and ignored the obvious: that ministers of both of the governments in power prior to the coups were all Fiji-born (and in fact the majority were of indigenous Fijian ancestry). Journalists in Australia and New Zealand contributed to this misconception. Nandan explains with reference to 1987:
When the coups came, the world saw Mahendra, Satendra and Bavadra [the indigenous Fijian Prime Minister] as Indian Cabinet Ministers! …And to this day, the AAP reports mindlessly the Indian-dominated Coalition. And this in a migrant country such as Australia. Doubtless it gave an erroneous picture of a political tragedy that went beyond ethnic boundaries (2001: 135).
Politicians and reporters are not the only factions to draw on discourses of ethnic incompatibility; the Methodist church in Fiji put out a statement during the 2000 coup which condemned “the illegal takeover” of the government, the holding of hostages and the targeting of “members of the Indian community” (Tuwere, 2001: 168). At the same time, the statement projected a united “Fijian collective consciousness…made up of the inseparable union” of land, church and state (Tuwere, 2001: 171). It proposed an 204
irreconcilable divide between Fijian and ‘Indian’ communities and prefigured this claim with a matter-of-fact statement based on an indigenous way of knowing: “Fijians categorise the population or inhabitants of the country, or any locality or village, into two main divisions” (Tuwere, 2001: 171). It continued:
A person is either a taukei (indigene or owner) or vulagi (visitor or foreigner) in any place. It is a relationship of mutual obligations and clearly defined roles in which one does not count or begrudge his or her contribution to communal life. Depending on the people involved, it can be a gracious partnership of host and guest, or a hostile relationship of landlord and tenant (Tuwere, 2001: 171-2).
The notion of ‘host and guest’ creates a distinction between insiders, with rights of inheritance, who may graciously give to outsiders if they remain perpetually grateful. Symbolism is a powerful part of the national imagination: defining the Fiji-born population as Indian maintains the fallacy that they are ‘guests’ to be tolerated (or not) by those with a ‘truer’ connection to the land. Furthermore, symbols are potent precisely because they are malleable and loosely attached to the realities from which they are drawn and to which they refer. In this sense, the potential for hostility between ‘landlord and tenant’ is bound up in the debates on the renewal of land-leases for Indo-Fijian farmers, debates that were taking place at a governmental level immediately prior to the 2000 coup.133
The effects of colonialism have also played a part in the creation of a landlord versus tenant division. Both Fiji and Australia are ‘migrant countries’ shaped by colonialism but there are key differences, which turn on the numerical balance and the balance of power between settler and indigenous populations in each country. Comparatively indigenous Fijians are a privileged rather than persecuted majority population.134 In Fiji, the commencement of colonial rule in 1874 altered but did not overwrite the dynamics that continue to shape contemporary Chiefly politics. The first Governor to run Fiji as a British colony, Arthur Gordon, believed that indigenous peoples to be sheltered from modernity. The ‘paramountcy of Fijian interests,’ enshrined in the Deed of Cession aimed to ensure that traditional ways were not disturbed by imperial progress; indigenous Fijians were ‘protected’ the from fully engaging in Fiji’s economy (thereby protecting colonial interests from the threat of indigenous disturbance). Colonial polices required the codification of indigenous society: “social units such as lineage, clan and 205
tribe as well as custom were constructed as immemorial and unchanging, ‘tradition was removed from and placed above the historical events that led to its creation”’ (Ghosh, 2001: 32).135
Gordon felt that if the indigenous community was allowed to “sink from its present condition into that of a collection of migratory band of hired labourers” all hope of the “preservation of the [Fijian] race” would be lost – and so indentured labourers were introduced for plantation work (Lal, 2000: 69). The sale of Fijian land was prohibited and the consequences of this “orthodoxy of inalienablity” have made the land question “one of the most divisive and potent political issues in Fiji” today (Kamikamica in Ghosh, 2001: 30). Over eighty percent of land is communally owned by indigenous Fijians. However, as part of an international labour system, however, the ‘migratory band of hired labourers’ was at the very vanguard of modernity and embedded in Fiji’s economic structures. This particular divide contributes to a residual discourse where the indigenous Fijian community is associated with tradition, land and economic backwardness and the Indo-Fijian community with modernity, money and economic progress. Devleena Ghosh comments on how this opposition is constructed, again in terms of opposing ways of being-in-the-world:
Margaret Jolly, amongst others, believes that for indigenous Fijians the past exists in the present; the past and the present are seen as continuous and enmeshed, rather than discrete entities. Therefore, the way of money (associated sometimes with Europeans but mainly with Indians), which is seen as existing solely in and for the present, is contrasted with the way of the land (the Fijian way) which existed immutably in the constructed past of indigenous Fijians as well as in the lived present. Ironically, both communities now appear to desire a ‘true’ present – indigenous Fijians by ‘forgetting’ the history of land codification and indenture and Indo-Fijians by re-emphasising it (Ghosh, 2001: 32-33).
Other recent studies have also emphasised the constructed nature of communal divisions in Fiji. Robertson and Sutherland claim that “[t]he impression and talk of homogenous communities is simply wrong”, pointing to the regional, linguistic, religious, political, cultural, gendered and class-based realities that fracture and transcend ethnic boundaries (2001: 119). However, false impressions of cultural incompatibility and a sense of competing interests are pervasive. They are reproduced (as Harvey and Ghosh suggest above) through processes of selective memory, through the dredging up and re- symbolising of the past in order to shape a more meaningful present. 206
‘Global’ discourses are often shaped for communal purposes in Fiji. As Robert Norton observes, “[i]nternational expressions of the indigenous rights movement have encouraged Fijian chauvinism, and Indian political parties respond by invoking international discourses about equality, reinforced by support from overseas trade union bodies and governments, and by foreign diplomats in Fiji.” (2000: 88). These perceived and real divisions are legitimised at the national level, through an electoral system in which the majority of seats in the House of Representatives are decided on a communal basis and by the lack of a common name for all Fiji citizens.136 Some former colonies have taken new names or renamed significant cities in their post-colonial nation- building efforts. Fiji by contrast has retained its colonial name and the accompanying use of Fijian to exclusively refer to the indigenous population. This contributes to the assumption of an ‘Indian-dominated coalition’ and the misrecognition of ‘Bavadra’ that Nandan notes in the press-coverage of the 1987 coups. He also suggests that it has worked to discourage “more than half the inhabitants of the country” from forging “a sense of belonging, a sense of country” (Nandan, 2000: 98).137 Lal and the other members of the Constitutional Review Committee were unsuccessful in achieving even a modest recognition through name-change in the 1997 constitution:
Our recommendation was for ‘Indo-Fijian’ to replace ‘Indian,’ and for all Fiji citizens to be called Fiji Islanders. The parliament reinstated ‘Indian,’ which is a pity, but I keep using Indo-Fijian, and will continue to (email correspondence 02/09/04)
Sudesh Mishra takes the Fiji constitution’s use of ‘Indian’ as an example of how processes of self-indentification (the “I-Self”) are always qualified by the collective force (the “they-self”) of others:
The they of Fiji’s Constitution, for instance, classifies me as an Indian, a classification that the they of India’s constitution fails to recognise. I exist, a name without a body (2004: 145, original italics).
The difficulty Mishra comments on here is not that of naming the indescribable but of being debarred from claiming an identity that is fully validated by recognition. The plethora of terms found in Australia-based writing (where Indo-Fijian, Indian-Fijian, Fiji Indian, FijiIndian and Kai-India are used) serves as a textual sign of this 207
uncertainty. The disjuncture between ‘name’ and ‘body’ is alternatively located in the use of a hyphen or in the absence of the hyphen. The last two terms are the most unusual and are employed by a younger generation of writers just emerging on the Australian literary scene. Kavita Nandan (Satendra Nandan’s daughter) uses FijiIndian in her introduction to her father’s autobiography. Shalini Akhil’s self-definition is explained on her website:
‘kai-india’ is a fijian slang meaning ‘from india’. generally used in a derogatory tone, the term ‘kai-india’ refers to people of indian descent in general. i’ve since come to wear the term with pride as it’s the only description of my own ‘heritage’ that makes sense to me - it combines the native tongue of the place i was born, with the name of the place i supposedly come from. that, and it’s relatively easy to say in australian. (hey, you try casually slipping ‘i was born in lautoka and my parents come from the balevuto/yalalevu areas, though my ancestry apparently lies in uttar pradesh’ into conversation). get my point? (Akhil, 2005: online)
The re-symbolising and claiming of terms used in a derogatory manner is a common tactic employed by minority groups to assert their presence in the national arena. Another method of narrowing the gap between apparently irreconcilable cultural histories, realities and destinies is to “look at Fijian history through the lens of colonialism” (Ghosh, 2001: 39). According to Ghosh this creates the possibility of a “conversation [that] is not based only on ‘shared histories’ (as may be claimed between the Settler and Native) but on the shared predicament of having been colonised (both politically and intellectually) (2001: 39). Both “Fijian and Indian cultures, knowledges, life-worlds and life-practices were invaded and colonised” she states (Ghosh, 2001: 39). Presumably Australia is implied in the distinction between ‘Settlers’ and ‘Natives’ on the one hand and Indo-Fijians and Fijians on the other. There are structural differences embedded in the historical and cultural contexts of diaspora and indigeneity in the two countries, as noted above. However the elevation of a ‘shared predicament’ over shared histories is ambiguous; both communities in Fiji also benefited to an extent and in different ways from the structures of colonialism. A more complex and difficult but potentially more realistic method of achieving resolution in the political sphere may be to accept rather than deny the legacies of colonialism, to recognise the distinctiveness of each community in Fiji whilst also affirming the intermeshing of cultural influences through interdependency and coexistence.
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Faction: Inscribing the Past
Brij V. Lal takes a similar approach when defining the multifaceted cultural influences that have “formed and deformed” his own sense of self (interview: 09/06/04). He feels that his “soul and imagination are nourished by the three civilisational influences; [the] West… Indian, or South Asian broadly speaking,…and Oceanic” (interview: 09/06/04). Lal makes the point that “colonialism was about control; controlling people’s minds, controlling people’s activity, their world-view” but he looks back at one aspect of the colonial project, his education in English literature, as a liberating and enriching experience (interview; 09/06/04). For instead of closing off the potential for free thought: “it made us aware of other experiences, other pasts and so on. It made us feel, growing up in a small enclosed village, that we were part of a much larger humanity” (interview: 09/06/04). This awareness is apparent in the approach Lal takes to his subjects in his work as both a participant in shaping Fiji’s constitution and as a professional historian at an Australian university. He has written extensively about both the indenture system and Fiji politics.
Lal explains that he became aware of a gap in the scholarship on the history of Indo- Fijian indenture experiences. Prior to his intervention, most historians had not focused on the background of the migrants or on their descendents:
A lot had been written about this [indenture] experience but a lot of it was written by outsiders, many of whom were quite sympathetic, others who were not, but I just had this sense that they went so far and not any further because they lacked cultural knowledge, linguistic skills and so on (interview: 09/06/04).
On further reflection, Lal connects the benefits of his ‘insider’s’ cultural knowledge to a desire to better understand himself and ultimately, an interpretation of the self echoes that of the people:
I wrote partly because the world of indenture was partly familiar to me, my grandfather was alive, and I saw the legacy of indenture in daily life…in a sense it was an effort, and again when I look back on it, to really understand myself and the forces which formed me…I think it is time, I felt, that some of us began to interpret our own experience that resonated with the experience of our people (interview: 09/06/04).
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Lal takes a revisionist stance, aiming to correct popular perceptions of an ignominious past and promote a sense of ‘cultural pride’ among a community that has often been disparaged by others – as Indian “interlopers”, as “mynah birds, raucous, ugly, never smiling” (interview: 09/06/04). His response reveals a complex set of motivations that simultaneously create and collapse a sense of distance between past and present, between agent and object.
Dipesh Chakrabarty has considered the way that minority histories and subaltern pasts are both incorporated into and supplementary to the discipline of History. He states:
Any account of the past can be absorbed into, and thus made to enrich, the mainstream of historical discourse if two questions could be answered in the affirmative: Can the story be told/crafted? And does it allow for a rationally defensible point of view or position from which to tell the story? (Chakrabarty, 1998: 16)
Regarding the second point he suggests that:
the author’s position may reflect an ideology, a moral choice, a political philosophy but the choices here are not unlimited. A madman’s narrative is not history. Nor can a preference that is arbitrary or just personal – something based on sheer taste, say – give us rationally-defensible principles for narration (at best it will count as fiction) (1998: 16).
Lal has investigated the limits of historiographic practice when attempting to render Indo-Fijian histories, branching out into a new form of writing he calls ‘faction’. In producing it he tries “to recall the past creatively, imaginatively rendering factual lived experience through the prism of semi-fiction” (2001: x). This marks a turning point in Lal’s work and a radical departure from his origins as a historian dealing in quantitative analysis.138 With his faction writing Lal is aiming to contribute to the archive instead of merely interpreting it:
Publishing an article in an academic journal was once a great thrill for me; it is still interesting, but the difficult one is writing faction. Digging deep within yourself and writing something that one hopes will remain as a an archival document, a text, rather than political commentary, these things are ephemeral and one is conscious of limited time (interview: 09/06/04).
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Intriguingly, Lal followed the comment on his increasing awareness “of limited time” with the statement: “but in the long run we’re all dead so it doesn’t really matter” – a historian’s brief heresy that is disproved by the importance he attaches to evidence and truth. Lal produces ‘faction’ through the deliberate interweaving of objective and subjective points of view. He does not dismiss the importance of records, which when used skilfully are crucial to the identification of historical patterns and trends. To reject disciplinary norms altogether would mean excising a large part of his professional past: “I have spent a lot of my life in archives reading those documents. My library is full of those documents”. However, he recognises that though ‘straight’ historiography provides breadth of knowledge, it does not probe the depths of people’s emotions in the way that fiction can. In the following reflection, Lal traces his changing methods:
if you look at the statistics, if you look at newspapers, if you look at archival documents, you construct a broader picture, and for many many years I was quite content with that, painting on a large canvas, but the older you get, whether age has anything to do with it I don’t know, I wanted to go beyond the surface and say see what was happening at the edge, in people’s hearts. What kinds of things motivate people?…So you mix experience, oral work, talking to people, sitting around a yaqona bowl and asking questions. I think oral evidence properly used humanises the story…and it seems to me that people like those kinds of stories…the human story in its infinite variety (interview: 09/06/04).
Interestingly Lal begins to structure the telling of his own past though a chronology of aging, but interrupts his story to qualify the comment in a way that illustrates how we actively work on our memories as they are produced. Again, Lal deflects attention from himself and the particular to the human and universal:
I find inventing characters out of the blue from my imagination and so on a bit problematic. My training as a historian does influence the way I write. So yes there is always an effort, I think, in many of these pieces to use the personal experience to illuminate a larger pattern. And that’s the historian in me inhabiting the interface between scholarship and creative writing. That’s where faction comes in. (interview: 09/06/04)
Mr Tulsi’s Store (2001) is a collection of ‘faction’ writing that focuses on “the experience of a generation coming of age in the post-war period” under the long shadow of indenture. In contrast to the overflowing archive of indenture documents, the years that followed produced very few written records. Lal is concerned with “capturing this vanishing past” and feels that ‘faction’ is “the most satisfactory way” he knows “of 211
remembering a past unrecorded in the written texts” (2001: x). He offers up his own past, as representative of a generation in a particular place and time, in the service of history.
In ‘Tabia’, the first piece of the collection, this remembering dwells on the village where Lal was born almost fifty years ago (at the time of writing) and begins with an anecdote concerning the circumstances of his birth. Lal describes how his grandfather, Aja, instructed the local midwife to symbolically ‘purchase’ him as soon as he was born in order to avert the “evil hand at work” in the deaths of two older siblings who died during childbirth (2001: 1). In this way, Aja successfully relies on “remembered knowledge” of “old ways” that return in a moment crisis (2001: 1). This type of (re)constructed cultural memory serves to disprove the stereotype of the Indo-Fijian people (in comparison to indigenous Fijians) as a people without a remembered past who live only in and for the present. It also unsettles the notion that colonialism entirely overwrites subaltern ‘life-knowledges’, which are erroneously perceived as incompatible with modernity. Furthermore, Mr Tulsi’s Store is dedicated to Lal’s surviving siblings and contains a piece about the untimely death of his adult older brother. So to begin in this way, by briefly mentioning (in a single sentence) but not elaborating on the deaths-in-birth of two other children, serves as a fitting illustration of the contradictory operations at work in “the return of what was forgotten” (de Certeau, 1986: 3-4).
Michel de Certeau observes that historiography “is based on a clean break between the past and the present” and, even though it “postulates a continuity…a solidarity…and a complicity between its agents and its objects, it nevertheless distinguishes a difference between them… established out of principle by a will to objectivity” (1986: 4). He compares this mode of presenting the past to the operations of psychoanalysis where the ‘return of the repressed’ confounds the notion of a break with the past:
There is an ‘uncanniness’ about this past that a present occupant has expelled (or thinks he has) in an effort to take its place. The dead haunt the living. The past: it ‘re-bites’ [il re-mord] (it is a secret and repeated biting). History is ‘cannibalistic,’ and memory becomes the closed arena of conflict between two contradictory operations: forgetting, which is not something passive, a loss, but an action directed against the past; and the mnemonic trace, the return of what was 212
forgotten… It resurfaces, it troubles, it turns the present’s feeling of being ‘at home’ into an illusion (de Certeau, 1986: 3-4).
As already indicated, issues of occupancy and expulsion are powerfully embedded in Fiji’s history and post-colonial political turbulence. The ‘present’s feeling of being at home’ was certainly proved an illusion for many Indo-Fijians in the wake of the coups. ‘Tabia’ provides an example of how the evocation of the past through personal memory may work to assuage the trauma of the present. The story sets up a profound relationship between the narrator and his girmitiya grandfather, Aja; in this way Lal takes comfort in the way the dead continue ‘to haunt the living’. The narrative of Lal’s early years also tells of how a number of adults claimed him as their child. These multiple claims are indicative of the multiple strands that weave through Lal’s awareness of his self and, potentially Fiji itself: colonial culture, diaspora, oceania. Although Lal’s mother buys him back six days later and the midwife also “continued to claim [him] as her son”, it is in fact Aja who has the strongest claim:
Aja took me over when I was still an infant. I slept in his bed, ate from his plate, listened to stories of his own childhood…there was a bond between the two of us, my father used to say, the like of which he had not seen before. I suppose my interest in things past began with that association (2001: 1-2 my italics).
Here Lal locates the first inklings of his future career as a professional historian in his genealogy. He would have been about ten years old when Aja died, possibly too young to have been thinking much about the past. However, it is not simply the actual bond between Lal and his grandfather but the way that memory “re-bites” in the connection made by his father. An association, in this sense, is something that is repeated over the years until it becomes part of the familiar archive. The saying is perhaps one of the ways in which Lal’s father’s remembered Aja and the statement is as much to do with Lal’s memory of his father’s voice as it is to do with the trace of his grandfather’s past presence in his life.
Lal employs this kind of highly personal, anecdotal storytelling at strategic points throughout the ‘faction’ pieces; it is a technique that differentiates this work from his other academic writing. In ‘Tabia’ Lal charts the changes and continuities in village life over three generations. His approach shuttles back and forth between the distinction de Certeau posits between ‘straight’ historiography and psychoanalysis (or fiction). Lal 213
does create a break between past and present; he places the two beside one another in order to compare then with now. But the break isn’t ‘clean’. It is complicated by Lal’s role as a participant in the history he is describing and creating. He traces the rituals and rhythms of Indo-Fijian village-life with an auto-ethnographer’s eye for detail and, as he suggests, “a historian’s mindset”:
I revisit the village but with a historian’s mindset, disciplined imagination: you say ‘I am on trial, I am on oath to tell the truth’. So in what I describe I try to capture the inner truth of that experience (interview: 09/06/04).
Lal employs this technique of “disciplined imagination” throughout the piece, most often taking the sweeping tone of a historian but using memories as his resources. The “inner truth” of a singular experience is found in the way it relates to and touches others. At times Lal will zoom in on a particular scene, using an autobiographical detail to illuminate, particularise or qualify a broader pattern. For example, after elaborating on the many ways in which a “woman’s world was tightly regulated” by the weight of village traditions, he goes on to describe how his vegetarian, teetotal father never complained about his mother’s meat eating or occasional bowl of yaqona: “I recall with great tenderness my non-smoking father gently lighting mother’s ‘suluka’, home-made cigarettes, towards the end of her life when she was frail and disorientated” (2001: 13- 14).
In another example, “the community” is described sociologically as “a series of concentric circles…[where] Fijians were on the outermost fringes” (2001: 15). This assertion is supported by Lal’s previous recollection of childhood interaction with just two Fijians. One is called ‘phua’, meaning father’s sister, proclaiming her status as like a member of the extended family. The other, Semesa, is simply a mysterious, silent “figure” who regularly passed by the house inducing fear in the children (by doing nothing). He becomes the fairy-tale bogey-man that is part of parental rhetoric the world over: “‘Semesa will take you away’ was enough to ensure silence and compliance from us” (2001: 6). The way this memory is etched in detail (“a middle-aged man, grey and hairy, who travelled shirtless”) disturbs the sociological tone and flow of the narrative and suggests how that particular image remains in and returns to haunt the adult imagination (2001: 6). Like Lal, Satendra Nandan comments on the way that Fijian villages were situated close to their own villages. For Nandan the river Nadi formed the 214
only geographical boundary but as he recalls “[w]e lived separated, separate lives. More than a river was in between” (2001: 91). Both writers speak of certain interactions across community lines as exceptions to the ‘safe’ or ‘dignified’ distance that was otherwise maintained (Lal, interview: 09/06/04; Nandan, 2001: 93). Nandan makes a generational distinction, remarking on the fluency with which his parents spoke Fijian and the distancing effect that “institutions and education” have had upon his own generation (Nandan, 2001: 95).139
At the close of ‘Tabia’, Lal connects his personal journey (that began in the village and takes him overseas to Australia) to the trajectory of an entire generation. He comments on the distance between parental expectations (in both senses of the term, as obligations and prospects) and the realities facing those who came of age in the post-war period:
That one day we could cross our own kala pani to live in the land of kulumbers, CSR plantation overseers, would never have entered their imagination. The gulf between the world we inherited and the world we now inhabit could not have been greater for my generation (2001: 23).
By using words (italicised above) that recall indenture, Lal keeps the memory of a ‘foundational’ generation of the Indian diaspora alive in his mapping of an Indo-Fijian cultural history that results in a ‘second crossing’. Lal hasn’t yet produced any ‘faction’ on the coups, only academic articles, nor has he written much at all about the experience of diaspora in Australia.140 During interview he explained that the coups were still too vivid and traumatic a memory to approach through fiction, whereas for Nandan (as I will discuss later) fiction is the only medium through which he could make sense of these events. Lal is currently planning to write more about the dynamics of diaspora in Australia in the future. He intends to canvass some of the many “divergences” he perceives between the direct-from-India community and the Indo-Fijian community in Australia: he comments on how the latter are often subtly (and not-so-subtly) disparaged by the former (interview: 09/06/04). Lal does not believe that tradition is static, rather it is “re-present[ed]” and “reconfigured” each time the past is invoked in the present (interview: 09/06/04). One of the questions that troubles him relates to the ‘ethnicisation’ that diaspora can provoke and what this means for memories and an awareness of Fiji in hyphenated Indo-Fijian-Australian experiences. He states:
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The Fiji Indians are more Indian here than they were in Fiji. I find that troubling. Is it an inevitable kind of movement towards this deep ethnic or religious whatever it is? Has a hundred years of living in Fiji left no trace on your soul? … Does the migration, the second crossing wash away [an attachment to Fiji] or is it a reaction against Fiji? Betrayal: ‘I’ll have nothing to do with Fiji because the bastards did this to me’ (Lal, interview: 09/06/04).
Indo-Fijian experience belongs to the Pacific experience as well. Whilst the diasporic connections are there, there are other connections which elude a diasporic reading of that experience. …If there is one thing that I feel very happy about it is that I have managed through my writing and my teaching and where I am to make people more conscious of the presence of Indo-Fijians as part of the broader mainstream discourse rather than as a sort of exotic people on the side. (Lal, interview: 09/06/04)
By keeping the Fijian aspects of Indo-Fijian cultural histories in view, Lal points to an alternative way of theorising this subject. Several scholars and creative writers (such as Subramani and Albert Wendt) have proposed Oceania as a concept that unites a regionally defined, culturally heterogeneous literature of the Pacific. Disrupting either/or notions of taukei (indigene/owner) and vulagi (visitor/foriegner), this expansive idea gives writers of the Pacific an equal stake in the literary conceptualisation of their region. It works against what Subramani has described as “myths and metaphors of smallness and dependency, propagated from the metropolitan center and reinforced by nationalists, separatists, and provincialists” (2001: 154).141
‘in the end is my memory of the beginning’
Lal aims to insert a Pacific presence into the diasporic sphere. Sudesh Mishra’s ‘Diaspora and the Difficult Art of Dying’ (1999) makes a different type of intervention, bringing diaspora into focus within the work of the Subaltern Studies collective. This is a multi-volume project which, like Oceania, takes an area studies approach to the investigation of South Asian history and society. It concentrates on labour, insurgency and modes of power during and just after colonial rule. The project is often associated with a tradition of writing ‘history from below’ pioneered by E. P. Thompson and E. J. Hobsbawm. This type of scholarship focuses on people previously forgotten or misinterpreted in official, state-sanctioned versions of the past. Subaltern Studies is concerned with defining an anti-elitist approach to the historiography of South Asia, one that foregrounds the actions and consciousness of the people. 216
As previously mentioned, Chakrabarty suggests that the discipline of history renews and maintains itself through the incorporation of once oppositional minority histories. Rather than presenting a “continuous site of struggle”, they are reconciled on the basis that they can be told from a “rationally-defensible point of view…or position in public life” (1998: 16). However, he claims that certain pasts resist recuperation: “subaltern pasts are like stubborn knots that stand out and break up the otherwise evenly woven surface of the fabric” (Chakrabarty, 1998: 22). They are not fully incorporated but supplementary in that “they enable history, the discipline, to be what it is and yet at the same time help to show forth what its limits are” (Chakrabarty, 1998: 27).142 In ‘Diaspora and the Difficult Art of Dying’ Mishra makes these limits immediately apparent by flouting disciplinary formalities. There are no dates or footnotes, no quotation from historical sources or references to other academic works, nothing to signal that it is an accurate, defensible account of the past. The irrationality of the piece is further indicated by the style Mishra employs, lacking capitalisation and paragraph breaks, with only one final full-stop in seven pages. It is a highly unusual style of writing, stripped back to the basics. These absences make the text visually striking, more so because it is the first in a volume of conventional historical studies.
Tenuous comparisons could be drawn between Indian subalterns and the first generation of indentured migrants in the sugar colonies (at least in terms of the forces that impelled people to migrate inter-regionally and the incentives that drew people overseas) however, the historiography of Indian indenture does not form a significant strand in the work of Subaltern Studies. Mishra’s contribution is an exception and the only example in eleven volumes of essays that offers an exploration of diaspora. In the preface to the volume, the editors remark on the peculiarity of Mishra’s piece and the difficulties of addressing a diasporic subject. They state:
Sudesh Mishra's contribution resists an easy characterization, for it navigates between history and memory, and raises questions about how we should represent the dislocating experience of transplantation and disenfranchisement experienced by the Indian indentured labourers in Fiji. Can the discipline of history and its forms of writing, which have traditionally depended upon notions of a located subject, deal adequately with the experience of dislocation and dispossession? (Bhandra et al. 1999: v).
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The unease conveyed refers to the way that histories of the indenture diaspora are supplementary to narratives of the Indian nation. Mishra’s text also challenges conventional historiography by emphasising subjective memory and rejecting the notion of objective truth. Unlike Lal who employs a “disciplined imagination” to “capture the inner truth of an experience”, Mishra describes “truth [as] a fickle sheikh in a seraglio of memories” (1999: 4). The piece opens with the words: “in the end is my memory of the beginning, a mixed brew of history and hyperbole” (Mishra, 1999: 1). The first part of the phrase is a twist on the way we might tell stories to a child, using ‘in the beginning’ to get the narrative going. Placing ‘the end’ before the beginning highlights the arbitrariness of conventional sequencing. The expression, ‘in the end’ also refers to a progression over time and suggests an element of contestation in memory formation. Processes of remembrance are selective; memories are fabricated and can take on an exaggerated quality or understate aspects of the past. Defining memory as a concoction rather than a simple storage system, Mishra locates the past as a force, actively created in the present.
Despite the initial reversal of the order of things, however, and the visible way the text deviates from academic norms, Indo-Fijian experiences are presented through a conventional chronology. The first harsh images of “ruined fields” and drought in Basti provide a rationale for a young man’s flight from India (Mishra, 1999: 1). Mishra then traces ‘his’ journey in Fiji over four generations and he uses a magic-realist device to structure this progression. One voice is maintained throughout, that of the young man who becomes a girmitiya, but because he cannot master the ‘difficult art of dying’ he is continually being remade in the bodies of his descendents: “i dissolved into the grey rodent flesh of my only child mahadeo” (4). The device is similar to the concept of reincarnation in that the individual is caught in a cycle of rebirth while striving for cessation; it differs because the consciousness of the young man is carried through into each manifestation. By describing the original girmitiya as “my former avatar” Mishra suggests the near-deification of indenture as a foundational experience for the Indo- Fijian community (4). Certain experiences are drawn out and others condensed in the formation of cultural histories. The prioritising of a girmitiya consciousness as the unifying principle for Indo-Fijian cultural identity is emphasised by the uneven pacing of the piece; the first story receives a far longer treatment than those of the three generations which follow. 218
Anthony Smith asserts that canonical texts are bearers of shared historical memories… associated with a specific territory which [is] regard[ed] as [an original] ‘homeland’ (1999: 208). Although the personal and singular ‘my memory’ in Mishra’s text is transformed into a communal ‘our’ history through a shared consciousness transmitted over time, there is little projection of India as a sacred homeland. The narrator recalls his past self as a young man “sixteen-years old and already corroded by despair” who watched his parents weep (Mishra, 1999: 1). Romantic notions of an ancient Indian spiritual continuity are dismissed by the actuality of “immemorial debt to a greasy man of crisp dhoti and castemark” (1). Indo-Fijian writing frequently incorporates traditions and symbols from the Hindu epics and the banishment of Rama is the mythic structure through which indenture is often understood. Mishra repeats this metaphor “i recognized the country of my banishment” (4). Yet he also focuses on the journey which, unlike the Hindu specific Rama, is a more inclusive construct:
many things were lost during that nautical passage, family, caste and religion, and yet many things were also found, chamars found brahmins, muslims found hindus, biharis found marathis, so that by the end of the voyage we were a nation of jahajibhais [shipmates]…all for one and one for all, yet this newfound myth fell apart the moment we docked at nukulau (2)
Here, Mishra suggests that the idea of a nation based on the flattening out of diversity is itself a myth that cannot be maintained. Ultimately, the journey provides only a momentary collective point of origin. Otto Bauer takes a macro view and describes community formation as a process of differentiation caused by slowly changing historical conditions; the descendents of ‘a common ancestral stock’ eventually become discreet groups. These communities are extremely broad, tribes and classes, and within each a relatively homogenous culture develops (1996: 39-77). Mishra, by contrast, suggests that there is no original, singular, shared culture in India. He also illustrates how particular values change within a community, even when material conditions remain stable. The text represents an Indo-Fijian collective through one omniscient consciousness yet it is transformed in each generation. As ‘mahedeo’, the narrator could choose to cultivate sugar but instead he spends his time:
learning to be unlike my runaway father, so that I grew up with an intense hatred of ratoons [a new shoot sprouting from the root of sugar cane] because, unlike the 219
girmitiya of my former avatar, I ascribed my condition to the whole damnable history of sugar (Mishra, 1999: 4)
The use of ‘condition’ here does not only refer to labour relations. It encompasses the structuring theme of the text: diaspora as an illness and affliction:
between the hell of girmit and the hell of basti was an ocean of alchemy, yes i stayed back because i had endured a sea change and was no longer the i of my origin, what more is there to say, i served the girmit of my misfortune and leased a bigha of land from the company and then married sundaree, who in less than a year retched up all her memories of krishnas and tulsis and neems and diyas, thus letting the past stray from her mouth to become the present, so that in the end she no longer felt the surf beneath her feet, while in contrast my sickness grew worse by the minute (2-3)
Motion is significant in this text in a number ways, as the journey overseas and over time and also as a particular form of sickness. This is a strange affliction; it does not hasten the process of dying but actually prevents the girmitiya from achieving the stillness of death. His affliction becomes an epidemic, shared among the indentured labourers of different colonies. It comes and goes “in purple swells of nausea” causing people to defy gravity and rise above the earth (5). The dislocating nature of diaspora is given a manifest form. The nausea is a type of culture-shock or home-sickness and signifies an inability or unwillingness to adapt to the new environment. Whilst the recovery of Indian traditions (retched up as memories) stills the motion of sickness for sundaree, the narrator’s condition worsens even during “the great age of our communal imagining” (3). There is only one cure:
to be rid of my affliction i had to die into the vanua, the land, but like all muses the vanua accepts only those who invoke it by name, hence dying is an art like living (3)
By defining motion as a disorder and prioritising roots and land over water Mishra seems to reject Oceania as a potential concept around which to unite and resolve “the shitty history of our misunderstanding” in Fiji (3). However, Mishra also conceives of motion as transformation: “i went through another sea change as my discovery of an oceanic present leaked into my memory of an indian past” (3). This second change is brought about through the process of naming. The narrator attunes himself to island ways by using the Fijian language and this restores balance to his senses: “i’d smell but 220
not taste an oyster until i said dio… i’d feel but not see the storm until i said cava” (3). Unlike the imperial drive to collect and classify, the narrator begins to “discover things as they were already discovered…name things as they were already named” (3). The process becomes one of potential exchange between indigenous Fijians and Indo- Fijians; the narrator wonders “if the names from my past were altering his present in the way that the names of his present had altered my past” (4). This is the moment at which he should be able to die into the land, having learnt its ways.
However, history intervenes. Mishra refers to the labour strikes of the 1920s against the CSR and indicates the way that the Europeans “bamboozled” both communities into distrusting one another (4). The narrator still cannot die and so becomes ‘mahedeo’ who turns to carpentry instead of a farming and builds a house in an attempt to secure his place on the island. Yet he still has the affliction and as his land-lease expires he melts into the body of his daughter ‘subadra’. She makes her way to Suva and the city represents another chance for a sea-change. Here all the people, “even the taukei”, share but do not suffer from the disease of dislocation: “the denizens of the city had no need for roots because they had smothered the vanua in steel and concrete thereby making a virtue of their illness” (5). The citizens are “those who were defined by what they had created and not by what they had inherited” and as such, citizenship has the potential to unite communities, as the city “by its nature belonged to all citizens” (5). The narrator as ‘subadra’ builds a house “on the freehold of our dreams” and sends her son overseas “to learn the ways of other cities” (6). Her disease is held in check until: “they came on that may of our unforgetting to claim for themselves the city we had all made” (6). The coup is depicted in an understated manner. The unforgetting refers to the fact that it took place on the 14th of May, the day that marks the arrival of the first Indians in Fiji. By placing the coup in the context of an Indo-Fijian history that revolves around a girmitiya consciousness, Mishra seems to naturalise it as part of the general condition affecting the diaspora. Nevertheless, the coup causes another round of “mass levitation” as citizens leave for the “lands of their new diaspora” (7). ‘[S]ubadra’ shares this fate:
nothing could entice me back to earth, not my husband, not my city, not my history, nothing and, in the course of a few seconds, i had pierced a roof of clouds and tailed a flock of mallards and passed the towers of Sydney and melted into the body of my son, rajesh, who sat at his desk writing the first of his many stories 221
about the island of his nostalgia in the hope that some day, when no one is watching, he will die into the acreage of his prose. (7)
The notion of writing about the past implied by these last lines takes the reader full circle, recalling the first phrase: ‘in the end is my memory of the beginning’. They describe the process of writing as the only way of achieving stasis for those who have made the ‘second crossing’ to Australia and so cannot now die ‘into the vanua’. Through the rejection of ‘rationally defensible,’ objective point of view, Mishra illustrates his contention that “history is, after all, memory’s narrative—rather than the reverse” (2003: 225).
Exiled
Like Lal and Mishra, Nandan navigates and fractures the disabling boundary between strictly academic and creative forms of writing, drawing on anecdote, personal memories and familial histories. Indeed, the slipperiness of genre-based distinctions is indicated on the back cover of The Wounded Sea, a text described as ‘his first novel’ and a ‘melding of fiction and autobiography’. Nandan’s autobiography, Requiem for a Rainbow (2001) is similarly described (on the front cover) as ‘A Fijian Indian Story’. His collection of academic writing, Fiji: Paradise in Pieces (2000), also contains a few examples of what Lal would call ‘faction’ as well as two speeches he gave at National Federation Party (NFP) Conventions in 1978 and 1980. These are the first pieces in the book and are particularly interesting because they prefigure themes, on the politics and the complexities of Indian-Fijian identity and destiny, which recur with intensity in Nandan’s later post-coup work. The remaining pieces were all written after 1987 (for radio, newspapers, journals and conferences; one piece is a memorial speech, another a short story); each conveys, in a different way, the trauma of the coups of that year.
However, in a peculiar twist of fate the entire book was written and prepared for publication but not actually published before the second coup of 2000 took place. Nandan writes the preface to the book while ministers “are still hostages to Speight’s misfortune” (2000: 27). 143 Syd Harrex, who provides an afterword, comments on the effects of this disjuncture: “it impossible for readers of Fiji: Paradise in Pieces not to be influenced by the present political drama, irrespective of their opinions about it” (in 222
Nandan, 2000; 191). The pace of academic production does not always match the actual, disjointed time in which we live. Other, everyday histories in the form of news reports and conversation intersect with an understanding and appreciation of the text. Vijay Mishra’s comments are pertinent:
history, largely diachronically presented in school texts, suddenly becomes contaminated by the synchronic moment of a crisis. We rush to our history books and begin to see another pattern, another way of ordering, of interpreting, facts (Mishra, 2001b: 337-8).
Harrex ruminates on the way the entire book could have been alternatively framed and named:
Had the present chaotic coup not occurred the book need not have had as its sub- title the despairing Paradise in Pieces. Instead, its germinal events…might well have prompted a title along the lines of Fiji: Paradise Lost & Paradise Regained (in Nandan, 2000: 191).
The use of the word ‘pieces’, however, is entirely consistent with Nandan’s other academic, autobiographical, fictional works, which often employ the metaphor of fragmentation to describe the workings of personal and national identities. The reprinted speeches, for example, are remarkable in their risk-taking and not only because Nandan was then a newcomer on the party-political scene (speaking about politics to “seasoned and scarred warhorses”) but also because of their eclectic form. Nandan freely incorporates poetry and parable, nursery rhymes and wise old sayings into his speeches in order to further his argument. This is similarly in keeping with the fragmented style of his other prose works. ‘The Indian-Fijian: A Complex Fate’ was originally written to address politicians not academics, and it entered the public discourse of the day through The Fiji Sun and Radio Fiji. Written pre-coup it is both hopeful and prescient and through it Nandan attempted “a self-definition” of a community from a position of attachment to both that cultural group and the broader Fijian nation (34).
There is, as Nandan identifies elsewhere, an imagined aura and haze of innocence to Fiji in the years after independence, represented in the now redundant 1970s slogan, ‘Fiji, the way the world should be’. It is a place of new possibilities, a paradise in the making. As such Nandan speaks of the need for effective leadership to meet the challenge of a 223
new postcolonial nationalism, one not based on racial divisions but a ‘common condition’ where: “our multicultural islands will stand as beacons in a world of encircling gloom” (48). Nandan believes that creating this larger consciousness (of the Indian-Fijian past as a Pacific Island future) does not require the abandonment of an Indian heritage. In fact, he defines an “Indian sensibility” as the product of an essentially ‘all-inclusive’ multicultural tradition which is thus absolutely compatible with the shaping of a new Fijian nation.
Nandan emphasises the continuity of the spirit of continental India in the Indian-Fijian islander in a somewhat idealistic manner. He accepts that “waves of invasion, feudalism, casteism, colonialism and communalism have affected quite damagingly the self-image of the Indian”, yet simultaneously asserts that “there is a living, positive core at the heart of the Indian tradition which transcends the tremors of history” (36). Recovering the “essence of Indianness” as an overwhelmingly positive list of achievements and values is a counter-discourse tactic, it re-places the Indian-Fijian in constructed version of the past in order to serve the present. From this ameliorated position, negative representations can be challenged: “the image that we are a petty people, exhausting our energies in petty prejudices reminding others of noisy myna birds, does less than justice to our people” (36).
In the sparse, hurried comments that provide Nandan’s response to the 2000 coup in the preface to Paradise in Pieces, Indian and Indo-Fijian indenture pasts intrude upon the present. He states: “[f]or some reason the image of Bapu [Gandhi], like my grimitya grandfather’s, haunts me even as the tragedy of Fiji unfolds daily with the terrible feeling of déjà vu” (2000: 33). Nandan succinctly reiterates the idea of dying ‘into the vanua’ as a representation of stasis and unambiguous homeliness: “most of my ancestors knew only one land, where they, and we, were born. Home, in the final analysis, was the cemetery and the cremation ground” (2000: 98-9). A similar process is at work in the last pages of his ‘novel’. Here the passive notion of ‘dying into’ is replaced by the more active, nationalist sentiment of dying for as a method, indeed the ultimate way of asserting belonging. Nandan states: “[i]t is true, perhaps, that a country never belongs to one unless one is prepared to die for it” (1991: 169). The qualified ‘perhaps’ of this declaration is elaborated on in the lines that follow; dying is defined as myriad and illimitable: 224
But there are so many ways of dying. Death has many faces: imagine those thousands of old men and women – the girmityas and their descendents – who have perished over the past one hundred and ten years (1991: 169).
This evocation and linking of death and indenture appears after Nandan has presented his recollection of confinement during the 1987 coup. The thousands of dead that Nandan calls up at the end of the narrative are present throughout the text, as dying, leave-taking and betrayal are key themes in The Wounded Sea. The coup – the metaphoric death of the nation – and the exile it causes provides the framework for all of the other deaths and departures in the novel. The novel begins at the airport with the narrator, Nandan, boarding a flight from Fiji to Sydney. At the terminal he replies to a reporter’s question (on his thoughts at the outbreak of the coup) that he was glad his father was dead (3). As he sits down he notices a newspaper report on the death of two prominent Chiefs. This causes him to remember an incident at work where he overheard a colleague mitigating a report on the deaths of a family who had drowned with: “but, they were Indians” (4). The plane takes off, the island recedes and a “deadly weight” is lifted. Nandan comments: “I was leaving my country at Christmas, with death on my mind. I asked the Fijian air hostess for a bottle of champagne” (4).
The startling juxtaposition (death and celebration) is mirrored in the way Nandan names his books. Each of the titles of his major prose works sets a beautiful image against a word evoking loss and desecration. In The Wounded Sea, Nandan states: “[t]he sea is one, I thought. Only we in our ignorance call it by different names” (5). In this conception the sea is related to humanity and the process of naming it to racial discourse. The intensification of racial differentiation, in the aftermath of the coup, is illustrated by the way Nandan affixes “Fijian” to minor characters otherwise identified by their roles “my Fijian colleague”, “the Fijian airhostess”.
In the opening pages of the first part of the novel, ‘Landscape of Little Ruins’ Nandan continues to dwell on dying. He begins by describing his father’s death over a couple of pages, and then recalls his father’s response to Baba’s (the girmitiya grandfather) death and finally, in a few paragraphs, comments on his father’s reaction to his leaving to study in India years ago:
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Why did he weep? Was it because his own father, at almost my age, had made and earlier journey from India to Fiji – and never returned? Something as a father he was now beginning to understand? Or was it because he himself could never make the journey to his father’s village?…But who would he have seen in Sultanpur?…Maybe Baba was escaping from the subcontinent? Just as I was escaping from an island? The thought haunts me now. Was this my father’s first death? (11).
In the rest of ‘Landscape of Little Ruins’ Nandan describes family and school life in a small village on the banks of a river and next to the airport. The next two sections, ‘Love in the Orchard’ and ‘The Day of the Colonel’ mix themes of death and betrayal with sex and politics. It is only in the final part of the novel, ‘The Night of the Mongrels’, that Nandan returns to the story of the airport set up at the beginning (133-4) and then recalls the period of the coup in detail (134-167). The decision to use the trauma of coup and exile as a framing device for the novel was an editorial one, as Nandan explains:
My editor felt it would be useful to have three parts that include a description of a young boy growing up in a village and then the sense of sudden turmoil. He took bits and pieces from the 200 pages [on the coup] I had sent him and juxtaposed them with the rest of the narrative (Kanaganayakam, 1995: 67).
In different ways Lal and Mishra suggest that indenture was a foundational experience for the indo-Fijian community now largely displaced by the coups. ‘Diaspora and the Difficult Art of Dying,’ in particular supports Vijay Mishra’s argument that the psychic disturbance caused by a traumatic event experienced in diaspora imbues the ‘original’ moment of rupture with added meaning. By placing the coup at the beginning and close of the narrative, Nandan (and his editor) have shifted and reversed this emphasis. Nandan describes the coups as the “defining moments for the Indian-Fijian writer” and in much of his post-1987 prose work they have figured as the primary metaphor (175). Memories of the indenture past ‘haunt’ or supplement his reactions to the contemporary coups; in The Wounded Sea, the narrator’s memories of childhood are framed by the present experience of coup and leave-taking.
Nandan uses dates and times to give order to the narrative when dwelling on the coup in the last chapter of the book, ‘The Night of the Mongrels’. The events of “five treacherous nights” are covered and the chronology intensifies at specific moments; for 226
example the 14th of May is recorded in minutes and hours. However the structure is flexible enough to include moments of digression and commentary. Nandan occasionally remarks on the coup from a position of distance: “such innocence, never again” (141). Yet, he also comments on how the personal trauma of the coup lingers on in the present. One incident “re-bites” with particular intensity; that is, the effect on his family of a false report stating he had been shot: “the shock of my death to Jyoti still shatters me” – another (imagined) death in a novel full of dying (142). Nandan’s text is also filled with light moments and at various points the coup narrative displays a “black humour” (144). Laughter is, for some, a paradoxical, instinctive response to moments of crisis:
Those of us who were beginning to laugh and joke were told sternly to control their tongues and understand the “situation.” In tight “situations” some human beings like me, cannot bear too much reality. Others cannot bear too much hilarity (143).
Nandan turns to literature as an antidote to the traumatic reality of the coup. He searches for books in the places they are detained but cannot find any. This personal method of coping is reflected in the behaviour of the collective. The ministers draw on their memories of hymns and stories and “the fragments of poetry, mythology, religion” Nandan had picked up in his “discursive reading”:
My colleagues were lawyers, businessmen, doctors, accountants, principals, trade- union leaders, academics and politicians all – and yet what everyone wanted to hear was a prayer or an episode from literature or from a religious text. During those five long nights in the PM’s bure no-one discussed the Constitution, or his bank account, or the value of his property (152).
The ministers began to pray before each meal, firstly in Fijian, then Hindi, Urdu and finally Nandan would offer an English contribution. This uplifting of spirits also had the effect of structuring the otherwise amorphous days shared between men with nothing to do. The symbolism of the government (as representative of the nation-state) praying in many languages is broken by the equally symbolic act that separated the ministers in to racial groups held in separate places. As Nandan recalls: “a cunning move on the part of the coup plotters. Together, we were strong and resolute. Racially separated, we were weakened” (155).
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The other way that Nandan copes with his incarceration, and that becomes especially important to him during the demoralising separation, is to write. He steals pieces of paper and writes down his observations on the events as they happen. Nandan writes copiously, he produces about fifty or sixty pages of notes, but most are confiscated by the soldiers. At one point he emerges from the toilet and is asked by two soldiers to hand over the pages. Nandan smuggles out “a few fragments in one of [his] socks” and parts of these are reproduced in the novel (148). In a part of the journal that Nandan managed to keep, he states:
I give them some of the written pages. I feel they should read my thought on their actions. Besides, writing makes things bearable and clarifies the “situation”. Words can give tremendous distance and objectivity to events too close to the heart. And how inspiring that is. From one word to another we can grow in strength and love and become conscious of a shared destiny. I’m trying to be philosophical in a helpless situation (150).
Although Nandan could find comfort and clarity in writing at the time of the coup, he undergoes a type of psychic paralysis after the event, which he describes in physical terms:
Thirty thousand feet above, I was facing the one terrible reality of my own life: exile. And like the blood from a ruptured artery, the haemorrhage of exodus would continue, planeload by planeload (134).
It is often said that Fiji had a bloodless coup. There is, of course, no such thing as a bloodless coup. Every coup is like a heart attack: something inside is silently dying, the heart is haemorrhaging (146)
Here, the nation itself is defined as a body, vulnerable to attack. For Nandan, the process of remembering and writing about the coups is fraught. He has lost vital memories to censorship and has also experienced the ‘amnesia’ that can accompany moments of trauma. Nandan outlines the difficulties of writing about traumatic events in the introduction to Requiem for a Rainbow:
Writing these pages hasn’t been easy. For days I sat in an empty room…looking through a large window pane… Remembering, I always stopped on the steps of the parliament of Fiji. I felt numb that such a thing could have happened in a place where I had known freedom and fearlessness. To see and then imagine the land of your birth being destroyed. It was like going into a room where someone you’d loved had been raped and then murdered. It leaves me numb even now…My mind 228
refused to write: to confront that eclipsing moment of reality. Imagining the real is an odyssey into self-knowledge: it is the longest journey. (2001: 13)
However, for Nandan writing fiction ultimately produces cathartsis. As an exiled writer, he is continually framing his memories of home in relation to the trauma of leaving but also describes writing itself as a form of homecoming: “writing then is your inner home, a struggle, a purging of history through the fire of words” (2000: 174). Furthermore, he directs his writing at future generations (suggesting another type of continuation and homecoming). Nandan wants Requiem for a Rainbow to be a “record for my children and the children of Fiji” (2001: 6). Kavita Nandan, his daughter, actually edits and introduces the text; she “put[s] the pieces together” (6). In her introduction she also links the process of reading her father’s writing to her own emotional growth, ruminating on her connection to Fiji. She reinforces the themes of trauma, home and exile and links the personal to the collective:
My father, like many other individuals and families who were forced to migrate from Fiji, has not forgotten the anguish of that nightmare. They remember in their life stories, knowing how unstable the reality of home is, that the only grounds they have to stand upon is language, remembrance, a haunted imagination. They have to create a world that exists on no map – for them the remapping of memory, the reshaping of experience and the renewal of self within imagined islands, is imperative and essential (7)
Nandan tentatively makes a virtue of anguish and exile, He states: “perhaps one way of possessing a stolen world is through a diasporic consciousness” (Nandan, 2000: 99). He believes that diaspora may open up new ways of seeing and being-in-the world:
One is dislocated from one world, but one is also connected to so many others. Suddenly they become closer to one’s own. The writer then tries to find new ways of being human, new ways of redefining his humanity, new ways of recognising his inseparable humanity with others. One is no longer searching for the identity of a rooted tree. Identity and home are more fluid, more uncertain” (104-105).
The dislocation produced by the sensation of being in diaspora allows for a degree of freedom precisely because it the unshackles the writer from the deadly past:
For our problem today is the problem of the past. It is the past that can kill us, entrapped in it as we are…Most of our quarrels are based on some aspect of our 229
past and we tend to lose our future by concentrating too much on the quarrels of the past (2004: 136).
Conclusion
Given the various ways in which the Indo-Fijian community is marginalised, misinterpreted and written out of scholarly and popular discourses, it is not surprising that the writers considered here see their work in terms of educating a wider ublic. For example, Nandan states:
When I wrote my poems, I had in mind a few friends in Fiji. Now I realize that few knew anything about Fiji outside of the country. Fiji was mainly seen as a tourist resort. By writing, I was giving the people a face and a feature and a voice. (1995: 70)
As previously mentioned, Lal was also motivated to write about Indo-Fijian indenture because he felt he could offer an understanding of these historical circumstances and their consequences from an ‘insider’s’ perspective. He writes in order to better understand both himself and the collective, as he puts it: to “interpret our own experience that resonated with the experience of our people (interview). By signalling the possibility that ‘history from below’ can also be written from within, each of these writers suggests a diversification of typical historiographic practice, collapsing the distance between a researcher and his/her subject.
It should be noted that the degree of authority conferred on the insider-historian is perilous at best. Stemming from an association and access to an ‘authentic’ cultural source, this knowledge is open to charges of partiality, essentialism or illegitimacy. Mishra and Nandan are both poets, concerned with illumination rather than fact. Nandan’s links writing to political rhetoric: “there are a lot of similarities between a politician and a writer. To some extent both are liars, but often they reach some illumination at the end” (1995: 62-3). However, Lal is not proposing a fixed link but an indirect (resonating) connection between the consciousness of a historian and the experiences of a larger group. The truth-stakes are certainly higher for historians. Lal utilises ‘subjective’ experience effectively because he does not claim to be objective in terms of his attachment to his subject; rather he is open about “prejudices, pet-hates, and bias” whilst simultaneously maintaining scholarly integrity: “the process of 230
reasoning is transparent and verifiable” (interview: 09/06/04). Here, Lal indicates his “investment in a particular understanding of the ‘real’” (Chakrabarty, 1998: 16). So although he accepts “that knowledge is tentative and partial”, and is imaginative in his research and narrative strategies, Lal remains faithful to disciplinary norms by “search[ing] for complete explanations and universal truths” (2001: xi). Yet getting at ‘the facts’ means revealing rather than concealing complexities: Lal is quick to see and make visible the various material and symbolic issues that stratify, differentiate and individualise members of the Indo-Fijian community. An evocation of ‘the people’ or ‘our people’ does not mean that this group is automatically reduced to a homogeneous mass, displaying a fossilised, equally and evenly shared cultural character.
Taken together, Lal, Mishra and Nandan’s work illustrates how the transformational quality to identity as the (unstable and mobile) points of identification or suture made inside history and culture: “not an essence but a positioning” (Hall in Braziel 2003: 237). This notion of cultural identity as a positioning can be transposed on to the professional, academic sphere, where the politics of position-taking and the structures of discipline boundaries are at play. Michel de Certeau suggests that the accreditation of the historian with institutionally sanctioned “social credentials…generates the legitimation of the text by its referent” (1986: 32). In this sense the authority of any historical study is tied to the credibility of the professor that produces it:
Here one does not believe in writing, but in the institution which determines its function. The text’s relationship to a place gives the form and guarantee of that place to the supposed knowledge of the text. The reality of this position renders credible the semblance of referentiality (de Certeau: 1986: 32).
When speaking of the institutional and commercial dynamics that impel and limit the production of historical knowledge, de Certeau depicts the ‘scientific’ community as a factory: one that is subject to “budgetary pressures…political decisions…sophisticated machinery” and where the products (books) “conceal their relationship to this hierarchical, socio-economic apparatus” (1986: 204).144 However, scholarly discourse is just one way of expressing the “fundamental narrativity that is our everyday historiography” and is closely related to other history-making media forms (de Creteau, 1986: 205). The ‘professional’ historian has to distinguish himself through the 231
application of specific techniques, and by taking on a well-defined role in the fabrication of a ‘rationally defensible’ understanding of the past:
To be sure this historian’s representation has its necessary role in a society or a group. It constantly mends the rents in the fabric that joins past and present. It assures a “meaning,” which surmounts the violence and the divisions of time. It creates a theatre of references and of common values, which guarantee a sense of unity and a “symbolic” communicability to the group (de Certeau, 1986: 205)
In this sense, it is more the writers’ positioning within a group of professionals than their cultural identifications with the Indo-Fijian community that confers critical authority. It is important to recognise but not necessarily overestimate the way that academic discourse can operate and circulate within an insular, fixed domain without connecting to the broader community in which much of this work takes place. If the object of study is “the creative inner life of the Indo-Fijian population” it is worth asking if and how such scholarship serves this community (Lal, interview: 09/06/04). As mentioned before, Lal, Mishra and Nandan’s scholarship is also only one outlet for their views. They have each contributed to the ‘everyday historiography’ that takes place through the radio, newspaper and TV in Fiji and Australia. They have each advocated for the rights of Indo-Fijian people in processes that take place outside of the university, and in doing so they take a broader than communal view. Mishra is quoted in The Australian speaking about the reinstitution of the 1997 constitution: “‘[t]his case is about the rule of law, which underpins democracy and human rights in Fiji and the rest of the world,’ he said. ‘The issues raised by the case are relevant to all Fijians, regardless of ethnicity.’” (O’Callaghan, 2001: 10).
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Conclusion: Summaries and New Directions
I don’t see why it has been complicated so much, whether it is politics, a question of cultural identity, a sort of fairly rigid dogmatic view. I don’t think literature should be treated that way. Cross-cultural writing is here; I mean what’s the big deal? (Khan, interview: 17/10/03)
A significant part of the preliminary labour undertaken for this thesis involved the construction of a bibliography of South Asian-Australian fiction. There are over forty writers whose literary work I have classified in this way, on the basis of each writer’s place of birth or ‘heritage’ and present location. This is a groundbreaking and necessary first-step in mapping out a neglected area of research: the bibliographical material my thesis makes available will undoubtedly be a valuable resource for future researchers working in this area. It complements and extends similar cataloguing work on the writings produced by other ethnic minority groups in Australia. (Sneja Gunew, Lolo Houbein, George Kanarakis, Alexandra Karakostas-Seda, Tseen Khoo, Serge Liberman, Jan Mahyuddin and Gaetano Rando are amongst those who have carried out this type of research). My thesis is similarly indebted to and extends the critical approaches developed by a number of scholars working within postcolonial studies on the study of ‘new literatures in English’.
I began this study by narrowing down broader conceptual categories based on postcolonial, multicultural and Asian diasporic cultural production (as explored in Literature Reviews I and II) to carve out a space for the minor field of South-Asian Australian fiction. ‘Zooming in’ does not require and has not resulted in a homogenising perspective or the construction of an essentialised view of the South Asian-Australian subject. By contrast, it has allowed me to indicate something of the variety, range and specificities of this work. Furthermore, in carrying out my research, I have been able to draw attention to texts that might otherwise have remained invisible within the academy; the self-published, small-press and performance-based work of Chitra Fernando, Christine Mangala and Ernest Macintyre, for example. This study has also provided the grounds for an assessment of texts by better-known writers such as Yasmine Gooneratne, Adib Khan and Chandani Lokuge within a discursive framework that examines the interstices and interface of broader literary paradigms. My thesis 234
examines the articulation of postcolonial histories within Australian multicultural and Asian-Australian frameworks, and the effects of these minority/national frameworks on the interpretation of one part of the globally dispersed South Asian diaspora.
Making space for the recognition and in-depth assessment of a ‘new’ minor (or sub- category of) South Asian and/or Australian literature makes a small contribution to the larger cultural project to effect transformation: to ‘decolonise the canon’ and ‘provincialise Europe’ by bringing other histories into view. In so doing, it remains important not to fetishise the concept of marginality or to uncritically celebrate the notion of an evenly shared ‘diasporic consciousness’. I believe my thesis has conveyed the complexity of South Asian-Australian cultural locations by not taking a reductive approach to concepts of ethnicity, culture and community.
Primary motivations for this thesis include the aims to:
1). Consider the corpus, determining whether and on what terms it is possible to view South Asian-Australian fiction as a coherent body of work (such as critics have constructed for UK, US and Canada-based writing).
2). Investigate location and theory, to identifing how this set of texts‘fits’ within the local/national Australian literary sphere and discourses on global South Asian diasporas.
3). Explore issues of categorisation and representation, reflecting on the approaches and responses of South Asian-Australian writers to the promotion and (self)positioning of migrant/ethnic/minority writers.
To conclude, I will draw out some of the findings spread across this study as they relate to these three objectives.
Corpus: Textual Migrations
The set of fifteen texts I have selected for comparison and analysis represents the literary output of thirteen writers: a large sample from a relatively small corpus comprised of works that have in the majority been published since 1999. The texts 235
considered certainly demonstrate a number of convergences, canvassing themes that are present in other South Asian-Australian works. As anticipated, one of the more prominent themes centres on the act of migration and the process of cultural transformation it engenders. This is conveyed through change experienced at the level of the individual, as protagonists have their “prejudices trimmed to manageable proportions” (Khan, 1994: 143 original italics) and their eyes are opened “to worlds beyond the limits of [a colonial] education” (Gooneratne, 1991: 285). A number of texts relate personal growth to the transformative impact of migration (as an effect of globalisation) on the nation. Although many of these texts espouse a cosmopolitanism view of cultural diversity as a process of enrichment, they also often engage critically with aspects of the Australian national imaginary, indicating the fallacies of a promised transition to ‘Asia-literacy’ and the rhetoric of multiculturalism.
The first-generation themes associated with arrival, interpretation, adaptation and survival (as explored in chapter one) are part of a broader ‘immigrant’ genre of literature. Texts not discussed in this thesis (due to reasons of space), such as Macintyre’s, Let’s Give them Curry: an Austral-Asian Comedy in Three Acts (1985) and Lokuge’s anguished If the Moon Smiled (2000) provide classic examples of such a genre. New ‘second-generation’ variations on the process of migration would include Chris Raja’s ‘White Boots’ (2003) and Shalini Akhil’s ‘Destiny’ (2004). These recent short stories published in Meanjin offer a different take on the guru/celebrity theme (as explored in relation to former homelands in Chapter three) by depicting the idolising of an ‘Australian Rules’ football player and an ‘India superwoman’. There is a sense of playfulness in much South Asian-Australian fiction which often overlays a rather bleak assessment of being in diaspora.
The use of humour and/or satire as a literary tactic designed to negotiate complex, traumatic processes of displacement emerges consistently over the course of this thesis, around issues to with both first and second-generation characters, in locations ‘here’ and ‘there’. Suneeta Peres da Costa employs humour to alternatively mask and reveal a sense of bewilderment, instability and profound lack of comfort in the family, home and nation for her young characters growing up in Australia (as do novels by Christopher Cyrill and Lokuge with less playfullness). This sense of displacement and the prominent theme of return take a twist in Macintyre’s He Still Comes from Jaffna with the ‘second- 236
generation’ character comically returns to Sri Lanka to follow through on long-distance nationalism. Macintyre aims to transport his audience through laughter to an examination of the human condition though his distinctive style of tragi-comic energy and several other writers also take this approach, addressing post-colonial political conflict through comedy. Satendra Nandan’s recollection of incarceration includes grim moments of coup-humour.
Some scholars might argue that an apolitical weightlessness is implied by diasporic texts that make light of political conflict and the turbulence of migration (such as A Change of Skies 1991) resulting in “a project of conversion through which diverse histories of displacement [are] assimilated to an aesthetic of pleasurable intercultural contact” (Huggan, 2001a: 121). However, humour is used as an effectively in South Asian-Australian fiction to challenge something. Gooneratne’s observations are pertinent: “And when, as now, the jester makes merry in the very jaws of disaster, comedy exerts an influence that simultaneously alerts the intelligence, objectifies emotion and comforts the spirit” (1995: 371).
Christine Mangala and Bem Le Hunte are amongst those who ‘make merry’ with issues of cultural commodification, appropriation and conversion, exploring literal conversions to the pseudo-spirituality and to ‘genuine’ spiritual insight (see chapter three). Both writers take an ironic stance whilst simultaneously affirming and depending on the mythic, translatable status of ‘India’ as a global icon – India as ‘guru of the world’. There is a prominent mediation of ‘global’ South Asian cultural forms and specifically Australian or broadly ‘Western’ symbols in many literary texts, which I read as reflecting the mutual dependency of national and international rather than any great challenge to the “salience of the nation-state” (Appadurai, 1996: 4).
With regards to South Asian religious practices, the clash and interface between Islam and Christianity is explored in Khan’s Seasonal Adjustments (1994). Chitra Fernando’s Cousins (1999) charts the philosophical and practical (dis)connections between Buddhism and socialism in Sri Lanka during the high-tide of decolonisation (a concern that is also evident in some of her short-story work). Two texts centre on Jewish-Indian experiences and narratives. Le Hunte draws on her father-in-law’s family history in her second novel, There, Where the Pepper Grows (2005), which traces the journey of 237
several Polish refugees and their flight to India during the Second World War. Moses Aaron’s collection of short stories, The Eye of Paradise (1998) ruminates on storytelling and combines tales from the Old Testament with tales from India. There is also a notable mixture of religious imagery in fiction that focuses on Anglo-Indian and Sri Lankan Burgher realities.
Several scholars have suggested that migrant/diasporic fictions are complicit in a reinvigoration of grand narratives through the re-centring of ‘Euro-America’ (Gikandi, Slemon, Tiffin). The Australian context of the work considered here problematises such an assumption. The ambiguous status of Australia within either of the overlapping categorisations of ‘Western’ or ‘Anglo-Saxon’ worlds returns frequently to destabilise, although by no means dissipate, the binary of East/West. South Asia is not the ‘Asia’ in which Australia has chosen, and been required, to be invested, Australia is not the West against which South Asia has chosen, and been required, to measure itself.
As a narrative setting, the Australia that emerges most frequently in South Asian- Australian fiction is not an imperial metropolis, nor the ‘outback’ frontier but the incongruous familiarity of the Australian suburban landscape. Although the multicultural nature of Australian suburbia is often emphasised, Indigenous Australians and their perspectives of Australia, are notably absent from the most of this work. A pertinent exception would be An Australian Son (1996) by Gordon Mathews. This autobiographical work recounts how a man adopted at birth grows up believing he has Indigenous heritage before discovering that his biological father is Sri Lankan and having to reconcile a powerful investment in Aboriginality with this sudden revelation. Sunil Govinnage’s short stories (2002) are similarly unusual in taking ‘black Australian’ as a term relevant to both South Asian- and Indigenous Australia experiences of multiculturalism.
Within the South Asian-Australian corpus there is a greater weighting towards texts that are set exclusively in the past in former homelands (the there/then), than those which are set exclusively with the context of contemporary Australia (the here/now). My textual readings have reflected this balance and focused in particular on the way that diasporic writers engage with the legacies of colonialism and intervene in the postcolonial politics of former homelands. However, the majority of South Asian- 238
Australian focuses on both poles of the hyphen. In certain texts the negotiation of the hyphen – between the here/now of Australia and the there/then of South Asian states (in some cases conveyed through affiliations to parental/ancestral pasts and/or to already hyphenated communities) – results in splitting and disorder (as in Homework 1999). In other examples, hyphenation operates as a potentially productive connective tissue between multiple worlds (as in Seasonal Adjustments).
Many of the texts make connections between the multicultural contexts of former homelands and the politics of multicultural Australia. A few take the latter as a major focus. For example, Siri Ranawake’s recent novel, Time and Chance (2005), dramatises the interface between changing values in private and the public life through a character working as a bureaucrat for the Australian public service. Raja Ratnam also explores this theme in his series of autobiographic/critical works including, Destiny Will Out: The Experiences of a Multicultural Malayan in White Australia (1997), extrapolating on insights drawn from a long career as a civil servant in the Ethnic Affairs department. This book is described as “an amalgam of personal reflection and informed analysis” (back cover), which links it to some of the other work considered. Many of the texts use memory, subjective and anecdotal experience to illuminate larger patterns and enable theoretical ruminations. Indeed, a significant strand of South Asian-Australian autobiographical fiction bleeds into theory. As Sudesh Mishra suggests: “whatever its truth-value, anecdotal evidence… forms an indispensable part of the unofficial discourse that constitutes diasporic narratives of place, politics and identity” (2004: 139). It is vital to consider these subjective stories an integral thread in the weaving of localised, national and global imaginaries.
So the corpus displays a certain coherence through a number of internal thematic commonalities. However, the ‘fiction’ it contains takes many different forms, with poetry, autobiography and performance-based work making strong contributions. Some of the narratives are conveyed in a relatively simple, ‘straight from the heart’ manner (Grace Mackie’s Of Jasmines and Jumboos, 1993 comes to mind). Other writers display a preoccupation with form, Michelle de Kretser, for example, subverts the genre of the memoir and the colonial murder mystery in her most recent novel; for Cyrill: “structure is the greatest detail’. When detailing divergences, it is important to point out that not all of these texts invoke South Asia and/or experiences of diaspora in Australia. 239
The absence of South Asia is notable in Khan’s latest work and in recent short stories by Peres da Costa and Cyrill. De Kretser is possibly the only writer considered here to reject the well-worn recommendation to ‘write about what you know’ in a first work, setting her The Rose Grower (1999) in pre-revolutionary France. Travel (rather than migration) forms the premise to a short story by Chitra Fernando titled, ‘The Road to Rome’ (1994a). To offer just a couple of examples of works by writers not studied in detail: Dipti Saravanamuttu’s poetry also encompasses insights brought on by travel but very “few of her poems have reference to Asian icons or to Sri Lanka” (Gooneratne, 2002a: 364). A few short stories from a collection by Frances Isaac, Strands of Serendipity (1999), are similarly unpredictable: ‘He or She’ explores the changing relationship between an Anglo-Australian couple after retirement, and ‘The Magpie’ focuses on an elderly Indigenous woman who recalls her good and bad relationships with white men.
Despite the divergences, taking a thematic approach to South Asian-Australian fiction seems more productive than an ‘ethnic approach’. I believe it is inadequate to perceive ‘ethnicity’ (in concert with location) as the only unifying premise on which to assess these works of fiction. Indeed, the complexities of fashioning ethnic identifications for diasporic communities in general, and with regards to multi-national ‘South Asia’ in particular, are such that it would be unreasonable to expect a singular ‘ethnic voice’ to emerge from South Asian-Australian fiction. The potential coalitional aspect to ‘South Asia’ is unfolded within the chapters of this thesis across a series of national locations (Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka) in which ethnicity, affiliation and alliance are recognised as strategic operations that are often constructed through and around conflictual flashpoints. Investigating Indo-Fijian-Australian histories further stretches the conceptual boundaries of nationally (Fiji) and regionally (South Asia/Oceania) delimited diasporic geographies. Brij V. Lal comments on the ‘dominant view’:
Indo-Fijian experience belongs to the Pacific experience as well. Whilst the diasporic connections are there, there are other connections which elude a diasporic reading of that experience. …If there is one thing that I feel very happy about it is that I have managed through my writing and my teaching and where I am to make people more conscious of the presence of Indo-Fijians as part of the broader mainstream discourse rather than as a sort of exotic people on the side. Once people said, ‘They’re Indians, I mean where do you fit them, they are more 240
with Malaysia or Sri Lanka or other places but not in the Pacific’. We are in the Pacific but not of the Pacific was the dominant [view] (interview: 09/06/04).
An awareness of the Pacific as an alternative framework for part of the work studied here demonstrates that even within the slim parameters set by the South Asian- Australian nomenclature, there are competing claims at work. It is my contention, therefore, that this terminology produces a necessary contestation from which its strength, rather than its weakness, as a potential analytical category arises. It is my belief that South-Asian Australian texts do speak powerfully to each other, constructing a series of dialogues that contest the boundaries of the geographical and social referents through which they are read. In the final analysis, then I would rephrase the enquiry into whether the texts under consideration represent a coherent ‘body of work’ through a question posed about diasporic locations by R. Radhakrishnan. He asks, “[c]an the voices be orchestrated within a single symphony, or can coherence be produced in and through the contradictions?” (1996: xiv). South Asian-Australian fiction produces coherence because of contradictions, not in spite of them.
Theory and Location: Naming South Asian-Australia in Multicultural Australia
So beyond ‘filling the gap’ in the records of Australian literary history and the international archive of South Asian diasporic literature, what else does this thesis do to advance and reconfigure the debates surrounding postcolonial literatures with which it began? Bringing the general theories to bear on a new category allows for a mutually informing dialogue which enables me to further clarify common or specific features in Australia-based writing. The inherent multiplicity and contestation that ‘South Asia’ signifies should be emphasised, if only because it is not a commonly used term in Australia. This particular issue, of how best to refer to the group of texts studied, was raised during an interview with Suneeta Peres da Costa. She made the following comments as part of her response to the use of ‘South Asian-Australian’ as a potential literary category:
‘South Asian’? Well, we don’t even use that term here: we tend to say ‘Indian’ in Australia. It reminds me of my time spent in America where that was [the term used]. It is so geographically displacing to be ‘Indian’ or ‘Subcontinental’ or ‘South Asian’. And in Britain they call you ‘Asian,’ don’t they? You’re just 241
‘Asian’. Whereas here, ‘Asian’ strictly refers to those people of South-East Asian or Chinese descent, or of Japanese or Korean [descent] (interview: 29/11/2003)
The first detail that needs to be emphasised is that Peres da Costa’s comments were purposefully addressed to me, a British national (of Sri Lankan descent), for whom the notion that ‘Asian’ might not adequately include ‘subcontinentals’ did serve as a necessary reminder. At points during interviews with other writers I was similarly subtly counselled that here in Australia things are not what they might be in Britain: the differences of ‘host’ nation-states have an impact on which names and labels stick and on how diasporic fictions are interpreted as a result.
Within the South Asian diasporic literary scene in North America (where, arguably, hyphenated Indian literatures predominate), the term ‘South Asia’ is most often used to signal a non-partisan approach – to work against the Hindu-centric ethos of certain community organisations.145 In the Australian case, however, my choice of terminology is largely pragmatic and due to the fact that very few writers so classified are actually directly from India. Roughly half of the writers (included in the bibliography) claim descent from other South Asian nation-states; and still many others have come to Australia from the already hyphenated Anglo-Indian and Indo-Fijian communities. Although we should not take this type of literary representation as an accurate indication of the actual demographic ‘breakdown’ of South Asian communities in Australia, the predominance of texts by Anglo-Indian and Ceylonese Burgher writers is linked to the timing of changes to Australia’s immigration policy (which permitted the increased entry of ‘part-Europeans’ in the immediate post-Independence period).146 Likewise, the prominence of Indo-Fijian writers is linked to Australia’s geographical location and geo-political engagement in the Pacific.
Comparing diasporic literary formations across national locations provides useful insights. On the one hand, I predict that the South Asian diasporic literary scene in Australia will continue to prove different in the manner outlined above, from that in the UK and North America. Of course, one of the major differences between Australia and these other locations relates to the much smaller numbers of South Asian writers here. Thus, on the other hand, the strategic exploitation of ‘lateral connections’ may result in a greater visibility for Australia-based writers. Canada is often a constructive 242
complement for critics concerned with Australia’s postcolonial, multicultural and hyphenated Asian- cultural production. 147 The interest in ‘SACLIT’ (South Asian Canadian Literature) has recently provided an avenue for the recognition of Australia- based fictions. Shyam Selvadurai, a well known Sri Lankan-Canadian writer, was offered the task of editing a collection of diasporic South Asian short fiction, Story Wallah (2004).148 He set out with the intention to produce a ‘globally’ resonant anthology and with the expectation that Australia would provide a plethora of short fiction to choose from, given as he puts it: “[t]here is much in common, especially the whole multicultural outlook” (in Bhandari, 2004: online).
Selvadurai registers his surprise at the comparative lack of material available in Australia: “At first I thought it would be like Canada…But it was really hard to find stories. I am not sure why. Maybe it just takes time, and I think things are stirring in Australia” (in Bhandari, 2004: online). The stories he includes (by Mena Abdullah and Chitra Fernando) may have otherwise gone out of print. Things are certainly ‘stirring’ in Australia, as my thesis demonstrates. However, there is great variation in the way that individual works of South Asian-Australian fiction circulate and are received within Australia. Some writers (Fernando, Macintyre, Nandan) will possibly remain far better known in the context of their former ‘home’ countries than in their current place of abode. Others (like Gooneratne, Khan, Lokuge, de Kretser and Mishra) have successfully carved out a niche and profile within the national literary sphere.
The writers I have spoken to take different views on the impact of Australian multiculturalism on South Asian-Australian cultural production (and vice versa). The contrasting perspectives offered below represent the views of two second-generation writers, born in the 1970s and raised with an awareness of multiculturalism as a part of broader public discourses:
Politically, socially and I would even say morally, Australians are much more aware of Asia. I’m not quite convinced that under this government they are actually more accepting, but certainly more aware of the various cultures of Asia. In my lifetime there has certainly been an opening up in the arts to [Asia]. …literature has led the way as far as exposing Asia to Australia. There have been so many wonderful Asian writers who are [still] around at the moment, Beth Yahp, Suneeta [Peres da Costa], Adib [Khan]. They’re putting it in people’s faces 243
basically. It’s unavoidable, you can’t walk into a bookshop and not see it and even publishing more in translation is coming over (Cyrill, interview: 19/11/03).
writers of immigrant backgrounds in Australia who do incorporate [a] kind of [sentimentality], I just feel … it gives rise to this sense that that’s what multicultural writing is about, which is such a shame. But it also feeds back into the particular kind of racism that exists in Australia which is, yes we’ll have their food, the food of Asia, and we’ll trade with them and we’ll flood their markets with our resources, but forget about, [anything else] yes, they’re not ‘us’. And where does that make the person who was born here or indeed, who is here on a temporary protection visa, stand? (Peres da Costa, interview: 29/11/03)
There is a suspicion of the discourse of multicultural enrichment demonstrated in the quotes above. They point to the gap between awareness and acceptance. They celebrate an equality of opportunity, suggesting that writers have ‘led the way’ and yet may potentially go no further than ‘exposure’ (important in its own right) without ending up in a cul-de-sac of continued marginalisation, where ‘they’ will never be ‘us’
The reductiveness of a ‘them’ and ‘us’ dialogue is also evident in the contest between ‘resident’ and ‘non-resident’ writers over representations of the (former) homeland. South Asian diasporic literatures have been criticised by a number of scholars for being over-theorised, disembodied, ahistorical, elitist and trendily postmodern in their orientations (Khair, Jeganathan, Paranjape, Parry, Roberts). Together, these criticisms work towards an implied dismissal of diasporic fiction on grounds of social and political irrelevancy – or in the case made by Makarand Paranjape, a complicity with the continuing dominance of the ‘West’ over ‘the rest’ (2000: 235). There is, of course, the non- or less ‘Western’ status of Australia to consider; as part of ‘the rest’, Australia is thus a minor location for a strand of the once-minor field of South Asian diasporic fiction.
Collectively, the texts included in this study provide a wealth of material that belies accusations of being apolitical (Satendra Nandan? Surely not), ahistorical (Brij Lal? Certainly not) and unabashedly celebratory (Peres da Costa and Cyrill? Rather the opposite at times). In fact, where South Asian-Australian fiction responds most powerfully to critics of migrant/diasporic literatures is in its attention to the specificities of postcolonial politics and histories. This finding clearly works against the argument that diasporic fiction lacks ‘real’ social relevancy and engages in a politically 244
neutralised, ‘happy-hybridity’. Having said that, the hybridity present in the texts displays what Jacqueline Lo has described as ‘organic hybridity’. Several texts comment on slow, accretive process of cultural change, on the compatibility of cultural codes and icons as part of the same infinitely rehearsed story (Aaron, Cyrill, Gooneratne). This prevalence of this ‘organic’ mode is undercut by (often paired with) ‘intentional’ forms of textual hybridity which seeks to unsettle fixed categories (de Kretser’s work comes to mind).
There is some evidence within South Asian-Australian fiction to support Paranjape’s observation that diasporic texts enact an ‘elegaic farewell’ to the former homeland in order to re-position themselves within the new place of abode, with exilic guilt apparent in Seasonal Adjustments for example. Furthermore, the professional status of many South Asian-Australian characters and writers, as anticipated by Monika Fludernik, is certainly in evidence. This does not prevent writers from exploring class-locations outside their own immediate experience (Fernando, Lokuge) or from interrogating the privilege of the middle-classes (Macintyre) and the (post)colonial elite (de Kretser). The opportunities these texts provide for sustained class-analysis will help to broaden an awareness of the wide range of social worlds inhabited by minority groups within multicultural Australia.
Fludernik examines the effects of a nationally orientated US pluralism on transnational discourses associated with the South Asian diaspora. She combines the opposing notions of what I would term, the ‘the global Indian’ and ‘the ethnic Indian’ in order to portray a flourishing and culturally self-sufficient (or insular) community. The context of Australian multiculturalism produces a different effect: perhaps because of the smaller numbers involved, alliances and dialogue with both the ‘mainstream’ and other minority groups are necessary for South Asian-Australian fiction. Thus with regards to her model for expatriate literature, South Asian-Australian fiction tends towards what she calls ‘cosmopolitan novels’, albeit with a significant quota of ‘immigration novels’ and ‘multicultural novels’ (see Literature Review II: 59).
Largely, this finding rests on the equation of an individual focus with the categories above. There is potentially a communal aspect to South Asian-Australian fiction, but on reflection, Fludernik’s careful categorisation of the ‘diaspora novel’ seems in practice to 245
be perhaps the least applicable to the works that I have studied. The works that come closest to the group focus that Fludernik defines as essential for ‘pure diaspora novels’ are the Indo-Fijian-Australian texts, although they also put forward a type of situated cosmopolitanism. The majority of the South Asian-Australian texts examined often consciously individuate, differentiate and empower their protagonists precisely by rejecting the imposition of group identities. They often draw attention to the constrictive aspects of identity as rigidly defined through ethnicity (in the context of the former homeland) and also generally refuse to represent South Asian-Australian communities through the flawed stereotype of the ‘migrant ghetto’.
Localised specificities and divergent cultural histories within and between minority groups should also be taken into consideration. When comparing the multicultural contexts of Canada and Australia for hyphenated Asian literary production, Tseen Khoo suggests that: “South Asian literature and history engages more directly with post- colonial discourses and the socio-political legacies of colonialism…East Asian literatures are often produced from histories of legislated exclusion and racist historical flashpoints (e.g., internment, riots)” (2003: 6). My research broadly supports this contention; the interpretation of post-colonial legacies has been identified as a major theoretical and thematic concern. South Asian-Australian fiction may most accurately be read as oppositional or resistant in terms of the work it does to destabilise the salience of the post-colonial South Asian nation-state, and in its interrogation of how (neo)colonialism feeds into the manipulation and reification of discourses of ethnic apartness. This fiction deals less directly with issues of racism in Australia, although the emphasis on negotiating conflict may paradoxically serve to confirm stereotypes of ‘Third World’ ethnic violence, fuelling the fear that such ‘pathologies’ are being imported into Australia.
Another point of difference between South- and East Asian-Australian literatures worth mentioning here relates to gender. Alison Broinowski argues that women writers predominate within Asian-Australian literature and have inherited the role formerly played by male Anglo-Australian writers in depicting Asia (she includes several of the writers considered in this thesis when making this claim). She also suggests that the female creative writer’s perspective serves to counter the dominant views of male politicians in defining the region (Broinowski, 2003). A closer look at South Asian- 246
Australian contexts would revise this contention. Female politicians have taken powerful leadership roles in South Asian nation-states. Whilst it is arguably true that South Asian-Australian women writers have received more recognition, they make up roughly half of the number of those included, both in the selections for the thesis chapters and within the broader corpus.
It is yet to be determined whether South Asian-Australian fiction will retain its minor positioning and destabilising edge within categories like Asian-Australian studies (as this area consolidates) or whether it will partake of a conscious ‘mainstreaming’ which brings both respectability and a degree of invisibility. When talking about the multicultural literature journal he edits, Manfred Jurgensen suggests that the whole purpose of ‘naming’ in multicultural literature is to aim for a stage when labels can be discarded: “[t]he ultimate aim of a journal such as Outrider ought really to be its self- destruction as a self-consciously multicultural publication” (in Khoo, 2003: 31). The two quotes below offer examples of how writers are ‘named’ and situated within the Australian literary sphere by others and by themselves:
I like to think of Sunil Govinnage as a writer of the Indian Ocean, rather than having to think about him in terms of national identities, like Sri Lankan, Australian or even a sub-identity like black Australian. He is, after all, a resident of Perth, a city lapped by the Ocean whose currents and winds link him to his place of birth (2002: xv).
Well I have a problem with such simple codification really. Because finally I think a writer is meant to be universally…as I said, not bordered in by anything. And this constant need to slot a writer in, as a Sri Lankan-Australian or if you are born in Australia as a Australian-Sri Lankan, this came to me as a huge surprise. Once in a postcolonial anthology there was Sri Lanka and I was under Australia and I felt a moment of not guilt but a kind of uneasiness with this, suddenly how did I turn Australian? I was not even asked. So I think Sri Lankan-Australian is a much better category if people have to categorise. But I think that a writer is a free floating individual (Lokuge, interview: 22/05/04)
Most of the writers interviewed perceive their fiction as contributing to the nation whilst extending beyond its boundaries and also exceeding the parameters of an ethnically (or otherwise, rigidly) defined notion of the South Asian diaspora; a finding that is also demonstrated at a textual level and with which I would agree. As such, there is no single theoretical framework that will neatly encompass all of the claims made for and by South Asian-Australian fiction. A better approach (and the one I have attempted in this 247
thesis) is to remain aware of multiple frameworks and to apply theoretical concepts eclectically on a body of work that is itself multiply situated across a local, national and globally defined terrain.
Categorisation and Representation: A Particular Universe
Threaded throughout this thesis is a line of inquiry concerned with identifying the way that South Asian-Australian texts and writers are positioned, promoted and received within and beyond Australia. As indicated above, I disagree with Fludernik’s contention that ‘properly’ diasporic novels engage in a type of insiderism – the fiction studied here certainly reaches ‘non-South-Asian-diasporic’ readers within Australia and across a range of locations. De Kretser puts it well: “good novels draw you into other people’s lives and to points of view that might well be completely different from your own” (interview: 25/05/04). Some of the texts studied here have been published or performed in the South Asia, are available in the UK and US, or have been translated into Greek, Spanish, German and other languages. ‘Going global,’ or being transnationally situated, can result in instances of mistranslation and likewise, there are potential problems associated with the necessary machinery of marketing and disseminating literature.
For example, Lokuge recalls that the Greek edition of her first novel, If the Moon Smiled (2000), was produced by a very informed translator who included a number of footnotes explaining Sinhalese words, thereby overwriting her own decision to avoid a glossary “in the true postcolonial sense” (interview: 22/05/04). The cover of this edition, however, depicted the protagonist with her palu (the drape of a sari) covering her hair, a Hindu rather than Buddhist habit of dress, and therefore out of key with the character. In the US, the second edition of Homework, by Peres da Costa, was published with a cover depicting a woman who was much older than the character, a child, described in the novel: “And they told me it was to sell it, to make sure [it sold]” (interview: 29/11/03). The writers I spoke to took a pragmatic approach to such issues. For example, Peres da Costa states, “all books do that” (interview: 29/11/03). Khan was was persuaded by his publishers into using a shorter title for his latest work; he was happy with the way the presentation of this title on the book cover emphasised “the fragmentation of the sort of the inner homecoming,” (interview: 17/10/03). As he 248
observes: “they always look at it from a commercial perspective. Now, look, that’s part and parcel of the deal” (interview: 17/10/03).
Graeme Turner has evaluated the gains as well as losses that come with literature being considered a part of rather than apart from public culture. He states: “what literature has lost in the way of credibility through its acceptance of the need for promotion and publicity, it has gained in terms of visibility…The absorption of the literary into promotional culture does not necessarily have to be a systematic problem” (2001: 303). South Asian-Australian fiction certainly gains from the heightened reputations of other well-known diasporic and/or resident ‘Indian writing in English’ texts. Although often tenuous, comparisons to Salman Rushdie, to Arundhati Roy and to Vikram Seth in reviews of new Australian texts are a commonplace method of locating this writing within the international arena.
It is perhaps too easy, in light of such frequent comparisons, to suggest that South Asian-Australian fiction is not written but marketed in a homogenous manner. The significant cohort of self-published and small-press work, which generally lacks a significant marketing strategy, serves to partially contradict this assumption. Another unexpected finding relates to the degree of control that writers are able to exercise over the representation of their texts beyond what is written on the page. Cyrill, for example, recalls that with the production of his second novel he had a say in “everything down to the actual type, the specific astronomical symbols that we would use… So not just the inherent structure of the book but even it the exact way it’s laid out, even leaving the gaps where the full stops are missing” (interview: 19/11/03). All of the writers I spoke to emphasised their positive relationships with publishers.
It also became clear, during the course of the interviews conducted for this study, that these writers were well aware of the commercial expectations, marketing strategies and textual positioning that will surround/claim/categorise their work as ‘ethnic’ writers. So the self-reflexive irony that marks much of this fiction is infused with another layer of ‘knowingness’ where the writers intervene in some of the ways in which their work might be received and categorised within the academy. South Asian-Australian writers often use this cultural knowledge to achieve a measure of agency in their writing practice, where they are able employ a number of different strategies to work creatively 249
within and against the expectations of both the academy and the marketplace. Khan makes a distinction between these spheres. He believes that:
the academic world in Australia is still fairly conservative but [there are]… a lot of fairly bright, progressive young people who are in the publishing industry, especially the women, who are prepared to take risks, who are prepared to explore a bit more (Khan, interview: 17/10/03)
Few writers were keen to be promoted or promote themselves as ‘ethnic’ in any way (with Lokuge’s emphasis on a ‘free-floating’ Sri Lankanness an exception here). My questions about categorisation were often met with impatient, short answers: “I don’t spend time thinking about it” (de Kretser, interview: 25/05/04); “I’d like to be promoted as myself” (Macintyre, interview: 28/09/03); “[c]ross-cultural writing is here; I mean what’s the big deal?” (Khan, interview: 17/10/03).
The overt rejections of ‘pigeon-holing’ revealed the writer’s desire to be situated within, rather than on the margins of Australian literary culture. By speaking to the nation rather than the diasporic group, many writers affirm the ‘universal’ qualities of their work. Khan states: “I should have something to say about society, be it Australian or global for that matter, the human condition. …you deal with certain human experiences which transcend cultural barriers” (interview: 17/10/03). Cyrill comments on how a sense of inherited ‘cultural memory’ might well inform his ‘own peculiar world’ but on reflection, relates this to the potential for broader insights:
when I sit down to write, I am writing about my own peculiar world…I write about the images that obsess me and sometimes they do seem to inform a greater cultural memory but that is not at all primary. It’s there, I can see it there, but not primary…I have no great deep insight into to how Indians, South Americans or Australians behave, human beings maybe, maybe, time will tell (interview: 19/11/03)
Peres da Costa takes a similar approach stating: “[i]f I were to reduce myself to what it means to be Indian I couldn’t do that honestly without experiencing [and] saying what it is to be human” (interview: 29/11/03). Few of the writers attempt to speak as ‘representative’ South Asian subjects – except at moments of trauma. Lokuge, for example, made an appeal to an Australian audience at a fundraiser held in the wake of the 2005 tsunami, explicitly as a Sri Lankan. The Indo-Fijian narratives explored also demonstrate the need to claim identity strategically in order to ‘speak for’ a 250
marginalised group. Peres da Costa, like many of the other writers considered, exposes the limits of language in her work. She comments on language as haunted by the impossibilities of communication:
Are we redundant?…what is the importance of language? Is it here to help us communicate? And should it represent the madness in the world? I think it should. That’s what I feel my role as a writer is. But how to represent that madness. Do you imitate the madness in your style or do you defy it? I think these are crucial questions for me. …there’s something deeply anti-humanist about writing, … This lack of, the communication that’s …never consummated. And the failure of communication in this world, the world of TVs and mobile phones while there’s a war [going on] (interview: 29/11/03)
Future research into South Asian-Australian fiction might take up these questions around the (im)possibilities of humanist expression and the impact of global technologies of power on the role of the diasporic writer. There are also other productive ways to expand the particular universe of South Asian-Australian fiction. For example, the theoretical debate between ‘resident’ and ‘diasporic’ writers over representations of the homeland could be usefully applied to ‘resident’ writers who explore Australia-specific dynamics of diaspora in their work. Colombo-based James Goonewardene’s The Tribal Hangover (1995), which focuses on a Sri Lankan child who is adopted and raised in Australia, could be compared to Lokuge’s Turtle Nest (2003), a novel on the same theme, if the boundaries of the South Asian-Australia were extended in this way.
Another take on South Asian-Australian fiction, with its own set of attractions, would be to explore fiction produced by other Australia-based writers (including the so-called NESBs and Indigenous writers, as well as those in the ‘Anglo’ mainstream) detailing South Asian perspectives and locations. Inez Baranay’s Neem Dreams (2003) contains a diasporic character whose return journey to India tallies with one of the prominent thematic strands in South Asian-Australian fiction. Finally, like many working on postcolonial/diasporic cultural production, my thesis is limited by its English-language framework. It would be illuminating to compare writing in (other) South Asian languages published in Australia, in the ‘ethnic press’ for example, with the English- language works produced by diasporic writers. These are just some of the many directions that future research could take.
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Endnotes
1 Reflecting on Asian-Australian studies, Tseen Khoo states: “there is undoubtedly a majority of Chinese Australian material…(indeed, Chinese material also dominates Canadian and US contexts)” (2006: 240- 241). Dean Chan suggests that the term ‘Asian-Australian’ is made to stand in for the “category of the ideal(ised) middle class Chinese migrant”, producing “new hierarchies” (2000: 57).
2 Edited collections of critical work on both Asian-Australian and Australian multicultural literatures have made a limited space for the analysis of South Asian-Australian cultural production. For example, Sneja Gunew and Kateryna O. Longley’s Striking Chords: Multicultural Literary Interpretations (1992) includes an essay by Yasmine Gooneratne on Mena Abdullah’s collection of short stories and an essay by Satendra Nandan on artists of the Pacific. Ien Ang et al’s. Alter/Asians: Asian-Australian Identities in Art, Media and Popular Culture includes an essays by Suvendrini Perera and Devleena Ghosh who examine, respectively, the contexts of Sri Lankan ethnic politics and the Indo-Fijian-Australian community. Alison Broinowski mentions some of the writers considered here in a highly condensed chapter in her About Face: Asian Accounts of Australia (2003). Yasmine Gooneratne’s Celebrating Sri Lankan Women’s English Writing: Volume II (2002) is reference work that provides bio-bibliographical information and brief analyses of some of the work covered in this thesis.
3 In the only extant critical work I have found to take a broad overview of South Asian-Australian literary work, Makarand Paranjape discounts the fiction produced by Anglo-Indians (and by extension Sri Lankan Burghers) because he believes “there is little effort on their part to retain a distinct South Asian identity in the larger Australian social mix” (2003: 295). I reject this flawed assumption and include work by writers of ‘mixed descent’ in this thesis.
4 Figures quoted in The Australian (based on information from the Australian Bureau of Statistics) put the number of India-born residents of Australia at 120,000 in 2005 (see Dale, 2005). The use of place of birth does not give an accurate indicator of the number of people who might identify as Indian or South Asian. This figure does not include those from other nation-states, Pakistan, Bangladesh etc. or those who are of Indian/South Asian descent, either born in Australia, or elsewhere, for example the many Fiji-born, Indo- Fijians who have emigrated to Australia. Carmen Voigt-Graf estimates that “India-born persons” currently “make up less than half of the total Indian population in Australia” (2003: 147).
5 Bilimoria and Ganguly-Scrase estimate that there were 7681 India-born residents of Australia at the turn of the twentieth century, of which roughly 3000 were ‘Anglo-Indian’ – in the older sense of the term, referring to British families stationed in the subcontinent for long periods (1988: 25). These figures are very approximate and based on the broader sense of British India, including, for example, those from Ceylon and possibly some people who were identified as ‘Afghans.’ For further information on ‘pre- Federation’ migration from South Asia to Australia also see: De Lepervanche (1984), Weerasooria (1998) and Rajkowski (2005).
6 For my purposes, South Asia is a geographical area containing Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, the Maldives, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
7 See Lo et al. (2000: 2) and Stratton (1998: 47-61).
8 See Shankar et al. (eds. 1998), Davé et al (2000) and Kurien (2003) for a discussion of Indian/South Asian-American issues in relation to the more established Asian-American collective.
9 The Australia Council for the Arts (which includes Literature) is a funding body that “supports culturally diverse arts and artists, building on the innate strength of a society which is one of the most culturally diverse in the world”. See the Council’s policy on ‘Arts in a Multicultural Australia,’ available online at: http://www.ozco.gov.au/council_priorities/multicultural
10 For an indication of the dialogue on the development and utility of postcolonial studies see: Appiah (1991), McClintock (1992), Prakash (1992), Dirlik (1994) and Hall (1996).
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11 Also known as ‘New Literatures in English’ this work resulted in a range of edited collections and monographs on topics such as, West Indian Literature (King, ed. 1979) and Indian Writing in English (Iyengar, 1961).
12 ‘New literatures in English’ is a term that coexisted with Commonwealth literary studies. See The Empire Writes Back for a concise discussion of the difficulties in finding a name that could encompass a broad comparative study of non-canonical english literatures (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 23-24). Also see Huggan’s distinction between the ‘universalist’ assumptions of the Commonwealth school and the more ‘local/historical’ approach to the New Literatures scholarship (2001: 234-236).
13 The ‘materialist’ strand of postcolonial studies has been attributed to a group of critics including, Arif Dirlik, Aijaz Ahmad, E. San Juan, Benita Parry, Barbara Harlow, Timothy Brennan, Satya Mohanty, and Neil Lazarus (see Shankar, 2004: 66).
14 Ahmad also remarks on the ‘Second World’, Marxist reality and potential of India, where the two communist parties are an important political force and “the electorate that vote ritually for these two parties is probably larger than the communist electorates in all the rest of the capitalist world” (Ahmad, 1992: 101).
15 Seth et al. signal this interaction with the following statement: “[f]rom the Simpsons to Suttee, from Madonna to Mao, ‘our’ postcolonialism offers a new promiscuity which not only heads ‘downmarket’ but along the way, breaks through the cordon that separates the anthropological-based cultural studies practiced in relation to non-western societies from the popular culture schools that focus on the popular in the West” (1998: 10). Also see Procter (2003: 10) for a discussion of the nexus between literary studies and cultural studies in the context of diaspora.
16 However, there are times when I find his ‘literal take’ on the connection between physical hybridity, cultural hybridity and progressive politics rather tenuous. For example, when discussing the ‘ethnic- conflict’ in Bosnia, Nederveen Pieterse is careful to point out the political and popular manipulation of ethnicity as well as the desire of some to emphasise common roots or not to identify at all. Then come the following surprisingly reductive sentences: “In Vojvodina, the region of the former Yugoslavia where cultural mixing, measured by rate of intermarriage, was highest, conflict was absent (Botev 1994). In the region where intermarriage was lowest, at 0.2 percent in Kosovo, conflict was sparked off” (Nederveen Pieterse, 2004: 105).
17 Nederveen Pieterse makes this point to opposite effect when discussing the modernisation- homogenisation thesis put forward by certain sociologists (he mentions Tomlinson and Barrie Axford) who see globalisation as westernisation in a technological guise. Nederveen Pieterse states: “one wonders whether these accounts are actually about culture or about power” (2004:113). He claims to be interested in the former more than the latter; this is a good example of the shortcomings of either/or explanations.
18 The original letter was written in 1998 in French. An English translation was published in Harper’s Magazine, No. 1794, November, 1999 (See Gikandi, 2001: 655, footnote 5).
19 Gikandi makes a similar point in relation to poststructuralism and postcolonialism, arguing that the emphasis on the experiences of minorities and migrant subjects within metropolitan centres (in Bhabha’s work, for example) comes at a cost: “although postcolonial theory has provided us with some powerful critiques of the nation and nationalism, its engagement with the decolonized nation and its literature has been minimal” (2004: 118).
20 To avoid confusion I should note that this review will switch between the terms ‘Indian’ and ‘South Asian’ in keeping with the preferred usage in the particular work under discussion and will occasionally use ‘Indian/South Asian’ when comparing models. Mishra attempts to be specific in his earlier article on the Indian diaspora, making clear that he is referring to the ‘Indian-Pakistan’ diaspora or ‘Indo-Pakistani’ diaspora when discussing Hanif Kureshi’s work (1996: 436; 440). Mishra also makes it clear that his “archive is the Indian diaspora (in a larger global South Asian context)” in his later work (2001: 25). The rationale for the switching between terms in Paranjape’s and Fludernik’s work is largely to do with whether they are providing an introduction to a collection – where South Asia is used – or a contribution to a collection – where India is more often used. 253
21 Michael Roberts has suggested that South Asian diaspora critics “tend to render quarter-truths into whole truths” (2003: 174). Roberts also challenges Clifford’s notion of ‘dwelling-in-travel’, and the general emphasis on the blurring of categories and hybridity in recent scholarship. Taking examples from the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora, he demonstrates how ‘roots’ are self-consciously re-established.
22 In two of his essays in Spectres of Comparison (2000), Benedict Anderson discusses diaspora (and the tendency towards long-distance nationalism in diaspora) as an extension of a census-style, identity- focused conception of ethnicity which lacks any universal grounding (see Anderson, 2000: 29-45; 58-76). For interesting responses to the debate over the utility of identity politics see Bramen (2002) and a recent collection of essays edited by Alcoff et al. (2006).
23 Ghetto is a term which has historically referred to the Jewish quarter of a city (with the first ghetto established in Venice in 1516) and is thus fully implicated the notion of diaspora.
24 Ghassan Hage comments on how tropes of cultural enrichment and ‘ghettoisation’ operate under a dialectic of inclusion/exclusion in relation to Australian multiculturalism and what he terms the ‘White Nation’s fantasy’ of control over ‘Third World-looking people’. See Hage (1998).
25 Braziel and Mannur state that the term was first used in the Septuagint, a “Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures explicitly intended for the Hellenic Jewish communities in Alexandria (circa 3rd century BCE)” (2003: 1).
26 Safran refers to ‘Cohen’s elaboration’ of his schemata for diaspora when reproducing and extending this model in a recent article titled ‘The Jewish Diaspora in a Comparative and Theoretical Perspective’ (2005) (see n.5 p.56). Monika Fludernik notes that Cohen’s nine-point model is “taken as a point of critical reference by several contributors” (2003: xii). Emmanuel S. Nelson, Vijay Mishra, James Clifford, Makarand Paranjape all draw on Safran’s model. Rosemary Marangoly George also reproduces Safran’s criteria as quoted in Nelson.
27 Here James Clifford is drawing on an early article on the Indian diaspora by Amitav Ghosh (1989).
28 Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin’s article was first published in 1993 in Critical Inquiry (Vol. 19. No. 4. Summer. pp. 693-725) and reproduced in 2003 in Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader edited by Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur. The page reference in text is to the 2003 edition.
29 Three distinct Jewish communities reside in Cochin (Kerala), Bombay and Calcutta. During the seventh and eighth century fifty thousand Persians chose to flee to India rather than undergo conversion to Islam. They maintain, in declining numbers, a belief in Zoroastrianism. The social and economic fortunes of the Parsi community are also connected to internal migrations within India. Many Parsis moved from Gujarat to Bombay after it came under British ownership in 1661. For two centuries Parsi migration to Bombay steadily increased until now over seventy percent of all Parsis reside in Bombay.
30 One exception is John Docker’s 1492: The Poetics of Diaspora (2001). Docker analyses Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) as part of his “utopian desire to recover in story and imagination the medieval pre-1492 Judeo-Islamic trading and social world of plurality and convivencia that stretched from Moorish Spain to India and China” (2001: 249). Another exception is Chekuri and Muppidi’s ‘Diasporas Before and After the Nation: Displacing the Modern’ (2003). They connect pre-modern cultural flows to the contemporary Indian diaspora. With an idealising ethos similar to that found in Docker’s work, Chekuri and Muppidi concentrate “on the Deccan region of half a millennium ago…seeking a cosmopolitan past, a premodern, precolonial past, a past in which Indians, Arabs, Persians, Mongols, Jews, Turks, Armenians, and Abyssinians were fabled to have crossed paths ….seeking Al-Hind, the Arab name for this multicultural Indo-Islamic world” (2003: 46).
31 For Mishra, the “first movement out of the homeland” is the emigration of labourers under the indenture system (1996: 421). In his later work Mishra recognises that “[h]istorians may, and some have, argued that the modern Indian diaspora has a longer history than I have conceded here and is contiguous with a much older wanderlust, the ghummakar tradition, that took the gypsies to the Middle East and to 254
Europe, and created a vibrant community of traders on the Malabar coast who traded across the Arabian Sea” (2001: 25).
32 Slavery was made illegal in Britain in 1772 but the slave-trade continued until 1807 and slavery throughout the British Empire was only finally abolished in 1833.
33 For brief summaries of these debates see Brij V. Lal ‘The Odyssey of Indenture’ in his Chalo Jahaji (2000: 41-44) and Adapa Satyanarayana’s ‘Birds of Passage: Migration of South Indian Laborers to Southeast Asia’ (2002: 89-92).
34 See Brij V. Lal (2002: 42; 131-132) for details on the numbers of those who did return to India after indenture.
35 Script-writers would include Hanif Kureshi and Meera Syal in the UK. Filmmakers would include (UK-based) Gurinder Chadha, (Canada-based) Deepa Mehta and (US-based) Mira Nair. Popular music from the UK would include Apache Indian, Asian Dub Foundation, Bally Sagoo, Fun^Da^Mental, Joi Bangla and a number of trans-Atlantic DJs. Needless to say these artists may have nothing more in common than the various ways in which they take South Asia and/or the diaspora as one strand among other thematic influences.
36 For descendents of the ‘old diaspora’, Vijay Mishra cites “repressive regimes (Burnham in Guyana)”, the calls for repatriation in Kenya and Uganda, and the Fiji coups as specific traumas (1996: 431 and 2001: 34). “For Indians from India living in the diaspora” he suggests that the traumatic moment could be ‘the tragedy of partition’ or ‘personal histories’ of dispersal and here he refers to “that of the Parsis in the works of Rohinton Mistry, for instance” (2001: 34). He also refers to the Komagata Maru incident of 1914 – which involved ‘white Canada’s’ rejection of a ship carrying potential Indian immigrants – and the crashing of Air India flight 182 in 1985 (34; 43).
37 The presence of India as an absence is conveyed in the closing comments of an introduction to a collection, Reworlding: The Literature of the Indian Diaspora (1992) edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. After pointing out the individualised nature of diaspora writing, he states in terms very similar to Mishra:
At the core of all diasporic fictions, nevertheless, is the haunting presence of India – and the anguish of personal loss it represents. It is precisely this shared experience of absence that engenders an aesthetics of reworlding that informs and unites the literature of the Indian diaspora” (Nelson, 1992: xv-xvi and quoted in Marangoly George, 1996: 183 my emphasis).
38 Brij V. Lal is referring to Vijay Mishra’s earlier work on ‘Indo-Fijian Fiction and the Girmit Ideology’ (1979). Girmit is a creolisation of the word agreement, referring to the contract under which Indians were employed in indenture.
39 I recognise the irony involved in my attempt to very loosely apply the Derridian concept of ‘differance’ to Lal’s comments. In Derrida’s work ‘differance’ incorporates both senses of the term difference – to differ (spatially) by way of separation, distinction, opposition and to defer (temporally) by way of relay, detour, deviation. See: Derrida trans. Bass, 1982.
40 This rather polemic stance is qualified at several points: Paranjape mentions the privilege accorded to the English-speaking elites of India who are also often seen as alienated within their ‘own country’ and suggests that there are no ‘pure’ states of either belonging or displacement (2000: 229; 231).
41 Available online: http://www.indiaday.org/ (accessed 14/05/04).
42 This quote is taken from a report titled: ‘Report of the High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora’, dated August 18 2000. The committee was chaired by Dr. L. M. Singhvi and the report was copied to the secretary to the Prime Minister as well as other government offices. Its terms of reference are broad and include the changes to legislation to allow dual citizenship that have since come to pass. The report is available online at: http://www.indiaday.org/singhvi-detail.htm (accessed 14/05/2004).
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43 Paranjape develops this argument in his essay, ‘One Foot in Canada and a Couple of Toes in India: Diasporas and Homelands in South Asian Canadian Experience’ (2000: 161-170). At the close of the essay he comments on how the homeland/host nation-state dialectic is more complicated in the case of a second-generation of writers born in Canada.
44 The delineation of historically separate ‘old’ and ‘new’ or ‘first’ and ‘second’ diasporas is present in a number of works which do not directly engage with Mishra’s article. To mention just a few: Victor J. Ramraj uses the distinction to include a number of non-South Asian diasporas that were, in the first stage, transported to the ‘corners’ of Empire and, in the second, left Commonwealth countries for the UK, North America and Australia (1996: 214). Ralph J. Crane and Radhika Mohanram also use the distinction in their introduction to an edited collection of articles on the South Asian diaspora. Unusually, they see Australia as a destination for both indentured labour and later economic migrations, but do not expand on this issue (2000: vii-viii). John McLaren divides the Indian emigration into three stages: the first diaspora commences in the 19th century with indenture, the second diaspora takes place in the 20th century and takes unskilled workers to labour on the ‘oilfields of the Middle East and in the cities of Europe’, the simultaneous third diaspora comprises of ‘middle or upper classes’ from India and the ‘old’ plantation colonies who settle in the Americas, UK and Australia (2003: 36-37).
45 Fludernik chooses to employ a particular set of comparisons in her introduction; firstly that of Indians in the US as a new ‘model minority,’ replicating the success of the Jewish-American diaspora, and secondly as better placed to flourish in the US than the UK due to their high status and the comparative lack of civil unrest and racism. Miriam Sharma argued persuasively in a paper presented during the Sydney South Asia Seminar Series (2002) that these particular comparisons are part of general media- and self-representations of Indians in the US which obscure the lives of those less affluent as well as the much longer history of Indian communities in the US (settled in California, for example, during the first decades of the 20th century) for whom the ‘celebration of the hyphen’ was/is far from easy.
46 The issue of ‘market forces’ is a point of contention for many critics. Uma Parameswaran, for example, suggests that diasporic writers are rewarded if their work continues to “occupy the safe space of the original homeland” and subtly penalised if they take a critical view of the host-nation (2001: 292).
47 References to ‘Silicon Valley’ are often used in an offhand manner (as I have) to signify the success of South Asian Americans. Paranjape states: “there is nothing alienating or dispossessing about a South Asian’s sudden burst of stupendous success in Silicon Valley, where she has relocated to better her prospects. Such a person’s success is celebrated the world over and not invoked to illustrate the misfortunes of forced, cross-continental traffic in human beings” (2001: 5). Amitava Kumar also draws on a common perception of the Indian-American labour force when he states: “[i]t is the software writers from India rather than the fiction writers who are wired to the circuits of global production” (2002: 187). However, he goes on to unpick the myth of unconditional success (in which computer code becomes the ‘the global language of entrepreneurs’) by exposing the highly exploitative underbelly of the IT economy in Silicon Valley, and by acknowledged the many new arrivals who fail to ‘make it’ in such boom and bust industries (see Kumar, 2002: 186-197).
48 From a paper titled, ‘The Concept of Diaspora in the Contemporary World’, presented at the International Economic History Association XIII Congress in Buenos Aires. Available online at: www.eh.net/XIIICongress/cd/papers/10Gourgouris390.pdf (Accessed 18/06/2003).
49 For general comments on class see Kumar’s introduction to, Away: The Indian Writer as an Expatriate, (2002: xiv-xvii). For an in-depth Marxist-inspired analysis of alienation in South Asian English-Language fiction see Tabish Khair’s, Babu Fictions: Alienation in Contemporary Indian English Novels (2001). For specific comments relating to the way the most prominent Indian-English language writers have graduated from either one of the two most elite schools in India, see Leela Gandhi’s article, ‘Indo- Anglian Fiction: Writing India, Elite Aesthetics, and the Rise of the ‘Stephanian’ Novel’ (1997).
50 For an American example, see the extensive information presented in ‘Echoes of Freedom: South Asian Pioneers in California, 1899-1965’ online at: www.lib.berkeley.edu/SSEAL/echoes/echoes.html Migrations to Canada were mostly to British Colombia to work in railway construction, lumber mills and forestry at the turn of the twentieth century.
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51 See the section on ‘Multiculturalism and Indigeneity’ in Gunew’s recent book (2004: 43-46). Also see Stephenson (2001 and 2003), Curthoys (2000), Perera (2000a) and Pugliese (2002).
52 Others include Chitra Fernando (deceased), Chandani Lokuge, Sudesh Mishra, and Satendra Nandan, each full-time academics and dedicated creative writers. Suneeta Peres da Costa and Dipti Saravanamuttu are primarily creative writers who supplement their income by teaching and/or research. Christopher Cyrill does likewise, teaching creative writing. Adib Khan also teaches creative writing although Khan has also previously taught in History and English. Shelagh Goonewardene, Laleen Jayamenne, Brij Lal, Vijay Mishra and Suvendrini Perera were/are primarily academics who have occasionally written creative pieces.
53 Ghassan Hage differentiates between the social and cultural conceptions of multiculturalism that were developed during the 1970s. The social form (associated with the Whitlam Labour Government) focused on issues of welfare and equity. At its most radical, social multiculturalism was seen as “a tool for dealing with the structural class inequalities produced around ethnicity” (Hage, 2003: 59). The cultural conception was based around the “traditions and practices” new migrants brought to Australia (ibid). Migrants were now not required to assimilate, either immediately or generationally, but were permitted and even encouraged to maintain their (ethnically defined) heritages. Hage believes that the Fraser Liberal Government endorsed this version of multiculturalism “in order to promote a culturalist version of Australian society ahead of a class one” (2003: 60). He suggests that it was used as “a key strategy in a conservative restructuring of the welfare state whose main purpose was the demolition of Whitlam-style social democracy” (2003: 60).
54 The ‘Discovering Democracy’ project ran from 1997 to 2004. In 2004 a similar project under, ‘Civics and Citizenship’ was instituted. Online: http://www.civicsandcitizenship.edu.au/cce/default.asp?id=8985 The comment to ‘prepare young people…’ was taken from the Executive Summary of 2000-2003. Online: http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/school_education/publications_resour.../introduction.html The comment on to ‘arrest a disturbing decline…’ is attributed to the Minister for Schools (in 1997), Dr. Kemp. See, Media Release: Discovering democracy May 8, 1997 k21/97. Online: http://www.dest.gov.au/archive/ministers/kemp/k21_8597htm.htm
55 From the Discovering Democracy School Resource File for Secondary Education. Available online: http://www.discoveringdemocracywa.net
56 Extracts from Seasonal Adjustments were being used in a 2005 course titled ‘Imagining Australia’ at Aarhus University in Denmark. Indiana University in the US ran a course titled, ‘Studies in International English Literature: Narrating Australia’ in 2005 that includes A Change of Skies as a set text. The German, Universitat Leipzig also offered a course titled, ‘The Experience of Otherness in Tourist Culture’ that included A Change of Skies as a set text in 1999/2000.
57 For details and different views on the ascendancy and displacement of multiculturalism in Australia, see the following. Carter (1986) examines the nexus between nationalism, multiculturalism and migrant writing. Gunew and O. Longley eds. (1992) and Gunew (1994) offer literary frameworks for the study of, primarily, ‘NESB’ writing. Castles (1999) and Ommundsen (2000a) provide overviews, the former focusing on immigration and the latter on public rhetoric. Lopez (2000) argues that the uptake of multiculturalism as an ethnic-affairs policy during the early to mid-1970s was a result of the ‘lobbying’ of a few influential figures. Stratton and Ang (1994), Khoo (1996) and Gunew (2004) compare Australia to the USA and Canada – Khoo and Gunew focusing on literary comparisons. Stratton (2000) examines the complex situating of post-war British migrants in multicultural Australia. Vasta and Castles eds. (1996), Stratton (1998) Hage (1998) Singh (2000) and Ang (2001) explore issues of race, racism, Asian-Australia and the dominant discourses of whiteness. See also note 33 in the previous review for references to work specifically focused on Indigenous–Multicultural/Asian-Australia.
58 Interestingly, Gooneratne’s most recent book of short fiction, Masterpiece and Other Stories (2002), includes a number of stories relating to ‘a work in progress’ then under the working title of Tsunami. The title refers to a Sri Lankan character’s unusual ‘Japanese’ name. Gooneratne may have changed the working title following the tsunami of 2005.
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59 The story, titled “How Barry Changed His Image”, was published by Meanjin in 1989 and became chapter fifteen in A Change of Skies.
60 To be exact, Relative Merits was Gooneratne’s first full length prose work (of a non-academic nature) produced after migration to Australia, she had also self-published a collection of poems in 1981. Gooneratne has, in fact, recorded the story of her father’s family in the first non-critical book she produced after migration Relative Merits: A Personal Memoir of the Bandaranaike Family of Sri Lanka.
61 Online. See: http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Gooneratne.html
62 Questions taken from the Discovering Democracy School Resource File for Secondary Education. Available online: http://www.discoveringdemocracywa.net
63 In an interesting parallel, fire is the most influential element in Homework, literally overwhelming the family home at the end of the novel.
64 Sara Ahmad comments on this connection in the introduction to her book, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. Entering the keywords ‘Strange Encounters’ into an online bibliographic search tool turned out lots of books referring to Unidentified Flying Objects and alien sightings, a far cry from the work on the issue of particular encounters with the bodies of strangers, Others, outsiders, she was expecting to find. ‘To encounter,’ in Indian English usage, is a euphemism for the deadly violence of the Indian police.
65 This observation comes after the family learn of the death of Indira Gandhi which causes a ‘small war’ between the two parents. So, in a reversal of the formula by which family dynamics are analogous to Indian histories (as in Midnight’s Children), Peres da Costa employs aspects of Indian politics to comment on personal histories. In a similar manner, Gandhian models of self-sacrifice become the pretext and self-justification for Mina’s nascent eating disorders: “I resolved to relinquish forever my outward delinquency and become the ascetic they wanted, reconstituting old social narratives, saving everybody but myself from the brutal reality of our collective eschatology” (1999: 146-147).
66 Originally published in the British Observer (8 November 1998: 24) to mark the ‘Visit India Year’ of 1999-2000. See: Huggan (2001: 81-2).
67 See Mongia’s book Brand India for an analysis of ‘spiritualism’ as one of the master narratives of the Indian nation. There is some discussion of the contribution of ‘guru fictions’ to this narrative (2005: 73).
68 The full title of this text was: The Travels of Dean Mahomet, A Native of Patna in Bengal, Through Several Parts of India, While in the Service of The Honourable The East India Company, Written by Himself, In a Series of Letters to a Friend. See Fisher’s edited version of this text (1997) and his critical work on Dean Mahomet (1996).
69 This full title of this text was: Shampooing, or, Benefits Resulting From the use of The Indian Medicated Vapour Bath, As introduced to this country by S. D. Mahomed (A Native of India); containing a brief but comprehensive view of the effects produced by the use of The Warm Bath, in comparison with Steam or Vapour Bathing. Also a detailed account of the various Cases to which this healing remedy may be applied; its general efficacy in peculiar diseases, and its success in innumerable instances, when all other remedies have been ineffectual. To which is subjoined An Alphabetical List Of Names (Many of the very first consequence,) Subscribed in testimony of the important use and general approval of The Indian Method of Shampooing. The second edition appeared in 1826 and the third in 1838 (Fisher in Kumar, 2003: 60).
70 See Aravamudan for a fuller discussion of these two events (2001: 30-32).
71 The esoteric (or mundane, depending how you view it) elements of ‘new age’ philosophies are certainly not restricted to the incorporation of South Asian spiritual traditions. In fact the mix-and-match approach is perhaps the key characteristic of this ‘new’ movement. Feng Shui is a good example of the mainstreaming of other Asian ideas and symbols associated with indigenous people’s belief systems have also been widely incorporated; the Native American ‘dreamcatcher’ is a popular market-stall item. 258
72 A prominent example, within South Asian-Australian literature, is Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies in which the key female protagonist follows in the footsteps of the redoubtable Charmaine Solomon “to educate Aussie attitudes to Asia and Asian foods” (1991: 292). In fact, her suitably titled cookbook, ‘Something Rich and Strange’, is not ‘Asian’ but “a wholesome synthesis of East and West” (1991: 293). A more recent example is Wayne Ashton’s Under a Tin-Grey Sari (2002). In this novel the narrator is an ambitious cook who develops a new type of tandoor oven only to have his designs stolen and produced in a British-owned factory.
73 The treatment and symbolism of food is a feature that connects South Asian-Australian writing with other migrant fictions in Australia. See Duruz (1999), Edwards et al. (2000), Khoo (2000), Ryan et al. (1999), and Gunew (2000) for articles on food-topics related to specific communities as well as the general Australian immigration scene.
74 Parama Roy analyses “how food and cooking have become, in several texts, the favored optic (or more properly, trope) to filter questions of national-diasporic filiation and affiliation and their economies of taste and consumption”, focusing in particular on Madhur Jaffrey’s cookbooks and her role as an actress in Merchant Ivory films as well as the novel Meatless Days (1989) by Sara Suleri (2002: 476).
75 Graham Huggan is referring to African literature in English, which (perhaps more so Indian literature in English) is often promoted in this way. For example, Huggan describes how a relatively recent edition of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart “featured a formidable battery of prefatory notes…including a glossary and a short essay…on Igbo culture and history” (2001: 41). He states that “[c]learly, the novel’s publishers are inviting us to read it anthropologically – a smart marketing move when one considers the novel’s prevalence as a high school introduction to a ‘foreign culture’” (2001: 41).
76 Mangala is perhaps drawing from life here. A ‘Cultural Festival of India’ was staged in London in 1985. For a discussion of the patronage and purpose of this actual event, see: Vertovec (2000: 100-101).
77 The NRI returnees are minor figures throughout the novel. They bring a certain cultural capital to Kuchchipuram because, as the novel makes clear, they have come from America and not Dubai. This reflects a ranking of different overseas places that is dismissive of Islamic states (and the lowly occupations that migrants take up there) and more accepting of Western locations. The extensive critical literature on the South Asian diaspora also implicitly produces this hierarchy as there has been little work relating to those migrants who live outside of the Euro-American sphere.
78 The points at which Aparna mentions fantasises and dreams of having been/becoming a sati can be found on pages: 10, 63, 66, 99 and 180 of the novel. Her desire springs from both the literal sense of wanting to die and the more spiritual idea that she can take on the qualities of a sati – sanctity, purity, detachment etc. The quality of fire is invoked in this way at several points in the novel (particularly during the wedding and the fire-walking ceremony).
79 See Lata Mani’s Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (1998). Water, a film by Canada-based Deepa Mehta that focuses on Hindu widows, has recently provoked controversy in India.
80 Steven Vertovec has commented on the “processes of reification, selection and definition” that were used by both “foreign (‘Orientalist’) scholars” and indigenous nationalists to consolidate Hinduism in the nineteenth century through (and in reaction to) concepts based on Semitic religions (2000: 9-10). This rather fluid opposition between Textual / Practical has also been defined in terms of the ‘Great’ and ‘Little’ traditions. The former is comprised of the philosophy of Sankritic rituals and references the most prominent deities in the Hindu pantheon. The latter relates to highly localised practices and encompasses a range of minor deities (Vertovec, 2000: 39-40). The fire-walking ritual in Mangala’s novel is an example of the ‘Little tradition’.
81 If Raghavan represents the (westernised) force of ‘modernity’ in India and Aparna the (indigenous) place of ‘tradition’, as I am suggesting, then the use of sati in this contemporary text is a revealing metaphor because it speaks back to colonial debates on the issue. For an interrogation of the sati debate in colonial India see Lata Mani (1998).
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82 Aparna’s father refers to the DMK (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam / Dravidian Progressive Party) when describing the history of Kuchchipuram to Raghavan, but he does not elaborate on their politics. In fact, the DMK is mentioned as just another iteration of the many changes the town has faced over the centuries, and as such, its political force is reduced.
83 The ‘padre’ acts as a foil to Aparna’s father in the novel. In fact, there is the suggestion of a ‘reverse dowry’ when the Padre thanks Raghavan for his “personal donation” and “the land-lease”, that goes to support the building of a new church, and Raghavan replies: “[y]ou have repaid me well enough in Aparna” (Mangala, 1991: 221).
84 As Paul Sharrad demonstrates in his analysis of The Serpent and the Rope, there is a tension between Rao’s authentic Hindu persona (created by both the author himself and critical interpretations of the text), and the work itself which reveals the complex and dynamic, not static and primordial, workings of Indian culture (1987).
85 See Paul Sharrad (1987: 10) for comments on the genre of The Serpent and the Rope and Vinay Dharwadker for a discussion of the shift from realism to magic realism in commonwealth fiction (1996: 66-71).
86 The two books that Kai Friese refers to, describing their inclination to ‘Hindustical Realism’, are: Manil Suri’s The Death of Vishnu (2001) and Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers (2001).
87 Online web-page address: http://www.harpercollins.com.au/bemlehunte/author_notes.htm
88 The guru philosophises on the importance of the feminine principal and “the science of sex-love” in a number of his discourses, describing physical pleasure as “a poor shadow of brahmic bliss” (see Mangala, 1999: 89-94; 183-187). Rachel Fell McDermott (2000) discusses second-generation South Asian- American responses to the use and celebration of Hindu female deities as icons of ‘new age’ and feminist ideals. In Australia, Selvaraj Velayutham and Amanda Wise (2001) examine the response of the (Hindu) Indian Sydney community to the celebration and/or ‘distortion’ of the Karmasutra in a fundraiser for the Lesbian and Gay Mardi Gras. The 1999 annual ‘Sleaze Ball’ took the theme ‘Homosutra’.
89 For an analysis of Sri Aurobindo’s nationalist and literary legacy see Aravamudan (2003: 196-210).
90 Sunaina Maira comments on the mainstreaming and ‘commodified cool’ of Indian fashion and music in America. She also discusses cross-appropriation between minority groups, with South Asian diasporic youth drawing from Black American hip-hop culture (2000: 329-369).
91 Salman Rushdie associates the rise of ‘Raj nostalgia’ in Britain with the conservative, Thatcherite politics and mythologies (such as the return to family values, a march back to the Victorian period) of the 1980s (1991: 101). Also see Hallisey (2004) for a discussion of the exportation of Raj nostalgia to American as demonstrated by the marketing strategies of home furnishing catalogues.
92 The Firewalkers made the shortlist for the Deo Gloria Award in 1991 and the South East Asia and Pacific section of the Commonwealth Literature First Book Prize the following year.
93 Online web-page address: http://www.aquilabooks.co.uk/frames/index.htm
94 The only books listed by this publisher that do not immediately appear to have a religious theme are a Sicilian cookbook and a book on the art of Graham Cox. It could be productive to compare Mangala’s work to Psychic Wallah, written under the pseudonym Lucas Finn, as this novel is apparently “deeply appreciative of the beauties and contradictions of modern India: a celebration of cultural meeting”. See website (address above).
95 Graham Huggan cites HarperCollins as an example of a more mainstream publisher that has “sometimes appeared to favour multicultural writers who distance themselves from their ethnic origins” (2001: 133); Le Hunte’s implied ‘progression’ from ‘cross-cultural’ to a ‘new Australian’ could be seen as an example of this distancing process.
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96 More than one year after the publication of Murray Waldren’s review, Le Hunte is described in almost exactly the same terms by reviewer, Sharon Verghis: “Le Hunte appears in the doorway of her Paddington home veiled in silks, a symbol of colliding worlds…Her cultural heritage is woven, tapestry- style, into her voice, the cut-glass English accent overlaid with the melodic lilts of Bengal and Bollywood, even the imperiousness of the maharani” (2001: np). Both reviewers draw attention to the author’s appearance and the sound of her voice; for Waldren this is expressed through a dissonance that ‘disconcerts’ him, her posh English accent does not quite match up with the ‘exotic’ body, whereas for Verghis both the body and voice symbolise her mixed heritage. It is interesting to note that Le Hunte plays on this very notion – the class-marked English-accented voice produced from an Indian-clothed body – at least twice in the novel.
97 http://www.harpercollins.com.au/bemlehunte/author_notes.htm
98 Bem Le Hunte’s website, hosted by HarperCollins originally contained four areas, ‘About Bem’, ‘The Book’, ‘Community’ and ‘Press Kit’. Since the publication of her second novel There, Where the Pepper Grows (2005) the site has changed and no longer includes the Press Kit or Community sections. See: http://www.harpercollins.com.au/bemlehunte
99 Of course, the unitalicised Hindi words in the novel are almost always contextualised by the sentence they appear in. For example: Aakash wrote a letter to Jyoti Ma in Delhi and explained that he was going to take up sannyas and live the life of renunciance (Le Hunte, 2000: 128). Nonetheless, by omitting a glossary Le Hunte creates the appearance of mystery. As Parama Roy explains in reference to ‘gastropoetics’, it is “the refusal of complete disclosure that is most productive of readerly gratification [and]…[f]or the expatriate reader …there is the (often self-exoticizing) thrill of imagining oneself a secret sharer” (2002: 487; 489).
100 http://www.harpercollins.com.au/bemlehunte/community/message_board/message.cfm?Topic=2#3
101 http://www.harpercollins.com.au/bemlehunte/community/message_board/message.cfm?Topic=72#1
102 This comes from an interview provided by the author or the author’s publisher to BookBrowse.com. Online: http://www.bookbrowse.com/author_interviews/full/index.cfm?author_number=858
103 The novels mentioned are by Sonia Singh, Amulya Malladi, and Kavita Daswani. See Sepia Mutiny: ‘Buzzword Bingo’. This page also includes a link to Australia-based Shalini Akhil’s The Bollywood Beauty (2005), describing it as a similar “light, pulpy read” to the other novels reviewed. Online: http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/002023.html
104 For Fludernik “[t]ypical representatives of this exoticist genre are the works of Salman Rushdie, Gita Mehta, Vikram Chandra, Arundhati Roy, or the recent novel by Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace” (2003: 261).
105 There are now more opportunities for subcontinental resident writers to publish in India. Tabish Khair comments on the expansion of “Indian or India-based publishers, such as Penguin, Oxford, Ravi Dayal, HarperCollins, Rupa & Co.” which cater to a growing readership amongst the English-educated middle classes (2001: 60). His assessment of the impact of these changes is qualified. New opportunities have:
thrown up a diverse and divergent group of Indian English authors in India who continue to be largely unknown elsewhere. For the first time in the history of Indian English literature, an Indian author does not have to be published in England to be reviewed by the papers in India and marketed in far-flung bookshops. This, however, is not to say that his/her reputation can be made in India – for that s/he still has to get published and reviewed in England or the USA. (Khair 2001: 60-1).
106 See ‘Literature Review I’ for a discussion of changing trends within postcolonial studies.
107 A genre which no doubt also influenced S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike in his fashioning of “John Ratsinghe, a Holmes-like detective” (Jeganathan, 2005: 448).
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108 The first part of The Hamilton Case is brings to mind a number of self-published memoirs produced by members of the Burgher community in Australia. Sam’s mother Maud, for instance, is reminiscent of the mother figure in Grace Mackie’s autobiography, Of Jasmines and Jumboos (1993); both women are in thrall to ‘the great, glittering wheel of society’ and consequently neglect their children (de Kretser, 2003: 173). Other texts reliving familial histories of tea-planting in Ceylon, and/or the changing politics that caused emigration are: Beryl T. Mitchell’s Tea, Tytlers and Tribes (1996) and Trevor LaBrooy’s Jungle Lure: Episodes of Adventures in the Jungles of Sri Lanka (1996). Extracts from these three works and other lesser known or ‘one-off’ fiction can be found in a compendium, Celebrations: Fifty Years of Sri Lanka – Australia Interactions 1948-1998, edited by C.A. and I.H Vanden Driesen (1998).
109 When discussing the particular use of English in The Hamilton Case, de Kretser also comments on the relative fixity and mutability of the English language in varying ex-colonial settings. She points out that certain phrases like ‘I say’ or ‘old chap’ remain ‘fossilised’ in former colonies where English was/is a minority language of the elite classes, in ways that they would not in a majority-English speaking countries like Australia or Canada (interview: 25/05/04).
110 De Kretser also plays with the rules of crime fiction by displacing one crime – Hamilton’s murder – from the centre of the story and replacing it with another. Sam makes one brief statement about his baby brother in his memoir: “Leo’s life was a short one: he died in his cot when he was only six months old and plays no further part in this testimony” (2003: 28). This statement is disproved as Sam’s role in his death (when a small child himself) is gradually revealed.
111 Most of the ‘plantation’ or ‘Hill Country’ Tamils are the descendents of Indian Tamil indentured labourers who were transported to Ceylon by the British from the 1820s to the 1840s. They were effectively disenfranchised and made stateless by the Ceylon Citizenship Act of 1948 and the Indian and Pakistani Residents Acts of 1949. Repartriation programs began in the mid-1960s and continued into the 1980 until interrupted by the civil war, with some acquiring Sri Lankan citizenship in this period. The ‘Grant of Citizenship to Persons of Indian Origin’ Act instituted in 2003 provides the means to enfranchise the remaining stateless Tamil population (see a UNHCR report: ‘Stateless in Sri Lanka’. Online: www.unhcr.lk/protection/statelessness/index.htmlfor further information). Darini Rajasingham- Senanayake draws on the plight of Hill Country Tamils to demonstrate how discourses of diaspora, often seen as enabling minority rights through the project of multiculturalism in ‘Western’ nations, can be used to limit who has access to citizenship in decolonising countries (2003: 90-94). The ‘Sinhala Only’ Bill was one of the first pieces of legislation passed by the newly elected Bandaranaike Government in 1956. Several modifications to this Bill in subsequent decades mitigated the sole language policy and Tamil was accorded parity of status as a result of political deals made in the late 1980s.
112 Chandani Lokuge’s first book of fiction, Moth and Other Stories (1992), is primarily set in Sri Lanka; the last story ‘Alien’ centres on a character who emigrates to Australia after losing a brother in the civil war. Her first novel, If the Moon Smiled (2000), explores the unhappy marriage and generational conflict within an expatriate family living in Australia through the perspective of the wife/mother figure.
113 Other examples would include Chitra Fernando, who writes of Sri Lankan domestic servants in Three Women (1994), and Wayne Ashton, who also examines the lives of cooks, ayahs and bearers in his Under a Tin-Grey Sari (2002) set in Chittagong a few years before the creation of Bangladesh. Moreover, not all South Asian-Australian writers come from identifiably suburban, middle-class backgrounds. Brij V. Lal, Sudesh Mishra and Satendra Nandan are writers who map out their connections to working-class, Indo- Fijian village life in their autobiographical fiction.
114 The local mudalali exploits his economic power by binding men to him “for life in a cycle of poverty” whilst Japanese “drag net fishing” results in smaller hauls (Lokuge, 2003: 50; 87). The fishermen stop going east during the monsoon as the civil war erodes an established, lucrative seasonal migration route (47). And as the war continues tourism declines so even those who live by providing services to tourists go “empty handed” (47).
115 Turtle Nest (2003) could be usefully compared to The Tribal Hangover (1995) by Colombo-based James Goonewardene. The ‘resident’ novel also depicts a character who was adopted and raised in Australia and who then leaves to search for his biological family in Sri Lanka. For him, however, returning to the homeland does bring resolution to a tortured childhood. He achieves a sense of belonging 262
which is made complete by his impending marriage to a girl who had: “something that was typically Asian about her. It was as if she had been steeped in Buddhist rituals and ritualistic processions with beating drums and thumping elephants” (Goonewardene, 1995: 231). Although far more ‘ethnic- authentic’ and palatable than the ending to Turtle Nest, this is far less convincing. It instantly brings to mind the clichéd fiction de Kretser satirises in The Hamilton Case; fiction she describes as: “all sort of frangipani and maidens and temple bells” (de Kretser in Scott, 2004: 101).
116 The Hamilton Case (2000) won the Best Book category for the South East Asia and South Pacific Region of the prestigious Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2004. Chandani Lokuge’s first novel If the Moon Smiled (2000) was shortlisted for the Best Book prize of the NSW Premier’s Prize.
117 For information on the reception of Chitra Fernando’s work in Sri Lanka, see Kandiah (1997) and Gooneratne (2002a) and Perera (2000). For Macintyre, see de Silva (1982) and de Chickera (1999).
118 Chitra Fernando took up a teaching position in the School of English and Linguistics at Macquarie University in 1968. Among her first works were a series of children’s stories she produced under the pseudonym ‘Chitralekha’ for the Taprobane Readers Series in Colombo.
119 Chitra Fernando’s self-financed works include those that were brought out by Wordlink in Sydney and The Writers Workshop in Calcutta. The exceptions are her children’s stories (see above) and PhD thesis, published as Idioms and Idiomacity (1996) by Oxford University Press (see Gooneratne 2002a: 123).
120 For a select bibliography of writing on the 1971 Insurgency, see Goonetilleke (1978: 134-183).
121 The two resident texts Thiru Kandiah gives as examples of a wholly inadequate response to the 1971 Insurgency are Punyakante Wijenaike’s The Rebel (1979) and James Goonewardene’s Acid Bomb Explosion (under the title A Once-Sheltered Island) (1978). He suggests that Ediriweera Sarachchandra’s Curfew and a Full Moon (1978) goes much further in grappling with the motivations of the insurgents (1995: 400-408).
122 Cousins was written over a ten-year period from 1989 to 1998; Chitra Fernando was also preparing her PhD thesis for publication and suffering from what was diagnosed in 1993 as bone-marrow cancer during this time. See Gooneratne (2002a: 123; 131).
123 A Somewhat Strange and Grotesque Comedy was first performed in 1972 and centres on a fratricide within a socially ambitious family. It shows a father returning home to be told that one of his sons has killed the other. The news is conveyed (by his wife) matter-of-factly, as if the child has simply broken another ornament. When asked to explain himself, the child accuses his brother of being the aggressor and goes unpunished. He is told to bury his brother: “Go on, you spilt the milk, you clear the mess” (Macintyre, 1991: 216). This play responds to the 1971 Insurgency in a manner that recalls Fredric Jameson’s formulation of Third World literature as national allegory (see Literature Review I).
124 Amitha’s hometown in Sri Lanka, the imaginary ‘Kalutota’, is, Perera claims, “unmistakably based on Fernando’s beloved birthplace of Kalutara” (2000: 17). Fernando returned to her family home in 1994 knowing that her cancer would limit her life to only a few more years. Yasmine Gooneratne notes: “she observed everything around her … with the intensity and passion of one who knows that she is seeing them for the last time. A good deal of that intense observation, recorded in her journals, is incorporated into Cousins” (2002a: 123).
125 Vancouver and Auckland are other cities with a significant Indo-Fijian population. According to Manas Ray, census data from 1996 puts the Indian ‘Fiji-born’ population of Sydney at over 20,000 and community estimates are up to double that figure (2000: 147).
126 To different degrees Yasmine Gooneratne, Adib Khan, Suneeta Peres da Costa, Christopher Cyrill, Christine Mangala, Chandani Lokuge and Chitra Fernando are or have been involved in teaching and/or academic research. Brij V. Lal is a Professor of History and Director of the Centre for the Contemporary Pacific in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University. Sudesh Mishra is a senior lecturer at Deakin University in the school of Media and Communication. Satendra Nandan is a Professor of Literature and the Director of the University of Canberra Centre for Writing. 263
127 According to Satendra Nandan’s memories of the event, all of the coalition ministers present in parliament were first taken to the army barracks and then transported to the Prime Minister, Timoci Bavadra’s residence. Three days later the Indo-Fijian ministers were removed and taken to Borron House where they remained until they were released. As Nandan recalls, this separation weakened the ministers psychologically and also had the effect of racialising the crowds of supporters who were keeping vigil outside of the two buildings (Nandan, 1991: 141-155).
128 See Brij V. Lal for a discussion of the 1992 elections (1998: 29-41).
129 Anirudh Singh, another Lecturer at the University of the South Pacific, was the main focus of these charges; he was abducted and hospitalised prior to his arrest. The charges were eventually dropped. For details of this event, see Kaplan and Kelly (1994: 123-124).
130 The third member of the Fiji Constitution Review Commission was the chair, Paul Reeves, a former New Zealand Governor General and Archbishop, who was selected and agreed on by both parties (Lal, 1998: 59).
131 The Fiji Constitution Review Committee received over eight hundred oral and written submissions from individual citizens, community groups, and political parties (Lal, 1998: 61). The consensus mood was reflected in the unanimous report submitted by the Commission. Although there was a campaign against the report, the Joint Parliamentary Select Committee, set up to facilitate the review process (chaired by Rabuka and made up of eleven Government and nine Opposition members) considered the recommendations and continued the pattern of compromise. Lal notes that it was Rabuka’s political transformation, from a divisive coup-maker to conciliatory multiculturalist, and his good relationship with the leader of the Opposition, Jai Ram Reddy, that led to the positive atmosphere under which the Commission’s report was reviewed (see Lal, 1998: 81-102).
132 This was also the year in which Fiji re-joined the Commonwealth.
133 Many of the thirty-year land leases held mainly by Indo-Fijian sugar growers were due for renewal and a number of commentators have pointed to the particular ‘abrasive’ style of the deposed Indo-Fijian Prime Minister, Mahendra Chaudhary, on this and other sensitive issues. See Ghosh (2001) and articles in Lal (ed. 2001).
134 At Independence in 1970 Indo-Fijians were the slightly larger group but now indigenous Fijians make up over fifty percent of the total population, with post-coup Indo-Fijian emigration contributing to this changing demographic.
135 Arthur Gordon used the existing hierarchy to construct a model of traditional social structures, setting up the ‘Great Council of Chiefs’ (Bose Levu Vakaturaga).
136 There are seventy one seats in the House of Representatives, forty-six of which are decided on a communal basis – with twenty-three seats reserved for indigenous Fijians, nineteen for Indo-Fijians, three for ‘General Electors’ (made up of minority groups including Europeans) and one for Rotuman Islanders. The remaining twenty-five ‘open’ seats are decided on a non-communal basis. A preferential voting system adds a further layer of complexity to the voting system in Fiji.
137 Satendra Nandan draws attention to how this ‘more than half the population’ includes many people from other communities. People from Rotuma and other Pacific islands, the ‘Part-Europeans’ and Chinese who have made their home in Fiji for generations are often overlooked in discussions (as in this chapter) that focus on the relations between indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians.
138 Brij V. Lal’s doctoral thesis examined the information contained in forty-five thousand emigration passes in order to map out the background of indentured migrants from North India, with a certain definitiveness. Based on an analysis of the caste and place of origin/registration categories, Lal was able to refute the commonly held assumption that indentured migrants came from the very dregs of Indian society. (Lal, interview: 09/06/04).
264
139 In a similar manner, Vijay Mishra tells of how his own bi-lingual experience of inter-communal cooperation which was nevertheless framed by an administration that “affirmed divisions in terms of race” (2001a: 61).
140 Brij V. Lal has produced a number of works on Fijian politics, see in particular Lal, 2002 and 2002a.
141 For theories of Oceania also see: Hau’ofa et al. (eds. 1993), Hereniko (2001), Sharrad (2002), Wendt (1976) and Winduo (2000).
142 For Dipesh Chakrabarty the key difference between the Marxist-inspired, traditional project of ‘history from below’ and work produced by the Subaltern Studies collective is the self-critical awareness with which the latter addresses the difficulty of incorporating subaltern pasts into mainstream historiography.
143 Aside from the remarks in the ‘Author’s Notes’ and Syd Harrex’s comments in the Afterword, there is only one piece focused on the 2000 coup: ‘Portrait of a Hostage PM’ (Nandan, 2000: 111-114).
144 Michel de Certeau comments on how the members of such a professional association are generally drawn from the same elite strata of society. This is not quite the case for Brij V. Lal, Sudesh Mishra and Satendra Nandan.
145 Lisa Lau examines the work published by both ‘resident’ and ‘diasporic’ North American writers in 2001 and 2002, finding eighteen writers publishing fiction. She states: “it is the [diasporic] writers from India who still prevail in sheer numbers, and it is their writings which dominate the South Asian literary subculture” (Lau, 2005: 240). A number of terms circulate within the UK, including the once popular ‘Black British’ nomenclature; a term designed to emphasise alliances between ‘black’ and ‘Asian’ writing.
146 See Blunt (2005) for a discussion of the changing immigration policies that permitted Anglo-Indian immigration to Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. See Weerasooria (1988) for the same with regards to Sri Lankan Burghers. See also D’Cruz (2000 and 2003) for a discussion of Anglo-Indian fiction in the context of Australian multiculturalism and postcolonialism.
147 For postcolonial studies, see Brydon and Tiffin (1993) who compare Canada, Australia and the West Indies. For an example of ‘situated multiculturalism,’ see Gunew (2004). For the comparison of Asian- Australian and Asian-Canadian literature and activism see Khoo (2003). The role of British and/or American influences on Australian and Canadian literary studies is addressed in each of these texts.
148 See: Shyam Selvadurai, Story Wallah! A Celebration of South Asian Fiction (Ontario: Thomas Allen Publishers. Ed. 2004). 265
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Appendix: Interview Transcripts
Christopher Cyrill 19/11/03 286
Michelle de Kretser 25/05/04 305
Adib Khan 17/10/03 313
Brij V. Lal 09/06/04 327
Chandani Lokuge 22/05/04 349
Ernest Macintyre 28/09/03 359
Suneeta Peres da Costa 29/11/03 367
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Interview with Christopher Cyrill in Glebe, Sydney on the 19th of November 2003
What prompted you start writing fiction and what inspires you to keep writing?
Between the ages of fourteen and seventeen I probably sent out a poem or story every week for three years and got rejection after rejection after rejection. It wasn’t until I was seventeen that I actually published something. So I had that strong toughening up process for three years and I don’t know what you were like as a teenager but I was faintly suicidal, so I wasn’t exactly the top of myself as a human being. It’s exactly what I tell my students, I tell them this story. I tell them you’ve got to go through that, if you can’t cope with that please don’t go on, because this is what happens: it doesn’t matter who you are, your work gets rejected. Another thing I’d stress about my work is that illumination or inspiration comes up in long diligent work, long mundane work. Bad sentences, crap first drafts and then something goes click. That was the process with Ganges. Once I had what I consider the main scene of the book, where the father makes the map and the rivers then spread out to the diaspora, that for me said what this book is actually about and from then it gradually gained momentum and started to write itself.
What are your opinions on the role or purpose of storytelling?
I don’t think it’s theoretical. I don’t think of anything beyond the Raymond Carver idea that it’s the story bringing the news from one village to another. For me that’s what it does; you walk in each other’s shoes, we enter into the cultural dreaming of any culture that we engage in. I can see that some writers are prophets, I am trying to write about certain images that appeal to me and trying to entertain on the level of language. I’m not a plot writer. I’m not interested in plots basically. My narratives are associative rather than linear. I don’t see myself as anything more than hopefully some sort of juggler or magician with language who carries across some kind of truth, but not necessarily something that is going to change your life. I don’t think that someone is going to read one of my books and go: right that’s it, I’ve got to sail the world, I’ve got to go to the Ganges, I’ve got to take up hand-gliding now I’ve read this book, I’ve got to tell my mother that I love her. I don’t write those kind of books. I’ve got a couple of small insights to make and that’s it. I think you can find a story in a shoebox. It’s just that you have to be prepared to stare at the bloody shoebox for long enough. I’d love to write some great big selling book with a hundred and fifty characters and a hundred and fifty different things happening, but it’s not part of my personality.
The narrator of The Ganges and its Tributaries often imagines overlaying or intertwining the cartography of India onto and into the Melbourne suburbs. Could you elaborate on the use of mapping metaphors in this particular novel?
There’s a book that had a deep effect on me when I was a kid its called Where the Wild Things Are (and my next book sort of engages with that as a text). For me that is one of the great prose poems of exile. I was just daydreaming about it, because half the time you spend writing is daydreaming; there’s the sense that this boy could always go somewhere else then return home. But I don’t have that comfort. I know I have gone from somewhere where I was supposed to be, in a metaphoric sense at least, but there’s no going back there because the place that I have come from is totally imaginary. India
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does not exist. There’s some place called India; it’s got nothing to do with me. So I thought what this narrator might then do is try to map everything that’s around him, to give himself some sort of definition of where he is in exile, to actually try to establish the borders of his exile. And the text that really fed me this idea, no, no I won’t say fed, that I stole the idea from, was David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life where Virgil is in exile for most of the book. So once I had that initial idea that this is what I was doing the rest is completely contrived. Now I hope it doesn’t read that way, but I just thought repeat it, repeat the motif. You know, Chekhov says if there’s a gun above the fireplace at the start of the story, its got to go off at the end. Detail must resonate, this is just one strand and I’ll keep working it and working it. Other critics have talked about the mapping but another thing that I put in was lots of lonely bums, derelicts, dossers basically, all through the novel. These people, men standing by themselves, lying by themselves, always seen in the public light. I like the way people behave in public spaces, but more particularly in public light and I would include in that sunlight, moonlight etcetera, the way they are actually illuminated by what is exterior. It’s something that has been on my mind lately and I realise I’ve been doing it for a long time, every book has got someone being illuminated in a public space. I can’t give you a reason. I know with the maps it was a contrived let’s carry this metaphor through, the light is just something that fascinates me.
Maps fascinate me and I found that although the metaphor did repeat throughout the novel it never seemed to stay the same of course. I read that book and all I can see are the flaws Tamara to be honest. Jorge Luis Borges said that he never reread his work because he could just see the flaws. Now when I was writing the radio play of the novel I thought, I’m not keeping that in because it’s just a really bad sentence. So part of the process of writing the radio play was cutting all the stuff I would have cut if I’d written it two years later because, I feel reading it, there is lots of scene setting that was just over-elaborate and there are also lots of unnecessary sentences that don’t trust the reader to make the connections. If I had my time again, I would have also kept my original structure which was initially much more like a river. I had wanted it to look like one paragraph and one sentence and I didn’t end up writing it that way because I knew no publisher would go for it. Even after I’d written it I wanted it to look like there were no distinct gaps between paragraphs and breaks, because all I was trying to do was recreate one man’s mind, obviously as a work of fiction so it didn’t really connect to the person [writing it]. My main structure was to make it look like a river and I don’t think it really does the way it’s presented in the book, but other people say it does.
There’s a point in Hymns for the Drowning where you talk about reading in terms of a water motif, in terms of swirls and dips which I thought was very interesting because you leave room for different streams of thought or ways of reading it. I’ve thought of going even more [in that direction]. The book that I’m writing now is meant to look like footnotes so that there’s a huge story that’s not on the page. These are footnotes to the story and what I’m going to do is write them in chronological order, one, two, three, four, up to twenty eight, and then I am going to go, one, fourteen, twenty-seven, sixteen, fifteen. So basically if the reader wanted to find the linear structure they could but they’d have to cut up the pages to do it. For me, structure is the greatest detail and to have something where language and form connect, hopefully connect neatly, that’s what makes a really great work of fiction, not that I’ve written anything great but I’m trying to.
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There are a number of stereotypes associated with the notion of suburban living, such as conservative politics, aspirational values, conspicuous consumption and so on. How does suburbia, as a concept, play out in The Ganges and its Tributaries?
I’ve got to say again that it was completely contrived. I actually grew up in St. Kilda and we moved out to the suburbs. We were in a very urban area surrounded by other Indians and we moved out to the suburbs much later when I would have been in my teens, so I consider my homeland to actually be St Kilda, a small suburb by the sea. But it was the skeleton houses, now you will never see one of those in St. Kilda, and I needed them in the book. I needed two lovers to meet in skeleton houses to convey the idea of home and of a home being incomplete. So I had to set much of the book there. Subsequently people have said you wrote so well on suburbia. Well I don’t think of it like that; this character must meet this character here for metaphoric reasons and it must be a skeleton house and I can’t find any in St. Kilda, there just wouldn’t have been any. There would have been houses that would be in the process of being torn down, the facades taken down but they would still have roofs on top. I needed building rather than [demolition], new houses. The other thing that appealed to me is that it connected with the idea of public space. There’s all that open space in suburbia. It’s not crowded in tightly. It’s the sort of place someone could construct an imaginary field without being interrupted by a hundred other people. I know suburbia gets a bad rap but I do see it as a place of great daydreaming, if you can find the right dreamer and the right place.
So that’s a twist on the idea of the suburban dream rather than the dream being an end- goal of house, car absolutely but coming from a migrant experience it’s aspirational to be middle-class and suburban. I mean you want to be that because growing up we didn’t have enough food to eat. So what’s wrong with that? But I see that what suburbia does do is create a cycle of ownership and ownership and ownership and extension and renovation and upgrading the car and people are driving themselves crazy to consume, but I’m not sure that’s just suburbia. It’s something that interests me because its something we don’t really have in the same way in the UK. There everything is really close and uptight and you have one town falling into another but here the suburbs go on for miles the big roads, yes it would be startling. When I first went to London (and I thought of myself as a city-dweller, nothing’s going to phase me) I felt crowded in. So I can imagine for you coming here and looking at [the suburbs], especially around Oakleigh where the suburbs look as if – does the road need to be that wide? Can’t we fit a few more people in? But to answer your question, I saw aspects of suburbia that would suit the metaphors that I was trying to carry in the novel, so I wasn’t making any commentary on suburbia. I was far too fascinated with what it means to be someone of a different colour.
To come back to that earlier point you made about these figures who are on the borderlines of inner-city life, kind of moving through that landscape, that seemed to me to sort of connect with this…it seemed so removed from the narrator’s quite comfortable life in the suburbs. There’s a sense I think I had as a child, how does that happen to someone? I’ve got metaphoric reasons for including them, saying this is one potential for this character, it could be, so he keeps seeing these people. It also shows a sympathetic quality in him, to actually notice when most people would just walk past. But if I go back the deepest impulse is that as a child I would see people like this, especially around St. Kilda. I don’t know if you know the suburb? It’s a bit gentrified now but when I was smaller it was really the migrant centre. I’ve heard it has had quite
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a bad rap it has, lots of prostitutes and criminals etcetera. But yes, how this would happen to somebody and following that process through, very bloody easily; it’s one or two mistakes in a lifetime. But it also does connect with this idea that this man is, at least feels like, an insider and sees these people as exiles within and from their own community, not because of colour, not because they’re migrants, but for some reason they’re on the outside.
The use of mapping is extended to incorporate the idea of genealogies and ancestry which is present in both your novels. Could you comment on the depiction of family histories, structures and dynamics in your work?
The family history of this narrator is probably the most autobiographical part of the novel, although I’ve got sisters and more cousins so there are differences but I did follow this family line. Partly because I was intrigued by it because it had been hidden from me, in a sense. I didn’t really know who my father’s parents were and my parents stopped speaking Hindi when they came to Australia so I had no access to their language, except swear words. So in some ways it was just me doing family research and then just getting it on the page and saying, ‘oh that kind of fits’, and then renaming people after gods etcetera, again for stylistic reasons more than anything else. But I went back and the funny thing I’ve found about Anglo-Indians is that they’re not really that big on family history. They don’t seem to keep the lines, they don’t create the large family trees. Something disappears at the edge of the map, which is what became intriguing to me: who are these people down here which no one seems to be talking about? Was that the British heritage or something like that? Who knows? No one talks about it. Why aren’t you talking about this? It’s one of the reasons I wanted to go in and invent, but as I said I’m not a saga writer so I actually cut myself off. I think I probably had five thousand words on it and I just said, no it’s not really part of this book, it might be for something else.
So how did your family feel reading the novel then? Once it was published. Have members of your family read it?
I don’t think many have read it. I don’t think many own it to start off with. But they’re supposed to be your best customers, where’s this diaspora, I don’t see it! My dad was proud that I’d published a book and Mum doesn’t read so she had bits read to her. One of my aunts actually got it and tore out the first forty pages, but I don’t know why. She died before any of us could explain it. She was an alcoholic, so I don’t know if it was just an alcoholic rage one day. But that’s funny because she was the most literary person of the family. She was the person who would have read it if her mind wasn’t a bit addled, but she just got it and tore it to bits and no one else has really made a comment. I think most of my cousins read it and they say, ‘was that meant to be me’? [I reply] ‘no you’re a metaphor, you don’t exist, I just used this bit out of you’, but they all look for themselves obviously. And having said that none of them have read Hymns. I think they read the first page and said, ‘no I’m not going to go here, at least with the first one we might be in it, but the second, no he hasn’t put us in here’. We’re really a family of musicians and I’m the one who can’t play a thing. They all play three or four instruments, my dad plays five different instruments, so they’re not readers, they’re not really interested that’s fair enough it is.
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So how about Hymns, the family structure there is very different from The Ganges, what prompted you to go for that?
I needed him to have a parent figure, two parents basically, but not his real parents. I needed him to be with and without a family, so I gave him an obscure kind of family. The grandfather isn’t around much and doesn’t really like him and the aunt is off on a kind of Mills & Boon romance that she’s imagining herself in. I had a very strong grandfather who died when I was very young so I once again felt free to invent him. It took so many drafts before I realised he was actually ‘dead’; he’s doing all this talking and he’s actually ‘dead’. But the basic family structure for that novel was having Ganesh as god and everyone else in the book is the son of the god or the daughter of god. Ganesh is the family structure, everything is flowing out of his trunk. I did begin with the idea of the orphan but then I felt I needed to give it something…I’m sorry it’s been so long since I wrote it that I can’t tell you why he had to have two parents that’s OK, that’s fine.
How are the experiences of being in Australia different for your first and second generation characters in The Ganges and its Tributaries?
It comes back to this idea that those older characters had somewhere to go home to but he [the narrator] had nothing. There is a country of story that he could return to but that didn’t actually exist so he couldn’t physically go there. Getting on a plane and going to India would be different for him than it would be for them. They would go home [and perhaps feel] some kind of recognition in the people on the street, in the surrounding area, remember the architecture, anything, people return to ‘that place’. So what did that make him? Again it goes back to the outsider who exists in a house that’s broken down, or a house that’s being built depending on which way you see it, so that’s why I ‘discovered’ the houses. That would be my interpretation. When I returned to India I felt a kind of annulment. It was like, you’ve meant to do it, you’ve gone back to the country of your fathers and your mothers and your aunts and your uncles and you’ve done this now, but now let’s move on. There was no great deep spiritual connection at all. People stood too close to me! It was difficult, in Australia we give ourselves arm’s distance!
One of the things I particularly like about The Ganges and its Tributaries is its detailed focus on the everyday, the almost mundane, small-scale events in life. What do you feel are the benefits of taking such an approach?
To look intently at any kind of object. I always go back to Rilke’s ‘panther’. And at this stage of his life Rilke is staring at things intently, looking for the very essence of them. For me, he doesn’t see how human beings are like panthers, or that panthers are like human beings, but he sees something essential that is in the panther and in the human being and he goes looking for that. So I think you can do that with a phone box, with a shoe box, with a car wheel, with roses, maps; to look intently and follow synapse to synapse the movement of your own brain and to try to capture that in a sentence. ‘The sentence is the tombstone of the thought that inspires it’, as Robert Musil has said. So to really capture the exact way you think in prose is what I tried to do with those two books. To stare intently at something, and then of course you have to make that inner vision connect with all the other inner visions within the thing. So a river can’t just be a river, it’s got to be something else; in Ganges it’s sperm and it’s diaspora and it’s all those different things. I guess that’s just part of my peculiar way of thinking. I don’t
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think it’s genius or dumbness. I just think that that’s what I do. It’s also obviously the influence of Carver and Chekhov at an impressionable age, there’s no question of that.
So how do you go about trying to capture thought in words?
You either know it or you don’t and I think it’s a fine tuning thing. Some people when they begin to play the guitar they tune up. I think you write your first draft of your sentence and you go is that true? Did I really think it that way? Then you can go back and try to get the underneath rhythm, [that] is usually what I’m looking for. It is like pulling out the weeds around a seedling, you put the seedling in and then you sort of nurture around it. Once in a while it will come to you complete, the first sentence of Hymns for the Drowning came to me: ‘Capricorn divides The equator snaps like the string of a guitar’. So that’s how you think. That is the first sentence of the book. You go from there. That was never toyed with, the only thing that happened with that sentence was the full stop got taken out. That is exactly how I think. That is the rhythm of my mind and then I just tried to build around it. When I was talking about the stuff that I hate about Ganges, it’s the sentences that sound like someone else and I know them and probably someone else who had read a lot of Proust or a lot of Gerald Murnane would say, ‘that doesn’t sound like him. That sounds like them’. That’s the stuff I really hate because I haven’t been true, but I can’t say that I knew that when I was writing down. I’m not sure. I might have known in some subconscious way.
Food and cooking in The Ganges and its Tributaries are described in the context of personal specialities, secret recipes and family gatherings. As a reasonable cook and an exemplary eater I thoroughly enjoyed these references, however, the emphasis on ‘ethnic’ food has become one of the defining tropes of Australian multiculturalism. So what are your views on the use of food as a sign of difference, how does that work?
I would justify it by saying that that is what we eat. People sit down to eat and if I need them to be at a table eating together well this is what these characters would eat. Now if you look at some of my short stories you see that there’s no ethnic food at all because these are people who are not necessarily defined by where they come from, they’re defined by who they are when they are together. Still is a classic example. The character in that is making Italian food. He’s not Italian, it’s just that the ingredients in the food were the appropriate ingredients for him to be using, metaphorically they made sense. There’s no point sitting Indian people down at a table and pretending that they’re eating a roast, they just wouldn’t do that. I mean they might now and then, but they didn’t when I was a kid, and when this narrator was a child that’s not what they would have eaten. If they’re defined by their difference, it’s because they’re different. It also shows their pride and it does show their structures: marinating something for four hours somehow makes you better than the aunt who marinates it for three hours and this is part of their being. A lot what I’ve felt with Ganges with [the response] of reviewers is that because I was very young at the time...I don’t write the sentence: my aunt marinated the tandoori chicken for six hours whereas my other aunt marinated it for eight hours therefore this means that the other aunt felt superior to this aunt, which is a sentence that would have come out of another kind of Asian writer. I hold that back and I feel that if someone had looked closely they would see that all the missing sentences are actually in there in the gaps. It’s just that I haven’t overstated it. The other thing I would say is that not only is the food a message to someone else and a gift or poison or an insult but it was engaging with this idea that the three most important things in life
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were meant to be food, water and shelter. I already had water and shelter in the book so I thought I might as well put in a whole lot of food. That makes sense. I did cut a huge section. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this but at my school they used to have an international food day and everyone from different cultures used to come and bring a plate of their speciality. I thought that is really cute in a way but if I put that in this book it’s going to sound so contrived, that no one would actually believe this, so I cut it.
The Ganges and its Tributaries can be read as a coming-of-age story involving a first love. The loss of love is also significant in Hymns for the Drowning. Could you elaborate on these themes in your work?
I haven’t yet and I can’t imagine a time where I will write about successful love. I’m not sure if it exists and I’m not sure that if as a novelist I want anyone to be truly happy. Part of the reason for the unsuccessful love in Ganges was simply based on some sort of autobiographical, not completely, but on some autobiographical incidents. In Hymns it was far more abstract because I didn’t necessarily want any reader to believe that the character Mirren actually existed. I didn’t actually want anyone to think; ok that person, actually he was in love with her, she wasn’t in love with him, and one day she just disappears because magician’s assistants generally do, sooner or later they disappear. My main criteria for that aspect of Hymns was so that someone could finish the book and go; you know what I think he was slightly flaky, I’m not sure if she even existed, he just made her up I think, when you think about the things he saw her doing, somehow they don’t seem real, they almost seem hyper-real, it’s too deeply imagined, someone observed too closely almost. That’s what I was going for. I like my characters to be, I guess, dreaming of the fantasy of the perfect love but not necessarily engaged in a truly physical and spiritual sense in the way that I would be with my wife, or you would be with your husband, real day-to-day love. Both of these male narrators are kind of flighty and fluky. I think if you could ask them what their definition of love was it would be very very far from what you and I know it to be, you know you get up in the morning smell each other’s bad breath all those small details. But I do, how do I put this, it would be wrong for me to say that I have negative, that I can see love as much as a negative as a positive, but I think that in my life I’ve got a diminished view of it, I think that’s probably the fairest thing to say, a diminished view of it.
So why then did the narrator choose to imagine her leaving rather than to imagine her staying?
I think there can be within everyone, doesn’t matter where you come from, a deep sense of self-loathing. I don’t think that either of these narrators were completely, you know ‘to thine own self be true’. I don’t think that either of them were actually as earnest and as honest as they tried to sound. I think there is something really withheld about both of them. I think [this] is one of the reasons I had to introduce these other characters into Hymns because I felt if I had just gone on with this guy’s one tone, monotone in effect, and I realised that as is, the book would have just failed. I have this sense that people who are overly self-conscious are actually not facing things within themselves and I think these two narrators are especially overly self-conscious. I’m not sure if he could have allowed himself to actually let Mirren fall in love with him. There is the equal possibility, (Heisenberg’s uncertainty theory) [that] if there’s a chance that something exists there must be a chance that it doesn’t exist, to put it blandly. So Mirren is both those things. She might actually have existed for him. In my mind she hasn’t. In other
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readings she has and she just did actually get up and leave one day, so maybe he didn’t have a choice. In my mind, my authorial intent, which is usually useless anyway, is that he couldn’t have allowed that love to be reciprocated. So for this narrator perhaps he was more comfortable imagining rejection rather than falling in love or having love reciprocated fully and having the responsibility then of love. I’m not sure about in Ganges but certainly for the narrator of Hymns, there is a huge price to pay for being in love and being loved. There is a huge responsibility that comes with that, as you know being married and I know with my partner, there are certain codes that your relationship establishes that you must abide by and that’s a hell of a lot of responsibility and I’m not sure that he could have dealt with that. I am just wondering if I even agree with the word love. I’m not sure that he loved her. Is veneration love? I’m not sure but maybe part of the answer is that it’s not really love in that sense, gazing at the Virgin Mary or something like that very much so and without Mirren’s voice it’s hard to see and that’s why there’s no Mirren’s voice. I had to make that choice. That’s why I had to give that voice to the aunt. I did experiment with using Mirren as book-ends, prologue and epilogue basically, and I thought, no that means she exists and if she exists that casts a very different light on the book.
How did you find writing the aunt’s voice, were there difficulties occupying a female viewpoint?
There should have been more, but she just announced herself one day. I said, this is a book of fours, everything’s arranged in four parts, I’ve got to have a fourth narrator and so I had her as the third, and she just came up one day and said: ‘I’m no more pink in the plush of my life’. That’s when I said, ok that’s how she thinks, that’s how I think she thinks and so I will follow that. The hard part was to try to convey her sense of sensuality because obviously I don’t know how a woman feels sensual. That was difficult and I’m not sure if I nailed it but I felt that I’d heard enough of my aunts talking about how they felt about men in unguarded moments for me to try and steal stuff from them and so a lot of what she says is based on what I’ve actually heard my aunts say. Her voice really stands out when compared to the male narrators in the book and in Ganges. She has such a different way of speaking and conveying her emotions. She’s the earth. In my mind she was the earth of the book and the grandfather was really the air, I don’t now where that puts the others, but she was really the place where you came back to reality. She could have been your neighbour.
Why did you choose dreams, memory and the imagination as such important motifs in The Ganges and its Tributaries?
With the imagination it’s definitely the influence of Wallace Stevens at an impressionable age; we’re past modernity and if god is dead what replaces god? For Stevens it was the imagination. I got to Stevens when I was fifteen years old. I’ve never got over that influence. So the imagination replaces the need for god, you can be somewhat divine yourself. As for dreams, they wrote themselves basically, dream imagery just fitted beautifully with water imagery. And especially with Ganges [where] I was trying to write sentences that looked a bit like rivers, a good way to do that was to expand them a little bit and the dream structure allows that expansion. I think it was basically just a writer being a writer, [thinking] I can use this neatly.
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Dreams could also be thought of as an altered state where you are both passive and active, but then I’m not really remembering dreams at the moment, although I remember some particularly vivid ones from when I was small. But you play so much with what’s real and not real, how memory works, can you rely on memory and so on, and dreams continue in Hymns, is this something that will return in your future works?
Absolutely. The observer is continuously in a dream state so that you don’t know what’s real and what’s not real, they’re the eyes of my narrators. They’re within and without at the same time. They’re looking at a landscape and imagining it in a new way, as well as seeing what is there, reconstructing basically in front of our eyes. But I can remember back to when I was two or three and I can remember dreams from when I was four or five. So it is an obsession. Memory is an obsession but that’s the influence of Proust on my particular mind. It’s something that concerns me, how we remember, what we don’t remember, cultural memory. I think I’ll always return to dreams and memory, they’re my great founts and they’re connected to the idea of an image, an image that you can’t forget.
Put it this way if I were to ask you of all the books in your life what is your earliest childhood memory of a book?
My earliest childhood memory of a book? I don’t know because it’s overlaid with, I seem to remember favourite books, so I don’t know if they were the first books or not….but I can distinctly remember one of my first, early and favourite books was The Hungry Caterpillar because I just loved the way he kind of munched through, and people who know me would say that has had implications in my life, and the other one was The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark but it’s the impact of the stories I remember not the physical books. The first one you mentioned, [although] it might not be your very first memory if you thought about it more, it was The Hungry Caterpillar and it’s not the sensation of the book you remember, it’s the munching through, it’s the little holes. That for me is the power of great fiction. Whether it happens to you when you’re three years old and someone’s read it to you, or it happens to you when you’re forty, it’s that image or detail that stays in your mind for the rest of your life that you can not ever exorcise. And I think dreams leave that, in the closed book of the brain dreams are also doing that for us. So if we go back into that central image and say what was that all about, why am I not getting rid of that? My earliest one is of a golliwog with a lollypop and I don’t know what the book was but I remember seeing this golliwog, a really clichéd golliwog with a lollypop. I do this actually with one of my prose classes and then I explain to them why that memory had stayed with me for so long. It was because the golliwog wasn’t happy he had a lollypop, because he was given a lollypop by these other kids who all happened to be white and they said, ‘you take this lollipop, you go sit over there and shut up because you’re not allowed to play with us’. It took me months and months [of] trying to remember into that image to get the rest of the narrative. That would make sense, that stayed with me for a reason and that’s my first childhood memory. I think the great power of fiction is to leave this with you. To leave you with these essentially human images without having to explain them. The life in the end informs on the book and the life in the end explains these images I think, I think, I’m not sure. I agree with you and books that leave you with outstanding images that linger are the ones you always want to go back to and reread as well, you think I just want a little bit more of that, I want to remind myself of why I found that so thrilling. And can you see how that’s happening with kids who are just encountering reading through the
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Harry Potter books and they reread that same thing again because they get that thrill. But the other thing was like you said when you talked about The Hungry Caterpillar, ‘people will say that has implications in my life now’, well yes I think sometimes the life informs on the text.
You choose to locate The Ganges and its Tributaries very clearly in certain suburbs of Melbourne, indeed the novel is hinged on the move from one house to another and the narrator’s memories of growing up in certain spaces. Whereas Hymns for the Drowning is set in an imaginary but at times corresponding ‘world of its own fiction’. What prompted you to choose such different ways of situating your novels?
I think the answer to that is probably at the back of Hymns where I’ve written a note to the reader saying please do not try to align the world in which you read and the world of this fiction. I was consciously trying to dislocate people. I was doing it subconsciously in Ganges because half of the streets in Ganges don’t actually exist although they’re put right next to streets that do exist. So if someone were to walk through St. Kilda or Dandenong [they could] say well here’s that street but there’s no street next door. It’s the idea that somehow the world of fiction should in a sense mirror the real world. Now I just don’t believe that’s true. It should mirror the world of one author’s mind certainly, but it’s a book and that’s the rest of the world. The world is bigger than a book. I’m not trying to represent reality and that was my way of making that point. I was trying to dislocate the reader. I was trying to take the reader out of any known world. I think what great writers do, and I’m certainly not one of them, maybe in ten years I’ll be a good to average writer, but great writers like Marquez, Morrison, people like that, people who I love, create the world anew. They don’t try to reflect reality or represent reality they create a reality that seems true, and I was trying to do that with Hymns.
One of the things I liked about Hymns was the way you take the narrator down the street past the library and the phone box is on the left and so on. There is such an intimate detailed mapping of space even when it is completely imaginary. That is, for me, creating the world anew. there are familiar things for the reader to catch on to, because Hymns is quite a difficult book to read, so it looks like a city we’d know even though we can’t name it, there are just little things that are a bit different about it. Like why would a library employ a historian to [analyse] some old cruddy tapestry? I guess it might happen in some cities. So it is familiar, yet strangely familiar.
To follow up on that then, if you want to warn the reader why place the warning at the end, after they’ve read the book?
That’s just me being irritating. It seemed really presumptuous to put it at the start. I thought if I put it at the start it’s going to seem as though I’m really confident I’ve done my job. But all texts are co-authored, I need your imagination as much as I need mine for this book to come alive, if it does. So that’s why. I put it at the end because I thought it would be really presumptuous to put this at the start. I’ve forgotten which poet it was who at the end of one of his books had written a word so obscure that you had to go to a dictionary to find it. His explanation of this, it was John Ashbury, was: I wanted people to put down my book and immediately pick up another and the only way I could do that was to get them to go to a dictionary and look up what this final word meant. In that sense [I thought] if I put this at the end, the book gets reviewed and maybe the person will turn back and start looking at it again.
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Then presumably, although you’re warning the reader against trying to align the worlds, you are also inviting them to do so?
Of course. I’m saying, this is your challenge if you choose to [accept it]. One of the reasons that the book sold so badly is because every review I got was good but each one said, ‘this is a book that has to be read twice’. That I think puts off a lot of readers. I was feeling a bit antagonistic about that and then I thought, hang on you idiot you’ve done exactly the same thing at the end of the book, you’ve said you’ve got to go back and read it again. But yes, I’m inviting you to make these alignments. What country is this? What country does it most resemble? Where is the old country?
Indian cultural practices, mythologies and religions filter through your work in many forms. You spoke at the Sydney writers festival a few years ago on “The Ever Present Past – Asian Mythology in Contemporary Australian Writings”. Could you comment on how you have employed these themes?
I didn’t know this for a long time but I tend to find some sort of very deep mythological structure for any scene, even two people sitting at a table will somehow remind me of cupid and psyche for example and I will play with that underneath, in the subtext. I’ll say ok we can draw on a couple of things, so I might put a, I wouldn’t do this, but for example, I might put a picture of cupid and psyche between them. The funny thing is that I didn’t know I was doing this until my knowledge and scholarship of mythology deepened. The Indian gods are certainly a pantheon that were sheltered from me for most of my life. I could quote Homer but I couldn’t tell you who Shiva was until I was about eighteen or nineteen. I do look for, it’s become such a bloody cliché because of American script-writing, but the mythic structures beneath the prosaic are for me certainly ever-present.
So was going to Indian mythology quite a conscious decision in your late adolescence do you think?
Yes, a real search I have to say Tamara, a real search. I went initially out of curiosity and then out of…I don’t know. I don’t know if you’ve ever felt this idea, that you sometimes without knowing it fulfil promises you’ve made to someone somewhere. It was almost like I felt like I owed it to Indian mythology to go and make sure I knew about it. I think that would be the best way I could put it. I knew a lot of Greek and Roman but once I encountered the real, would you call it my cultural heritage? I feel a bit uncomfortable about that; certainly one part of it. I felt indebted to go to Indian mythology more than I felt indebted to go to India.
So how important are the specificities of Anglo-Indian traditions to your work or to you personally in any sense?
That’s a really difficult [question]. I don’t know how not to be Anglo-Indian, I guess. I once got chided by a journalist friend of mine for calling Anglo-Indians a race because he said well they’re not really a race are they, they’re kind of sub-race, they’re not really…so ok that’s an interesting viewpoint. I remember having an Anglo-Indian girlfriend once and someone said to her on the train, asked her what she was, and she said ‘I’m Anglo-Indian’, and he said, ‘oh that means your great great great great great
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great great grandmother was a flirt’. She was very young at the time and she didn’t know quite how to respond; she just moved seats or something. But for me the emphasis is really on Indian rather than [Anglo]. I see that quite clearly. I don’t see any great Anglo tradition that my family has maintained. They certainly are in custom, in speech pattern, in act even, Indian.
I guess I’m asking because I have read stuff that situates the Anglo-Indian community as quite a separate entity to other Indian communities in Australia. It is and there’s this sort of Anglo-Indian society run in Melbourne by Keith Butler, who I believe has a novel coming out with Penguin soon, he’s Anglo-Indian and no they don’t associate with other Indians. They are separate. Even when I was in India I would say that. They are very distinct but I guess it goes back to this idea that the India I believe in, or that I write about, doesn’t in any way exist. For all I know the India that I dream of or think of or imagine is only the India defined by what my parents, my aunts, by what I’ve been told, what I’ve seen when I’ve lived there. As for writing, I’ve never understood anyone who would think of writing the great Indian novel or the great American novel. There’s the great novel of life, which is Ulysses and there’s the great novel of sentences, which is In Search of Lost Time but I don’t know if they’re the great Irish or French novels. No I don’t think so. I maintain, I’m sorry I keep coming back to this, but I do not in any way expect my readers to believe that what I have to say about India is in any way true, is in any way a reflection on anything any Indian person has ever done in their entire lives. No I’m just recreating it for what I need for my fiction.
That is an interesting point because I think a lot of writers may feel like that but are sometimes positioned as an ethnographic subject almost, as able to give you the low- down in terms of telling you how these people do that, which perhaps misses the point of creative writing in the first place. Well there’s writing and there’s creative writing. I think someone like, however much I admire him, V. S. Naipaul, when he goes back to the culture and becomes informer, saying this is how these people behave, not me, this is how ‘these people’ behave, Muslims, Indians, deep Southern Americans, that is writing and I think he does a wise thing to call that his non-fiction. It’s certainly not the kind of writing that I’m interested in producing, I’m interested in reading it, I’m not interested in producing it. I have nothing to say on anyone. I have no great deep insight into to how Indians, South Americans or Australians behave, human beings maybe, maybe, time will tell. No I’m not an informer, I’ve got no low-down to bring to any[one], I’m just bring the news from my village to yours, basically.
I was recently reading an article on the image of the Anglo-Indian community in Australia as ‘good Australians’ where Glenn D’Cruz maintains that whilst The Ganges and its Tributaries celebrates hybridity, it also leaves certain stereotypes intact. Firstly, that of this community as easy to assimilate into the Australian suburban dream, and secondly in terms of the sterility of the narrator. How would you respond to this interpretation?
Where is that? I haven’t read that. I’ve got it here and I’m not giving it a fair reading because it’s set in the context of a wider discussion of Australian multiculturalism rather than on your work alone, but he does use The Ganges as a way of commenting on the image of the Anglo-Indian community as kind of, seen as a very positive migrant community within Australia who adopt Anglo traditions quite easily. I don’t have a great disagreement with that comment. I think they are, if I talk as a person rather than
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as a writer, they are a very easily adaptable community and they are very easy going. I guess that’s part of their Anglo tradition that they do a lot of things, I mean a lot of them do drink Gin and Tonic at three forty-five or four o’clock or whatever. No I have no great disagreement with that and I wouldn’t even see that as a particularly negative comment. I think they do assimilate more easily because they do have some sort of cultural link with what it means to be Anglo or anglicised in terms of religion as well? In terms of religion and also with the language. My parents arrived in Australia speaking perfect English. That’s a huge difference. It’s easier to go and buy groceries if you know what to ask for. I don’t know if they adapt any easier but they have equipment that helps them, language being the primary. I think that [is] one of the reasons I consider myself a very English writer, in many respects, because all of my books are made up of you know almost perfectly grammatically correct sentences except when I’m obviously subverting it. I do write after English prose stylists, I write after the King James bible.
So how about the issue of sterility, how did that come about in the novel?
It was just the idea of water and sperm. It was just a metaphoric device, if he is sterile and can’t produce active sperm then he has no water in him and it just fitted at the metaphoric level. Of course there was the section where it all turned out not to be true. It was also a good device because I’ve heard, and I’m not putting myself above other men, I haven’t used this device myself, but I’ve heard other men, teenage boys, who have said [that] to girlfriends so that they could have sex without oh right. That’s what my publisher at the time said, ‘oh is that why?’ I said, ‘oh look that’s actually a good reason but this is my real reason, but yes that might work, it might be a kind of really unsophisticated stupid way of trying to have sex with someone’. That fits but really it was the idea that if he could not continue the line then there was a great chance that the Anglo-Indians would actually die in this soil, so there would be no continuation which is why there is all this emphasis on names and how names can’t be carried on, etcetera. Remember the uncle that he’s named after actually drowns, so he’s almost drowned in sperm, and he [the narrator] has no sperm, just those kind of ideas.
So I’m going to ask a question on style. As you know, your novels are highly crafted in terms of their non-linear, associative narrative style, the use of multiple narrators and stories within stories, the intertextuality, the references to processes of writing and reading and so on. For example, there is a section in Hymns where one of the narrators describes his disappointment in stories which do not reveal their fictional source, after exposing his journal as the manuscript, or one of the manuscripts, for the novel. So how significant is this sort of postmodern ‘play,’ if you want to call it that, to the structure of the novel overall?
I’m a great believer that the draft or the drafting process will reveal the true structure and you’ve got to, overused word again, but you’ve got to dream into the draft and the draft will actually speak back to you. Inspiration again comes after hard work. The structure for Ganges came because I had my title. Ok it’s called The Ganges and its Tributaries it must look like a river, that’s my structure. Much more conscious in Hymns was the idea that having stories within stories and frames over frames etcetera, etcetera, simply because I am very interested in the novella as a form and the novella in its infancy always used a frame story, and as you alluded to earlier, for a manuscript to exist there had to be a larger frame, someone who could unite all these manuscripts.
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Now there’s only one person who could do that and that would be god, so if I call him Ganesh or someone else calls him Jesus Christ, he would be the only person who would have access to all these things, so that necessitated the fourth narrator. So you can see that what is happening is that I’m going through and I’m drafting and I’m drafting and I’m drafting and the structural choices are being made by the manuscript. They’re being insisted upon. With Hymns it wouldn’t have had any internal logic if three manuscripts existed and there wasn’t a fourth manuscript that united them. How could these all come into the same book? And as you said it’s all about reading and writing, so how could these exist? That necessitated the fourth narrator. So there wasn’t any, on my part, postmodern play, it was completely that the book needed this structure. The reason for the non-linear [style] is simply because of the idea of trying to write books that, after Proust, are trying to depict one person’s mind and all the rattle-bag of stuff that’s within it. That’s all I’m trying to do and I’ll probably continue trying to do that. I consistently come back to the first person. I want to show what one person thinks about the world that they live in. This internal logic Internal logic within story and within mind. It also gives a writer great freedom, [because] that’s how he thinks, he’s gone from there to there, that’s how he thinks. Hymns was much more structured because I’d created an orbit, so characters come in and out of each other the way planets go round each other, and so I had to do certain things at certain times; with Ganges I could just let him [the narrator] float, meander.
Did you have much control over the way the narrative was presented in Hymns, the way the words were on the page?
Oh yes, everything down to the actual type, the specific astronomical symbols that we would use. I did that at the very end, when Ganesh is talking he used to have quotation marks, and I said, ‘well he’s a god so can we use astronomical symbols?’ And they said, ‘look we’ll try and do it’ and they figured out a way to do it. So not just the inherent structure of the book but even it the exact way it’s laid out, even leaving the gaps where the full stops are missing. I said, ‘we have to leave a gap here so that you can see that this is the absence of a sentence’. It’s not meant to be like Joyce, it’s not meant to be stream-of-consciousness. It’s meant to be a perfectly coherent sentence that has no punctuation.
When searching on the net I came across this ‘live journal’ where an anonymous contributor had posted their thoughts on a lecture you gave on Hymns. What caught my attention was that the contributor mentioned that you had written an ending to the novel after it was published and that you read this new ending at the lecture. Could you tell me bit more about this?
They probably heard me speaking here at Gleebooks. I’ve ended the book and it’s just about to go out to sale, and I sat down and I wrote the ending. And obviously it’s far too late but I had the perfect ending. The ending was to do with…in Melbourne there’s this festival called Moomba. One part of Moomba is that these idiotic people go to the Yarra river, they make flying contraptions, they might make it out of tin-foil or they might make proper hand-gliding things, and they run along this plank and they throw themselves into the river. Now some of them actually fly, some of them have proper things and they actually fly for about twenty or thirty meters, other people just make birds feathers flap their wings and go straight down. I thought, I have lived in Melbourne for twenty five years, I’ve seen this probably every year for the last fifteen
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years. I’ve witnessed it. I’ve been there when it happens. I’ve seen it on television and I’ve never thought to use this. And this is my ending because it fits in with all the ideas of bird-man and all the birds that fly and birds that don’t fly and revealing the secret of flight, and so I wrote this paragraph. It would have been one of the best paragraphs of the book and it took me three or four weeks to write and there was no point writing it because [the book] was already published. But I thought I’d use it as a lecture and I think I said at the end of the lecture, I’ll tell you what the end should have been but just don’t tell anyone, obviously he’s gone and told someone. So the paragraph is about this rally where these citizens make these flying contraptions and they fly. What happens is that most plummet but one or two do fly and they fly thirty or forty meters and when they get out of the water they are beaten. They are beaten severely and thrown out of the city because the mayor and all the citizens say, ‘you have now insulted the birds who had revealed this secret to us’, because they believed they could fly at one stage, ‘now you have insulted them, it will be another two hundred [or] three hundred years before they will actually tell us the secret’. So they get thrown out of the city and they are never allowed to return and it was the idea that flight, exile. I’ll send it to you that would be excellent.
So how did you find that? I’d like to read it.
I’ll send you the link, I just put your name into a search engine. It seems like a really random journal, full of things like my favourite CD, this that, and then there’s just this posting that says, ‘I got up this morning and I was blah de blah, then I heard Christopher Cyrill speaking about his novel’. The main point the contributor was making was that you said how many times you’d drafted it and to a student it was the thought, you know, drafting an essay twice is horrific, so they were talking about the drafting process, but it was the bit about the ending that caught my eye. I tell my students to draft and every week they’ve got to give me two or three pages of writing, and what I do is encourage them to give me the same two or three pages every week, rewritten, rewritten and rewritten. And I edit it for them, I say ‘it has got to get deeper here,’ or ‘you’re overstating’ or whatever the main editorial comments are. Then they start to see, ‘oh I started with these three pages, look where I’ve ended up, they seem like the same three pages but they’re so much better’. I tell them that when my daughter, my six year old, writes a story I get her to draft it so no way! I’m joking. I was going to say, that’s really harsh get in the corner, redraft, that detail must resonate! Remember your Chekhov.
Do you write stories for your children though?
I don’t write them for them but I do tell them stories. I’m a little bit obsessed with elephants and I’ve got these eight wooden elephants near my desk and I make up stories for them out of that. And if they show a particular, like my elder one, Emily, she was really into dinosaurs for a couple years so I just used to tell her stories about dinosaurs and you make those up? I sort of make those up yes…the cake eating dinosaur. Her favourite was the one about the three types of dinosaur, the herb-eating dinosaurs, the meat-eating dinosaurs and the cake-eating dinosaurs. Then she’d contribute because she’d say, ‘oh, where do they make the cakes?’ And I’d say, ‘well obviously in volcanoes’. So she used to get into that, but they like it when I tell them stories and use the little elephants.
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In your Meanjin article, ‘Towards a Final Draft: The Story of Writing Hymns for the Drowning’ you describe your relationship to imaginary readers or ‘ghost-doubles’ who assist you during the drafting process. Could you tell me a bit more about this?
It’s somewhat based on a Hemmingway quote where he says, ‘you write for who you love whether she can read or not, whether she’s alive or dead’. Occasionally as I was writing I was thinking, I’m writing this for the editor of Meanjin and I’m hoping that she’s going to read this and what would she say about this particular sentence? How would Carver rewrite this sentence, what would Carver leave out of this sentence? What would Proust do? Well he would make this probably a bit longer. I feel as if someone is looking over my shoulder. I think what that is based on is to do with the intertext; if I’m writing, say a paragraph with basic biblical resonance, I’m seeing the authors of the King James bible behind me. I think I should have been more specific when I wrote that [article]. I’m seeing the people who have influenced me behind me. Whenever I write the words, ‘I imagine’, which I do a hell of a lot, I see Wallace Stevens behind me. I feel that this sentence will be informed by the work of Wallace Stevens and I say informed rather than influenced because obviously he’s a poet and I’m a prose writer. I feel I wrote a lot of Ganges using much of the editing techniques that Gerald Murnane had taught me, so I could feel him behind me reading over my shoulder.
In this same article you comment on how two points in The Ganges went unnoticed by readers: firstly the genealogical joke and secondly a sentence written in Cyrillic. Could you explain these points?
If you follow the genealogy of the narrator there is another Christopher Cyrill who would be me who would be his cousin. I can’t remember how I did it, but that was the intent of that. If you place all the streets that the character lives on they actually make a sentence in Cyrillic, which I believe is a Balkan language, I can’t even remember, I did that research ten years ago. The sentence reads: I call upon the spirit of this place. So as this is a book about spirit and place, if you actually put together all the streets that he has lived on they actually add up to, ‘I call upon the spirit of this place’.
Now does it matter to you if these things do go unnoticed?
No. I’ve heard, specifically American writers, talk about the ideal reader. I think it’s a lovely theory that there is someone in the world who will get everything. I think there is someone in the world who will get half of your intent, you can’t get every single thing across. You’ve got to allow enough room for the reader to imagine themselves into this book otherwise it’s a closed circuit. One of the things I tried to do and I failed (I’ve written about this in the speech I gave to the Australian Asian Society) was just trying to find the exact mythological points where different cultures coalesced. So you could see in say the story of Odin, the story of Christ and in Shakti you can see Psyche. In Hymns I tried to use those motifs rather than specifically Indian or Catholic ones which I had done with Ganges, to try and find the exact moments or the exact images where two cultures could be seen to be coalescing, the idea of trees as crosses, crucifixes etcetera. I didn’t succeed. I didn’t manage to get it for every scene of the novel but that was my intent. And that connects with the idea of sending the reader dreaming off into their own culture rather than necessarily into mine.
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You’ve spoken already about adapting Ganges for radio, in terms of the changes you made, but what about the novel becoming something spoken?
It helped that it was written already in the first person and I could just create the actual story around this narrator. The great skill of anyone who writes radio plays is the use of silence. You can use background effects etcetera but to have no one reading or no one speaking at all, to have no actor, is incredibly effective and incredibly evocative. That’s why Still in the end succeeded. It didn’t succeed on everything but the silences were ‘informed’, filled. What I consciously did with Still was to make sure I had more silences at the appropriate places, things that people won’t say. People will listen intently to silence, I’ve been in a classroom and seen them listening to a play and you can see people dozing off a little bit when someone starts talking but as soon as there’s silence they’re tuned back in. You’re following a narrative purely on sound which is a really good thing for a writer to do.
What form do you prefer? You’ve written short-stories, radio plays, novels. Would it be the novella as you were saying earlier?
At the moment it is the novella, because I’m writing a novel made up of three novellas which are interconnected, so it’s one book made up of three small books. I just love it as a form. I also love the prose poem as a form but I’m not a poet, I don’t think so. I’m a novelist, that’s what I am. I don’t know, maybe it’s like Marc Chagall says, ‘I work in whatever medium likes me at the moment’, but if someone asks me what I am, I say I’m a novelist.
Much of your other work is related to books and writing, in terms of your roles as book reviewer, editor of Heat and teacher of creative writing. How does this work inform or connect with your creative persona?
Well I basically have no life. I go from one job relating to books to another. So I finished marking yesterday, I’ve my markers meeting tomorrow, next week I start at Gleebooks again. I mean it’s partly the writer’s life because I’ve been lucky enough to work consistently within the one great passion of my life, literature. I’m not a teacher but when I do teach I am passionate about teaching. I adore my students. I mean I’m very strict, I’m a bastard, I admit that I’m a bastard of a teacher but I do fall in love, not in a sick way, but I do fall in love with my student group. They feed into each other. However, teaching does tend to overwhelm your writing. I like to be full on with my students so that means my writing does get neglected. But to be quite honest with you I’m not twenty-one anymore, I don’t have great days of artistic torment. If I’ve got an hour to work I use the bloody hour. When I was twenty-one and I was writing Ganges I’d sit and think about my…what is my relationship to the culture and so on…just sit down, write something! No time for no, do the real daydreaming which is the work.
So how would you say Australia, as a location for South Asian cultural production, has changed during your lifetime? Has it changed?
Politically, socially and I would even say morally, Australians are much more aware of Asia. I’m not quite convinced that under this government they are actually more accepting, but certainly more aware of the various cultures of Asia. In my lifetime there has certainly been an opening up in the arts to [Asia]. I can think of something like the
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4A gallery which is completely devoted to Asian arts which certainly is the very first time I can think of anywhere in Australia that that’s happened. I can see that a lot of my Asian friends are having more success with getting into film.
Would you say that has had implications for the literary establishment over the last few decades?
Over the last few decades literature has led the way as far as exposing Asia to Australia. There have been so many wonderful Asian writers who are [still] around at the moment, Beth Yap, Suneeta, etcetera, Adib. They’re putting it in people’s faces basically. It’s unavoidable, you can’t walk into a bookshop and not see it and even publishing more in translation is coming over. I think of something like Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, it has been translated, he’s come over here and read at the festival, in Chinese, etcetera, which is wonderful and that wouldn’t have happened twenty years ago.
So would you see yourself as a migrant or hyphenated writer and what are the benefits and difficulties associated with this idea?
If I be honest, being of a different culture certainly helped with my first novel. It comes back to the right publisher at the right time and I think the book is ok, I don’t think it is anything special, it’s very much a first novel, it’s an apprentice’s novel, that’s how I see it. But it did help that I was Indian and it did help that this came so far out of left field that the publisher found it irresistible. But as far as I [am concerned] when I sit down to write, I am writing about my own peculiar world.
This is related question then that you’ve partly answered, but do you see your fiction as part of a broader literature of a South Asian diaspora? I think with Ganges you are saying, yes in some ways it was.
Certainly it was and I think I have moved from there. I mean, to repeat, I think The Ganges was my first novel and very much my first novel and that over [time]… Certainly with the one I am currently engaged on, it’s a novel less to do with who I am as person and more with who I am as a writer, I think at this stage of the drafting. It’s certainly more to do with one again peculiar individual living in one peculiar state. I think it’s a much more universal book than Ganges but I think in a sense Ganges will end up being the most universal novel that I wrote because it was so autobiographical and because it was so pivoted on one or two Melbourne suburbs and one particular place in the world and one very particular time, whereas Hymns is much floatier, it could be in a variety of countries and it could be in a variety of times. I sit down to write and I write about the images that obsess me and sometimes they do seem to inform a greater cultural memory but that is not primary no not at all primary. It’s there, I can see it there, but not primary.
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Interview with Michelle de Kretser in Richmond, Melbourne on the 25th of May 2004
[First five minutes of interview lost due to faulty recording equipment]
Sam seeks to be the perfect imitation of a perfect English gentleman and lives in fear of being found for a fraud. He is in all aspects a reprehensible character yet I found myself sympathising with his predicament: ‘that everything might have been different’. Could you comment on Sam?
[Sam is] at odds with today but I don’t think everything he says is ridiculous or out of date. There are some things he says that [are pertinent], for instance, he sees through the very aggressive kind of nationalism that Jaya ends up representing. Maybe he sees through it for the wrong reasons but he isn’t fooled by it. So there are certain respects in which he gets things right. He is not a very easy character to like though, and I’m sure that was intentional. I wanted to do that almost as a technical challenge to myself. One of the great things about novels in general and characterisation [specifically] is that good novels draw you in to other people’s lives and to points of view that might well be completely different from your own. I wanted to try and create a character that readers would not like but I hope by the end of the novel find themselves sympathising with because he is such a crushingly sad man really. You can’t help yourself sympathising with him. I am really pleased when people say that almost against their will they were drawn into it because I think it’s easier to like sympathetic characters. It’s easier to paint characters who you know the reader is going to be charmed by, harder to do it the other way. How about writing from a male point of view, did you anticipate that as being difficult or not? No, I did that in my first novel as well and I really don’t think it is that different from writing from a female point of view. You have to understand the individual I think. It has to be psychologically true to that individual and whether they’re male or female is caught up in that but it’s not the main thing.
The speech mannerisms and phrasings in The Hamilton Case are very distinctive. I’ve read Yasmine Gooneratne’s memoir Relative Merits which contains similar language, the use of ‘Mater’ and ‘Pater’ for example, which to a contemporary reader is quite extraordinary.
I’d forgotten that Yasmine’s book has that. My father called his parents Mater and Pater and so did his brother. Boys, because it was boys, who went to those sorts of public schools were just taught to say that. So that was a little thing I drew from life really, not from Yasmine’s book but I am not surprised that she has that because she would be writing about people who went to exactly those same schools. One of the things about it is that they produce these people who are completely interchangeable with each other at some level. Did you find any of the books you drew on about the Burghers of Sri Lanka useful or did you depend more on your own memories? Yasmine’s book isn’t about Burghers it is about her family who are Sinhalese. The great thing about that book, as you know it’s so witty and well written in itself, but I come from a very middle-class family in Sri Lanka, The Hamilton Case is describing a much grander background and Yasmine’s book was useful in that respect because she belongs to Sri Lankan aristocracy as you would know. So it was useful to get a sense of the grandeur and the scale of the entertaining they did and so on. It was a mixture I suppose of memory and, a lot of the speech mannerisms for instance are straight from the 1920s and 30s, so I read things like Somerset Maugham to take me back into that period. It’s interesting
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because I realised that a lot of the things I think of as being distinctively Sri Lankan English are in fact Edwardian English. Or Victorian English because of course people were taught English by that generation. It’s interesting to note the sorts of phrases that stick, that remain through the generations and that of course remain in colonies where English is not the dominant language so it becomes fossilised and fixed; phrases like, ‘I say’ or ‘old chap’. ‘Chap’ for instance is I think something that still exists among a certain class of people in India and Sri Lanka, whereas most people don’t talk about ‘chaps’ in Australia or England. It has moved on but these things remain fossilised in [former colonies] because English is a minority language.
In The Hamilton Case you trace the rise of populist postcolonial nationalism in Sri Lanka and hint to some of its outcomes in the hardening of ethnic divisions by reckless politicians like Jaya. However, you also portray the elite classes and their brand of colonial mimicry as a highly inappropriate national model. So how important was the political framework to the novel? It seems almost in the subtext.
To live through the last fifty or sixty years of Sri Lankan history, politics suffuses every aspect of life, in one sense. On the other hand I wasn’t writing about people who were directly involved with politics themselves. So I guess I wanted it to be there but I wanted it to be background in a sense rather than…again it was that choice not to write about the Jaya type of character in whose life political change and political choice would be everything. I wanted to write about lives that are ordinary in that sense, people to whom politics happen rather than people who make politics happen. That was the same with The Rose Grower too. These people are acted upon by history rather than seeing themselves as actively creating history. Certainly for people like that obviously the changes that happened did have far reaching consequences for their lives but I would say yes the motivation for me was psychological rather than political.
You have mentioned that travel writers often portray Sri Lanka as a paradise whilst journalists compare it to hell. You also mention (in a different interview) that you were attracted to the ‘sense of beauty entwined with menace in Sri Lanka’. Could you comment on these contrasts and how they come through in The Hamilton Case?
Well I suppose I was thinking of two things. One is that a lot of people who go to Sri Lanka on a holiday for tourist purposes come away often thinking of it, ‘oh it’s such a beautiful place, it’s such a lush, green, pretty place’. I don’t know if you’ve been but it is, it is a gorgeous place but life there is hard for many people, really hard. I don’t mean that people experience their lives necessarily as hell, but that this surface gorgeousness might mask a different set of realities for people who have to live there and negotiate life there on a daily basis. Also personally I have memories of Sri Lanka as being again this very gorgeous lush place but it’s also a place where there were quite a lot of physical danger. For instance the very basic things, as a child when going out to play you are always warned about snakes. Those kinds of everyday things. Or the way that disease was such a prevalent part of everyday life so you’re always conscious of [it], you’re being told to wash your hands or that you can’t drink the water from the tap. You would often hear of children dieing because they had been struck down by cholera or other diseases in a way that doesn’t happen in the West really. Of course children die here too but there’s a difference. There’s a kind of immediacy of life that can turn very suddenly into death in a place like that, at least in the time that I remember, it might be quite different now. So in the book I tried very hard to, and in a way it was unconscious,
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I found myself unconsciously producing these images that suggested this doubleness of a barely contained violence. I talked about this at a talk I gave at a writers festival, an image of flowers staging, the phrase is something like, ‘staging brief violent dramas, blazing and dropping within a day’. So that sense of, on the one hand, bursting life but [on the other] it ending very suddenly. Someone said to me after reading the book that it’s actually full of images of damage that’s done to children, to animals, to the landscape and I guess it is. I wasn’t conscious of that, that there is a lot in there, on the one hand, about this landscape that can’t be contained, that keeps bursting out, new growth and new life, and on the other hand, of horrible things that happen within that very fecund environment.
In the last section of the novel Shivanathan evaluates his own literary work Serendipity and states: “the coloniser returns as a tourist, you see. And he is mad for difference. That is the luxury commodity we now supply, as we once kept him in cinnamon and sapphires” (366). Do you believe there is an element of exoticism in the production and promotion of diasporic fiction?
I think there can be. Sometimes I read books, actually not just by diasporic writers but even sometimes by the writers who are still living in these countries, they seem to me to be sometimes just not terribly interesting as fiction, the language can be quite banal for instance, clichéd but that the reason they’re even being published in the first place is because they produce, almost on demand they have, the exotic elements of beautiful dusky maidens and then Buddhism, Buddhism is such a popular faddist thing in the West now so you just have to mention a monk and then this atmosphere of sanctity is produced, you mention a paddy field. If those novels were set in Manchester or Melbourne or Manhattan and used… it’s like writing an Australian novel and mentioning a gum tree on every page or something, except no Australian editor would buy that because they’d see it as being completely clichéd and no Australian reader would be very interested or it wouldn’t be marketed as serious literary fiction anyway, it might be on a popular level, but if you substitute mango trees, saris, it becomes somehow more exciting and more exotic. And we’re all susceptible to that I suppose, we all like what’s different. I’m not saying that these writers do these things consciously or cynically necessarily, maybe some do, who knows, I have no access to their minds, but I think there is a certain kind of promotion that panders to the Western craving for difference and exoticism. So do you see it then as reflective of a wider cultural trend towards the consumption of otherness then? Yes absolutely, it’s completely connected with travel for instance, the passion for travel. You go to these places and you have your wonderful holiday, you don’t want to live there of course, but you bring back your souvenirs to prove you’ve been there, coconut-shell spoons or whatever. So yes I can see completely that it is linked in with a consumption of exoticism. And in a world where everyone’s got a car and a house and two-point-three kids or something then travel is one of the things that you [use to] try to mark your difference, your status difference by the further a field you go and the more exotic it is the higher your status is.
In terms of your work for the Lonely Planet then, how has that influenced your views. Do you find any connection between the non-literary, non-creative work you do, or did, and your views on fiction?
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Yes I suppose it left me with a hatred of travel writing. I was very tired towards the end of my time with Lonely Planet of the clichés of travel writing and not so much travel writing but the clichés of travel. The people wanted… this is something that was a Lonely Planet absolute article of faith was that the north of India was more interesting than the south because there are more, dancing girls, I don’t know, wonderful Mogul architecture, but somewhere like say Kerela which has no great architecture or anything particular to recommend it from a purely touristic point of view, apart from the beaches, but the fact that it is probably one of the most prosperous states in India and that far more people have access to a dignified life it’s a communist state isn’t it well I don’t think it still is but it certainly had the first elected Marxist government in the world, and also they are lucky that they are on the right side of the mountains so they get the rainfall and all that and they’ve had an equitable system of land distribution, all of this stuff I think means that to travel there you feel that it is a fabulously interesting place, women for instance are so visible in public life whereas they are not in other parts [of India]. It’s that kind of thing where poverty and degradation produces interesting spectacle. I come from a country where, but for an accident of birth, I could have been living on a street somewhere trying desperately to have enough to eat and I don’t find that kind of stuff at all colourful. I find it awful, and that people can go and look at that and be fascinated by it I feel is in some way a terrible comment on us in the West.
Could you comment on the style of language you use in The Hamilton Case, the cluttered lushness, for example?
That lushness, which isn’t all the way through, it is most in part three I think. I really wanted to have this prose that reflected the lushness of the landscape so I wanted that very overripe, flirting with almost too too much, so lots of metaphors, so that the style reflected the content, almost slowing you down and causing you to read slowly in the way that heat forces you to move slowly. Then in part two, which is I suppose the ‘Hamilton Case’ proper, I tried to mimic a crisp kind of 1930s Somerset Maugham type of diction, of the colonial murder mystery and keep it very cool and very ironic. Part one is of course Sam’s style so that has to be more florid and well slightly ponderous and pompous, it’s Sam and at the same time him trying to be witty, always at the expense of other people of course. Then I tried to get something that might be Shiva’s voice, Shivanathan’s voice at the end. And why did you choose to do that at the end with the letter, I mean you have two very writerly forms, the memoir and the letter to structure the novel, was this a conscious decision or did it come through in the drafting process? It kind of came out through the drafting process I think. When Sam came to me as a character he was speaking in his own voice, it was a first-person narration, so I think it was good to have him present his own case as it were and then to see him from other points of view. Shiva, I had that for two reasons, I wanted another firs-person narrative to counterbalance the weight of Sam’s at the beginning and then I also wanted, as you know if you’ve read any classic detective fiction, Agatha Christie, you always have the detective [who] comes on at the end and gathers everyone in a room and explains everything to them and solves everything and resolves everything and brings all the loose ends together. So I wanted someone who comes on at the end and does the opposite and problematises in fact things that you think you know the answer to. He gives it a different twist, not always even realising that he is doing that. So to have this figure at the end who does exactly the opposite of what happens with the tidy resolution, who untidies the resolution.
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So how did you feel about winning the best book of this region in the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize? I assume you were very pleased, but what do think about the category of Commonwealth writing? Do you see yourself as a Commonwealth writer?
I never think of myself as a Commonwealth anything. What it means in practical terms is English language writing minus America and Ireland I suppose, the Republic. On the other hand, one of the nice things I think about in terms of the Commonwealth is, and I suppose because I have been thinking about the prize, is a kind of affiliation of kinds of English I think, always minus America and Ireland. In Australia or the UK, English is something you take absolutely for granted. I grew up in a place where speaking English was contested, it was charged with political value and the right to be educated in English for instance was contested. So I’m very grateful that I was lucky to have that as my birthright because as a writer, while I am sure there are many masterpieces in Sinhalese and Tamil particularly which has a much larger population, just simply in terms of numbers there is much more around in English and so to have unimpeded access to that is a wonderful thing as a writer, to have that gift of all those different kinds of English that you can draw on. So I feel quite lucky in that respect and you know I like English, it’s a nice language and I like playing with it.
What writers, texts or literary models influence your work?
I have no idea. I’m very good at spotting influences in other people’s work and pretty much useless at spotting it in mine. In terms of who you admire? I could just give you a list as long as my arm. I like lots of different kinds of books and lots of different kinds of writing. People always ask me this question and I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m a kind of reading junkie so I just read all sorts of things and it will change, I might find a new writer and think this person is just fantastic I just love their work and then maybe five years later I’m over that or something.
Do you see yourself as a migrant or hyphenated writer and, if so, what are the benefits of this? Or do you feel this is a limiting idea?
It’s not that I think it’s limiting but I don’t think I see myself, other people may see me as that, but I never go around thinking to myself ‘I am a migrant writer’, but I am sure other people see me in that way.
How has Australia as a location for South Asian cultural production changed in your view?
Well I guess there are more South Asians living here now than there were thirty or twenty years ago or even ten years ago. So it’s really a question of numbers isn’t it.
Ok so would you want your work to be considered in that way at all? What I am saying is that some writers have a very antagonistic response to being positioned as a South Asian, or migrant or multicultural writer in Australia, obviously there are others who find it a very positive notion and I guess still others who couldn’t care less, to whom it makes no difference whatsoever.
I’m probably in the last category. You know because my first novel was set in France it really just never came up. And in a way how other people see you, you never have
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control over that. People will see you the way they want to and people will read your books the way they want to. I don’t spend time thinking about it I think is the answer. I guess it’s not important at the writing stage but perhaps more relevant to the promotion of a novel. But I don’t think my publishers anyway promote me as a Sri Lankan, again perhaps because The Rose Grower was the first thing and being Sri Lankan or not had absolutely no relevance in that case. And I don’t turn up to writers festivals wearing a sari and presenting myself as an Asian writer or marking my difference in that way. I think every writer hopes that their work will be assessed, anyone who is a serious writer surely, hopes that their work will be assessed on its own merits.
Are interactions with other members of the writing community important to you? For example in The Hamilton Case you acknowledge Yasmine Gooneratne, Chandani Lokuge and the Victor Melder Sri Lanka library in Melbourne.
Oh those weren’t interactions those were just, well in the case of Yasmine reading her book. I acknowledged her book rather than her. And in the case of Victor, well it’s a very wonderful library that he’s got and I just wanted to acknowledge his kindness in letting me borrow books as much as I wanted. And Chandani answered, there are particular things about Singhalese culture that I wasn’t sure of and I would always run them past her because obviously she knows about that stuff. But interactions… I don’t know many other writers, Sri Lankan or otherwise, and that’s ok really I think.
Do you have a specific readership in mind when you write? No. Not at all.
Ok, have either of your novels been published in translation or in English in other countries?
Yes in the UK and the States, then in translation in Germany and Spain.
Have you had any responses from German or Spanish readers?
I get the odd letter sometimes. Those translations are for The Rose Grower.
Do you ever imagine when you’re writing that this could be read in Germany or Spain then?
No. I think when you write, well I don’t know about other people, but for me I’m just trying to write a good sentence. Who is going to read this is just really doesn’t enter my head. I might think about my publisher reading it and think what will she make of it or something but that’s really about the furthest end point.
Could you describe the process of getting your first novel published?
I was very lucky it was just sent to Random House and they bought it. And you were on sabbatical from Lonely Planet is that right? I’d taken a year off my job. So you’d put aside time to work on the novel? No it wasn’t that really. I just wanted a year off my job. Then I just started writing so it wasn’t intentional it just happened that way. Serendipity. Did you particularly choose Random House, did you feel that they were a good publisher to go with? No I didn’t particularly choose them but I am glad they bought it. I think they’ve been very good.
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So how did the editing process go, did you have to make any significant compromises?
No, they’re very good. The suggestions they put up are more on the level of stylistic things. Or they might say, ‘we want to hear more about this character’ or something but they never say, ‘you need to change the ending’ or ‘we want a character who is more of a nationalist hero’. They’re not asking you to [make radical changes]. It’s interesting, with The Rose Grower it ended up being published by a completely different publisher in the States who, I mean he didn’t change anything from the version you see here, but other publishers were interested and one of them rang me up and wanted me to change the ending and have a happy ending because she said, “bad things don’t happen to good people”. This is a senior figure in a New York publishing house which is scary and tells you a lot about the American way I think. I didn’t, obviously, sell the book to them. So no I haven’t had any bad with Random House no, gosh no. We went through lots of and this wasn’t antagonistic it was just more difficult thing about, with The Hamilton Case, about italics and what italicise and what you don’t which is interesting. Having been a former editor myself I am aware of these things in a way that maybe other writers or readers aren’t. Do you italicise a word that is Sri Lankan English for instance but not Australian English? But why should you italicise a Sri Lankan English word but not an Australian English word. Then you get these funny sentences where maybe one thing is italicised and another isn’t because in the same sentence someone might be using, an example is perhaps the word dobi [that] might or might not be [italicised]. Or words for food that’s very hard to know what to italicise or not because maybe readers know what a roti is and then maybe some readers don’t still. It depends on generational [knowledge] and where you live. Do people know what a sambol is? For some people it looks ridiculous to have those words in italics. Should you have croissant in italics? So in the end we decided, it’s just like an editor’s solution really, we just picked a dictionary and said if it was in there in italics we put it in italics, or of course if it wasn’t in there we put it in italics and if it was there in Roman we left it in Roman. It’s a very pragmatic it is very pragmatic but like I said it does mean that you sometimes get in a single sentence say there are two food words one might be italicised and one might not be. I think that ninety-nine percent of readers don’t notice anyway.
No, I think that’s really an editor’s eye at work. And being an editor what was it like working with another editor, did it help having that shared understanding?
I think so. You know what editors are trying to do and you understand the publishing process in a way that, I think it’s quite a puzzling process for people who come to it with no background. I know that I’m allowed to say no, for instance. I like working with editors. I still work as an editor myself from time to time and I think a good editor can shape a novel, in a good way not in a bad one. I probably feel I am just a sort of needy writer because I’m always wanting more editing, more, give me more. As a writer I think one of the things it does to me is make me obsessive about rewriting, rewriting, rewriting endlessly. But it demystifies it having worked in publishing myself. It probably is a disadvantage in some ways in that I can see their point of view, this is probably not always a good thing, you should probably be more single-minded and narrow in your prejudices as an author. But I guess if you find someone you enjoy working with than that partnership can be very productive. It was good for me because both books were actually edited simultaneously in England and here so I had the benefits of two editor’s points of view. Did they line up with each other? There was
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never a case of someone saying, ‘I love that character’ and the other one saying, ‘oh but I hate him, can you get rid of him please’. Maybe one wanted to know more about this [particular aspect] and the other one didn’t mind knowing more but wouldn’t have picked it out herself and vice versa. But in broad terms though there were no disagreements.
Did you have any role in the design of your book covers?
They show it to you. They always show it to you and you can say no. But you were happy with it? I was happy with the final ones yes. I did say no to others with The Hamilton Case for instance. It was harder for them to come up with something for The Hamilton Case at least in Australia. But I think they did a good job. What kind of things did you reject? There was one with a flowery design. I didn’t want that for two reasons, first of all having had a novel called The Rose Grower where of course roses went on, I didn’t want to be ‘the floral writer’ but also the flowers, god knows why this designer did it, but they weren’t actually tropical flowers. It wasn’t frangipani or something, I mean that would have been terribly clichéd I’m not saying they should have done that or lotus or something, but if they are going to have flowers then at least it should be flowers that belong to that place. The publisher could see that herself. So that was one example. Another one, I couldn’t tell you what it was because no one could actually say what it was, something blurry. I think this one is beautiful, with the old fashioned wall paper and the combination of East and West, they did a good job on that, yes.
The Hamilton Case mimics but also undermines the rules of classic crime fiction by displacing one crime from the centre of the story to replace it with another. What prompted you to play with crime fiction in this way? Has crime fiction always been an interest?
Well I’ve read a lot of crime fiction and I suppose Agatha Christies classic whodunits were the first sort of grown up novels that I read when I was a child. So I suppose I associate being a child in Sri Lanka with reading those kinds of books. Then because the thirties is the golden age of the detective novel so it seemed quite nice to have a pastiche of one. But why did I play with it? Because obviously a lot of classic detective fiction is also a shoring up of very conservative values to do with class and race and so on. It speaks from a position of great certainty about what is right and what is wrong. So you have, who is guilty and who is innocent. I think today we are less certain about those things so I wanted to have something that both drew on and as you said undermined that deeper structure of the classic whodunit. And then because history is a little bit like a whodunit too. Whose guilty and whose innocent? If you think of somewhere like Sri Lanka who’s responsible for what has gone on? Obviously colonialism played its part even in what is happening today but at the same time you have to acknowledge that nationalism has not exactly helped. So the questions of guilt and innocence become very blurry in postcolonial countries. Not at the moment when they are struggling to get rid of the coloniser but as time goes on and this is what I mean, plots only become more complicated as time goes on.
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Interview with Adib Khan in Melbourne on the 17th of October 2003
What prompted you start writing fiction?
Well it sort of happened. I have no background I writing. I suppose I turned forty, fortyish and I was teaching English in school and History and perhaps it was some sort of mid-life-crisis; an ‘is this all there is to it’ sort of syndrome. It became a choice between perhaps thinking of a PhD and maybe creative writing. I didn’t particularly enjoy doing a Masters. I’ve always had this attitude that, ok, I’m writing on someone else and therefore how original is that? I know that there is a type of originality involved, of course, but that wasn’t me, I think I realised that much. And it just happened that perhaps in this confusion I sat down and put a few ideas in words. Basically it was a form of therapy I suppose, when I think about it with hindsight. And it brought, I don’t know, some sort of consolation, some insight and by the time a year was up I had a novel; well I didn’t have a novel I thought I had something, and that stood there (that was Seasonal Adjustments) for a while and I didn’t do anything about it. I happened to mention it to a friend who runs a bookshop in Ballarat and he said, ‘well why don’t you send it?’ I mean he didn’t look at it because I don’t show my manuscripts to anyone, so I said, ‘well who am I going to send it to?’ I had no idea about publishers at that stage. So he gave me a list of publishers in alphabetical order and Allen & Unwin was on top, A, all that sort of thing, so I sent it off to them. I didn’t even know who to address it to. Then I probably forgot about it, I was preparing to send it off to a couple of other publishers when they rang me after six weeks and said they were interested in publishing it. So that’s how it all got started. That’s excellent so you didn’t have to go through the whole process of rejections…No, I’ve never, for my novels, I’ve never had a rejection. I’m sure one will come along. But I’ve never had that, the cupboard was absolutely bare, there were no short stories, nothing of that sort.
What inspires you to keep on writing?
I think it becomes a habit. Is it addictive? It is very addictive. It’s very addictive because every time I finish a book; let me relate my latest experience. When I finished Homecoming the publishers threw everything into the editing, they really liked the book and they threw everything in to it. It was a long long long process but what was bothering me at that time is that I wasn’t really writing as such, and you are left with this sort of hollow feeling, ‘well what happens next?’ because you are never sure where the next book is coming from. And as a result, you sort of, you don’t go out searching because I’m a great believer that if there is a novel in you it will emerge and I think you instinctively know when the time is right and you make a beginning. You may not have any idea how the book is going to work out and quite frankly at the moment I’m doing something which I think is rather stupid but I have begun two books at the same time, because I don’t know which one to choose and I have written the opening chapters and I am no wiser now than I was [at the start]. So you might have to go further with both? I might have to go further, and I have tried everything. I’ve tried writing each in the first person and the third person and it still doesn’t…the one that I didn’t want to perhaps pursue seems to be coming through a bit more strongly. So, yes, at the moment it’s very difficult to [know] and it will be struggle because I’ve got Homecoming published next month and the usual going through this that and the other. It’s very disruptive. Writing has become very fragmented. I often recall my days writing Seasonal Adjustments,
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[when] no one knew you and you had this clean uninterrupted run, but you have to adapt to those circumstances. So how long does the process of writing a novel take, or has that been different for each of your novels? It’s different for each novel. I never set out with a process, as such. I think the thing to do is to leave the last novel behind you because that often tends to intrude and carry into what you are writing and [you] should never have expectations from the previous novel in terms of your writing process, that’s disastrous for creativity. It’s done, finished, move on.
Could you tell me a little about your creative processes, do you begin with an image or a character or a particular emotion?
No set rules. I am more character orientated, perhaps, and it’s a question of taking the character from point A to point Z and what am I saying about life when I trace this process, basically. But the idea, it is almost…I can give you an analogy: think of a fairy floss, you must begin with the stick and it starts revolving and the whole thing builds around it. So the stick is the character and everything else is subservient to it. Now that’s the first draft, later on, obviously you have to make adjustments, things have to be grafted in. Homecoming would probably be a good case in point because, see I wanted to write an anti-war novel but I didn’t want it to fall into the trap of writing a conventional love story within it. The passionate love story with the torrid love affair and then one gets killed etcetera, etcetera. I didn’t want that. I always wonder what happened to soldiers, say twenty, thirty years after they have been through a war. So the central relationship in Homecoming is between the veteran who is impotent and a stroke ridden woman. Now how much responsibility does he have for her? So that was gradually grafted in, second draft onwards and that became very important because it sort of paralleled the theme of moral responsibility which I was trying to get at.
What are your opinions on the role or purpose of storytelling?
Well perhaps mine is rather narrow because I write what is known as literary fiction and without being terribly didactic about it I do feel that, Christ I should have something to say about society, be it Australian or global for that matter, the human condition. I am one of those writers who finds human fallibilities far more interesting than human virtues, if you like. I think it was something that Kafka once wrote to his friend Oscar Pollock, that ‘a book should be like an axe for the frozen sea inside us’. I’ve never forgotten that. That if you can’t provoke, if you can’t disturb, of course, literature has to have redemptive features, there’s no question about it, but if you can’t disturb and you can’t provoke I think I’ve failed, to a certain extent. I’ll give you a perfect example of what I consider to be the best novel written in the last ten years, Coetzee’s Disgrace. It made me so uncomfortable at the end. I couldn’t see a solution. I thought about it and thought about it and thought about it. To me that’s what literature should do.
Do you have a particular reader in mind when you write?
No. Not at all. I’m rather selfish, it’s me, what I want to say. If the reader wants to read it, fine. I don’t write either for a commercial purpose or for a specific type of person. I want to explore my own ideas and basically what you are doing is every time you write a novel you set up your own university, you write your own course, you are your own supervisor. And there is that elation of freedom, that I am not answerable to anyone. You’re doing it for three to three and a half, four years. It has that sort of freedom that
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you wouldn’t get in an academic setting and I suppose as you establish yourself that freedom is even greater. So, well, if you’re hell bent on mischief then you go for it.
How has Australia, as a location for South Asian cultural production, changed over the last 30 years?
It’s far more receptive now, of necessity because I suppose as part of globalisation there’s more awareness of a wider world out there. I think the publishers have had a lot to do with it. I think the academic world in Australia is still fairly conservative but the publishing industry…I don’t know why it is. I suspect it is to with a lot of fairly bright, progressive young people who are in the publishing industry especially the women who are prepared to take risks, who are prepared to explore a bit more. So you get away from the Jane Austin syndrome and the George Elliot and that sort of thing, and they will take things on board which perhaps the academic world will frown on. There is more risk taking. So, Australia is not a bad place to be in if you want to have a diversity of writing. I don’t see any problem. And that will continue to develop and grow, more and more South-East Asian appreciation. Especially in view of September the 11th and Bali, I think people are perhaps in a sense, forced to take more of an interest.
What are the benefits of being a migrant or hyphenated writer?
You have a huge landscape to work from and I think you’ve got to take advantage of that. Or let’s say you have twin landscapes to work from. It took me a long time to start feeling comfortable about Australia as my backyard. I wrote my first three books essentially set in the subcontinent and you can enter a comfort zone and stay within it and that’s not me. I thought about it and I realised that Australia is not a foreign landscape. I have been here thirty years. I have the advantage of living on a double block, and they are both mine. So I think that it is only fair that I now start exploring the other side of the coin. And I sort of procrastinated and pontificated about whether I should set a book in Australia. This is partially the result of one reviewer, I have a lot of time for him, Andrew Rheimer of the Sydney Morning Herald. After I had published The Solitude of Illusions he was kind enough to say in his review that…he had always been hinting that I should write about Australia and he said something to the effect that I was a good enough storyteller to get away from the exotic. That sort of rankled me a little bit. I thought, you can’t dictate terms, I’ll write the way I write. But I think I saw where he was coming from and what he was getting at and as a result I wrote Homecoming and it surprised me how easily it came. That transition wasn’t traumatic or difficult or in any sense dramatic, because I suppose you deal with certain human experiences which transcend cultural barriers. So it was my quickest novel in one way, it’s probably a fairly complicated book but it didn’t seem to make any difference. You can make life difficult for yourself. Storytelling has to be basically an instinctive process. I think that you have got to learn to distinguish between the creator in you and the craftsperson. The relationship is not a very harmonious one very often, and I think you’ve got to learn to separate the two, but basically to get the framework you’ve got to rely on the instinct. So to allow any sort of artificial barrier to intrude can make life very complicated and I always try to keep it simple, no hang-ups at all about, look that’s the way it is, I’m going to write about this, that’s it.
Are there connections between your writing and the work of other writers in Australia?
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Not necessarily. No, and I don’t even try to make that connection. That kind of situation is more for people like you, where you want to make those [links]; it probably falls within the academic realm where you see connections and quite legitimately too. I don’t because that’s confining yourself again and I work in total freedom. I don’t care about reviewers, I don’t care about critics, I don’t care about academics. And in that sense you would as easily see a connection between yourself and a writer working in France as a you would with an Italian writer working in Melbourne? Absolutely.
Do you believe that the Australian literary cannon has expanded to become more inclusive?
It has, it has. I think there is a broadening of the horizon, the literary horizon and the landscape and I think Australians recognise that. The literary establishment I think recognises that, even though sometimes there is a grudging recognition. It’s still to a certain extent fairly conservative but I think the publishers counter that, this push to make it more inclusive.
Do you occupy a mainstream position, given your success?
Don’t know, don’t know. I can’t answer that and it’s not a question which is important to me. It doesn’t worry me at all whether I am in the mainstream or in one of the by- lanes.
Are there any difficulties associated with being a migrant writer here?
It’s not easy to get published for migrant writers because, and I think to a certain extent probably migrant writers, I hope I’m not being unfair, create their own problems. You see, the voice of diaspora is beginning to sound a bit tired. And I wish migrant writers would take a little bit more initiative and, talking about mainstream, force their way into the mainstream. I think you can be terribly stuck in the traffic sometimes. Now do you think that the publishing industry has an involvement in that creation of a kind of, genre, if you like, called migrant or diaspora writing? Not as much here as perhaps in Britain because you wouldn’t have a large enough reading public, I don’t now what the situation in Britain is with the reading population especially among migrants, but you see it’s a cultural thing that you get a lot of migrants from India say and they are very professionally orientated, doctors and lawyers, etcetera, etcetera, the artistic side of things perhaps tends to just get pushed aside a little bit. I mean I know they sort of perpetuate their own culture and so on and so forth but the reading population in Australia, I would say, and I could be entirely wrong here, is still the anglo-saxon, anglo-celtic. I first published in 93, ten years on it would be far more difficult I think, because it’s getting harder, there’s a lot more competition, lot more migrant voices. And while of course a certain percentage of fiction that’s published will continue to be, but whether suddenly one springs up and stands out, I don’t know.
Do you see your fiction as part of a broader literature of a specifically South Asian diaspora?
Not really. I mean it’s very difficult to pinpoint where I go from here. Now obviously I think events of the last two years will have a role in fiction and I can’t ignore what has happened when writing fiction, otherwise what the hell am I writing about then. So I
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don’t know where I sort of fit there, whether it is essentially South Asian or whether I am taking a more global perspective. I’ll have to think about that a little bit more. I guess I am asking because many reviewers when discussing the work of South Asian writers here or abroad, the reference point is always Salman Rushdie or… I think Rushdie has had his day in a sense, partly because he is stuck in this style of his writing, that I think is his main problem. I still like to remember Rushdie of Shame more even so than Midnight’s Children, but then the sameness set in.
What literary texts or writers have influenced your own work?
I do admire Coetzee, very much. No, others no. I mean I admired the earlier Rushdie, let’s face it, he basically dragged subcontinental literature out of this polite, deferential, Edwardian writing, where we wrote correctly in beautiful prose. It was very correct and formal and that was I think his great achievement because he completely dragged us out of it. He was perhaps one of the first to instil a sense of confidence by laughing, by satirising, caricatures, and that was a very significant initiative, so we owe him a great deal, there’s no question about that.
How do you feel about South-Asian-Australian fiction as a concept?
I don’t see why it has been complicated so much, whether it is politics, a question of cultural identity, a sort of fairly rigid dogmatic view. I don’t think literature should be treated that way. Cross-cultural writing is here; I mean what’s the big deal. You know the so-called notion of exotic writing, I’ve always questioned; whenever someone says, ‘exotic writing’ my attitude is, ‘well how ignorant are you? Why is it exotic? Because you don’t know. Why don’t you know? Why haven’t you been?’
At a writers festival a few years ago you were on a panel discussing the use and effect of Asian mythology in your writing. How has Asian mythology been used in your work?
Inadvertently, I think. I probably used it more in The Storyteller than in anything else, but that was a one-off. I don’t consciously rely on mythology, probably [because] I find enough in social reality, which to a certain extent I suppose reflects a lot of the mythology, especially rituals and things like that. So I don’t work overtime on mythology, now there may come a point where I will want to, but not at this stage.
A few reviewers have discussed the autobiographical quality of your first novel, Seasonal Adjustments. How would you respond to this?
My question is, ‘how the hell do they know what my life is about?’ What an arrogant assumption. There is a bit of you in every book, you can’t help that, it’s an expression of your views, your personality. The reason they took that up was because they were written in the first person and if I had written in the third person, well I wouldn’t have escaped but maybe a little less of that. No there wasn’t much in common between myself and Iqbal Chaudary. It seems that this happens with first novels especially, which for some reason are assumed to be more autobiographical than later works… See what happens is you perhaps learn to be more subtle and disguise the autobiography as you progress, but they’re still your views, your perceptions, your perspectives, so you can’t escape that.
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In many ways Seasonal Adjustments paints a bleak picture of cultural incompatibility and universal prejudice. Yet in other ways it celebrates the duality of a hybrid perspective. Could you comment on this notion of a cultural collision in your work?
I think probably when you talk about cultural collision I was more concerned about it perhaps, say five years ago than I am now. You know, I think it is probably experience and an age thing and basically I tend not to let the worlds collide now. I’m more accepting of the differences and if I had written Seasonal Adjustments now, it would have been a very different book. Do you think it was necessary to get that out of your system? It was necessary to get out the problems from my system. Not necessarily because I was seeking a solution because there aren’t any but I think the murky shady areas, the questions, the tensions had to emerge somehow or the other from within me and perhaps what it taught me is the limitations of life basically. I think James Bond once put it, ‘that everything in life depends on how you accept its limits’. I am a lot more accepting now and tolerant of a lot of things in the subcontinent than perhaps I would have been five or ten years ago. And you think this is just a shift in terms of your perspective on life changing over the years? Yes, possibly, I think so, maybe aging, [a] live and let live attitude. It’s a natural process, it is not something I have gone out of my way to develop. It is just something that has happened but in the sense that if and when I go back to the subcontinent I’ll probably be a lot more accommodating of, myself and my perspectives than I possibly would have been [ten years ago].
Iqbal is positioned as an outsider in both the Australian and Bangladeshi settings; he becomes invisible at social gatherings. How is this detachment empowering or disempowering?
Partially because he is able to see and record a bit more objectively perhaps, and maybe it’s disempowering because, and it’s a question I often ask myself: does it make him cynical, less humane in a way? I don’t know the answer to that. But being an outsider, being the outcast is not necessarily a bad thing. Obviously there is a desire to belong, to want to belong, but maybe it gives him an insight into things and enables him to express it in a way that he wouldn’t have if he had been part of the mainstream in either cultures.
Is fragmentation, detachment and melancholy an inevitable condition for the migrant?
Yes because I think you live with parallel worlds. One is a world in the memory, of what was and you cling to that because that sort of represents a pristine idea of life which is gone now. Everything changes and yet you cling to and retain a part of the past and you sanitise it. You remember the best bits and some how or the other you hope that that is still there when you get back and it is an impossible expectation. It doesn’t exist at all. In 97 I went back to Dhaka after quite a few years, I was absolutely devastated because a city of four million is now what, twelve million, thirteen million? I couldn’t recognise any of the landscapes. To me that was absolutely a shattering experience and it was probably at that point when my ties with Bangladesh were snapped, they snapped. It hurt me enormously that I have to let go now. I did used to have these rather absurd longings that one should end there, I’d like to go back and finish there. I don’t know whether I feel that way anymore. It would be nice to think of it as a complete circle to begin and finish at the same point, but it is not quite so simple as that .
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How are the experiences of migration and return different for your first and second generation characters, for example, Iqbal and Nadine?
Well I didn’t sort of look at Nadine perhaps from that perspective. She is too young and obviously it is totally alien to her and it will obviously be very different. I took my daughters with me in 97, they saw life there from a completely different angle and I have to be understanding of that, both my wife and I, you can’t have children here and expect them to adopt ‘core values’ of the subcontinent. I think that is always a problem. I suppose it raises the notion of well what about identity? Well what about it? Your identity as a human being is far more important than your identity as a Muslim or a Christian or a Jew or a Buddhist. But somehow or another there is an element of pride involved in it, that I’m this and I’m that. You’ve got to evolve in the place that you have settled in. The next generation, they are a natural part of that society whereas you are not and you’ve got to learn to understand and accept that.
The role of the individual in relation to the family and wider community is central to both Seasonal Adjustments and The Solitude of Illusions. Could you comment on this dynamic, on this balance between duty and desire?
It is very difficult to achieve balance between the duty and the desire because I think the sense of duty, especially in the subcontinent, is instilled into you, the duty that you have in your families. And perhaps the sense of individualism is enhanced in a western society; me, I’m at the forefront. There is a tension that you never quite resolve. It is probably an assertion of one’s right versus guilt very often, and maybe that’s not a bad thing because it gives you the tension that you need in a book and that comes naturally so you don’t try to create it artificially.
Could you discuss how issues of religion and religious belief are put forth in Seasonal Adjustments?
Yes, I mean to a certain extent let’s face it I was sort of writing on the back of Rushdie at that time, with the Fatwah and all that with Satanic Verses and I was really annoyed that there was such a negative reaction to him about the book. It’s a book and he’s got every right to say what he wants to. And to a certain extent I think I was coming out with my own version of, hey hang on, people have a right to be sceptical even though they are born in a particular tradition and whatever. At the same time perhaps looking at it from the point of view of a traditionalist, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to be an absolute fanatic about it. So probably those things were at work and I think I did make the point in Seasonal Adjustments about the problem that, or the differences between Islam and Christianity, that symbolism and allegory have been the great saviours for Christianity. If you ask a Christian, ‘what do think of resurrection?’ You can always turn round and say well that’s symbolic, a metaphor. Islam hasn’t got that leeway. If the Koran is the word of God transmitted by arch-angel Gabriel to Mohammad, then you are grounded in an absolute truth that is the word of God, but we don’t live in the age of absolutism. See this is where the problem arises with the, say Einstein’s relativity and the uncertainty principle, that you fashion truth after your own perception and perspectives, it makes it very difficult to reconcile and especially for a
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lot of us who have been born as Muslims but basically have had our education in a Western tradition. Now I think it is a hugely enriching experience, don’t get me wrong, but I think it also enables you to see the anomalies and the difficulties that religion creates, not only Islam but every religion. So in that sense probably the beliefs that are there, you try and make them as objective as possible. They are not necessarily mine but only what you believe are the beliefs that people have.
What is your view on how Islam is represented and perceived in and by Australian society?
Yes, look basically you’ve got to make a distinction between Australia and Britain here. Australia has been very naïve in its perception and very simplistic in its perception of other religions and other cultures, it always has been. I’m not so sure that it’s a great deal more sophisticated now in that respect, even after 9/11. There is still a lot of stereotyping that goes on and the curiosity to know and learn perhaps has increased a little bit but not to any great extent. Australians still, there is a longing for Europe, partially it’s a deep seated insecurity of being in this region. They deny it like mad but I don’t think that’s necessarily true, I mean to tell you the truth I think a lot of people and not only Australians would be worried as buggery about China, that they had a space program would upset them enormously. So in that sense there is a dilemma that they have to work with; yes it’s there, Indonesia is the largest country in the world yet how much do we know about it? Oh we know about Bali, but that’s the beach and the surfing and the Culture Club. So, let’s face it, only a minority in any culture would be interested in another religion, it’s far too esoteric. I think Manning Clarke put it wonderfully, there’s too much sunshine in Australia to be worried about religion, you need dank dark places and you know mist and you know and things like that, I mean religion and sunshine…yes ok, religion is not on the top of everyone’s agenda which is a nice way to be I think, really. Summer in Australia is a wonderful place to be. How long have you been here? Well, this will be my second summer. I am ashamedly Australian in that way. When we were looking around for flats my one condition was that it should be walking distance from the MCG, which it is, because I am a great cricket fanatic. So summer comes and my writing stops basically, well not stops, but it slows down and I think it’s terrific. So you are not going to find the mainstream Australian population particularly interested or involved in religion. Of course there will be the minority who will. I guess I was wondering if that would be changing now, in a sense, because of this issue of terrorism? Not yet, no. I mean naturally you are concerned that so many people have died in Bali and you’ve sort of woken up a little bit but waking up doesn’t mean you look out of the window at what’s out in the landscape.
Seasonal Adjustments highlights the elitism and moral decrepitude of the Zamindari tradition, drawing attention to the gap between the principles of Islamic egalitarianism and its practice. Could you elaborate on these themes?
Well it is probably true of every religion, there’s a discrepancy between precept and practice. I suppose you try and live up to ideals but it never works because of the human greed and the human ego factor. In a way I was trying to fictionalise the obvious aspect of human nature more than anything else, that you can strive for the ideal but you’ll always fall short because you’re human and that is part of being human. I was thinking when I was re-reading that novel about Iqbal’s relationship to poverty and to the urban poor, and how that very complicated relationship you drew out there between this
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feeling of revulsion on the one hand and a desire to…help to help and do good even when he knows it won’t change anything. Yes, that’s very natural I suppose. In a sense that causes a very typical dilemma and it paralyses you in a sense because there are two sides to you, one that is sort of revolted by what you see and yet your humanity perhaps comes to the forefront, you say how can I help them but the magnitude of the problem is so great that you turn away from it, very often.
In The Storyteller you write from the perspective of the urban poor and outcaste. Was it difficult to make this transition?
In the conceptual stage yes, but not in the writing stage because Vamana took over. He led me instead of my leading him and you know after I wrote the first draft it sort of sounded very stilted and I had to work it out that you can’t try and control him. If you are going to create this character he’s got to run and go, whatever he wants to do. When I wrote he next draft it was attitudinally very different and I just sort of went, without any hang-ups and conscious decisions to make him be. So he wasn’t working for me he was working for himself, so he in a sense created himself and I didn’t try to control him after a while. That was a very difficult experience but an exhilarating one because you realise the dimensions of imaginative writing. That it can happen where you create a character inadvertently and realise well this is too big for me, so what do I do? So you say, well go your own way. So is there a connection between Vamana and Munir from The Solitude of Illusions? I was celebrating probably in both cases, not deliberately, the imaginative and the instinctive lives. In a way society doesn’t give enough recognition to people like them but they may have a lot more to contribute. We sort of label people so much based on their material success but the richness of their minds is so often lost which is a great shame.
What motivated you to write Homecoming from the point of view of an Anglo- Australian?
I’ve done three novels which were essentially set in the subcontinent and I felt that it was time to perhaps move on, and it was difficult finding a theme, if you like. I wasn’t going to write a historical novel. Australia is pretty well covered in that area, that’s not saying that it’s not important, I think historical novels are important. So I wanted to do something which had contemporary relevance but perhaps with some resonance of a significant part of Australia’s history. And I wasn’t very sure until accidentally I happened to walk into a pub with a friend of mine and it was very crowded, we just found the only table that was available, there was two chairs there and we were just having a drink and a couple of fellows sort of wondered over, stood by and asked if they could sit there. These two blokes happened to be Vietnam veterans and we got talking and they were very non-committal and somewhere along the line, I forget in what context it was, I happened to mention the Bangladesh war. I said something to the effect that, you never lose the sense of fear, even if you have been a civilian in a war and one of them perked up and said, ‘ah now you. You understand’. And that got us talking, they opened up just a little bit more and I thought yes, maybe this is something that I could explore. I mean here are these people thirty years on, what are their lives like? So I sort of asked them if I could talk to them again. I had to make up my mind right there and then. They were not very keen on it but they sort of agreed and then I went back and saw them later and I didn’t get much out of them. They were very good at avoiding questions; ‘things happened’. ‘Well what things?’ ‘You know, things happened’. And
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therefore poetic license became very important for me but it probably gave me the base for exploring something which I thought well yes, this is important. Did you talk to any other people? You couldn’t. It’s very difficult to get people to talk about it and after a while I thought well no, why should I? I’m not doing a thesis or I’m not documenting anything. It’s fiction. So I’ll go with these two fellows (and they told me very little, bugger all really) and let’s see how I construct from this. It was the impetus they gave me, to take it forward.
So is the figure of the expatriate who returns to a once familiar environment similar to that of the veteran who has to readjust to civilian living?
Yes that is very much an issue and whether you at all readjust. I don’t think you ever get rid of your past, neither should you, but very often what happens to you, what you make of yourself and your life is dependent on your past life. As it happens with Martin Godwin, who is the main character in Homecoming, that a terrible incident in the Vietnamese village affects his entire life because later on he feels that it was his moral responsibility to act in a certain way, which he didn’t. And that theme of moral responsibility comes back to haunt him in his relationship with this woman. He’s not married to her, they have never had a sexual relationship, so how responsible is he for her once she has a stroke? Can he just leave her in a home and move off? Because his son has had a crisis, he’s moved to the country, so what do you do? How do you solve that problem? In the end I don’t offer any solutions. It’s probably an ending which surprises, I mean it certainly surprised my publishers and they thought it was just the right ending but it didn’t solve any problems. Basically what I was saying is that you come of age, you mature when you make a u-turn in life and walk into your problems without flinching.
How have contemporary politics impacted on your writing of the Vietnam war?
Well it has. I mean, I’m not an apologist for my very fairly aggressive anti-war stance. I’ve always been against wars. So obviously there’s a slant in that. One should never try to write an objective novel. It’s my belief, my passion, so that’s what it is. It does also seem, in a sense, that it is a very good time to be publishing this novel. Yes possibly, so I am told. You should be in marketing, the publishers, that’s exactly what they told me. Obviously that wouldn’t have been in your mind at the time but...no it never is and even when they mentioned it I wished I could have gone back and changed the bloody thing; they always look at it from a commercial perspective. Now, look, that’s part and parcel of the deal. But in a sense there are resonances…yes of course there are, of course there are. There was an appalling, I mean an interesting but an appalling situation, this program on SBS recently, about the need for speed or something of that sort, with the American pilots actually doped up and I was absolutely horrified and you think well ok, these people come back. What happens to them? There’s a flourish, they get a parade, lots of speeches, John Howard pats them yes pats them on the back, but then what? Twenty years from now? Suppose you have been an ordinary, a normal ordinary fellow conscripted and you had this experience of actually going and killing. Even if you are a trained soldier and you have killed, when you come back (and you sort of gradually shunt it out of the scene, of course) how do you react?
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Why did you choose Homecoming as the title for your new novel, the Australian Literary Management website also mentions this work as Journey of Shadows, was that an earlier title?
Yes it was an earlier title. Well, as I said to you, the Marketing people wanted something simple so that was when we…decided upon together? I don’t know whether I was…I was a reluctant but now look, I think it has worked out well because Homecoming is [fine]. And they have done the cover very cleverly. See, home and coming is split in the title so it shows the fragmentation of the sort of the inner homecoming, if you like, that it’s not a very cohesive homecoming. So they have been quite clever in doing that but yes look, it’s fine.
What do you see yourself writing next? I know you may not want to give this away.
Well I mean I can’t, as I’ve said to you I’ve started two novels. One very blatantly is going to deal with the terrorist theme, the second more subtly, written from a woman’s perspective, but yes, it’s too early, too early, one of them will come through. So when I am reading Homecoming you will already be well into your next novel, are you constantly on the move from one novel to the next? Well you try to be. I mean you take a break, you’ve got to recharge your batteries now and then but as I said to you, you never force it. You know when there is a barren patch. You don’t try and force it. You just shut up and say nothing and do nothing. Creativity is not an endless well. It will dry up and I only hope of the insight to recognise that I am finished and when you finish you go quietly. You disappear quietly. You don’t jump up and down and keep churning out things which have no meaning; but I think I’m right for the next ten years or so.
Have any of your works been translated into other languages?
Oh, Seasonal Adjustments was translated into Bengali, yes that was the only one. Do you know anything about how it was received in this translation? Mixed response. Some members of the army were rather upset about it. Yes I wondered about that but because I was a Bengali a lot of people took it up enthusiastically. Yes so it was good, pretty well received.
Have you received any correspondence from readers of your work?
Yes I do, but it’s sort of, what do you do? They write and most of them say that they enjoyed the work, well ok, great. I’m grateful for it. Is there anything that sticks out in you mind, that surprised you? No. I mean people have the right to interpret book the way they want to. There is such a thing as creative reader. There is the book, read it, make up your mind.
What compromises did you have to make, if any, during the editing process of your latest work?
Well Homecoming was given a lot of attention by my publishers. They appointed, I think one of the two or three top editors in the country, Judith Lukin-Amundsen, who is in Queensland and they said, no time limit, do what you have to. And I’ve never met her, I rang her and I said, ‘my first priority is to have a sparse novel, stylistically very different from what I have written before’, because it was a stylistic challenge more
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than anything else, especially after coming from The Storyteller. I said, ‘I want you to cut and trim, take all the fat off the bone’. That became the priority. It was a very slow process because every time you trim and you, say, take this passage out, you have to rewrite the chapter, virtually, to maintain the rhythm. So we worked through that and I thought she perhaps cut out a bit too much and I didn’t say anything and said, ‘let’s see how the publishers feel about it’. There was one scene, no a couple of scenes, one in a pub where there is a discussion on the usage of rape in war as a form of intimidation and aggression, and Judith had cut that out and it got back to my publisher and my agent, they both said, ‘no, that stays in’. Now I’d finished this work with Judith, then they got me the in-house editor that I had worked with on The Storyteller, so I had to work with her as well. Then as soon as you say, ‘well no this goes back in’, you have to rewrite again. So it became a very long drawn out and protracted process but in the end I think we got it together very tightly. It’s the tightest of my novels and as a result, the shortest. So there is not much excess baggage there. And like you say, coming form The Storyteller which is very lush yes that lushness is completely gone and that was good because I wanted to experiment stylistically. You can’t have the lushness of The Storyteller set in Australia I don’t think. You’ve got to change and it was also something that was challenging for me, how well can I adapt stylistically? Culturally yes but how much can you change [stylistically]? And it was good, it was a good feeling.
Could you comment on the strategies employed by your publisher in promoting your most recent work?
Yes well, they flew me to Sydney to talk with their sales rep this time. I’d never done that before and I had to tell them about how I had sort of… they brought, they actually had sample chapters of the book at the Melbourne Writers Festival here. They I think also did a lot of unread proof copies which they sent out, so there was a lot of pre- publication publicity this time around which I have never had. So they’ve obviously pushed a lot harder because it’s an Australian novel. Will you have to do any tours or signings or I think I’ve got to do one on the 14th, they are still working it through, I’ve got a launch in Ballarat on the 6th and I think I’m going to do one, see there’s an embargo on the press release until the 1st of November so you know nothing much happens until [then]. So you’re sort of waiting for the books to come in, which will be in two weeks time and then they’ll work out what happens and what I will do. So it’s one of those [times]. It’s a period of time where you just wait. I can’t do anything about it. As a writer you know the least about your book, everybody’s meeting for lunches and coffees and you’re sort of left behind here. If you don’t live in Sydney it’s a great disadvantage, not even Melbourne, so half the time I don’t know what the hell is going on. Not that I want to know.
I guess you have already answered this question then, you don’t have anything to do with the design of your novels, do you write the blurb?
They write it and I have a look at it an modify it.
And why have you chosen to publish with HarperCollins, because they were the highest bidder?
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They bid for it. The Storyteller set it up. [HarperCollins India have bought the rights for The Storyteller]. I don’t like changing publishers and I get on well with people there. I’ve always had reservations about, in a sense it’s Murdoch, but you realise the people you work with, they’re very ordinary people and they’ve been terrific, I get on well with them and I see no reason to change. HarperCollins is also a big publisher in Australia. Well look there are four in Australia, HarperCollins, PanMacmillan, Random House and Penguin and if you go anywhere else you are sort of moving sideways.
Your novels have been extensively reviewed by the press, do you feel that your work has received a fair appraisal? Do any reviews stand out in your memory?
Yes, I don’t tend to read reviews of my own novel. I mean they send it to me and I glance over it. I don’t see the point in it. It’s done, somebody’s going to give me a caning, a good serve or praise me, I think that mostly, I’ve not had a bad review I don’t think and yes so I can’t do anything about it. I guess that’s part of you moving on, you’re already thinking about the next one now, so the reviews will appear next month, so what? That’s quite admirable, I think I would be nervous. Would you? No, you don’t make it the central purpose of your life. You loose the freshness if you treat it as though it’s the sacred cow. For God’s sake, it’s a book. You’re dealing with a book, there’s a lot more to life than getting worked up about a book. Yes books move you, they influence you, fine, but the fact remains there’s cricket on next month.
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Interview with Brij V. Lal at the ANU in Canberra on Wednesday the 9th of June 2004
In ‘The Road to Mr. Tulsi’s Store’ you state that ‘Colonial Fiji…had no place for thinkers, writers and dreamers’. What do you believe is valuable about such ‘waste- time’ activities?
I think the first point to make is that colonialism was about control; controlling people’s minds, controlling people’s activity, their world-view and what the government wanted was more cogs in the colonial bureaucratic wheel, people who will do things but not ask questions. So scholarships were given to people for training in things like high-school teaching, accountancy, economics, administration and so on and so forth. There was no encouragement of creative free-thinking as you can imagine. But what was interesting also, for me, was that in primary school and high school there was a great deal of emphasis on learning about the empire, broadly speaking, so we read books about Africa, about the Caribbean, the great English novels and in a sense it had the opposite effect. Instead of closing our minds, it exposed us to the great thoughts of humankind. It made us aware of other experiences, other pasts and so on. It made us feel, growing up in a small enclosed village, that we were part of a much larger humanity. That has stuck with me, the sense that we were from the village but we were also part of a larger entity.
The second thing that was important about that experience of growing up was that there was very little of interest in things that were happening around us. We were on a farm, in school holidays we used to work on farms and help the neighbours and so on and these books really opened up new horizons. It became an escape from the dreary reality that surrounded us. So it became fantasy, escapism, if you will and one thing that has remained with me from that experience is that I became much more aware of the universality of the human experience. So I read those English texts, Wuthering Heights or whatever it was, but I could see that the kind of emotions and impulses that the novelists were talking about were broadly [similar]. I could recognise the broad contours of the experience. So the idea of the fundamental oneness of humanity transcending barriers of culture, ethnicity, race, religion, geography was planted by those texts and has remained with me.
Now there was very little in the texts that we read about our own local experience, whether in Fiji or the Pacific or elsewhere. In our Hindi books we read a little bit about India, the heroes and the heroines and the culture of our ancestors, but really that was more at the primary school level. As we moved up to secondary school that began to fade away. Now an earlier generation of people coming through the system in Fiji and other parts of the empire were doing things like the Cambridge School Certificate. They did in fact do Hindi at that time but for us those options were not there. And so, in a sense, there is a kind of lop-sidedness to this education: we learn a great deal about other experiences but not our own. Now, for me it is not too much of a problem because I went on in high school, university and further on to revisit that experience so the gaps that were there in our education I was able to fill, but I do feel sorry for people who after high school went into the sciences or other professional subjects that did not have an opportunity to study their own past. And the gap there in their universe, if you will, is clear and there’s an element of regret, that we know about Shakespeare, we know about the Bronte sisters, we know about Steinbeck and so on but we don’t know anything about our own people. So there is that gap and as I say I am aware of the
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limitations of colonial education, the prescriptive nature of it, but I also find the deliberating side of that enriching aspect of that enriching and illuminating.
I was thinking as you were speaking that in your book Mr Tulsi’s Store you show this doubleness visually, by heading each chapter with a quotation from some of these classic English texts. Yet the chapters themselves obviously pick up on other cultures, other languages, indeed are very postcolonial in that sense and are prefaced by a statement from another text which is also part of the culture of Fiji. In the broader culture of Fiji the residues of a colonial education system cannot just be dismissed, I think.
I totally agree with you. I think that our soul was nourished, nurtured, as I reflect now, by a number of influences, Western literature, Indian art, music, faith, food and so on and the Pacific as well. The other thing is that the kind of experiences we had growing up in a colony was broadly [shared]. I talk to people in the Caribbean, they read the same texts. So I find wherever I go I find the, what I call, the Anglo-Australasian culture, the English colonial culture, the curriculum and so on is familiar to people of my generation in a number of [former] colonies. So I do find those English texts, Tennyson and people like that, very much part of my [heritage] but that doesn’t take place at the expense of anything. I still read Hindi. I write in Hindi. I am fond of Hindi music and I play it every day in my home so there is no sense of regret in Fiji but if you go to the Caribbean you’ll find that they have lost their Indian culture because of a prolonged absence, if you will, of contact with familiar, because of the physical isolation. Whereas we in Fiji never really lost touch with India whilst we imbibed the things that the colonial texts imparted.
I’ve read your review of Subramani’s Dauka Puran, do you yourself consider writing creatively in Hindi?
It’s interesting that you ask that because last year I in fact wrote a story in Fiji-Hindi. I’ve published a book in standard Indian Hindi but this is a story in Fiji-Hindi about something in my village. It is coming out in this book Bitter Sweet. Now when I gave it to the publisher, the publisher said ‘well this is very interesting’, and then I showed it to a number of people from Fiji and they found it authentic. The publisher said ‘but I think it is also important for you to translate it into English’. So I translated from Fiji-Hindi into English. So in the book you have both versions printed. In English it’s called ‘Marriage’ and in Hindi the word marriage is marit and so the Hindi version is called ‘Marit’ at the end of the book and ‘Marriage’ is the English one. I think there is a sense in which people are generally not completely comfortable with Fiji-Hindi as a medium of creative expression, partly because they feel it is a mixture of all kinds of dialects, it doesn’t have proper grammar, it’s a Creole language and so on. They feel in a sense that this doesn’t do justice to their culture and so they stick to standard Hindi. But this a language that was born in the context of a particular historical and cultural experience, this is the language of our emotion, this is the language I spoke with my parents or with my friends. So I am not ashamed and this is something I have been thinking about more and more, to write in Fiji-Hindi. I’ve made a start and who knows where this will take me.
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So do you see the benefits of using Fiji-Hindi as a way of accessing highly localised or everyday experiences that are better, or more authentically, expressed in this language? What were the difficulties then of translating into English?
That’s very interesting and important but a very difficult question. I think that the sort of words that I use when I am writing in Fiji-Hindi are words which have vanished from our vocabulary now, more or less, because of western education, because of improved communications, mobility and so on, generational idiom and all of that. So what has happened is that I write in a Hindi from when I was growing-up, the 60s and early 70s. I think I write more authentically in a sense when I write in that language and when I read it out to my friends there is, ‘a-ha! Yes, we recognise that’, whereas writing in English, it is not as easy to communicate certain levels of experience as authentically, I think, as I could in Fiji-Hindi and that maybe my limitation as a person who learnt English at a much later stage of life, who is still struggling with its syntax and grammar. But I think there is something else that prompted me to write in Fiji-Hindi and that is that the world which formed and deformed me as a child is vanishing. Because of the political problems in Fiji, people are migrating, because land-leases are not being renewed so farmers who lived on a particular piece of land for generations are moving out. The village community that developed in the 1920s when indenture ended to about the 1970s had a world of its own. An inner life of its own that is beginning to vanish and I wanted to capture that. Also I suppose there is an archival sense here as well that I wanted write in this language, maybe to preserve it as a historical document so people in I don’t know ten, twenty, thirty years or generations later can see, ah this is how they spoke at that time. As a historian I am also creating an archive besides trying to write as authentically as I can in my mother-tongue.
Could I ask then why you feel motivated to write about the indenture period and the years that follow? I know you have done this both academically, in your thesis and elsewhere, as well as creatively through characters like Aja, who give life to the statistic of 60,000 who crossed the ‘dark waters’. So two questions. One, why is it important to write about the past, and two, would you consider writing about Aja or a character like him in a more extended way, say a novel?
The first question, why do I write about the indenture experience in the way that I do? A number of reasons. First is that indenture was the foundational experience of our people in Fiji and indeed one of the turning points in modern Fijian history, as it is in the Caribbean, or for Mauritius or Africa and this constitutes an important foundational experience in these former sugar colonies. A lot had been written about this experience but a lot of it was written by outsiders, people, many of whom were quite sympathetic, others who were not, but I just had this sense that they went so far and not any further because they lacked cultural knowledge, linguistic skills and so on. I wrote partly because the world of indenture was partly familiar to me, my grandfather was alive, and I saw the legacy of indenture in daily life, the sugar cane farms, all of that. So in a sense it was an effort, and again when I look back on it, it was an effort to really understand myself and the forces which formed me. And I knew I had the skills, linguistic and cultural to probe deeper than others had done. I think it is time I felt that some of us began to interpret our own experience that resonated with the experience of our people. That [Girmitiyas: The Origins of the Fiji Indians] was the first piece of work I did and the book has recently been republished to mark the 125th anniversary. So I think there was something there that I wanted to understand, why our people left India, what kinds
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of aspirations and hopes did they have, what kind of difficulties they encountered, what happened on the plantations and so on. And the book which I consider to be my definitive work is called Chalo Jahaji. As a result of that experience I began to challenge certain notions about indenture. The conventional wisdom is that indenture was slavery because it replace slavery in the 1830s and all the features of slavery were replicated in indenture. This whips and chains version is the dominant one in public discourse. I began to challenge that though my research. May this year marks the 125th anniversary of the arrival of Indians in Fiji, so I went to Fiji and I gave a talk called ‘Indo-Fijians: A Hundred Years in a Lifetime’. What I argue is that indenture was what I’d call a limited detention of five to ten years not the life sentence that slavery was. If you go to the Caribbean you will see the remnants of slavery and indenture even today. So that’s the first point I make, that five or ten years later they became free settlers and were able to do things on their own. So I would draw a distinction between say Fiji and the Caribbean where dependence on plantation [labour] lasted for generations.
The second point I make is that indenture was simultaneously an oppressing and oppressive experience but also a liberating one, because a lot of people in India, especially in the lower strata of society, had no hope in this life or the next or the next for any betterment, because of ritually proscribed behaviour of the caste-system. And that broke down. So people who had no hope at all found they could make their own destiny. That their destiny was in their own hands, once they became farmers, setting up on their own, they educated their children and a lot of people like myself in the professions are from that experience. If my grandparents had remained in India, I don’t think I would be a professor in Canberra, most likely. So I argue that one has to look at this in that sense and I also try and give some agency to the girmitiyas. Yes they are poor people coming from impoverished backgrounds but they also had a sense of, alright this is five years, let’s make do with this and deal with this and then progress from there. Now that is broadly the essence of what I am trying to communicate through my research.
The post-indenture period is interesting. For the indenture period there is a lot of documentation because the indentured labourers came as British subjects under a contract and so their movement was monitored, the British did like to keep records. Indeed, the paper trail is enormous, when this person arrived, which date, when they became free and so on an so forth, because they had to report, both to India and to England. So it wasn’t as if they were controlling and working these people in isolation. There was overseas oversight, if you will. But once you enter the period of post- indenture, Indians have left the plantation, are on their own and there’s rudimentary administrative control but for the most part these people are left to their own devices, like my father’s generation – my father was born about 1918. So how do you write about this foundational experience? From the 1920s to the 1960s because from the 1960s onwards there’s a new movement towards independence and more records were kept. But this period, the inter-war period if you like, there’s nothing. There’s nothing and yet a lot of us grew up in that time enveloped, if you will, in the overarching ethos that informed that period. That is where imagination comes into play. There are some written records, very few, but then you say ‘alright, what was it like to live in a village, what were its fears and hopes, the difficulties, how did people celebrate life, or mourn its passing? How did people get out of this terrible situation of poverty and deprivation? Why did they turn to education? What was the effect of all of this?’ And that’s where I revisit the village but with a historian’s mindset, disciplined imagination, you say ‘I am
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on trial, I am on oath to tell the truth’. So in what I describe I try to capture the inner truth of that experience. It is only when people from Fiji read the book and say, ‘a-ha! I recognise that’…and when you look at the experience critically a number of things begin to appear.
I’ll just mention two things to you. Indenture was an enormously liberating experience, a leveller of hierarchy, whether you were high-caste or low-caste you work on the plantations and were paid according to the amount of work you’d completed, and in that sense, therefore, individual initiative, enterprise and all of those things were emphasised. So out of this complex experience emerged a more egalitarian society, less respectful of protocol, much more on their own and doing things on their own. Look at our schooling. When I went to primary school, we came from very poor backgrounds, or secondary school for that matter, it didn’t really matter whether you were rich or poor, whether you were in shoes and socks, the classroom was a great leveller of hierarchy just as indenture had been for my grandparents. So a lot of people from my generation did well because we succeeded in our scholarship and our schooling. So new markers of status came from schooling rather than wealth or privileged connections and proximity to colonial rule and officialdom.
There was a time in the 1920s and 30s and 40s when people from high-caste because of their connections, because of their greater awareness, did form what I’d call established families in Fiji. Big names. These things became obvious to you when you begin to delve deeper into the [experience]. The other thing that occurred to me was how clever our people were. Now one way of gauging changes taking place in that society is through looking at names. Now the indentured labourers were named after objects, they had non-descript names, named after a particular event, or if someone had died in the family and a child was born they might name them Dukhia, dukhia means sadness or pain, or sukhia means happiness or simpleton, bhola. And if you were sufficiently attuned to the Indian system of valuation so to speak, cultural valuation, you could tell roughly a person’s caste by how they were named. Now the indentured labourers began to name their children after Gods and Goddesses, Ram Prasad, Sukh Ram, sukh Ram means happy Ram, prasad is the food offered to the gods and Ram you know and things like that, or important personages Jawaharlal or Rajendra or whatever. And you couldn’t tell whether Ram Prasad was a Chamar or a higher-caste. So this is an obliteration of old marks and boundaries that had defined the world of our [grandparents]. Now our parents did something else. They began to name their children after film stars, the new gods and goddesses; Mahen Kumar or Suresh Prasad or Sunil Kumar or Satish Lal and you couldn’t possibly tell whether Satish was a Brahmin or a Chamar or whatever. Now all of us are all equal. And of course, the latest thing is that you give people names that are completely unpronounceable, Akheshwari or this or that. I see in that, when I began to think about it, a conscious effort at what I’d call Sanskritisation, that is upward mobility, obliterating those markers which had defined people in their particular small categories in the past. Now for those sorts of things there is nothing written in the records anywhere. You just talk to people and reflect. So there are layers of experience that are very important to how a community defined themselves out of that experience of indenture into something else that you can’t access through historical documents alone you can’t and that’s where I think this kind of faction writing, writing about a past that is real but undocumented because memory is not archived. Writing about that creatively, imaginatively but with a concern for the truth of the experience is what I found fascinating.
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With Mr Tulsi’s Store I noticed that you move quite rapidly sometimes from a highly personal insight to speaking from a broader historical perspective. This happens within a chapter or paragraph but also in the structure of the book, so you include a chapter on your brother and one on your political practice. So did you intend to mix up the personal and the public in this way, if you even recognise this as a distinction between different spheres of life?
There is a distinction and I think it arises from my effort to try and tease out from my personal experience things that I think are common to the experience of a larger group of people. I feel very uncomfortable writing about myself as an exceptional human being and all of that, because I am not. I try and use my experience to talk about the experience of a generation coming of age in the post-war period. There are some [chapters], the one you mentioned about my brother’s death, which are very personal because he was very close to me and it’s very emotional, but really when you talk to people living overseas and they hear the death of a loved one those emotions are [shared] the particular details may vary but [not] the broad experience. So I find inventing characters out of the blue from my imagination and so on a bit problematic. My training as a historian does influence the way I write. So yes there is always an effort, I think, in many of these pieces to use the personal experience to illuminate a larger pattern. And that’s the historian in me inhabiting the interface between scholarship and creative writing. That’s where faction comes in.
Do you think then that taking that approach, using personal experience, using memory, using oral histories is perhaps a better way at getting at that truth than going purely through written documents and archival records? Is there a need to combine these things?
I have spent a lot of my life in archives reading those documents and my library is full of those documents. So I am broadly familiar with the larger contours of that historical experience. Now some people, like Subramani, [his] Dauka Puran is a work of literature, although he is also conscious of certain social details and so on. But for me, I don’t think that documents by themselves really get to the truth in that sense. What the documents do is to give you a sense of the broader patterns, if you look at the statistics, if you look at newspapers, if you look at archival documents, you construct a broader picture, and for many many years I was quite content with that, painting on a large canvas, but the older you get, whether age has anything to do with it I don’t know, I wanted to go beyond the surface and say see what was happening at the edge, in people’s hearts. What kinds of things motivate people? Ok you may have an institution like the panchayat system, which is a five-member council adjudicating disputes and so on, but how does it actually work? Yes. At the grass-roots level. How is it used and abused? So you mix experience, oral work, talking to people, sitting around a yaqona bowl and asking questions. Those sorts of things, I think oral evidence properly used humanizes the story. To me it’s a kind of thing that someone like myself can do because I come from that background, I speak the language and all of that, so why not use that and it seems to me that people like those kinds of stories. I think the human story in its infinite variety is much more interesting than, although my first book, my PhD thesis, was a quantitative analysis. Really? I think I was probably among the first students in Australia ever to use a computer to process [statistical] information. My PhD looked at emigration of North Indian indentured laborers to Fiji and as part of that exercise I went
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through each and every one of the forty-five thousand passes. Forty-five thousand passes. Looking at the background, the caste, the places of origin and so on and so forth and when I went to Fiji I looked at things like, for example, I am digressing but I want to make this point please carry on from the Indian background I was able to do detailed work, two volumes of my thesis, on exactly how many members of each caste, how many men, how many women, how many children, from which district, and all of that I was able to map out. I don’t think anybody will be foolish enough to repeat that kind of work, but now it becomes a standard for [work on] all overseas Indian indentured migrants all over the world. And I was able to say things with a definitiveness about the social background and all of those sorts of things.
I’ll give you another example of where quantitative work helped. Fiji had one of the highest suicide rates in the world at the turn of the twentieth century and people believed that indentured laborers committed suicide because of sexual jealousy. There were very few women, men competed and women being [the] mercenaries that they were took the jewelry and moved to the next man took more jewelry and this guy hanged himself and then this guy hanged himself. So women were blamed. You didn’t find this convincing? I thought there’s something fishy about this. So what I did was I went to the archives and went through the register of suicides from 1884 to 1920. Each and every person who committed suicide, about three hundred or so people committed suicide, the day they committed suicide, the age of the person, the name of the person, the caste of the person, the religion of the person, the method of suicide, hanging or drowning or whatever, all of that [was recorded]. And I analyzed it, all those deaths, numbers! And I completely overturned the sexual jealousy thesis. I think, and I am speaking from memory now, twenty-five percent or so committed suicide within six months of being in Fiji. It was the trauma and the shock. Then if you look at the region of origins, more South Indians committed suicide, because they came late and their language was not understood, cultural prejudice and so on. So when you go into it more Hindus than Muslims committed suicide. So doing the detailed study of one experience of suicide I was able to dispel this myth which had lasted for a hundred years. If you see what I mean. So quantitative work has [a value but] I wish I’d had each person’s stories. There’s a paper which I have published that is now cited quite widely called ‘Kunti’s Cry’. It’s about a woman who was about to be raped and she jumped into a river and then I use that experience to talk about the experience of women generally. So I find that working with both these [methodologies] very important for my work and I acknowledge my limitations as a historian but that’s what I am most comfortable with.
In the ‘Beginning’ section to Another Way you state in response to the 1987 coups that ‘detachment has dubious value on the moral battlefield’. I was wondering if you would expand on this statement, perhaps in relation to notions of historical objectivity and the historian as a passive commentator?
I always write from a position of attachment. I realise that there is no such thing as objective truth. I mean there is, but it’s not very interesting. The coup happened in 1987 is a fact. Why did it happen is a more interesting question. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that when you are writing about your own society of which you are a part, writing about people who have made you a personal target because of who you are, writing about an event that violates basic beliefs you have about how people should govern themselves, the values that should underpin human societies and human relationships, the idea of using violence as an instrument of public policy, those things
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go very close to your heart, especially if it’s your own society but even in Australia I feel very involved with Indigenous issues. I feel very sad when people like Pauline Hanson espouse racism. So there are certain core values that inform my being and I think the coup really touched something very deep in me. And I thought then that the coup was not about race, it wasn’t about the racial fight between Indians and Fijians. It was more about vested interests losing out, it was more about people out of office trying to get back in but at any cost. I felt then, and I have been vindicated, that race was a scapegoat. A tool in the hands of these rabid nationalists who had their own agendas but manipulated the innocent emotions of a lot of people for their own political purposes. And now people like Rabuka are in their books saying we were asked to do the coup by Ratu Mara and so on and so forth. The same thing when the coup took place in 2000, I took a very strong stand on that and I’ve got a book here which I’ll give you. I said, ‘this is not about race, this is about this pale business man who is a front-man for other interests, it is more about a fight within the indigenous community in which Indians were used as a scapegoat. So in that quote about detachment, I couldn’t simply stand on the side and say, ‘on the one hand and on the other’. A lot of people, mind you, I wrote that book in Honolulu, a lot of my colleagues said to me ‘Brij I understand your hurt, your anguish but if you take a position wont it compromise your professional reputation as a historian of Fiji?’ I said, ‘yes it may but this is something I strongly believe in’. I’ll take a stand and show my hand. This is where I am coming from, this is who I am, this is where I stand. And a lot of people even then said, ‘I agree with you’, because I wrote a book about it Power and Prejudice. It’s a more honest response than maintaining the pretence of objectivity whilst being attached. One of my books called Broken Waves which is a history of Fiji in the twentieth century, I talk about this. And I said, it’s very important for me not to pretend that I am objective because it’s just not on. What I should do and honestly I hope I have done in my academic writing is to say this is where I am coming from, these are my prejudices, my pet-hates, my bias: in favour of democracy, individual rights, gender equality and so on. If you think this is wrong then fine, these are things I believe in and I stand by them. So the reader is then in a position to say, ‘alright I know where this person is coming from. This is his point of view’. And whenever I make an assertion, I document it so you can go back to the sources. In the way I construct my argument, the way I come to conclusions things, the process of reasoning is transparent and verifiable.
I was thinking that the statement on detachment is also followed by the sentence: ‘when one’s house is on fire, one has no choice but to join the firefighters’. Was that in relation to a comment made by Ratu Mara justifying his defence of Rabuka’s actions or something along those lines?
Yes indeed. When Ratu Mara in 87 said, ‘my house is on fire’, I said, ‘yes well that’s true but why do you join the arsonists’? My house is on fire and my response is that I want to put the fire out! I want to help those people who are trying t bring things back to normalcy. So as a citizen as a concerned citizen first and foremost… I give Ratu Mara his due when I asses his motives in my book, I say, ‘this is what he said’. In Broken Waves there are two or three pages where I say ‘look, it’s important for me not to dismiss Ratu Mara but to say these are the reasons he has given for what he has done’. So my duty as a scholar is to be faithful to the evidence of this person but then I don’t leave that hanging, alright this is what he has said but let’s analyse. So in that sense the reader is not taking my word for granted. The reader also has in front of him or her the word of the person I am criticising.
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Now this is also going back to that notion of detachment because I think you’re very right in saying how can you remain detached when it is something so close to your heart. It’s your country and your people who through these political machinations are in the firing line. But also you took an overtly active, participatory role; there’s that lovely quote in one of your articles where your young son says that ‘you have taught and written history. Now you can make history and then become history’. And clearly you have been a part of making history in Fiji in a very concrete way by being on the Commission to review the 1990 constitution. Now I know you could probably speak about this for days but could you perhaps pick out a couple of the most memorable or important aspects to you of this process of sitting on the Commission?
There are many things I could say but I’ll mention just two or three things. One was fear, apprehension and doubt. When my name was mooted people said, ‘well he is an honest guy, a good scholar but whether he’ll be able to stand the political pressure…he’s never been in politics, what does he know about these things’? And a lot of my friends wrote to me and said ‘don’t accept it because do you think this government will change the constitution. This is for show. They are just getting you… The commission is a farce. Rabuka wont change the constitution. This is just to buy time’ and so on and so forth. Family members also expressed concern, ‘if you fail then for generations people will spit at us. Our name will be embroiled in all the controversy’ and so on. So there was that and I’d never done anything like this in my life. The enormity of it dawned on me. Am I up to it? Yes I can read and write and summarise and synthesise but when in the glare of public scrutiny and all of that... But I accepted the invitation because I thought well if you don’t try… And I think I was put in the commission for precisely that reason; here is a man that understands Indo-Fijian fears and hopes but he is also a scholar who will hopefully understand Fijian fears and hopes. The only way to make progress is to understand the other person’s concerns and interests, which I tried to do. As time went on that sense of anxiety began to give way to a vague hope that we might be able to achieve something. So that was one thing.
I suppose the other thing was that as we went through the country, different places and talked to people, listened very closely to their submissions both oral and reading the group submissions and so on. Honestly what came through to me very clearly was that yes there are differences between Indians and Fijians, socially and culturally there are competing, and sometimes even perhaps incompatible, interests but as we listened it became very clear that on most basic issues people are agreed. There is a lot of common ground and people used to say that we in the villages were getting on very well, it’s when politicians stand up in parliament and spout poison that it affects usand so on.
The third thing was my friendship with Mr. Vakatora. We were chalk and cheese. He was in his late sixties, only primary school education, a few short courses here and there but nothing [sustained], a politician, well known as a hard-headed almost a Fijian nationalist, former minister, senator, businessman. He had earned his spurs, so to speak. And me? I was known in Fiji but as a scholar and Tom [Vakatora] was understandably distrustful of me because we were put together by two competing groups. And I remember very well the first day, the session went reasonably well and I said, ‘Tom, there’s no blood on the floor’ he looked at me and said, ‘not yet’. I thought my goodness me what have I let myself in for. I showed him the respect that is due to a person who is older, in my culture that is the thing to do and I listened to him very
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carefully and over time we became very close friends. We trusted each other and I remember very well on the last day before we submitted our report we’d hired a boat; he, his wife, my wife and myself. We went to this place where a ship was wrecked in 1884 and he took a man with him from the village and the man dived and picked up two pieces from the broken ship. He gave one to me and kept one himself. He said ‘my people saved your people in 1884 and we will save our people now together the two of us’. So in that sense it was a… and travelling around the country, I had bookish knowledge of history, but this man who had never been to a university, or even high school, had so much knowledge and pride in himself. So we complemented each other and a lot of people began to say, ‘well if those two can agree, why can’t we?’ The momentum of the report and the consensus on the nature of the report carried on and that’s I think what [is important]. It does go to show that when you remove all the trappings, constructions of race and community and put two individuals together in the same room for six months and lock them up that’s right and don’t feed them, but what can be achieved. The good thing was there was only two of us so we couldn’t hide behind a third person and say ‘well I agree with you but this person doesn’t’. So it was just us. We bear the responsibility.
Now you’ve touched on community relationships already by saying that there is a sense of, or at least a desire for, common ground. In the work I have been reading by Indo- Fijians, including your own Mr Tulsi’s Store, it seemed to me that Fijians were always on the outer fringes of Indo-Fijian community life, which was in itself very self- contained and divided along lines of North and South, Hindu, Muslim, gender issues and so on. This may be to do with the time that you are writing about but I also thought that the language barrier and lack of shared schooling must have contributed to many tensions alongside, of course, the colonial policy of keeping the communities apart. So what I am asking is whether on your last visit to Fiji you noticed, or in your general opinion you believe there has been, significant change? Are the communities drawing closer together?
I think there are a number of things to be said in response to that question. I was writing about the world in some of the earlier chapters of the 50s and 60s when we’re talking about self-enclosed worlds and very little [interaction]. Now this also reflected the experience of this particular place in Labasa where I came from. There are other places where there was more interaction. In parts of Viti Levu. There’s a chapter in my book Bitter Sweet where Vijay Mishra writes about speaking Fijian. But the point to be made is that in the sugar belts of Fiji, in my part of the world, the contact was limited, was peripheral to our daily lives and ephemeral. But there are other places where people did interact. It was more kind of easy relationships than any kind of meaningful [exchange]. I think things now, there is a greater awareness among Indo-Fijians particularly of the intricacies of Fijian society, the protocols, the rituals that govern that society. There is a greater willingness among Fijians to speak of their internal differences now that the fear of Indian dominance has [dissipated] because before you see in the 50s the Indian population was at least fifty percent or thereabouts and there was a fear that if we don’t unite, the wolves at the door syndrome, that they will take your land away and so on. But now the Indo-Fijian population is estimated to be about thirty-seven percent which is a huge decline from fifty percent in 87. So that fear which poisoned discourse and closed communities has dissipated. More people are talking about internal differences, of tribal and chiefly differences and that has opened up the space for democratic debate. More people are educated, they read newspapers so the kind of control that was there
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before is no longer there. You get your news from radio, television, newspapers and so on, access to information is very very important. Also I think the sense of the impact of globalisation, the sense that Fiji is an island but only an island in the physical sense alone is beginning to dawn on people’s consciousness. We cannot extricate ourselves from the international community and the university [of the South Pacific that opened in 1968] and all of that. So the circumstances are much more conducive now to a more open dialogue, more openness in terms of talking about issues that would have been hidden before from public gaze. All of those sorts of things are beginning to play a role.
But to answer your question whether there is a sense that people are getting closer, whether the common space has been enlarged, I really don’t know, but I don’t think so. And I don’t think so for a number of reasons. One is the political trouble. Now you have a government which is committed to reviewing this constitution and has rejected that. And that after agreeing to the rules of the game. So the constant fear in the hearts of most Indo-Fijians is that they’re at the mercy of somebody else, that the rules of the game could be changed at any time. In 87 twice. In 2000. They are emotionally uprooted, trapped and terrorised. People want to leave. This is the first thing; the emotional and psychological effects of the political situation. The second is that as since the coups of 87 close to about eighty to ninety thousand people have left. There is a sense in which our future is not here any more. Our future is overseas, somewhere, anywhere. So the history of Indo-Fijians might come to be written as immigration to emigration. What I argue in my papers is that we are witnessing the second crossing. The first was from India to Fiji and this is the second. We are seeing the diaspora of the ‘twice banished’, to use that expression. I think there is a sense among some Fijians as well that these are migrant people, migrant people leave all the time. There’s no sense of attachment to place. I don’t buy that. We have lived there for three generations, four generations, five generations, and people are leaving because they don’t see any future for themselves. And now this government has embarked on implementing racially based affirmative action programmes, they’re talking about Fijian unity and if you look at where all the power in the country is; ninety percent of all land is in Fijian hands, the army is ninety-nine percent Fijian, the marine resources one hundred percent Fijian, seventy-five percent of people in the civil service, top echelons, are Fijian. This process of exclusion, the glass ceiling syndrome is debilitating. There is a Fijian middle-class which has emerged since 87 partly because of better education, possibly because of more opportunities, partly also because of the departure of Indian public servants and so on. So what is happening is one would expect these people to stand for accountability, transparency, good governance and so on, but they have benefited from these racially based programmes and so on and my argument is that really nothing will change in Fiji unless Fijians stand up and speak out at corruption, mismanagement and all of those sorts of thing taking place. So to answer you question there is greater, on the surface greater interaction on this playing field, the public arena and all of that, but deep down if you ask any Indo-Fijian person they will say, ‘look, I wish I could go but if I can’t go I’ll make sure my children can’. And if you go to USP, the University of the South Pacific, you look at all these kids and what are they doing? They are doing those courses that will win them points in the migration statistics to come to Australia, IT, accounting, whatever the government wants. They’re gearing their schooling, their whole careers towards migrating rather than [staying] and I can understand that. I think that the effects of the coups and the convulsions they have caused will be with us for a very very long time. And a lot of Fijians are beginning to realise the harm that was done but just yesterday I received, (I gave a talk at USP and I talked about what it means to
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be an Indo-Fijian, a hundred years of experience) a letter from Mosmi Bhim who said: ‘I found your talk very interesting but you know, I grew up after 87’. So you have a whole generation of people, Fijian and Indo-Fijians, growing up in this atmosphere, the coup-infected atmosphere who have known no other world, except racialism, racial discrimination, turbulence, turmoil, exclusion. My experience goes beyond that and I talk about colonial texts and education and this and there’s a sense in 1970 that we must make this model of multi-racial democracy work, but they have grown up in a time, what I call the children of 87. The children of 87, on both sides are polarised. So it’s not, public propaganda and tourism clichés aside, it’s not a happy country.
Have you, or would you consider in the future writing creatively about the Fiji coups?
I am not sure I would like to write about the Fiji coups creatively. Partly because it dredges up memories of a past that I find painful. I thought that after 87 we had learnt our lessons an then something like this happens in 2000. People shoot themselves in the foot and then complain they are feeling pain. It’s like what is said about an orphan who has been sentenced to jail and then says ‘feel sorry for me because I have killed my parents and I am alone’. I was talking to a former government minister when I was in Fiji recently and I asked’ ‘what is all this about?’ He said, ‘look, we’re making progress. In 87 they staged a coup after one month. In 2000, one year. Next time they’ll wait three years. This is progress’. I said, ‘well, if that’s progress I really...’ I’ll give you the book on coups that I edited basically looking at initial reactions. You know you look at it and there was a time when I stopped writing about Fiji in scholarly terms and I have got this book to write, the biography of Mr. Reddy, and that will probably be the last thing that I write. Really? Yes, because it’s just so depressing. Having worked on Fiji and having hoped that they’ll be able to make things happen, having participated in public life, I mean I’ll never leave Fiji as such. My wife is in Fiji today and probably in four or five years time we’ll retire and live half time in Fiji half time here and do some creative writing. More of the kind of faction I was talking about and maybe, maybe the anger, the anguish will subside but at the moment it is too raw to write about that.
Yes, I think for some people there can be a cathartic effect to writing about traumatic events yet for others there is not. You’re right. I wrote my book Power and Prejudice in three months. I was in Fiji when the coup took place. The soldiers came looking for me because I was the chief commentator on radio, we didn’t have television then. It was a very very tense election and I was the chairperson of all the election discussions, so my name was well known in Fiji. So when the coup took place I was giving an interview. The soldiers came looking for me and my children were traumatised. And I couldn’t function. Then I returned to Hawai’i and I just sat down and I wrote and wrote and wrote. The book came out really within a month or something. I found it a very cathartic experience. This one in 2000, I wasn’t as involved. I was involved because as you know I was on the radio and television in Australia virtually everyday. But the sadness; if you don’t learn from history you are condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past. Now I suppose I am getting more and more detached from the daily politics of it all. I’ll give you an article I published on my reflections on Fiji, it’s called ‘Heartbreak Islands’. I think I would like to write more creative writing. Publishing an article in an academic journal which was once a great thrill for me, it is still interesting but it’s not the same, you’ve published so much how could it be the same the difficult one is writing faction. Digging deep within yourself and writing something that one hopes will remain as a an archival document, a text, rather than political commentary, these things
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are ephemeral and one is conscious of limited time. So to try and write some things that have more eternal let’s hope, but in the long run we’re all dead so it doesn’t really matter.
What kind of an audience are you trying to reach with a book like Mr Tulsi’s Store and your other factional works?
I am not sure I have consciously thought about that. A lot of these pieces that came out in Mr Tulsi’s Store were written privately and in private moments. No expectation that they would be published. The spirit seized me and I decided I would write. But what happened was I published a piece in Conversations (this is a literary journal that I edit) and my publisher, Mr. Ian Templeman, saw this and said, ‘you should write more’. So I gave him some things I had written and he said, ‘this is great, write some more’. So that’s how it came about. I think my worry was that there are things in some of those essays which are so culturally specific, names and so on that require a certain amount of knowledge and I wasn’t really thinking about universal themes that people may find, ‘ok this is a story situated in Fiji but it has resonance with my experience’. I hadn’t thought about that.
I think at the back of my mind was two things; one was to capture this vanishing world as best as I could without thinking about who might read that; but the second thing I suppose was I was trying to write, although my children I don’t think have read anything that I have written. They read a lot but, [it’s the] old man’s thing, the old man’s hallucinating. So they don’t at all. I don’t think they’ve read anything I have written, maybe a few things here and there. But I suppose I was writing for children of people who come from that experience and are grappling with questions of identity. Who are we? We are Indians from Fiji living in Australia. And older people, adolescents they get caught up in this whole identity politics business in Australia and they begin to search for their roots. So I tried in that book and in my other writings to capture some of the episodes of a vanished world. These people, the children of the diaspora, the children of the ‘twice banished’ so to speak, might have some sense of where their parents might have come from. But it was more to capture as best I could that experience without thinking hard about [an audience].
I’ll read something to you, this is fascinating. This lady, I had never heard of her in my life, wrote from Fiji yesterday, 8th of June: “I recently finished reading your book Mr Tulsi’s Store. I just wanted to let you know I thought it was absolutely brilliant. I rarely come across books that have such an impact. A delight to read and impossible to put down. I am an Australian currently living in Fiji under the Australian Volunteers International Programme and I am fascinated by the rich mix of cultures, history and people that blend together to make up this unique country. Thank you for sharing your journey and offering such a touching insight to growing up in Fiji”. So in that sense a lot of people who wont necessarily read history pick up something like this, so it becomes a kind of a text that’s accessible, with a mixture of fact and fiction and faction and so on that opens up a window so to speak. That was my main goal but I think also having published a lot of stuff in the past as a historian, to be perfectly honest I wasn’t really concerned about readers.
You can say that about professionally peer-reviewed journals and academic publishing, you write for maybe ten or twenty people in the world who read this. That kind of
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scholarly thing; you don’t write to be read, you write to get ahead. If you see what I mean. So this consciousness about writing creatively for people and with them in mind is something that has come to me in the last four or five years. You’ll see from this, I’ll give you this as well [ANU Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies Quarterly Bulletin]. There’s three of us in this division writing creative stuff and each talking about it, all historians. Donald has just published a novel called Afterlife: a divine comedy. ‘Academics who write’! That’s right, the three of us, and that caused some disquiet among my colleagues, ‘why are you doing writing? You should be…’ more publishing, more DEST points more DEST points, exactly the point.
I did notice in the preface to Mr Tulsi’s Store you mention scholars like Spate and Gillion who desired to ‘communicate research in the intelligent language of ordinary discourse to an audience beyond the halls of the academy.’ That came across clearly as an admirable concern, of a previous generation of scholars. And I felt that perhaps you were also trying to tap into that, as you have illustrated to me by reading out the comment from a reader, the sense that this may travel further than academic writing which as you say is read by very few.
If you look at the tradition of historical and humanist writing of an earlier generation, historians thought that their duty was to interpret whatever it was to the larger community. They write accessibly, you didn’t have to take a course in something to understand what they’re writing about. The idea of a good coherent narrative, storytelling in an accessible language, without requiring any prior knowledge on the part of the reader, and if you look at the great historians that I read, Ken Inglis in Australia, Bill Gammage for example, a lot of American historians, E. P. Thompson in the UK, A. J. P. Taylor, Eric Hobsbawm, all of them. You pick it up and think this is good stuff, it’s readable and you learn something and enjoy. What has happened in the last ten fifteen years is that we have all been infected by this virus of jargon-filled writing. To write simply is in their view to write simplistically. The prose has become so self-referential, there’s so much navel-gazing, communicating simple ideas in complex language that is beyond the comprehension of ordinary people, and that is supposed to be very good! I am not rejecting that approach in a knee-jerk fashion because Cultural studies and postcolonial dialogue and discourse have made us aware of a number of things, the authorial presence, the way we construct stories, the politics and poetics of construction and so on, that’s fine, and to lay bear the epistemological underpinnings of what we write, I have no problems with that, but when that becomes an end in itself... That’s the first thing. The second thing is that I am concerned to communicate to a wider audience, the children who I talked about, they want to know, they want to read it, they want to get some sense of who they are. And my background, my first love was English literature, and English is my second or third language so I can’t write complicated stuff anyway, if ever I wanted to. So in that sense yes I am taking my hat off and saluting those people and saying this is my act of resistance against this globalising tendency of this very complicated, convoluted discourse. If it is just an end-in-itself expression of form without meaning then something has been lost. It is so arid and parasitical. You are always dependent on somebody’s text to deconstruct. And I am saying, ‘no I want to create my own text’.
Now I was going to ask for your perception on issues of cultural identity for the new young generation of Indo-Fijians, both those who remain in Fiji, who you have talked about as the children of 87, and those dispersed around the world. I think that your own
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children may well turn to your work when they are much older and searching for answers in a different way, because I think you are right in saying that we go through stages in life with these kind of identity questions.
I think all of us go through a certain stage and I believe in that really, from my own experience, that the questions you ask begin to change. I mean there was a time when these sorts of identity issues didn’t concern me. I was just here writing my refereed papers and so on in the best journals in the world, write and get ahead, not DEST points but fattening your bibliography and so on. Then I reached a point where I said, ‘well what does it all mean?’ And as the shadow lengthens you begin to ask ‘what is really important? What does it all add up to? How does that illuminate the larger questions of human life? What’s the purpose of it all? Why are we here? What is it that is really valuable in life? Climbing up the ladder? Yes, ok, I’ve done that. What is it, inner peace, inner equilibrium? I don’t know.’ The questions that you ask depend on the particular stage of life you are in. You’re right, I think that my children will at some point come back to this question of ‘who are we’ and then begin to look back at the world of their parents, their journeys and transformations. There are a lot of cultural clashes that take place. Things that are obvious to us are not so obvious to them. My children, now don’t get me wrong of course I am very fond of them and we speak all the time, but you know they are exploring new worlds and it is wonderful, we were doing the same thing, we were breaking taboos and barriers when we were young and our parents though we were terrible. And inevitably in Australia, because there is an essentialised notion of what an Australian is, these questions will come up. So my son who is twenty years of age, plays cricket and was the head boy at his private school and so on, all of that, for all practical purposes [he is an Australian] but the question that they ask him is, ‘where are you from?’. So in a sense I suppose I write in the hope that this will answer some of the questions but really at the end of the day you write for yourself.
One of the things that guides my thinking, my values, my philosophy in life is the Bhagavadgita. It says, ‘don’t worry about rewards, praise and blame, these things don’t really matter, you do what you think is right’. I’ll give you an example if I may. Yes of course. The first book I published, my Girmitiyas: the Origins of the Fiji Indians and I challenged the slavery thesis, as I do now in my lectures and talks and so on. And people say to me, ‘Doc, you shouldn’t do this because they will seize upon this, the Fijians and others, will seize on this and say, look one of you are saying that it was limited detention not life sentence. They’ll use this against us. And you are our spokesperson, you are our leader, and if you say these sorts of things, you and I know it is true, but this is a domestic secret’. And I said, ‘No. No, I have to speak the truth as I see it.’ So while what I say is not politically correct because the big thing is that indenture was slavery and therefore Australian government owes us this and the British should be guilty and we have earned our place, all of that I agree with but I am saying that, in a sense, hindsight should not hound history; the present should not prosecute the past. There is an integrity and wholeness to that experience. I can distort it and say slavery and so on but the truth will always be there. So I have honestly never tailored any of my arguments or conclusions in any of my [work], I hope so, to be politically correct or to suit a particular political purpose at a particular point in time. I write as I feel. I speak as I feel.
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That’s very admirable, but also in relation to the specific point on the slavery thesis that you mentioned earlier, it does then make Indo-Fijians the perpetual victims of this situation, lacking in agency. Not people who, as you say in Mr. Tulsi’s Store, had enormous courage to even step outside of the system in India, to get up and leave. Although not every case is the same obviously, but I think there is something important about challenging the slavery thesis in terms of agency on the part of the girmitiyas.
And our historical experience demonstrates that. All these people who came to Fiji and quite a few of them were small cultivators, labourers and so on had absolutely no hope in India and within a generation they had their own ten-acre farms and within the second generation were able to produce school-teachers and now, doctors and lawyers and accountants and professionals and academics and writers and poets. So the whole history that we have is a history of courage and determination of confronting obstacles and overturning impediments and making something of ourselves. I don’t see the victim [in that]. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t deny the brutality of the system. That’s true, but look, five years after hat they said stuff it and the way they went about it, in a conscious way to… so as I say it’s a mixture of oppressive but also liberating experience and when you talk like that people will say, ‘I agree with you but don’t say it too loudly’ just in case somebody hears that’s right. And when I was in Fiji a couple of publications came out marking indenture and in not one of them is anything I have ever written reproduced, except in a very distorted way. My voice is a traitor’s voice. That’s quite an insight for me, because I wouldn’t have realised that at all. This book on Girmitiyas. Not a single thing of mine in here although, and I swear this is absolute truth, this map, this is exactly from my book but the citation is to the National Archives of Fiji. I’ll show you another example, this is my diagram from my book, my thesis, and you’ll see it’s here. Yes. To see that done must be quite hurtful really. [It was] 77 when I did this and this is exactly the same thing and the maps, it goes on and on. A lot of information comes from my work and not a single [acknowledgement].
Who is that published by? Is it published by a government body? No, by a faction of the Indian community, the National Farmers Union, who think that I am sort of a traitor because I dare speak out and say, ‘we are not faultless’. I’ll give you an example. I had an interview on television, when I go to Fiji because of my [work] they ask me to talk and on radio and so on, and the interviewer said to me, ‘Dr. Lal as you reflect of the 125th anniversary could you talk about Indian people and their missteps and so on’ and I said, ‘we are the very first people to accuse others of racism, Fijians and there are racists among the Fijians and so on, we have been victims of racism in 87 and 2000, but look at ourselves. You know we still talk about North Indians and South Indians, we talk about Hindus and Muslims, we talk about Arya Samajis and Sanatanis and we talk about Mahendra Chaudhary being the first girmitiya prime minister of Fiji’. I said, ‘whether he is a girmitiya or a black or a white or a pink, that is not important to me. [What is] is that the person is legitimately and democratically elected and so on’. So we play the racial card, or the ethnic card among ourselves. When I asked a guy in 1999 about voting, he said, ‘Doctorji, I’ll tell you. We’ve always had outsiders lead our community. The first one was Mr. A. D. Patel, (whose biography I have written) he was a Gujarati. The second one was Mr. Koya, he’s a Muslim. The third one was Mr. Jai Ram Reddy, he’s a South Indian. It’s our turn’ and I’m a North Indian, our turn, North Indian. I said, ‘if you play this North, South, Hindu, Muslim game how can we criticise others’. These things when I say them it makes people feel embarrassed and they think you’re not playing the game according to these rules. So that’s the result. That’s the result, the
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complete editing out of my voice. There’s another book which I’ve given on loan to a friend in Sydney, it’s called Children of the Indus and it’s a book that [promotes] a kind of propaganda for the National Farmers Union. You read it and all the information is from my texts but not a single acknowledgement anywhere in anything, footnotes, bibliography, nothing. It doesn’t worry me because in a sense I don’t write for their approval. It’s their loss, look at it that way. But there is a price to be paid and thank god there are enough people out there like this lady and it will live on and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. So in that sense, reward and all of those things are the furthest from my mind. If some people write to me and say, ‘I love it’, good, thank you but it doesn’t affect my sense of what I write or what I should write. Yes I can see that, but also politically in a sense it’s quite a worry that that kind of project is taking place to exclude a voice who might be critical of the community, that self-censuring need to present the Indo-Fijian community as absolutely united. As you mentioned this is also an issue in the Fijian community but it is starting to open out to self-critique and until you have that how can anything be resolved. So I can see your concern, aside from the personal investment in your work being duly acknowledged, there is something deeply troubling about that sort of exclusion of differing views.
Has Mr. Tulsi’s Store been distributed widely in Fiji?
It’s been distributed in Fiji and as you can see there’s a [review by Michael Field for The Fiji Times on the wall] oh yes but none of my works have ever been reviewed by Indo-Fijians. Really? Ever. Not even in Australia? Not even in Australia. But I have received reviews, my drawers are full of reviews, I have put them away. But now there’s a reluctance, and there is, I don’t know what it is. I suppose a lot of people don’t read in Fiji. The reading culture is gone. The idea that grown-up man should sit down and read a book, what’s wrong with him! Why isn’t he doing something else exactly, earning money or playing sport or whatever. I think that’s one aspect of it, the second aspect of it, I suppose, is envy. But when I go to Fiji I have lots of friends and great times. And although they try and censure me, I speak on radio and people listen to my talks and lectures and I write in the newspapers very frequently, so my voice is there and people like it. So whenever something happens in Fiji I get an email: ‘we’d like your views on this’. So there is an independent outlet for my opinions. So what they do reflects more on them than it does on me or what I have to say.
What I would like to ask then is what are your views on the concept of an Indian or South Asian diaspora and do you see your writing (and that of other Indo-Fijians, and I see now you’re making a distinction here as well) as falling within this grouping?
I think the whole question of the Indian diaspora is for me a problematic one. A paper I just printed out this morning because I am giving a talk in Melbourne where I talk about what I understand by [the term] Indian diaspora. It’s coming out in a journal in Hong Kong. Now there’s a very interesting point to be made here, that there are points of convergence and points of divergence in the Indian diaspora. There are certain things because of our ethnicity, culture and so on that we share with India, I mean our food, films, faith those sorts of things and we go to temples in Sydney or wherever and find that Hindus from all over the world will converge, or Muslims, or Sikhs wherever they’re from, those points of convergence. There are also points of divergence. You should follow this up if you haven’t already, there was an article say six seven years ago in a Sydney newspaper about an India Indian who said he was ashamed to be seen in the
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company of Fiji Indians. The article was called ‘Blood Cousins or Bloody Cousins’ and they asked me to respond and I said, ‘I am not so foolish, to respond to that kind of rubbish’. So the Indo-Fijians acknowledge their Indianness but they also acknowledge their difference as well, they are for example, the Indian obsession with status and caste, those sorts of things, protocol, boasting about how many houses they have. [Indo- Fijians] are much more au fait with Western culture, can speak the language, can identify much more with Australian [habits], going out and having a beer, barbeque, because we have been exposed to Australian culture for a hundred years, so in that sense a greater fluency and movement in the cultural journey. I talk to Fiji Indians and they say, ‘bloody India Indians, they want all the glory but no work. They go to the temple but expect others to clean the temple’ and so on. ‘They come in well dressed up, to be seen’ and so on. Many of them I suppose come from well-to-do homes in India, they don’t know how to cook food and so on because they have their servants. Whereas we, I cook all the time, I enjoy cooking. Those sorts of things. So there are points of convergence and divergence.
The question which troubles me, and I really haven’t been able to find an answer, is, and it’s something I want to work on as my next project, is: we have Indians from Fiji, Indo-Fijians living in Australia, they had been there [in Fiji] for a hundred and twenty- five years and when I see how they act and react in terms of the social relationships and participation in volunteer associations and temples and so on, it is the Indianness or South Asianness that is emphasised. They send their kids to learn proper Hindi, dance, dressing up in the kurta and all that, being embarrassed about the lack of knowledge about the precise rituals to be followed, this is the proper way of doing it, so there is a concern to learn about the proper way, which is in the Indian [tradition]. And now with the internet we get it all the time, this is the proper way, this puja is on this date, this puja is about this, and so and so is sponsoring this puja on this date, and this puja is…god! The Hindu fundamentalist kind of thing that comes out. What troubles me is, and I want at some point to find the answer to this question, is ‘ok so you guys are Indo- Fijians, what aspect of Fijian culture do you retain in Australia?’ ‘Alright, you go to Mandir but do you go to associations with other Fijians? Do you celebrate something that is distinctly Fijian?’ ‘Oh we drink yaqona but I don’t have any Fijian friends, the bastards took my country away’. There is more of an essentialised notion of what an Indian is in the diaspora than in India itself or in Fiji. The Fiji Indians are more Indians here than they were in Fiji. I find that troubling. Is it an inevitable kind of movement towards this deep ethnic or religious whatever it is?… Has a hundred years of living in Fiji left no trace on your soul?
I use the word Indo-Fijian in all my writing and people say, ‘why?’ I argue that my soul and my imagination are nourished by the three civilisational influences; West, the judicial system, the political system, values about equality and all of that, one of my languages, part of my literary heritage; Indian, or South Asian broadly speaking, in terms of my faith, my food, my music, my art, I’ll be impoverished without it; and Oceanic, being born on an island, my sense of place, my sense of flora and fauna, my sense of my relationship with other human beings as well is all influenced by my experience of where I grew up. So that worries me. Does the migration, the second crossing wash away [some of that] or is it a reaction against Fiji? Betrayal, ‘I’ll have nothing to do with Fiji because the bastards did this to me’. Or is it… I don’t know. It’s an incredibly interesting question. Also I see Muslim colleagues who I used to drink with. I see them here with proper Muslim beards and proper clothes and with the top
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gear. I say, ‘what happened to you? What’s wrong with you mate, I mean…’ remember the old days. They are embarrassed about it, ‘oh we did improper things. Now we only must eat halal food’ this sort of stuff. I don’t know.
So how are you going to tackle this in your next book? You mentioned that you want to write about this, do you mean in an academic context?
I am going to take a tape recorder and talk to people. It’s a book, in my mind, after I finish this book Bitter Sweet which will be launched on the 23rd of September by the chief minister, then you see the next project is what I call, From an Island to an Island Continent: Fiji Australia Journeys. I want to ask these people when they first heard about Fiji and the first encounter and where they settled and what the problems are and why do you do this and not that. Hopefully in the course of that… There’s a very interesting book I picked up the other day called, Being Chinese: voices from the diaspora, it has stories and this is fascinating. This is the sort of thing I want to do myself. Talking to people of all ages, men, women and so on with a tape recorder and see if I can capture their stories and I’ll just be the medium through which they express. So in that sense it will be another kind of faction as well. It is, indeed. I will have the overall broad structure of the patterns of migration and the patterns of settlement, you find [many Indo-Fijians living] for example in Liverpool and Sydney then you have Endeavour Hills in Melbourne and then you have South Brisbane in Queensland, concentrations, ghettoes, if you will. Why do they go there? What kinds of lives do they create or recreate? The ethnography of suburbia and within that broad overarching context then these individual stories. Then through these stories I guess you will find people talking about the tensions between India Indians and Fiji Indians that’s right, and also the tensions within the family. Men wanting to re-establish their patriarchal privileges and women working all day and not always coming home and saying, ‘yes dear, I’ll cook enough for you’. And the children are saying, ‘well dad, I’ve got a boyfriend’. ‘What! What’s wrong with you?’ So those kinds of tensions and clashes of values and expectations.
What I want to do with this term South Asian diaspora, which I also have problems with, is to precisely get an idea of some of these divergences as you put it, which is why I am so interested in your response, because I think the convergences, well we can say there are broad similarities but we are broadly the same at a human level also. So I feel the convergences are perhaps less interesting than the divergences which are fascinating.
I think you can find a whole range of things there, for example the indentured diaspora, but even there you see… I was at a conference in Singapore where Vijay Mishra gave a paper and he talked about the ‘impossible mourning’ from Derrida’s idea, you know yes, I’ve read that. And I said, ‘Vijay, really?’ Vijay Mishra is a Brahmin and a literary theorist so he talks about [diaspora] in great abstract terms, ‘oh our severances, our ties to the motherland’ and all these things. ‘Vijay, that’s good. Good theory, but for a lot of people it was also liberation, mate’. He talks about ‘the Girmitiya Ideology’. ‘Vijay, you know there are lots of ideologies. For the women, for the low-caste, for the high-caste, for the middling-caste, those who came first, those who came late’. So even within that I am conscious of differences. I am also conscious of differences with people of a much younger generation from Fiji but grown up in Australia. There’s a girl by the name of Shrishti Sharma who wrote a couple of creative things and she has a piece in my book.
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Her parents decided that she should do Health Sciences or Medicine or something or other, she’s living in Otago at the moment and the point there was that, she said, ‘this history doesn’t mean anything to me. This indenture; hey you know, what is indenture?’ I’ll just retrieve this for you and read the sentence, Shrishti Sharma: “Sure we have our forefathers but does indenture really speak to us anymore? Has it ever? Does politics really concern us anymore? Perhaps in High School it did, when injustice was a trendy emotion...” and so on and so forth. The children of 87 growing up. So even in Fiji you draw a distinction, the generational thing you know. And then there are people from, Adib Khan somebody like that Bangladesh who lives in South Australia, I’ve read a few things by him. There’s a woman in Sydney, her name is Satya Colpani yes I’ve read her novel and the biography she wrote of her father. I wrote to her, I met her in Sydney at a book launch and I said, ‘I like your work but it is…’ she is the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, a very wealth industrialist and she describes the world of the suburban upper-middle class, that’s again another difference, whereas I emphasise my indentured kind of connections and trace my roots from there you see. Subramani does that in his Dauka Puran but there too his work was criticised in Fiji, ‘how dare this South Indian write about…’ So I wrote a letter and they said, ‘Dr. why are you defending a South Indian?’ This is the kind of pettiness.
So my last question is to ask whether you think it is more, less or equally crucial to consider the work of Indo-Fijians in relation to a literature of the Pacific?
I think for a very long time the Pacific imagination was shaped by European intellectuals and so on, people like James Mitchner and others, and more recently in the last twenty years or so people at USP, people like Ron Crocombe and there was very little consciousness of the creative inner life of the Indo-Fijian population and a conscious effort was made, I think, by travel writers and scholars to edit the Indian experience out of the Pacific consciousness. J. C. Furnace has a book in which he describes Indian as interlopers. Mitchner described us as mynah birds, raucous, ugly, never smiling. So that’s the dominant consciousness that informed the perception about Indians. That began to change slightly when USP was established because a lot of people there were Indo-Fijians who were teaching English and beginning to write creatively. Satendra Nandan, Subramani, Raymond Pillai and other people. So this is the period of cultural literary renaissance in the mid-70s, USP starts in 1968. So a lot of people from different ethnic backgrounds were beginning to come together, Albert Wendt, Epeli Hau‘ofa, Pio Manoa a whole range of people, Vilsoni Hereniko, as creative writers engaged in this endeavour, whether Indo-Fijian or whatever at that stage it didn’t [matter]. So in a small kind of a way they were able to get their works published in journals which also published Pacific material, like Mana, the literary journal, is a good example. That provided them with limited exposure to the Pacific audience and I think that has increased in recent years with people like Sudesh Mishra who is a postmodern poet, an oxymoron! And they use Indo-Fijian themes and issues and write in a way that is acceptable to people. So there is more awareness of that. I certainly think honestly that Indo-Fijian experience belongs to the Pacific experience as well. Whilst the diasporic connections are there, there are other connections which elude a diasporic reading of that experience.
I suppose if one were to ask me what do I think I am most happy about my work, what sort of legacy I would like to leave behind. If there is one thing that I feel very happy about it is that I have managed through my writing and my teaching and where I am to
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make people more conscious of the presence of Indo-Fijians as part of the broader mainstream discourse rather than as a sort of exotic people on the side. Once people said, ‘They’re Indians, I mean where do you fit them, they are more with Malaysia or Sri Lanka or other places but not in the Pacific’. We are in the Pacific but not of the Pacific was the dominant [view]. My mere presence, and don’t misunderstand me, as a Professor of History in this School, through my writings, now I go to Hawai’i, I go to the islands and there’s ‘oh I heard your voice on the radio’, or ‘I read an interesting article you wrote’. And I get letters, weekly letters from Pacific Island students, ‘Professor, I would like to come and work with you’. Breaking that barrier of prejudice created by colonialism and by self-interested and selfishly motivated individuals, to me is the one thing that makes me the happiest. To my own people I can talk all the time, if they disregard me it’s neither here nor there. But there was just this enormous barrier, we were regarded as interlopers, as not really belonging to the Pacific and all of a sudden here we are, irrespective of what they say. That is to me the greatest satisfaction and now I have students from the Pacific, non-Indians working with me and I push them very very hard. Then they go back and think ‘it’s not too bad, what we were taught about these people is not exactly true’. That kind of thing. I have my own motives which is to break down these barriers and prejudice so I go the extra mile to help them. But that has been a very long and painful process in trying to create that link.
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Interview with Chandani Lokuge at the Sydney Writers Festival on the 22nd of May 2004
If you see yourself as a diasporic writer, as you were discussing in the session, what do you think are the benefits to this? ZZ Packer was speaking about the concept of ‘double consciousness’, do you see this as a great benefit?
Yes, I do. That migrant’s double vision I think is one of the most energetic areas of the creative process because you have two cultures or three cultures from which to draw and you know each one quite well. So you are not really a stranger to it but at the same time you are a little distanced, even from the Sri Lankan culture in which I have grown up. Now when I go back, to see… I used to think about this… A writer, Romesh Gunesekera, writes about a shoeflower opening up and I was in Sri Lanka when I read this and I thought, a shoeflower, what is he writing about? But now when I go back I can see what he was doing because you look at it differently. You don’t take it for granted anymore. The homely Shoeflower becomes something beautiful. So that objectivity, that observation is sharpened by the fact that you are not living in the country. A lot of what you take for granted within the country seems like you should not take for granted when you look at it from outside.
And when you say you draw from many cultures, could you specify, because of course within Sri Lanka there are so many. Yes. My girl, Aruni [character in Turtle Nest], she says that in Sri Lanka her parents are a little of everything else. In my own family, my mother is a Christian, Catholic. My father is a Buddhist. He is from the up-country, my mother is from the coast. So she is very westernised, he is very conservative nationalist Buddhist Sinhalese. So I grew up in that cross-cultural atmosphere. So that was the beginning, but strangely enough it never conflicted. I was lucky. It was a blessing because it seemed to evolve into that ‘third space’ where you draw strength from each other, rather than reject one for the other. So I kind of sped along happily in this childhood between religions. I’d go to church. I studied at St. Bridget’s and I resented that a bit because it was real imposing of religion on you. As a result I think my father’s flexibility and his philosophy appealed so much. I used to go with him to temple. But really at the core of my being there was no conflict between the two. One is a philosophy, one is a religion of course, but I think that in moments of crisis I draw strength from both. So outside then, now in Australia I draw from Australian culture obviously. There’s an adventurousness and innocence about it that makes the country go forward with speed, rather than in Sri Lanka which tends to go two steps back all the time because we are so much embedded in an ancient culture so we have to work culturally for anything. So that’s the Sri Lankan, then there’s the Australian and then there’s the British canon [interrupted to sign a book].
Where were we? Drawing from other cultures. Ok. So in the time you have been here, the last fifteen years, can you see ways in which Australia has become more open or less open to South Asian cultures in particular?
I think Australia has become open to all cultures more than when we were here first but I think I came on the rising crest of that wave of being accepted. I don’t think it was that easy say twenty years ago but when I came over I did not have any problems really, nor did my two daughters or my husband. But I think that is also because, like I said at the session, it has to be a two-way street. You have to give. You have to be open to cultures
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so cultures can be open to you. If you lock yourself up, I know people who do that, and not entertain anyone but a Sri Lankan or an Indian if you’re an Indian, then you’re asking for trouble. You can’t close yourself [off], then you have to live back in your country. If you live here you have to open up not only to white Australia which is the majority but to all cultures and have an open house that way, especially if you have children I think that is very very important. Otherwise they get trapped in two lives and then they have to choose and they generally might choose the peer culture because that is where they are most at home and there is no pressure there. Whereas when they come in and you kind of tighten them up so do you think your upbringing in having mixed influences at home as a child has given you the strength to face the challenges of migration? It did. And from the very beginning of time I have been with English Literature. I’m bilingual. I couldn’t say my first language is Sinhalese and my second English it has been the two together all the time. And I went to St. Bridget’s convent which was very exclusively a westernised school on western lines. I was introduced, and this is a common saying by postcolonial writers, to the daffodils before I was introduced to the lotus. So that tradition made me feel quite at home I think when I came over and I had also travelled to Japan and England before coming to Australia. In my school there were students who were from the English medium not only from other cultures within the country but from other cultures outside the country. So it seemed to me quite an interesting, not even so much of a challenge, that I could be at home in all these other cultures. I’m also quite engaged with life and people I think, as a person, I enjoy their differences and I can find points of contact in spite of different cultures.
Would you say there are any difficulties then to being a migrant writer here?
Oh yes if you’re not careful you can be the most unhappy person can’t you. You can be totally ostracised by your own community. You can be alienated, alienation is a word we know, you can be exiled. And you can get into that state of fossilisation, of being like my woman Manthri in this [If the Moon Smiled]. You feel so sad for her because it’s not as if she didn’t put in effort or anything. It’s just that she so believed in and she so withdrew into that nostalgia for the culture she left behind that she could not function in a different culture. Even though at moments she feels that, like when she sees that man and woman in the café, there is a deep sensuality in her that has been so suppressed, that though she is aware of that suppression, because of the suppression, she cannot express it. That dwarfs her personality even as an adult which results in her children, you know a total failure for the family. Yes Manthri is a fascinating character because she is so caught in that dilemma. In some ways she resists all those cultural constrains yet can’t seem to make that leap out. Yes, she can’t move past it. So unlike her mother and mother-in-law who find solace in Buddhism, she can’t even achieve that exactly. I guess she’s at the worst point of that migrant experience where she can’t retreat completely into the past or find renewal either. And she’s a very sensitive woman, so imagine the sorrow of seeing your children before your eyes just take away in directions that she can’t follow because of a cultural claustrophobia.
That leads me to something I wanted to ask. Both of your novels are so tragic, why is it impossible for your characters to achieve the sense of belonging and acceptance they search for? What draws you to write about those unhappy experiences?
I think it’s just that I don’t settle for simple answers. Or, it’s easy to talk about, they rode happily off into the sunset, but how true would that be? Because we live in a world
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of chaos, fiction means giving that chaos some kind of order. But if you give it so much order that it becomes mainstream… I tend to, like Robert Frost has said, tend to take the less trodden path, as a writer I find that more fulfilling, more demanding and challenging, pushing against the limits of mainstream life. Asking that question, if, what would happen if she didn’t go on the mainstream [path]. That question gives the drama of it for me, and alternatives. I think writers always go for alternatives and probe the depths of…because in those alternatives I think lies who we really are, the essence of who we are. We are kind of profiled for the public, we follow images, we follow the media, we know we have to do this and we have to do that but if you really move into what Lawrence would call the unconscious, I think that’s where the moment of truth happens for my characters. And that’s a deeply sad state? I don’t mean it to be sad like that but it tends to…I must have some deep miserable dark spot in me [laughing]. I don’t know about that but I think you’re right in that those emotions are at the more interesting end of the spectrum where there is more room for development. More than that I think in both stories that would be the realistic end, particularly for Turtle [Nest]. I wanted to change the end and make it happier. She’d gone through this now let her come back to Melbourne, walk into her job, she is a full person now, she knows who she is. But the more I read those endings the more they didn’t work for her, or for me. This was the only one I thought that I understand what you’re saying that to suggest she could just go there and then come back enriched is a trite simplification, yes exactly. And also there was something about her character wasn’t there. That romantic almost naïve longing that only she had, everyone else around her knew that it could not happen. That she could not belong but she went on and on, so naïve about it that she played into their hands.
The thing I wondered though is that Paul, the Australian character in the novel, describes the local boys as being very “feral”. That’s how he sees it, and the end of the novel sort of plays out his vision. I wondered why you chose this path yes the complete rejection. I’ll tell you what it was. In an newspaper article I read that this had happened, before I wrote the book, and that was in my mind quite a lot. And I have two young daughters, like your age perhaps, and when I think of how dangerous it could be, because they don’t know the country as well as I do, how dangerous it could be for them to walk around by themselves. They are such daring [people] and their terribly Australian adventurousness what trouble it could get them into if they tried that. So realistically speaking I knew of the dangers. I also lived in the location and believe it or not, about a month after my book was published and I was in Sri Lanka, there was an article in the paper again about how a young foreigner, tourist woman, had been raped in a cactus plot by beach boys. So then I thought… But I got into bad books with the country on this one. Quite a senior academic got hold of me and said, ‘how do you write about the country like that. You can’t write about Sri Lanka like that!’ You know that postcolonial, I don’t know what it is. For me it was writing the truth.
So Turtle Nest has been published in Sri Lanka. Yes it has gone to Sri Lanka through India because Penguin India publishes it, they buy the rights of this book and they publish it there. So have you had any other kinds of feedback on reception. Oh yes, the first one was excellent, it had wonderful reviews. The second one is a little too new yet to see but from that academic’s viewpoint I thought, maybe I’ve had it, I’m going to be crucified with this one. I don’t believe that people should be dictated to like that. How can an academic sit there and tell me what to write about. Just because he has preconceived notions. And because they’re within the country perhaps we see from
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outside the dangers. Also does a migrant writer always have to portray their home country as paradise, exactly. Should you always close your eyes to not if you’re a serious minded writer. And your characters have to have that life without being totally controlled by your writer’s voice. I let her go where she went and that’s where she went. So I wanted to change it because people wanted me to but it didn’t work for her, or for me.
Sexuality is important to both novels. In terms of the expression and control of female desire in If the moon smiled, and in Turtle Nest focusing on the exploitative nature of sexual transactions in a poverty stricken and tourist driven setting. Could you comment on how you explore this theme?
Well I write about sexual women, very sensual women who celebrate body even thought they are unaware of it. Manthri’s honeymoon itself shows that there is an inner self there that’s open to sexual fulfilment which she does not get from her very stereotypical husband. That’s one of the problems at the heart of the marriage isn’t it. That’s another thing that you might want to think about; migration itself was not their problem. The problem was in the marriage and that was enhanced by the problems they faced in migration which would have been lessened had they been in Sri Lanka because they would have had the temple, the family as support. But here it all exacerbated. So for Manthri it was a suppression, that had it been fulfilled it perhaps could have led her to happiness, because she keeps fantasising and the Sigiriya frescos and their sensuality, about the man and woman she sees in the café, and all subconsciously. She is quite unconscious of her sexual lack. So that’s for her. For Mala, she lived with her body all the time. She was a body person. She did not think much. I’ve had a girl in my house who was like that quite a lot, domestic [help] and it was just fascinating to see the way she operated. It was so totally unconscious this celebration of body. She couldn’t meet anyone [without that being present], it was all there and people loved it, loved her for it but she was also quite abused and exploited for it. Sexuality without much thought behind it. And then in Turtle Nest there is also Priya and Simon’s relationship and that whole side of things where there doesn’t seem to be so much a celebration of body no, and even for Mala because she had it in her it was easy to exploit. And we know that the south of Sri Lanka as a tourist resort for maybe years now the people of that area have been exploited like this, tourists make use of their poverty. All that I have said is quite true. It’s fact also. Priya the risk that, prostitution, child prostitution. Sri Lanka was at one time, I don’t know whether it is now, at the time when I was writing this [Turtle Nest] it was the second highest in little boy prostitution in the world. So I remember a French tourist who had kept a hotel accommodation and had these boys… it’s tragic the long-term effects of that kind of exploitation of children and what it has led to, like the beach boys who grow up in that culture. It does undermine the myth of Sri Lanka as the perfect paradise, a tourist destination that you can visit and leave without and that’s there too. There is no way one can say that this is all corruption personified. It is not. It is just below the surface, sometimes, in some places.
Another thing I wanted to ask you about is the way you’ve used Buddhist traditions in If the moon smiled particularly. So again in the session you mentioned the notion of detachment that comes up again and again in the novel. What drew you to use those ideas?
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Well I’ve grown up with it. My father, my grandmother, my husband who is a very strong Buddhist and his parents, they’re very staunch, very devout Buddhists. And it’s something which I come up against constantly which I admire as an ideal but I have not reached it. And that’s probably [the reason for] my preoccupation with it because I don’t know whether I can ever achieve that rather higher than human ideal. Because we are born to be attached to people, it’s around us all the time and then philosophy preaches that we must not, and that it will lead to sorrow. So it’s it’s a real conundrum isn’t it for me it’s almost an obsession because in my heart I want it but I don’t think I’ll get it in this world, too attached to people. I know what you mean. Even if we accept that all life is suffering and that attachment leads to suffering, I’d still have the sorrow for those fleeting moments of joy, however illusory, even though I know they wont sustain me and so on. I think Manthri in the novel also struggles with these ideas. You see her mother was a more fortunate woman but that’s because she had the nation in which she could live it out and there wasn’t any other life that intervened. Whereas for Manthri the Australian culture, not having a temple in Adelaide, which was true, the temple came much later as I was about to leave almost, the fact that there was no way of anchoring, you know going to listen to chanting, going to listen to a pirith, it’s all so alien [for her].
In a newspaper review that you may have read Susan Kurosawa objects to your publishers cover-branding If the moon smiled an Australian novel, stating: “It’s a novel of condition, not country”. What are your thoughts on that statement?
Yes I noted that. She said it in all seriousness, in full paragraphs and Penguin India, taking note of that, removed that. When they published it there is no such line to say that it is an Australian novel. It is a selling point perhaps. For an Australian publisher to publish a story that’s about Sri Lanka, it perhaps sells as an Australian novel. I don’t know. I have no idea why this happened or why Susan said that.
So how important then is capturing a sense of place. Obviously Sri Lanka comes through very strongly in this novel. The Australian setting doesn’t come through as much and perhaps that’s because Manthri is so caught up in memories of her childhood that she’s not thinking about her present location and that’s why it doesn’t seep into the novel in the same way. But equally in Turtle Nest Australia is literally a distant place. Do you find yourself wanting to write about Australia?
It just happens that the novels are set in Sri Lanka and perhaps I’m still not comfortable enough in Australia to get it right. There are a couple of chapters in If the moon smiled where you go to Crooked River, where the girl [Nelum] has her first sexual adventure. I’ve been there myself and I know the location thoroughly so I felt safer or easier writing about it. That’s what I said at the session, that if you are writing about a place you have to know it like the palm of your hand otherwise you’re doing an injustice to yourself as a writer, being false to yourself and being false to the reader. And you don’t want to be detected as not having known the place about which you write. James Joyce, for instance, in Dubliners or Portrait of the Artist knows Dublin so well, you read it and as a reader you are in it. That’s the kind of mood I would want [to create] if I were to write about another culture. So with Sri Lanka I write about what I know and love and understand perhaps in Australia I am still not quite sure. The character Paul, that was a leap for me. Not only, I’ve written about getting into the consciousness of a man, that was easy because I’ve done it in Moth and Other Stories but to get into the
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consciousness of a man from Australia; I wondered if I could pull it off and I’m happy that I did. For him also to see the land, to see the country back in Sri Lanka…I went, I mentioned him in [the acknowledgements to] this book, Bill Ashcroft, he was with me, he went for a series of lectures but I showed him the country a bit. And it was interesting to see the location, the people, through his eyes and that’s why I think I was able to portray an Australian also, because I understood the connections there, the disconnection, the displacement. You know he is the one who called those boys ‘feral’, it’s not a word in Sri Lankan languages, so I cottoned on to that pretty quickly.
Paul also provided a very good contrast to Aruni’s romantic naivety. In fact there were so many characters that I wanted to know more about. So when I finished the novel I wanted to read the stories of all the peripheral characters let down was it? No I think it’s a good thing. It’s Hemmingway who said, ‘touch the snow on the peaks of the mountains and let the reader probe the depths’. Say less than more. I like that. I like to challenge the reader to go where I have not led them. I have said this is what can happen, now it’s your story. In this book [If the moon smiled] whether that girl [Manthri] is a virgin or not. I’m surprised you haven’t asked that question. I have been plagued with it. So much so that someone got up at a writers festival and asked me whether I’d been a virgin on my wedding night! And whether she was a virgin, or whether she dreamt it, or whether she had this sexual experience. I have no idea really as a writer because for me also it is a reader’s journey. I like to leave it to the reader. Well I certainly read that issue in the novel as very ambiguous and intentionally so. I could also see that you were incorporating this idea of the female demon, because of the exorcism that’s going on at the same time that she’s looking through an open window, you know the Mohini story don’t you? It’s a by word in Sri Lanka. Roughly, very slim details, just enough to make some of the connections but I could see that there was both the literal reading and something else going on. So I really liked the way it was done because you do leave it open to the reader’s imagination. And I don’t think you have to make a decision one way or the other. Yes, good. It’s not whether it happened. It’s the results of whether it could have happened exactly. Whether it could have happened to a girl from such a background. Whether she’d rush off and have an affair under a tree, with all the conditioning. And from Mahendra’s point of view, that all consuming hatred about something he can never be 100% sure about. But you know people like that who get so caught on one thing it plagues them for the rest of their lives. And that’s a particularly researched issue. If you wan to read about it, how a marriage can be annulled on this. In Sri Lanka there was a group of doctors, I can’t remember the name, but I did it for my masters of the research that was conducted on this issue. A conservative husband can be as unforgiving as Mahendra, or more, he could call a divorce on that issue. It’s one of the most important of marital problems. And there’s no, I mean the doctors were saying in their research that there was no way that the doctor could explain to the husband that this could happen, that it was natural that this could happen. No, they would not believe it. That’s so traumatic isn’t it. Yes it is. Not so much now and not in the westernised milieu that we live in but much more in the country. You think that it would happen more though because that ‘proof’ is so important but so unsound. Have you seen a film called Devini Gamene? In Sri Lanka, a Sinhalese film. No I haven’t. It’s all about the catastrophe that happens because there is no blood stain on that sheet and she doesn’t know how it happened either. So it’s not a unique issue, it’s quite a did you have the film in mind when no I don’t think so because it happens often enough. The film was not the best I’ve seen. It was quite romantic, one of these pulpy ones.
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Now you’re talking a little bit about the reader. When you write do you have a specific reader in mind or is it more a general idea of somebody, anybody?
That’s a good question. I write for myself, that’s for sure. I don’t have a reader in mind but, possibly in my subconscious somewhere there must be lurking a reader because I never would send a story or a novel for publication without showing it to a series of people. And they are, my husband who checks the practical details, the technicalities of the boat in this [Turtle Nest] for instance, how the boat is pushed into the sea. He’s very technical in his approach, so if the slat is pushed this way and not that way, he’ll tell me immediately. Then I do a bit of research on that, just to get it right because facts have to be right. Then I show it to my two daughters and my son-in-law who is an Australian. They’re very sharp critics. They’re all doctors, medical but they read a lot. So until they pass the book, I don’t do a thing with it. And then of course I have a lot of faith in my editor. This time it was Belinda Byrne a very senior editor and I know her presence enriched Turtle Nest. If she said Chandani, a small question on the side, I would in full flight of imagination I could put in a chapter just because that question opened out new visions for me. And I could see the sense of it, because whether we like it or not, we have to understand that I’m not writing to a Sri Lankan audience who’d immediately understand the word poya or whatever so you have to cater to an international audience finally, when the book is going to be published. But I think if you have all that in your mind when you are writing the book you’d destroy the creative process itself. So how do cope with your dual roles as Mum or Chandani and writer when you show your work to your children or to your husband. Is it difficult? I would have thought that they would be your best but also your harshest critics. Oh they are. Perhaps that’s why you do it. I’ve said this before, it’s like going to five dentists, which I hate. So I don’t look forward to it but I am open to the criticism and I take it to heart. It’s not as if I consider everything they say but when I see that there is something. Even my son-in-law, Lachlan, who’s very very Australian, and I take his point of view I think even more seriously than my daughters because he is reading it from the outside and if he has a question then it has to be answered. The book then belongs to the reader. It’s easy to say, ‘as a writer I believe only in what I write, I write for myself’, but no the book goes out and then it belongs to the reader.
If the moon smiled has been translated into Greek; how did this come about and do you know anything about how it has been received in Greece?
I think it was received very well. Penguin marketed or showcased the book at Frankfurt Fair, a major book fair, and the Greek publisher picked it up from there. And it was very well done, to the extent that the translator actually has George Keyt footnoted with a little biographical note on who George Keyt is, or poya, what I have not [done]. What I have avoided, a glossary, in the true postcolonial sense, why would we try to describe a word, let the reader cotton on to it. But in the Greek version a lot of it is explained in footnotes and so quite an informed translator has done it. And everything was wonderful except the cover on which they put a woman with the palu piece on her head, which means she’s Hindu and no one could be more Buddhist than Manthri in this book and the Buddhist woman never wears that sari draped over her hair. But for that it was a lovely beautiful cover.
So in terms of editing, did you have to make any compromises?
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No. No compromises at all. From the beginning it was my book, the editor understood it, my children understood it. So unless I agreed with what they said, I wouldn’t go anywhere with it. A couple said about the ending [to Turtle Nest], change the ending, it’s not going to work for you, wait for the reviews, everyone is going to damn you. But I thought no, the ending I had to have and thankfully every review highlights it as being powerful or the most powerful thing in the book so thank god I didn’t change it. But the ending was a bit of a problem for everyone and on that I was very very strong, including with my editor. You wouldn’t do anything to your book if as a writer you did not agree with whatever is being said.
Do you have influence in the way the books are designed then, in the covers?
You can have influence. The first thing Penguin does is [ask] do you have any ideas for your cover. But I think to myself, they are the experts. They know what cover the book should have. I’d feel rather naïve trying to design a cover for my book. And also when they design it in the first draft they send it to you they’re wonderful, and ask me if I like it. So I had no problems with liking the two covers.
Your collection of stories and both novels were promoted or assisted by state and federal arts and heritage bodies. Do you believe that arts funding policies shape or influence the fiction produced in Australia to any degree?
No. I’m assuming there were no strings attached anyway. No strings, except that the funding made it possible for me to have teaching relief, when you’re in full-time employment the funding is helpful for that, to travel back to Sri Lanka on research, to have someone doing your work here while you are doing that. Then also, I mean writers are not rich people. So especially when this was being written I think I was on contract, did I get a grant for this [If the moon smiled], the publishers got a grant for this. No it was for this [Turtle Nest] that I got a grant and it allowed me months of travel which otherwise I could not have afforded. So I was able to go there, the flight was paid for, and live there, research. No strings unless of course you fail to publish. The string is that they give the grant because they want to see your book published. So what happens to you if you don’t publish? Maybe you’ll be cut off the do you have to pay the money back? No not at all. I’ve not heard of that one but I don’t think you’ll get a grant again. Because I think once you write your book, you would write your book and send it out for publishing, it’s not your fault if it can’t get published as long as it has been written.
Are interactions with other members of the writing community important to you? For example you have written on Chitra Fernando and Yasmine Gooneratne’s work and Michelle de Kretser refers to your assistance in the acknowledgments to her novel.
They are important in as much as friendship I think, more than as writer to writer or helping each other out or anything like that but as people I like them all. I like Yasmine’s work and she likes mine and I’ve reviewed her work quite a lot, I’ve also reviewed Chitra’s work. So it’s not a kind of promotion of a Sri Lankan writer or anything but just as a scholar and as an academic you see a book and you think it is good, you want to review it or this is bad, you want to review it and you do. But the friendship happens at a different level altogether.
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So how do you feel about South-Asian-Australian fiction as a categorising concept? In the language of publishing or academia do you think it is a good thing to group all these works together in that way or do you see problems with that?
Well I have a problem with such simple codification really. Because finally I think a writer is meant to be universally…as I said, not bordered in by anything. And this constant need to slot a writer in, as a Sri Lankan-Australian or if you are born in Australia as a Australian-Sri Lankan, this came to me as a huge surprise. Once in a postcolonial anthology there was Sri Lanka and I was under Australia and I felt a moment of not guilt but a kind of uneasiness with this, suddenly how did I turn Australian, I was not even asked. So I think Sri Lankan-Australian is a much better category if people have to categorise. But I think a writer is a free floating individual.
So could you talk a little bit about the style of your novels? As you were saying in the session on short story writing, you do use this form, in terms of short intense episodes strung together but within the novel where you have the freedom to develop character and all that. Is that the way you naturally write or is it a conscious decision you have made?
I find it the most comfortable. I find the short story, difficult though they said it was, the easiest form for me, it’s a quick flash and intense and just there. I find when I am writing a novel, like I said, it’s always a series of short stories. So I write a number of them, like fifty, on the same characters and then their interactions with each other and then they grow into a book. This one [Turtle Nest] came as a slightly commercial project. I was commissioned by a Bloomsbury anthology published in London for a short story. And I sat there stultifying and I’d got a grant and I was still stultifying, still in this peculiar stasis. Then the deadline was coming for the Bloomsbury anthology and they said Chandani if you don’t give it in two weeks we’ll have to go ahead without. So I really sat down and wrote a story, it just came out of my head a bit. So which part was that? The part that really got the novel going is where little Priya awaits Mala and she comes in the middle of the night pregnant and that little scene with the mother. That’s what started this off but before that Priya had come alive for another Sri Lankan anthology and the story of the prostitution came in that anthology but at that time I wasn’t even thinking of a novel. There was only this little boy and the vague or not vague connection with the sister who happens in a dream almost and then I brought it back into the book. So it’s all short stories. That’s interesting because Priya is at the centre of the novel and he is the one who sparked all this off but he is also one of the characters that is least known, least accessible. He’s put to one side so that Mala’s story can unfold but even in his real life he’s always been on the periphery. He’s Mala’s little hanger-on or mother’s little servant boy, looking after the baby, [he] never really had a life within the community possibly because he’s this undernourished, miserable little creature, not even going to school, just on the margins so to give him a huge big story… And also I thought it was, a bit craftily, I thought it was tantalising. And to bring Simon to the centre, because otherwise it could get pretty sticky, so much emotion. Priya would spill out a terribly emotional tragic story but Simon gives it that objectivity, that distancing. And Simon is interesting because he brings up all sorts of questions to do with his desire for Priya but also the reasons behind his prior attachments to this family. See these are beach families we are talking about where the huts are like [arranged very closely together]. So it’s almost like a huge big family and I think Simon was a kind of benefactor. He helped out with the money, he was higher socially than they were and
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the mother’s dream was also if possible for the children to move a little higher. So it’s possible that it was a conscious attempt there between the mother wanting it and Simon was also very fond of the little girl, because he had no family. You find such attachments in Sri Lanka I think, he was alone.
That leads me to another question about the community structures that surround the main characters. So in If the moon smiled the expatriate community who gather to gossip about the failures of other people’s children but also in Turtle Nest you have the beach community who defile Mala’s family home because she is known as promiscuous. Why did you want to portray the negative, constrictive aspects to community dynamics in this way?
Because that’s the way it is. To portray anything outside is unthinkable because, like I said, these are people who are moulded by family. The foundation of the society is the family. So there is no way around it. Mala, when she is having that baby in that devale, is just so alone because she has gone against the mores, the accepted notions of how a girl should behave. Family and it is also role identity, she is the daughter, there’s no way you can work around that one. The community, I can’t say too much [over emphasise] how much the community is important in both and the differences in the Hill Country and then Colombo and then [the south coast] each one has its particular features and characteristics. I think it is within that difference that people are moulded and shaped and it’s the most natural thing in the world I think for me [to write about]. So communities are a very constrictive force. They can be constrictive, or else you have to just jump up and run away but it’s not easy because Mala you see keeps returning home because it is home also for her. It begins not so much with the community as with that bonding, the mother-daughter bonding, however irritated the mother is, however harsh the mother is, she waits for Mala to come home and that’s very natural within the Sri Lankan culture. I celebrate it even here although it’s a futile thing, between mother and daughter, Manthri and Nelum [in If the moon smiled]. And it’s because I think, as I said, the western notion of individualism does not count so much in our families, it’s the role, it’s the daughter, it’s the wife, it’s the mother, it’s the father, it’s the husband or the grandmother. It’s not outside that you live and you have to accept it if you are a person in that culture. And as you were saying in the session there is that tension with the second generation that comes through so beautifully in the novel when Nelum demands to be called by her own name and not duwa because she feels otherwise her identity is stolen it’s only symbolic of that individualism that she is [seeking], which Manthri will never understand.
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Interview with Ernest Macintyre at the Lighthouse Theatre on the 28th of September 2003
What prompted you to start writing for the stage?
Because during university and after that I was associated with a large number of people who were interested in the theatre and we began by producing and directing the plays of well known European and anglo-American playwrights, and then the audience perhaps began to dwindle in Colombo, seeking material closer to home probably and that may have been the reason that I started working on writing plays for, writing plays, writing for the theatre. But it also could be that once you start getting involved with the structure of drama it may spark off in you a kind of desire to also get involved in the structure of writing.
Your name has been cited as synonymous with the English theatre revival of the 60s and early 70s which coalesced at the Lionel Wendt theatre in Colombo. What are your strongest memories of this period?
The strongest memories in theatre, or generally? In your involvement in the theatre in the 60s. In involvement in the theatre the strongest memory was of two or three very big plays, one was The Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller and the other was The Caucasian Chalk Circle by Bertold Brecht, both of which I directed and both of which set the standards like virtually for producing, directing and selecting plays in Colombo at that time. That and also my own play, The Education of Miss Asia, which became a text some years later for the HSC and universities in Sri Lanka and is still a text.
Could you comment on the relationship between English and Sinhala theatre in Sri Lanka?
Yes, there is an extremely interesting relationship because recently when I was in Colombo I asked a very famous Sinhala playwright why today’s Sinhala theatre is so, poor in a sense, compared to the theatre of the 60s and 70s. He said, ‘Mac, that is because we were bilingual’. Today all the writers are reading only Sinhala, they can’t handle English so the window to the world has been closed. So is there much interaction between the two? Not now but when we were there there was a lot of interaction, because they were bilingual, that’s why. And, with the English theatre, how is that funded, does it receive any Government funding? No not directly, there is the Arts Council of Sri Lanka in Colombo which gives some help but no funding, funding is done entirely by generating money through the box office from its own plays.
Many critics have referred to you as the major exception to an English language theatre which is otherwise lacking social relevance and creative vision. What are your views on the purpose and status of political theatre?
Well I suppose that all activity in the final analysis can be classified as political, you when you say political theatre it means involvement with the human condition. So I feel that when they make that comparison with others they are trying to say that the others write about things merely to get an audience laughing in the theatre but do not want to explore the human condition. Whereas you… take the risk of exploring the human
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condition because you can also by doing that probably drive audiences away because some people say we have enough troubles in life, we come to the theatre to have a good laugh, why come to the theatre and again get our emotions heavily involved. But to me that was not valid an argument because, it is a famous story of St. Augustine, you must of heard of him, who went to the theatre there and asked the question, why do these wretched people come over and over again to feel sad. He was unaware that in India there’s a theory call Rasa where you don’t feel sad personally, you feel sad in the universal sense. So however troubled your life is your getting sad in the theatre doesn’t mean that you are tapping the same source
Sita Fernando implicitly connects the ‘downgrading’ of the English language (and, by association those who speak it) to her decision to migrate. She states: ‘I laugh and I cry only in English’. Has the issue of language had a personal impact on your own trajectory from Sri Lanka to Australia?
Yes, well, the other day one of the interviewers asked me, what is the meaning of this – we have the Bengalis doing plays in Bengali, and we have the Tamils doing plays, here in Australia I mean, in Tamil, Sinhalese in Sinhala, you are doing plays in English, isn’t that like taking rambutans to Malvana, Malvana is a famous place for a fruit called rambutan, so he was using a comparative to taking coals to Newcastle. I said no because though the language is English the content and culture is not anglo-celtic. So, for example, the largest circulating English newspaper in the world is the Times of India but the content of the Times of India is no way anglo-celtic, it’s very Indian in culture. So the language is not necessarily the thing to be guided by.
How has Australia as a location for South Asian cultural production changed since 1973, when you arrived?
Yes it has changed considerably, I think at that time the only thing you saw, and that very occasionally, was Bharatanatyam and Kathakali or something like that. The very idea that the English as a spoken language could be used by people other than Australians in projecting their cultural interests and political interests was quite a foreign concept at that time. But now, you get many groups of people using the English language not being anglo-celtic, something like your group in London who specialise in Asian plays – I forget their name – they were very good at it, well a lot of groups have cropped up here, so I don’t think that being in Australia has any problem regarding that question of the content of your English language vehicle.
What are the key differences in the way your work is produced, promoted and received in Australia and Sri Lanka?
Yes there are major differences. For one thing, in Sri Lanka we were what is clichetically called the mainstream. We were the mainstream so the big press, The Daily News, The Observer, The Ceylon Times, Sri Lanka Times all regarded us as, here of course, we are not considered the mainstream theatre and you wont get ourselves covered like that so we have to, unless you believe that you are in the act of doing something that you have to do for your own sustenance and not for connecting up with the big society then it is pointless doing drama here, it is like going to church – you don’t only pray at St. Peters in Rome you can pray in any village church, so that’s the
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same attitude. Though, in fact, progressively we have been covered by the big papers like The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and others.
So could you tell me a little about the Theatre of Migration, this production that took place at the fringe festival? Yes that was an experiment that had a very large cast of 40 and I tried a new theatre form there, making it clear to the audience in the very beginning that we are moving freely through the whole theatre without constraining ourselves to conventions of staging and that worked because the actors just walked around, some actors just sat down there and the other actor acted, you know got up and acted again, it went on an on, and the subject matter was, of course, migration mainly from South Asia. And it involved the audience as well, I imagine… Yes there was involvement of the audience in that sense but the main emphasis was not so much on that but the loss of consciousness that we were on a stage but rather in a very free area with some other people also seated down there, that’s about it.
How have your motivations changed over time and between locations?
Motivation would be to, yes the influence on motivation is that in Sri Lanka during my whole period there though I was happy and enjoying the acting, writing and directing, I had not the slightest notion of the theory of the theatre. After I came to Australia, I got deeply into the theory of the theatre mainly through the university of NSW which I joined in the department of Drama and did a masters in drama studying the theory of the theatre and so the theory of the theatre has now become a big thing for me whereas in Sri Lanka it was not.
Have your play-scripts been translated into Sinhala, Tamil or other languages?
No, one in, well the translation for Rasanayagam’s Last Riot is now on in South India but no other plays have been translated. Would you like this to happen in the future? I am not particularly interested whether they are translated or not, but Rasanayagam’s Last Riot dealing particularly with something of interest to Tamils, they are translating it.
Do you see your work as part of a broader literature of the South Asian diaspora?
Yeah, I think that that is possibly the case. In Australia not so much as the South Asian diaspora but as the non-anglo-celtic migration spectrum, the Greeks, the Italians, they have all done plays. When I did Let’s Give Them Curry which was highly successful in Australia and became a text in the schools here, I found that somebody had a thing called The Shifting Heart, I think it was Greek, which dealt with the same subjects. So people began to see that lots of migrants, you know, come out with, Let’s Give Them Curry was about a Sri Lankan young woman falling in love with an Australian boy. So would you say, in that case, that you have more connection to other migrant Australians working in Australia rather than South Asian writers who are working in say the UK or US? Yes, quite definitely yes. You have already mentioned that you think there are shared thematic concerns in terms of migration do you think there are shared aesthetic concerns also? Yes, I think there are because we all somehow seem to be influenced by the various movements in the world and those reflect in both the works of my community as well as the other communities, like the Australian playwrights, by Brecht and Boal and all those people. Yes I think in that sense there is a common platform of
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aesthetic concerns. On the other hand in a lot of my plays I use a lot of stuff from the Sinhala theatre, specific Sinhala theatre. The mask you saw last night that is one of the 18 diseases of the Sinhalese and that mask is worn by the demon who represents the disease when he approaches the woman who is ailing.
How have debates on postcolonialism, multiculturalism and hybridity influenced your work?
Yes they certainly have influenced my work to a large extent because I happen to be in a circle of people who write a lot about that, so because of them I read all their stuff, you know, Khadri Ismail, Michael Ondaatje, who is a good friend of mine and Neloufer de Mel in Sri Lanka, Yasmine Gooneratne, all of them so that what they write certainly keeps my thinking processes nourished with ideas and thoughts.
In the author’s note to The Loneliness of the Short-Distance Traveller you say that ‘Play-writing….isn’t a strictly literary activity, it’s a theatrical activity’. Could you comment on this process, the difference between a published text and performance?
Yes, this is not an easy question. The answer is that until about, if you go anywhere around the entire world and have a look, until about 1900 no university in the world had a professor of Drama, it was always part of literature, but somewhere, I think it was Chicago or probably Columbia University, appointed and then the first recognition came around that there is something quite different from the written text in a performed text and that is why as you know people in USA have won a great victory in Performances publications, in the USA if you perform it goes on your list of publications for your tenure and all in universities. It doesn’t have to be a document as long as there is a record of performance. So I always feel that theatre is very different from literature though they are very closely related, you can’t separate one from the other. Lots of things, for example, even in this play [The UN Inspector is a Sri Lankan] came out which in performance got very different meanings from what was directly written in the text. Could you elaborate on that? Well for example, just a very simple example, which probably doesn’t answer your question, but when Ghandi Macintyre says ‘no, no don’t go there’, because he knows the other minister is there behind the curtain, ‘you go that side, you need ample space’, the relationship is to the actual actor. And then when he looks at his stomach and says ‘man can not live by bread alone’…that’s a very simple example but there are other things like, for example the relationship to Australia in the play, because I am performing it here…this play was written specifically for the Lionel Wendt’s 50th celebration, that’s why there are all the references [to the Wendt in the play]. And also it was written to be filtered to an Australian audience, otherwise there was no real relevance of getting the man wanting to go to Australia, it had no real connection with the background of Iraq.
In your Introduction to Rasanayagam’s Last Riot you also comment on the fact that some political theatre when performed has a very different impact to when it is read and that at certain times it may be best not to perform but to have a written script. That came because of Rasanayagam’s Last Riot, for a long time people refused to produce it in Sri Lanka saying that audiences are too close to that event and won’t take it. So then I thought, well damn good thing I wrote it because at least people can read it now. Now universities, inside universities only, it is being directed and produced but not in, the
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public are still a little distanced from that. But I am taking the risk this time of taking He Still Comes from Jaffna to Colombo which is also pretty close to the bone.
Issues of language usage are paramount in Rasanayagam’s Last Riot; in terms of what can and cannot be spoken, in the changing value attributed to English and as a method of identifying who comes from which community. These issues resurface in He Still Comes From Jaffna, in the elision of ‘the terrorist’s’ name, for example, in his claim that ‘language is their most powerful weapon’ and in the ambiguity surrounding Maya’s ethnicity. Could you elaborate on these ideas of speech and silence, and the relationship between language, identity and history in your work?
Yeah, you have stated it very sharply academically, I know what you are saying but I am not sure I can articulate it in a quick answer. But for example, when that guy says that ‘language is their most powerful weapon he means they, the whole world has now taken it, the word terrorist, they use it for political purposes but it is the use of language there giving meaning to it and he says you get on with your work unconcerned about that. Yes I suppose that despite the fact that there have been magnificent and large pre- alphabetic civilisations, ever since the alphabet came into being it has become a potent force. The use of words in communication and in…globalisation, terrorism, these are words but I begin to feel that in recent times they are more important than even in the past. In the past you didn’t get a single catch-word used but today you find it very strongly used…In the play we saw last night there was this focus on the difference in names and how a single letter can identify you. Yes that’s right. But it was also used to point out that the differences that are made out are really so very slight. One of the big playwrights of Sri Lanka Dr. Sarachchandra, he is one of the famous Sinhala playwrights, he said ‘I’ll never at a mortuary slab be able to tell between a Singhalese and a Tamil lying side by side’. It is only when they speak that there is a difference. In He Still Comes from Jaffna that becomes very strong though.
Your plays focus on the characterisation and concerns of a particular class. One reviewer has asked of A Somewhat Strange and Grotesque Comedy: ‘Is it a bitter indictment of the apathy of our middle class? One can never be sure as to whether Mr. MacIntyre is playing some sort of game or whether he is deadly serious. However one does certainly feel a bit uncomfortable or is it guilty at the end of the play.’ What would you say to this reviewer and could you comment on how class issues play out in your recent work?
Yes I would say that it is not a game that it is about the middle classes that I have written, and their apathy toward the 71 uprising is what made me write the Grotesque Comedy where a large number of youths were killed, where brother killed brother. So I wouldn’t say that it’s a game. No, it is something that the middle classes is the class that I know, I could never write of the village people because I am not able to write about them. But even when I did He Still Comes from Jaffna somebody said that is the civil war seen from the middle classes point of view, which is precisely that.
Your introduction to Rasanayagam’s Last Riot draws attention to the interplay of fact and fiction, the relationship between real life events and plot driven narrative. Could you comment on how these themes are brought forth in both Rasanayagam’s Last Riot and He Still Comes From Jaffna?
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They are stronger in He Still Comes From Jaffna because Maya is writing a novel and her interest in all the proceedings are taking her notes down for the novel while the drama is going on. At the end when the drama comes to a point which probably cannot be resolved she suddenly steps in and says ‘that’s not the way my novel ends’. And the lighting then brings about, it conveys to the audience that this is how a novel would end. In Rasanayagam’s Last Riot, I didn’t see the point you are making, how did that come in there? I think in the introduction to the play you were commenting on the fact that although it is based on a very particular time, there is an internal fiction in the play, an essential fiction that… Oh yes, fiction is vital for any play because that’s the one that gives it its engine, right, and there I point out that because nobody in Colombo would have brought out their innermost feelings, that’s right, yes.
Could you elaborate on the paradox at the heart of He Still Comes From Jaffna, ‘that terrorism and anti-terrorism are interchangeable stances’? are cousins, yeah. Because, that’s why at the end of the play he’s carrying this mysterious bag and everyone thinks that it’s weapons or dynamite, or something but at the very end of the play while they are dancing the baila he moves up opens the bag and takes a swig of whisky and then the girl says I thought you said you never take alcohol, because at the beginning of the play as a terrorist he says we don’t touch alcohol, then he says that was when I was a terrorist now I am an anti-terrorist, so that he has changed position. But what it amounts to is that the vast majority of humanity, in my opinion, go about their daily work not very clear as to what this is all about. But there is a hardcore of anti-terrorists who are the powers that are under threat and there are the terrorists, so that the vast majority of humanity is in-between these and these two positions are easily interchangeable as in the case of Menachem Begin, Yitzak Shamir, all that is in the play, you see, or anybody. The moment you take power anybody opposing you becomes the terrorist, it depends on your viewpoint and current position.
The title of your play He Still Comes From Jaffna recalls an earlier work; the first Sri Lankan English language play written and performed by E. F. C. Ludowyck in 1934. What are the connections between the two productions?
Well there are no connections except that this play makes it clear that those who came from Jaffna in the time of the 1930s which He Comes From Jaffna is about are well- heeled, upper-middle-class Tamils who come to Colombo and try to do business or educate themselves in the South with the Sinhalese and they are all, in the end ultimately they’re assimilated into that society. But now, He Still Comes From Jaffna is a new kind of man who is coming to part the ways not to assimilate.
Your plays achieve a fine balance, a negotiation between the farcical and profound. When describing the process of producing A Somewhat Mad and Grotesque Comedy Laskshmi de Silva states: “I expected a number of laughs, and a relaxing of attention when the tempo of the play changed – but not the laughter that came up in continuous waves and the absolute absorbed stillness that followed”. How have you utilised comedy in your more recent work?
Yes, comedy is I think the way to go about it because lots of things have changed since the Greeks. So what has happened is that in today’s world you use comedy, not necessarily the Black Comedy of the English period, but a variety of comedy to keep
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people interested in the subject matter but let them go out after the theatre and digest the subject matter. Is it almost a vehicle in that sense? It’s a vehicle, that’s true, that’s how it works, I mean the most world famous example is Dario Fo, he has an audience of 400 million people each night when he performs Euro Television and he uses comedy for the most serious themes in the world.
In The UN Inspector you’ve obviously used recent events in Iraq to shape that play but I was looking in the program notes earlier and you state that this is not meant to be an absolute representation…
Well, put it this way, it’s a very difficult, I probably didn’t get through what I was trying to say. But any event in the theatre is an event in its own right. It is not something in a costume and in dialogue to depict anything else, it can be influenced by something else, so Iraq has influenced it but then on the other hand, events outside of the theatre do influence each other so that’s not relevant, that’s not to the point. It has to be judged entirely internally and not be judged in relation to, you cannot say ‘but that didn’t happen in Iraq, that’s not quite true’, that’s not the point, you see. What is true is what is true of this event. This is the famous argument in the theatre – that there is a very ambiguous tension between what is actual and what is fictional in the theatre. So that we are faced with, it became very clear in the Sanskrit theatre, in the Natyashastra, that a theatre event was considered an event in itself it was not a representation of something else.
Finally, if you had to categorise yourself and your work, how would you like to be promoted to your audience? As an Australian writer, or as Sri Lankan writer…
I would like to be promoted as myself Ernest Thalayasingam Macintyre because I am beginning to see that the meaning of countries is disappearing very fast. It’s just vanishing, the boundaries are vanishing very quickly. It will take some more time but it is now becoming very very doubtful that a person’s identity is so much dependant on his or her country of birth or whatever. I would say that a country is an administrative convenience for everyday life and not necessarily part of your soul. One of your characters last night presented a very different view, in her longing to go come, how can we get back etc. Yes but each character is speaking for himself, it is not necessarily the author’s views. Of course. One of the things I was most interested in last night was in the way that you managed to contain so many different viewpoints within the one play. Your dictatorship was neither purely evil or wholly good. I always think that is the case. I mean to write a play just getting on the boards and lambasting the USA is very easy. But you know you’ve got to get into the situation where if Iraq was a world power it would behave identically, I am dead certain, you know. So that’s not the issue in the play, the issue in the play is to create sufficient material in the play for people to work out what they want out of it and not pummel them with one point of view. Many people found it hard to form a view on the war in Iraq because of the question of human rights abuses within Iraq, but the alternative of just making war was never the right way so what I am saying is that it wasn’t clear cut to begin with and I think you brought all of these uncertainties… That’s why I brought all the absolutely disgusting state of that Bhoomisthan, I brought it along. Then towards the later part of the play I began to show that the invasion was not the way to solve it. I go back to Ghandi when Mountbatten told him, ‘if we leave India this will be an utter chaos’, he said, ‘yes Lord Mountbatten but it will be our very own chaos’, that’s it. I can’t fully agree with that because if I find
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that my neighbour is beating his wife senselessly to death or something, I would intervene. So I don’t think I would agree completely with Ghandi’s point of view that it’s our very own chaos and that nobody does anything about it. Still, I think that some in the USA must be believing that they were doing the right thing.
When discussing other writers and books.
I was surprised to see so many Sri Lankans in the audience, not so much last night but last weekend was sold out, and that they picked up on references to Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, that they are reading all that. As I get older I think I might write a novel as then, to paraphrase Rushdie who once said that he was originally interested in theatre, it is just you, in a room, with your pen.
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Interview with Suneeta Peres da Costa in Sydney on the 29th of November 2003
You have stated in newspaper reviews that Homework began as a personal project instigated by a number of life crises. Can I ask then about the process of writing the novel, what compelled you to continue to write it?
Well yes after having had the initial impulse, I had a whole summer and I knew I was doing honours in communication, I was studying at UTS, and I had at that time mapped out a sort of academic path for myself going on to do a PhD. My majors were largely political science and communications theory, cultural studies sort of areas and I realised at that point due to other things that had happened in my life that I had probably chosen that [path] because I was sort of scared of the gratification I got out of reading and writing fiction and perhaps I should have in the first place been doing a literature major and, if not doing a thesis for the coming year in literature, producing some kind of fiction. All along I had been writing plays and fiction at Uni but I had never considered it a legitimate option. And in some ways I suppose you feel the danger of it more when you are doing it…I don’t know. Do you feel the danger of it more when you’re doing it on the sly? Or do you feel it more when you’ve got full rein to do it? At that time no one knew about it. I didn’t have to declare myself as writing a novel or thinking myself good enough to [write a novel]. I did sort of sit down, if that’s what you’re asking, and write day after day. There was a sense also of finality of life in general. I don’t mean in the sense that Mina has it, that sense of death, death abounding everywhere, but just that I had to do this because if I didn’t do it now I never would and that the time had come to just be myself instead of… I can see what you mean about seeing it as a freedom as opposed to academic writing which can become stifling. I had come to all these impasses stylistically in theory. Every conclusion I came to, it didn’t matter which question I was asking myself and what the subject was, it was always; what’s the form then? What’s the form? How do we live? How does it happen? The answer to that was…I guess it’s questionable whether style is everything, but that’s how I approached it then. I wanted to embody everything I thought in a beautiful style.
Was it difficult, or liberating in any way, to put something so personal out into the public sphere? When you move from doing something so private for yourself to actually having to publish it.
Look it was liberating but I think that sense of liberation was associated with a number of illusions that you have. That it will be liberating because the message, or one of the messages will suddenly leap out at the people whom who read it and not just them but those in particular who you might have, whose attention you might have wanted to have before. I’m not being very subtle here. That’s not necessarily what happens. I mean that’s what the cult of fame is all about isn’t it? It’s all about the impersonal nature of knowing another person and perhaps I wanted… It liberated me to say this is myself I suppose to the world, but in other ways I think I was a bit naïve about what kinds of freedom it would give me and how it would affect those in my immediate circle. Did it have knock-on effect that you didn’t foresee then? I would have to be fair in saying that I thought it would have greater ramifications than it did. I overstated the impact it would have. I thought it would transform our lives so to speak and that’s the kind of anticlimax you feel though in every aspect of your life when you think [idealistically]. I guess I’m a romantic for thinking [in that way]. Perhaps there’s something good about that kind of
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romanticism too. Could you have done it if you didn’t feel that way to begin with? No I don’t think I could and I think that there are romanticisms that are healthy and I hope that writing a novel say is less unhealthy, that it’s a bit more salutary.
So how did writing Homework differ to the script-writing you’ve done for radio and for theatre?
It’s a similar process. It’s a much lengthier process so the consistency with which you have to approach it is something different to what I’d experienced. And the plays I had written by then were only short plays. I suppose what I found really interesting narratively was the idea, because Homework is written in the first person, the idea that each story always has an underlying narrative conscience and consciousness, it has something that is coherent, and as a playwright I don’t think I’d fully grasped that then. By the time I wrote Homework I was writing plays that were generally about one character even though he or she was placed in a dramatic situation with many others. But writing narrative fiction is a way of coming much closer to the limitations of [a] character’s consciousness and the flexibilities too of what you can do inside one head. Also I guess that in a very simplistic way you don’t have to think about it being staged, think about the conventions exactly and the things you can do with time and space. A novel can be all about memory for example. It’s very hard to have a play happen that way, it becomes expositional. I’ve tried to write a play about memory and it feels as though it’s… Plays have this insistence, because the audience is in real-time that something happens during that time. Fiction doesn’t necessarily have that, not all novels have that. The drama of consciousness playing itself out can be the things that happen as it were. So yes I found that really exciting. And it’s no surprise really that fiction is the modern form whereas drama is the older form from the classical Greek period when society was a much more controlled entity; the novel is really about what has happened to us since, particularly about the last three hundred years and the weird things that capitalism and modernity have done to us. I think there was something really refreshing for me in the novel form. You can also sit and read alone whereas if you watch a play, and I guess this is slightly different if you are listening to the radio which is maybe on the borderline, but if you watch a play you are part of a crowd, you’re part of an audience. It’s a social activity for which you’ve probably spent time preparing, by getting ready to go out to the theatre, having a meal or whatever. It becomes an event whereas reading is very private. And I guess this is the sense that I got from Homework that it’s much more private than the radio plays you have done. And I must say I’m not sure if that’s because of the things we’ve just been talking about to do with privacy in the modern and stuff. I think it was more to do with the fact that I hadn’t discovered my own voice yet when I was writing the earlier plays and other works. At the same time, I was writing for radio, and radio may have brought me to an awareness of that much more because like you say it is modernist, it is a modernist form, the twentieth century form.
Could you tell me about the work you’re currently doing for ABC radio?
Well currently, in fact just yesterday and the last two and a half weeks I’ve been working on the recording and post-production of a script I wrote last year which is a doco script and I’ve not done this before, this is the first time. It’s for a programme called Radio Eye, they have that about one o’clock I think it is, on Saturdays on Radio National. It’s a journey of this unnamed narrator who goes in search of Lucia Joyce, the
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subject of my thesis at Sydney Uni and the research I did on this project last year when I went overseas has formed the basis for this script. It’s about the discontents of biography and how you research a biographical subject and what the politics of it are, and also the story of Lucia Joyce itself. It’s called ‘Estranged Muse’ and one of the things it tries to explore is why her story has been so silenced. Excellent, so when’s that going to be hopefully in January. So we’re just doing post-production now and this is the first time I’ve been involved in the production part of things. It must be quite exciting though to work on something at the level of writing the script and then at the level of actually creating it into a sound piece. It is. It’s really good. I’m not sure whether theoretical writing, and this [script] had some literary criticism of Joyce’s work, especially Finnegan’s Wake, you end up being a bit intellectual, you can’t help yourself and I think it’s hard to listen to that on radio. I do like listening to narrative on radio but I think I’ve discovered that drama and narrative that’s maybe like memoir would work well but this kind of veers between memoir and theory so that’s got to be much harder it’s hard to hear, it’s hard for the listener to keep listening. That’s true although I know someone who’s a fanatic ABC Radio National listener and he loves documentaries on anything, the more obscure the better, so perhaps your listeners are out there. I’m all for it and having said that, the script I’m working on next week is about Walter Benjamin and though it’s a stage play it’s about this incredibly dense writer who was an exile, German exile to France. So I love listening to things like that. It’s just I suppose how you express it. I also think I’m probably better at doing drama, straight drama, than the hybrid form on radio. Whereas it works on the page to do both I think. So the one you’re working on next week is that The Art of Straying, or a continuation of that? That’s The Art of Straying. Finally you’re getting to do it. His is such a tragic and dramatic story, wasn’t it the case that if they had waited a day longer they would have got through, over the border? That’s right. Well he actually suicided that night. It was a simple bureaucratic decision that word came from the Vichy government, that they’ve overturned the decision of yesterday which is that the non- nationals, because that’s what he was, a German exile living in France, could pass through rather than be detained at the border of and returned to France. He’d already died when they found that out the next morning, so it was just fateful. And that’s what stories turn on, those missed moments, if only, it gives it a very dramatic edge. Yes it does and he wrote a lot about historical determinism and so it has this other peculiar resonance with his writing.
Actually one of the things I am interested in hearing about is your radio play ‘Fire’ and I noticed when I was I was browsing through the ABC website that you followed it up with one called ‘Water’.
That’s been aired as well, I’ll give you the name of the woman who you can contact to get a copy, Jane Ulman, she was the producer but I’ll write it down for you at the end. So the fire, water thing are you going to follow those with others? Well I wanted to do the other two elements but unfortunately just three weeks ago ‘The Listening Room’ was axed. They’re all just recovering from the decision. The man I’ve just been working with is a Listening Room producer and it’s just tragic, it’s one of the most cutting edge arts programmes in Australia and it has such a huge overseas reputation. It’s just disappeared because yeah there’s a sense that it’s elitist. So you won’t get the opportunity to follow up no they won’t commission new works. I’d have to do it for ‘Radio Drama’ if I was interested. And they are monologues but I’d have really liked to do it for ‘The Listening Room’ and with Jane producing.
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The other one I am interested in is ‘Angelina’s Song’ because it has such political overtones, and yet it is still about memory and imagination and those sorts of issues. So what prompted you to write that one?
That had actually been written before Homework or anything. It was a script I wrote for the Ian Reed Foundation Prize at the ABC. One of the plays I entered won the short play section and one of the other ones was ‘Angelina’s Song’. I must have been eighteen, nineteen I think, when I sent that one in, so it was before I’d written Homework. I’d been really interested in East Timor for years. I suppose I was introduced to the idea when I was in High School by my father telling me about Goa’s history and then finding out about East Timor. Then of course learning about East Timor’s fate since Indonesia had invaded. I became more and more politicised in other ways at Uni and that continued to be a concern of mine. I can’t believe, because it was written pre-independence, what’s happened now. What courage the Timorese had. So you would have been writing this while the invasion was going on yes while it was still there, so 75 East Timor was invaded and I was writing that in 96, 97.
So could you tell me about your work for the stage, theatre in more detail?
There’s nothing to say. There is no work for the theatre. The Art of Straying had been written for theatre and it had a few readings and workshops at the National Playwright’s conference here in Canberra and unfortunately no one picked it up. It was then read again in Manhattan, at this place called the Bat Theatre in Manhattan, or by them actually. It was read at the Tish School of the Arts but again no one picked it up for production. There was some interest at one stage by Griffin Theatre in Kings Cross but nothing has come of that. So I’m just crossing my fingers that one day it will be discovered. Would you like to do more work for the theatre though? No. I actually made this decision, I probably made it a while ago now so time has passed, not to write any more for the theatre. It’s just it’s very tiring to have to promote oneself and you have to be a very vigilant crusader about your own work when you’re a playwright in Australia. And I’m not very good at it. The theatre world has an element to it, just an element that I experienced a few years ago, which is a little bit hostile to, I suppose, intellectual ideas. So I feel that I fitted better into the world of print. I see what you’re saying and this point was brought up dramatically in a play I went to see a little while ago, called He Still Comes From Jaffna. Within the play the characters were speaking about the difference between writing a novel, one of the characters was a novelist, and writing a play which kind of needs action, needs to be moved along. You can probably more easily have a novel of ideas than you can a play of ideas. Yes you can, its much more amenable. And so I suppose that’s the real reason why I’ve moved; it’s because fiction is in fact a more, it accommodates my vision more, if you like, than a play would.
So going back to The Art of Straying for just a moment, I was hugely attracted to the idea of fictionalising a major intellectual figure and in many ways Homework also engages with theoretical concepts. Could you comment on the relationship between fiction and theory in general terms but also with reference to Homework in particular?
Well for me they’re inseparable. I suppose that’s what I was saying in the first question; that if we live by what we believe it makes life interesting but it also throws up a whole lot of questions about how we must live ethically as well as artfully, if you know what I
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mean. Fiction and theory…well yes to me they are a part of each other. Clarity is really important to me. Meaning over sound, even though I love sound, is important to me. Meaning over style. So is that a shift in your thinking? No I would have thought that as an undergraduate but it’s almost like you have to take for granted that you’re going try your best to write well, or that you’ll appreciate works that are written well. The story I’m writing now about Lucia Joyce’s life is an interesting one, like Walter Benjamin’s as well. In his case a lot has been written about him. There had been a couple of novels, I think there’s one called The Border by Elaine Feinstein, the English writer, and another one called, I can’t remember, it was by an American novelist and it came out in the mid-nineties about his last night and the trek to the Pyrenees. So he’d not just been discovered if you like by theory, cultural theory, he’d been discovered by fiction writers and poets and others as well. I just really like the idea of writing about those I care about and sometimes they might be people who I’ve just imagined, who’ve come to me fully formed in my imagination and at other times they might be people who have existed. So this play The Art of Straying is largely about this period… Benjamin wrote radio scripts during the twenties for the new radio stations in Berlin and Frankfurt and it was to make money that he did this and the scripts he wrote were children’s stories and he broadcast a few of them himself. I learnt about it in Jeffrey Mehlman’s beautiful Walter Benjamin for Children. The scripts were all about disaster, like the Lisbon earthquake of 1788 and the fire of Rome, I think the fire that Nero lit, all these totally macabre stories, and they were for children! ‘Dear children this is Dr. Benjamin’, and so immediately this thought, and I suppose that’s why I am a fiction writer or dramatist, this idea of him, this unlikely figure of Benjamin the [children’s writer]. It was probably a good amount of money for him as he was very hard up. He also spent a lot of money on books. And he liked travelling a lot so maybe that’s what prompted him though he also had a son by then. So the story for me it’s all about his last night in that hotel room in Port Bou (where I went last year actually oh right, it was amazing) and he is recalling this particular period when he was writing the scripts. So just to give this other side of Benjamin that we don’t know. So there doesn’t have to be a kind of natural or perhaps unnatural division between fiction and theory, the two things are interrelated are being part of each other yes and I think modern German writers knew that very well. In a way we’ve forgotten it as readers in English. The history of German letters, modern letters, and in Europe in general, is that they’re part of each other. But he was friends in life with Bertolt Brecht and Bertolt’s his friend in the play and I also wanted to trace what it would have been like for someone like Benjamin who was a gentle man, you know a bit of a walkover actually, with a friendship with this ego-maniac, Brecht, and what that would have been like.
So ok we have sort of covered this but what form would you prefer to work in?
Given the choice and not motivated by the need to make money, as we all are how can we even think like that? But just writing for yourself, would you prefer radio plays, short stories, novels, academic writing, whatever? I dream and I’m just entering a period now where I’ve finally been allowed to, god knows how I’ll feel when I’m in it, of being able to write fiction unfettered and without interruptions. Fiction that might be about ideas, but fiction. Would you prefer to put that in the longer form of the novel or would you be attracted to the idea of the novella for example or I have actually written a novella. What was it about? Actually you might be interested and I’m happy to share it with you. It’s about a family of Goans who are living in Luanda in pre-independence Angola, and it’s the narrative of the daughter who ends up leaving by herself, she’s sent
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back to Lisbon by herself. And it’s very different to Homework. It’s pretty unforgiving and pitiless. Oh really? Yes it’s kind of my response to, ‘oh Mina’s such a nice character’ ‘how charming’ yes. Well that would be really good to read and I’ll make sure I’m in a depressed mood before I pick it up. Well it’s honest. She’s a romantic this character but she’s totally aware, unlike Mina might be, of the perils of romanticism. This book deals a lot with the problems of diasporic Indians among Africans in Angola and the kind of colonial mentality which they inherited from coming from India and brought with them and just this family and the politics of colonialism within the family. That’s a really interesting area to go into and one that not much has been written on I don’t think Naipaul has done anything to my knowledge and I can’t think of any Indian West Indian writers who’ve written about those relations in West India in interesting ways. But that might be my ignorance, do you know of any? None spring to mind immediately because it’s so fascinating because they’re so hated, hated in Fiji too. And when those relationships are commented on it’s often transposed onto a new location, say in London by writers from the Caribbean, so you do wonder about before.
So another broad question what are your opinions on the role or purpose of storytelling, in any form?
Oh that’s a really hard one to talk about isn’t it. It’s a bit of a ‘why are we here’ question. Look in the thing that I’m writing at the moment I suppose what I am thinking about is how…what am I thinking about? Different narratives…I mean the novella I was just talking about, the title is Oblivion, is about actual geo-political things. And I’ve had a really hard time since, everything that’s happened since 2001 in the world (not that they’re necessarily new things, they’re very consistent with things that have been happening, but this year with Iraq and everything) in thinking about what our role really is as writers and what’s the point. Are we redundant? And if we’re not talking about these things then it’s a bit, I don’t know, it’s very irresponsible not to. But how do you find ways to talk about them that are, eternal? Because that’s what good art should be about, metaphysics. So the thing that I’m writing now, it’s not the Lucia Joyce thing, it’s a different thing, is kind of about how an ordinary person who is very frightened of making changes in their life, changes their life, how and in small ways but in some ways cataclysmic ways also. And it’s about words and this whole question, I think I’m a bit of a literary writer in that sense, with both the Lucia Joyce project that I’m working on and this current one that I’m doing. They’re both about [words] people, I mean Joyce was a words person, and whether words save us. I suppose that’s a question in Homework as well, and in Walter Benjamin; what is the importance of language? Is it here to help us communicate? And should it represent the madness in the world? I think it should. That’s what I feel my role as a writer is. But how to represent that madness. Do you imitate the madness in your style or do you defy it? I think these are crucial questions for me. They are certainly crucial questions and so in that sense storytelling is both an act of communication and stands in defiance of it yes, there’s something deeply anti-humanist about writing, especially writing more than the other arts, music perhaps to the same extent. And I think I became aware of that, in the same way that you were asking me about what can a novel do that plays can’t, like I was saying about classical Greek theatre and stuff, the novel responds to this madness that we have. This lack of, the communication that’s never going to the desire for communication that cannot actually is never consummated yes. And the failure of communication in this world, the world of TVs and mobile phones while there’s a war… Well that is very heavy, so I’ll go on to the next question.
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For me, one of the appealing aspects to Homework was the way you incorporated a range of references, from Catholicism and child psychology to math problems and cartoon catchphrases. I felt there wasn’t a separation between high and low culture in that way, but was the intertextual nature of Homework important to you, and did you set out to create such a layered text or was this something that happened as you wrote it?
I think it happened as I went into it but there are parts of it that don’t work and they have been sort of added after the first or second draft even, after having discovered that that’s what I’d been doing unconsciously and that I should perhaps do more of it throughout. So in those early chapters I don’t think it quite works, actually it was there in the first chapter, but those first chapters I just can’t bear to look at they’re so bad but I did set out to write about the world that I’d perhaps experienced as a child of popular culture completely infiltrating family life, yes. So it was partly intentional. I mean for me that worked, did it? I liked some of those references, I guess we’re not that dissimilar in age, so perhaps its about the pleasure of recognising something known yes, similar cartoons and so on and in some ways I suppose it dates it as well. I don’t think it was sort of intentional though if your asking, there are other things that were intentional or even tacked on afterwards which haven’t worked and I think that was less so. The cartoons were part of the whole thing from the beginning. The references to Loony Tunes and all, is that what you mean those things? Yes alongside Deepa’s like, yes her reading and also those medical textbooks that have such a oh that’s right, they were a bit added on after I realised that the mother had all this potential because she would be, what is she, a palliative physician. They were a bit belated. I guess what I liked was the way you mixed it up but Dr. Spock comes up and never comes back and he has nothing to do with Freud, see I don’t like that. Well ok that’s fair enough, I mean, you wrote it. I quite liked the Dr. Spock bits, because it’s such a classic text and it’s so but the truth was Indian parents of that period were using it but white women here would not have been using it in Australia, Anglo-Saxon women in Australia, really? No, because it is like…Indian parents are twenty years behind. They’re still beating their children! I shouldn’t say things like that on tape, but it’s true isn’t it? I guess I know what you’re saying. They’re still disciplining their children in certain ways that would have been unacceptable, which the state of Denmark deems to be illegal. You see I found the Dr. Spock stuff funny and highly ironic because of course I couldn’t ever imagine somebody actually reading to their child about, whatever it happened to be, to illustrate why they’re being punished, because, I don’t know, my parents and most parents I know are just not that organised no mine were not it’s much more reactive. But on the other hand, there were lots of things that did resonate, especially in terms of this work ethic, so study hard, study hard, study hard, that kind of mantra which to a certain extent I think is a very immigrant thing. I think so, very much the over valuing of education and of course you send that up a little bit by saying that Mina was at school at two, perhaps that’s true of your experience, but I took it as very much an exaggeration, she’s a little bit prone to exaggerating her suffering absolutely, and as children do, but on the other had there’s something that rings very true about that about the pushing, yes. So were those sorts of issues important to you to get across? I think they were instinctive just because those aspects of it were things that I’d drawn from direct experience of being told that, you know…push or perish in other words, you’ll not survive and that there was no other option in other words. In terms of, for example my family and I know that a lot of other friends of mine from the subcontinent are the same, it’s not only the fact that you will not do well and then screw up your life that one’s parents threaten
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you with, but that you’ll fall out of their favour which is even harder to fathom, that’s harder to deal with. It was more tacit in my family than anything else and that’s even more painful. You gave me a knowing look. Yes the disappointment yes a lot of parents do the whole guilt trip but you’ve done better than them. They would never have been able to do what you’ve had to struggle through. Emotional blackmail it’s to justify their existence and Indian parents tend to think, and I’m generalising hugely, that they own their children. It comes from, I think, the time-lag in modernity or something, that they believe that their children are there to explain their existence, and that’s not how it is. It often leads to some kind of impasse it’s very stifling. But I guess it gave you good material, which is one way of looking at it. There’s an Alice Munro story called ‘Material’ and yes it’s true, all the bad things that happened to us can be fodder for [fiction].
Ok Homework has been called a ‘coming-of-age’ novel, so why did you choose to focus on Mina Pereira’s so-called formative years?
In the sense that you could have set it later in any period of her life. That character only existed for me as a young girl, she came to me that way. I don’t think that the voice could work, if you sort of say that the book is its voice or it’s that contradiction between what she knows and what she’s able to express, what could really have happened, those contradictions are relevant only to a small child. Yes because if she was older then it wouldn’t be as unlikely that she had that precocious awareness of the world. So that’s what you were trying to I think so, yes.
That was the next question I was going to ask, what was the stimulus for the idea of Mina’s feelers?
It was a bad stimulus obviously because it was literally stimulus. I don’t know, I guess I had been influenced by magic realist texts that would allow me to use a device like that. But because it’s such a realist book in so many other ways it sits incongruously in the narrative. So in other words it was an idea and I’d worked on it too long before I probably realised that it wasn’t [good but] it worked better than it would have worked without it, if you know what I mean. So I left it in rather than try and excise it, which was an option definitely. I kind of thought, well there’s the quite obvious way in which they show her emotions to the world and so expose her as a very vulnerable figure, but also I thought it was in some ways connected to this idea of the body, the abject body, towards the end she’s becoming bulimic, and the whole thing with the mother’s body, it seemed to tie in quite nicely. You thought so? I guess I’ve also internalised a lot of reactions which have been, not I might say just from strangers, close friends as well [who said], ‘I just couldn’t get into the feelers’, or ‘I couldn’t read it because of the feelers’ or… you’re looking at me, nice friends, really. Yes so maybe I’m just internalising a bit of that, but no you’re right they signify all those things, the abject body, the alien, the stranger. I came to write the novel and that was a unifying principal for it. I think you can see at the beginning of the chapter [where] she talks about it and introduces them that she’s obviously going to have to explain them, because a lot of the thoughts about the book have happened without knowledge that this is going to be necessarily a part of it. I don’t know whether I’m contradicting myself but I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I think the way it’s written in works, but the problem is it keeps popping up in these episodic chapters as if because its been introduced you have to refer to them. I like the way they’re introduced and the way they leave, they depart. I
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see what you’re saying and it has been said in reviews that the momentum of the novel overtakes them as everything around her starts becoming so weird anyway that they don’t become so important exactly. So the balance was hard, but as a reader you’re quite forgiving are you sure? You’re the only one I think. Really? Perhaps it’s because I like magic realism then. To me it’s so strange now to read that I wrote something like that because I can’t imagine having a device like that in a book now. Now I’m much more interested in the magic of realism, in other words the fact that realism is so, so much of a misnomer anyway.. So you wouldn’t need to actually highlight it in that way. Yes exactly, to me that smacks of fantasy in a way, compared to the universes I’m thinking about now.
So although there is much humour in Homework ultimately it is a very tragic novel. Mina is ostracised at school, rejected by her mother, alienated from her older sister, she is unable to stop her family falling apart and she cannot forestall death which is ever present. Could you discuss the fragmentation of self and family in Homework?
You’ve put it very well. What could I add? I really can’t add much to that, [other] than it was a huge preoccupation of mine having come from a somewhat, well like all families I suppose, complicated and damaged. Yes I think all families are dysfunctional to a large degree and especially the immigrant problem of families and what they have to shoulder having come from elsewhere. And so much of a person is erased when they travel even for voluntary economic migration purposes. Self and family, can I discuss it? I can discuss it… I’m asking because many ‘migrant’ narratives do speak of fragmentation, dissolution and loss. Now in Homework it wasn’t focused in that way because it’s more about madness yes and the separation of the child from the mother, as much as it was about them being a family who are different from their neighbours. So I was wondering about the connections, whether the loss of culture, if you like, for the parents is connected to Mina’s loss of… Yes and I think I am more concerned with the losses that immigrants experience now. I don’t think she was as aware. She was aware of this sort of latent madness and that her parents came from elsewhere, but she was generally only aware of the world of Sydney, except when she had those flights of fancy, which I don’t think work at all, about Goa and her holidays there. So I think in that sense the theme of fragmentation that I was exploring was the fragmentation of the individual at the core of any unit, whether it be geo-political or social and that I suppose the idea that, yes that madness is immanent. This novel is concerned mainly with that fall form grace that one experiences. We have this expectation that children are not fallen yet, that they’ll fall later, but the truth is the experience of childhood for so many people is that they can’t take for granted that their life will be stable and normal and that they’ll be comforted and have an explanation for why they are here. It’s an illusion that we’re born [in a state of grace]. That was a very convoluted way of expressing it. Convoluted is ok.
How does suburbia, as a concept, play out in Homework?
I suppose boredom and anxiety are twin for me and they play themselves out in the lives of all the characters in the book and just this sense of the artificial playing out of cultural identity that happens in the suburbs where identity is void, completely void. So I remember stuff about Halloween and the kids trying to enact Halloween even though they don’t know anything about Halloween except from what they’ve seen on TV sitcoms. And I suppose that was my experience of the suburbs. It’s a good place to
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examine how put on our national identity is. How people who don’t fit the mould have to conform to the monocultural identity of the suburb, or erase their identity. And the Pereiras generally feel weird in the book because of their status as migrants or as different looking people. Is that helpful? Yes definitely. I think the other thing of interest was the narrative of feminine madness in the home in the suburb yes very much. How alien it is to any sense, especially Mina’s mother’s sense of home because she grew up in a city. And yes it’s a place in which she just goes mad because she can’t escape. I’m sure there have been brilliant PhD theses and studies of suburbs, American and other suburbs. I’m just asking because it’s quite new to me. We don’t have that. It’s just cities towns or if you’re affluent the countryside, which is very different from country towns here, it would be idealised as the village green, the local pub and so on. So suburbia is a different way of living that I’m interested in. It’s almost a third frontier in a way compared with the city and the village, the traditional English village, because it lacks an identity whereas those places are bastions of cultural identity. The American suburb and the Australian suburb has this unique character which is that it completely lacks any historical identity. Or the sense of how people have arrived there. They’re not indigenous to the place and that’s a particularly postcolonial thing about Australia and America as well.
I’ll move along. Mina seems endlessly caught up in a cycle of sin, penance and potential redemption, could you describe how you have used religious themes in this novel?
They’re probably pretty indigenous to her character because they are these staunch Goan Catholics, the parents who, well the father’s not, the father’s an atheist by the time they get to Australia but the mother who’s both politically conservative and religiously conservative, Mina’s just imbibed this sense of doom and redemption from the mother. And there are motives throughout the book about that, not just scenes that are actually in the church and stuff like that, but what communion, redemption and forgiveness and all of that stuff [means to her]. I know from having come from this particular background of Goan Catholics that… It’s a really strange thing the diasporas of Christians, Indian Christians, which Salman Rushdie has parodied so well, especially in The Moor’s Last Sigh, this phenomenon whereby they are more staunch than any of their Roman or even medieval counterparts. Why do you think that is? I think it had a lot to do with the sense of, well in the case of the Goans who went to Bombay for example… I’m just having this very surreal moment. I thought I saw the presents on [that plastic figure of] Santa’s sleigh moving! Oh no, I think it’s because I have to put my glasses back on again I hadn’t even noticed. Now I’m having a surreal moment even seeing Santa when the sky’s like this colour I know it’s a bit sick really. I think that’s the other thing, back on the suburbs topic, that the book talks about, the incongruity of so many rituals of Australia which are part of the suburbs as well and the unquestioned tradition because the suburbs have no tradition, they’re so lacking in history, seemingly, it’s just that that history’s been silenced. But regarding redemption… we can move along from there if you like because there’s still a fair few things to go through.
Your chapter titled ‘Old Sydney Town’ which was one of my favourites, I don’t know if it was one of yours they’ve closed it down now, so the book’s really dated now. They closed it down last year, I think this year or last year or something. I think the guy who set it up went bankrupt. Not enough interest! Who wants to go and see people enacting the first settlement and being flogged. It’s a bit out of it’s not really in touch with Sydney’s new image is it? No it’s not. That’s why it was near Gosford. That’s
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interesting but what I liked about this chapter was that it looked at this question of history and the possibility of alternative histories co-existing or running parallel to each other. The chapter also touches on the concept of revolution as a political dead-end, with the father’s constant revolutionary politics and I think Mina comes to the conclusion at some point that this isn’t the way to do it. Now you may not want to go on about this much No I do very much so how, ok just babble on. I think in that sense she’s an alter-ego of mine because I have different opinions about that sort of stuff and did when I was writing it but comically wanted to represent this aspect of the political reality of that family having inherited all these contradictory traditions and in her case she has become sort of politically apathetic or she looses all idealism. She becomes a complete pragmatist in some ways and I really wanted to pitch that against the father who’s quite zealous. But I don’t personally agree with the viewpoint that is present in there, that revolution is a dead end, no certainly not. I thought it was interesting that you had the contrast between Mina and the father and then Deepa being totally irreverent about the whole thing anyway. Irreverent about what? Well about the Goan cause yes and she didn’t seem to have a moment of considering the political implications of what was going on around her, which in some senses seemed to be the most sensible way forward. And the mother. The mother in that book is interesting as well because she’s sort of pro-Indian, pro the mother-land, and this is curious to me because I never experienced this myself in my family or anything, and the father’s pro Goan at the same time so there’s this impossible conflict. And Mina’s sort of saying the personal is the political there but yes you’re right there’s this…[disk cuts out at this point]
So what were we talking about? The parts of the novel that you do like and would keep.
Yes like I was saying about that second part of the book, it doesn’t compromise on its meanings, there are no double meanings. There are no reminiscences about the false past and I like that uncompromising reality which it tries to [convey]. It’s true for me, in other words, to write like that without myths to console us is for me the part that remains important about that process of writing it as well. The chapters in the second part of the book were all written one after another. So I knew who she was and what was going to happen and I didn’t give in to any impulses to make any of the things that were happening more comforting. Yes it does become bleak and stays bleak it’s very absurd and funny but it’s unsentimental, completely unsentimental. I hope it is. Is it? Sentimentality is a thing I abhor really in fiction and sentimentality is what she gives into in those moments of reminiscing and it’s almost like she’s forced to… they don’t even [work at that level], she’s not successfully sentimental. We’re being very hard on poor old Mina here so long as I’m not unmasked as the real Mina. No.
How are the experiences of being in Australia different for your first and second generation characters in Homework and do you see any generalised differences between the writing of first generation migrants to Australia and the fiction produced by the second generation?
Well I think that the first generation characters are concerned with just surviving and the second generation characters have time to become. So the mother and the father in the book, they are just caught up in controlling the vestigial Indian things in them that suddenly surface at unlucky times. And so all they can do because they are so exhausted with that project is survive and then the children are observers, they are observing everything. They are not actually participating in the new culture if that’s fair to say,
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they are just kind of observing. I suppose in Deepa’s case she’s sort of observing because she’s Deepa as well, not just because she’s [second generation Indian]. I hope they’re not reduced to their status as Indians. Then the little sister too is just observing but she’s sort of observing fantasy or cartoons which resemble a more, well actually resemble her reality more than… The absurdity of the cartoons mirrors the absurdity of her life. Mina is just observing everything and not able to do more than that. She’s sort of locked in this prison of observation and you know the prison of language vis-à-vis, action. She’s both too young and also the world itself is not there for her to control it. And how about, do you see any generalised differences in style in terms of the writing of first and second generation migrants? Styles of writing about this particular thing about generations? Yes. I’m just trying to think, there are so few, you mean with Australian writers of Indian descent? Yes, or I really don’t know that many and I have to say I’ve been so consumed with other readings for my other work that’s a very fair answer. I don’t know about contemporary fiction to comment. I’ve already told you I’m a big fan of Chris Cyrill’s [work]. In his first novel there’s this gulf between the young man and his family, much greater…and I think it’s to do with class as well. Because these people are isolated professionals as well in Homework and they don’t seem to have, they don’t support cricket or football… I see what you mean so there’s no easy way for them to kind of integrate identify yes. Not that I think it’s because of your class that you like sport.
Right. In a review for the Courier Mail Rosemary Sorensen quotes you as saying “English is my only language, of course. I regret it, but it’s a fact. So, with Indian parents, something has been lost, linguistic, but something else too. My struggle to write well is a struggle to claim that language, to get access to it.” Could you expand on this issue?
If you want to. I’m just reading it and cringing because it sounds so Stephen Dedalus, especially the Stephen Dedalus of Portrait more than of Ulysses… I don’t really agree with that anymore ok fair enough I think all, we’ve talked about this earlier, all language is about the impossible act of communication. So we’re all in translation even when we are speaking English. That’s really the position I have come to. I think I might have been sincere when I was saying that to Rosemary but I was obviously being a bit of a Stephen Dedalus. Well things change, let’s face it and as you say Homework is now quite distant from what you’re working on and writing at the moment. And how well I know what I think, just because I’m older, because I was young then. I was young and I hope I’ve grown a bit. But I almost feel that I have become polemical about this question of language that, yes we’re all in translation. That’s why I don’t sound so good on this [sound recording]. Its because my thought processes aren’t just being produced directly onto the machine. You can’t get away with that.
Ok there are many references to food and cooking in Homework, in terms of nourishment and punishment and with particular emphasis on Indian cookery. So what are your views on the use of food as a sign of cultural difference, in terms of the way ‘ethnic’ food is often used to promote Australia’s diversity?
Yes, look, just like the Goan reminiscing, the sentimentality I really really don’t like recalling the… Are you wondering why I agreed to come? It’s not just to bag my book. No I’m just worried that do you know, it’s a lapse into sentimentality that’s happening. And to me the happiest moment as a writer was the meat pie moment, because it was so
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true to their experiences as a family. In a way the other stuff just seems forced, all the cooking stuff. It’s like the language question, it’s as if there’s this essential past that you can just return to and you can’t, you can’t. And I must say that contemporary multicultural, whatever you want to call them, writers of immigrant backgrounds in Australia who do incorporate that kind of [sentimentality], I just feel it’s no better than…I don’t know, I think it gives rise to this sense that that’s what multicultural writing is about, which is such a shame. But it also feeds back into the particular kind of racism that exists in Australia which is, yes we’ll have their food, the food of Asia and we’ll trade with them and we’ll flood their markets with our resources, but forget about, anything else yes, they’re not ‘us’. And where does that make the person who was born here, or indeed who is here on a temporary protection visa, stand? Yes, that’s a problem because the promotion of food and perhaps the arts more generally can give over the image of Australia as multicultural and equitable and all the rest of it without the need for any kind of political change exactly or any kind of redistribution all of that stuff, or a re-conception of who we are and you can find resemblances between that and Aboriginal discourses too, of dreaming and so on that have occurred, of romancing the subject, and I’m very suspicious of it. There are heaps of Australian theorists who have written on it, Suvendrini Perera is one of them, Sneja Gunew has written a lot, ‘Eating the Other’ was one of her famous articles about that, Rey Chow also.
So and I guess this follows on quite well, you mentioned in an email that you have many misgivings about the term ‘South-Asian-Australian’ as a method of literary categorisation. Could you just tell me about this in more detail?
Yes sure. Just that South Asian, well we don’t even use that term here, we tend to say Indian in Australia. It reminds me of my time spent in America where that was [the term used]. It is so geographically displacing to be Indian or Subcontinental or South Asian and in Britain they call you Asian don’t they? You’re just Asian, whereas here Asian strictly refers to those people of South-East Asian or Chinese descent or Japanese or Korean. Just with regard to the substantive aspect of South Asian though… Well for me it’s simply not an accurate description of what I am. I have Portuguese nationality as well as Australian and I was born here. Yes I have roots in the subcontinent, the contemporary subcontinent, but nation states are just these entities that serve us for today. So I just have misgivings about the term because I don’t know what it means. I think that it’s a short-hand for a lot of the things we were just talking about in the last question to do with exoticism. Or for a particular type of mannered writing, or alternatively, it’s actually quite full of contradictions, for magic realism ala Rushdie. So there are these three aspects, or [for] attractive Indian women who can be marketed well like Arundhati [Roy] and I’m not saying she did that, but the press did that. And I write in English, I’m an English writer and I write about everything from Walter Benjamin to what it is to be me and that experience, like I was saying with regard to language, is a quintessentially human experience. If I were to reduce myself to what it means to be Indian I couldn’t do that honestly without experiencing [and] saying what it is to be human. Because what is India? India’s this vast subcontinent, it’s a subcontinent full of… Sri Lanka too. By the way, I was thinking of that question to do with family, I was just reading Michelle de Kretser’s work recently and, do you know her work? Yes I’ve read The Hamilton Case, just recently, I haven’t read The Rose Grower yet but I’ve got it sitting on my desk waiting to be read. But yes I loved her work amazing stuff a really beautiful novel really well written. And a very interesting characterisation of this particular colonial type, mimicry but we could go off yes we could. I guess with the
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term South Asian specifically is that I guess it’s often used because it does cover the subcontinent rather than just, I mean to call you a South Asian Australian writer is not correct but to call you an Indian writer would be less correct because of the Goan heritage, and similarly for somebody from Bangladesh or Pakistan. If they suddenly become Indian sure. I would even like less to be called Indian but then I have problems because you know people who do… Indian writers or Indian diasporic writers who have gone from an Indian culture whether it be in Africa or the Caribbean or wherever to generally an Anglo-Celtic or Saxon culture and written in English, they can be called Asian-Americans, Asian, British-Indians or, is that what you call them? British-Asian probably sounds so weird doesn’t it. It’s funny at home it would just be Asian and Asian stands in for South Asian even though there are Chinese writers and But you see I think Asian people in the UK, and I might be completely wrong, you’ll have to correct me, have claimed that term back a bit better than we have. We’ve just accepted it here, and as I’ve said Asian doesn’t even describe Indians. Indians are just referred to as Indians here and we’ve never…whereas Asian had a particular class connotation in Britain as well and the whole yes there was a kind of politicisation of and mobilisation around the term Black British which crossed fed in with that yes, particularly in the 80s but the difference I find here in a way is that Australia is so caught up in the whole terminology of, you know if you’re wondering around the city someone may say to you, oh that’s the Korean area, this is the Vietnamese area, this is the such and such area. Now you could say that urban space is similarly demarcated in the UK but I think the policies of language, the way things are spoken about, or not spoken are so different here and there. They are. I guess it’s double-edged because to categorise in any way can be so limiting but then it also gives you a position from which to speak that you may not have otherwise. But why not? Michelle de Kretser’s book The Rose Grower, and I haven’t read that one, it’s a really good example I think. As are my other projects that are not about my identity or the identity of Indian people. It’s a really good example of why we should be taken just as writers you know. Yes I guess that’s I’ve inherited an English literary tradition, they’re the people, I mean I love literature in translation and really I’d have to say that I’ve been most influenced by German modernist writers but the English literary tradition…I’m doing my thesis on Joyce, I mean how much more English can you get? And also, as you say in that conversation with Rosemary Sorenson about being pigeonholed. Well I think what I’m trying to say is that I do believe categorisation can work as a political platform and in positive ways but that all too often, and probably more often, it works in a way that is limiting and negative, forcing people into very niche areas yes exactly and that’s not where you want to go no not at all. I suppose my thing is, look if a writer wants to be known that way that’s fine and if that’s their subject and that’s going to be their exclusive subject, the identity of Asians in English-speaking countries, fine, but I don’t want to be [known in that way]. It’s an essential question…is identity universal or is it particular to individual experience of immigration or whatever and I don’t believe it is. So I suppose I am more of a…I’ve just got much broader you’d go for a more universal yes and I suppose in some ways its been a result of the fact that having come from such mixed identity, Indo-Portuguese, I’m much more keenly aware of the fluke of history, that I could have been born something else or something else or something else again. And what does it matter or why should it matter? well it should matter but it should help you to see the world in broader terms.
Ok this leads on to another question. In a review by Murray Waldren for The Weekend Australian you are quoted as describing Homework as international and expatriated in
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terms of its co-ordinates and being? So could you elaborate on this observation? Was this one of your ways of commenting on the universal aspect to it?
How jargonistic. Is that a quote? Well I think newspaper reviews are going to pick up whatever I’ve said, yes but perhaps only the sound-bites, so I’m sure you said it in a more long-hand and involved manner. International and expatriated? Oh in some ways it is. In some ways it isn’t. I would look at what I’m writing now and think that it’s much more so than Homework. For example the things we’ve talked about with regard to lapsing into a sentimentality about the homeland and all the past that can be recaptured is something which I would suggest went against its international, expatriated being. It seems much narrower for those lapses. Ok so reviewers have also compared elements of Homework to Rushdie’s magic realism and you yourself have been hailed as the new Arundhati Roy don’t know why which I thought was it’s a great example of how it’s just a newspaper thing isn’t it? but how South Asian can be used, or how stuff about exoticisation is used in journalism and the focus, with some of the reviews, on your youth, the fact that you’re attractive. All of these things actually take away from the work itself. I guess the question I want to ask is do you see your fiction as connected to, in any way, other South Asian diasporic writers or the idea of diasporic writing? Look I wouldn’t complain about my book being compared to Rushdie. I didn’t think my book had anything in common with Arundhati Roy’s novel, other than it was about family. I think of my style as very different. But I had read Rushdie a lot when I was at Uni. I think one of the first novels I read which really articulated a lot for me was Midnight’s Children which I hadn’t read until I was eighteen. So he was very helpful, but he’s nothing like Naipaul, then again he’s nothing like Rohinton Mistry, or Vikram Chandra, or Vikram Seth or any number of well known Indian writers living in the UK, America or here. And I’m not sure about using them so I suppose what I’ve done is move away from that and I never asked to be recognised in those terms. It did turn out that for example the launch of Homework in the US was at an Indian restaurant and it was hosted by the South Asian Journalists Association. So unbeknownst to me there were a huge number of Indians in the audience and it did make me feel much more conscious about the shortcuts I might have taken politically or otherwise in the book. And also about her [Mina’s] vision of the uselessness of political transformation or revolution, about how I’d justify that, for some weird reason I felt more conscious of having to justify it. I think I should explore this more but I’m not sure whether it’s very useful. It is. That I was more conscious of that given it was an Indian audience than elsewhere. And then another weird thing that happened was when I was in somewhere in Germany, because it was translated into German. I think I was in Stuttgart. There was this group of Indians who were the Indians of Stuttgart. One guy stood up and said, ‘all the boys here have wanted to ask this question of you’, and he started to just talk as if he were somehow speaking for a group and I was part of that group and the question didn’t at all make me feel that we had anything particular in common. But the presumption of his right…he also seemed to feel he had more of a right than any other member of the audience to ask these somewhat personal questions. And I remember the woman who was with me who had to read it in the German and then I read it in the English was, she was the publicist, really disarmed by this, as was I. I don’t know why I’m telling you that story but just to say that it’s problematic, it’s loaded with… that sense of there’s something shared therefore that natural assumption, but once strangers start asking you certain exactly, whether their Indian or not. There was this woman from Manhattan in the audience who had come from India. She said how wonderful it was that I wrote about sex with such candour in the chapter about [Mina’s] personal development and all
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of that stuff and that all schools in India should give this to students to read as an instructional text. And I thought well…but I was charmed by that because she was so progressive, the instinct was really progressive in that way. But then the guy at Stuttgart I just thought… And he came up to me and wanted to stay there long after the session had finished and it was really odd. Yes. To be owned yes to be identified in that way and claimed. And I don’t think I’ve used…so I’ve never consciously used that I was Indian or whatever. Besides making those huge generalisations earlier about Indian parents! Well if you can’t generalise about parents, what can you generalise about? But more seriously I guess if you’re going to talk about universal themes then you have to make some generalisations about human experiences that and how do we communicate if not on that level?
Ok so you’ve touched on this already but could you speak about authors, novels or ways of writing that you particularly admire? You’ve mentioned modern German writers.
Well look Kafka was a big influence on me when I was at Uni., I told you I’m writing a thesis on Joyce, so I’m a huge fan of the modernists, all of them. It’s funny how you blank out, just at this moment it’s as if you’ve never read anything in your life. So what is it about modernist writing that appeals to you? Look Beckett’s a huge soul writer for me. I can name you know a number, but say with him, the idea that… The idea of the revolution of the self and that the mind is the only frontier. So in other words it’s legitimate to write about the madness of the universe by representing it through the consciousness of just one character and that you can do that in a way that totally speaks to many. It’s a singularly experienced madness, it’s about the disarray of one mind, but it can speak to so many at once. That’s one of the chief things about modernism that I’m interested in. I haven’t read much modernist stuff. I’m so caught up in it that I don’t know what’s going on today. But I’d have to say yes, Beckett and Kafka and they’re all mad really aren’t they? I don’t like Joyce so much. I’m actually not writing a very sympathetic thesis about Joyce. He was more of an ego-maniac. He strove for success, his letters document the lengths to which he went, including dragging his family from one backwater town (actually they weren’t backwaters, Trieste was hardly a backwater it was actually very cosmopolitan and chic) to another so that he could make his career. He was also an alcoholic, but he wouldn’t have been the first writer to have done bad things. Actually we were talking about a similar thing in the car but to do with music, do you judge the work or the person? Oh you have to, don’t you think? You think you have to judge the person behind the work as well? Yes. It’s a really interesting question and I’ve been reading a bit about it. In the London Review of Books there has been a few articles and letters in response to a review of Elizabeth Costello by Coetzee, he’s like Flaubert and he’s like Joyce, hiding behind narrative ruses… Yes, I think you have to live right. You have to live…I sound like a moralist but you can’t have kids and then just fuck off somewhere. Does that lessen the value of his work, Joyce’s work? But that’s a fascist kind of way of looking at the practice of reading. We assume today that reading is part of knowing what the writer did and who he was and all of that stuff. It’s a New Critic, of the 50s, who would have thought that the work is all that counts and today we’ve worked out that it’s not only passé but irresponsible of the critic. So look I don’t think Ulysses is the novel of the twentieth century, as it’s considered to be. I think it’s a critic’s novel, it’s an academic’s novel and I think Beckett is a superior writer by a long shot and a superior person? And a superior person, although he would have hated…superior is not a word he would like to [be associated with]. But to me he was superior, he lived by what he felt. I think Woolfe’s conceit is evident on the page,
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whereas Joyce puts his through Stephen Dedalus and has a bit of irony in between. I think especially The Waves, shows how she hasn’t managed, as Joyce has, to disguise her conceit. That’s the thing about modernism because it’s all about the workings of the human mind, if you don’t like what’s being said, if you don’t…she’s so stuck up. In terms of the mind, are you also attracted to modernism because of its engagement with psychoanalysis, because it’s so embedded in the theory of its time? Psychoanalysis, yes I’m really interested in it.
Could you speak about your experiences in America?
At the time I was reading reviews about Homework they were all saying that you were just about to go off to the States. Now I know this is going back years ago. Now I’m here, disgraced. Disgraced? But in some of the reviews there was the notion that America may offer a more intellectually stimulating environment to work in. Was it? Not the milieu in which I found myself. I was very very naïve about what I would be doing there and how much I needed it. I’d proposed to study an MFA because I wanted more time to write and this was before knowing that my first novel was going to be published. Then at just about the same time [that] Bloomsbury ended up publishing Homework I found out that I’d received a Fulbright scholarship. So when I got it I was in this dilemma, this book was coming out, that was a really good thing but the book was also very personal. It was a shame but I imagined that I could get that kind of context I needed in a Masters of Fine Arts programme in a Liberal Arts college in [America]. There were wonderful teachers at that college but I’m just really sad that the experience itself, due to the students and the way in which identity politics had riven…I don’t know whether it was just that department but I imagine (all you have to do is read a little bit into a Phillip Roth novel to see how much it has riven the academy in America generally, especially the humanities) that it’s everywhere present. So could you just expand on how you see identity politics working in American universities?
Oh look what happened was just my particular classes. I hope the whole degree wasn’t that way for everyone because I don’t know how they got through it. It just felt like I was in a Phillip Roth novel, it did. I’m still trying to fathom how you relate Melville to yourself without by saying things like, ‘I know what it was like for Bartleby because when I was living in so and so’s place I kind of didn’t have anywhere to live’. It was just really really sad. That is a shame. But you know when you’re in a situation, I don’t know if you’ve ever been in something like that, you just think it’s going to get worse and worse.
When you were in the States did you come across, there’s been a lot of writing recently on Indian-American identity, and the term ‘desi’ has become popular I don’t know about this. Or the term ABCDs? Standing for American Born Confused Desis oh. You didn’t come across them there? You see because of the research my partner’s doing we’re getting emails from various groups here, I think one in Perth, one in Sydney called Hot Ashes, whenever there’s an Indian movie or a dance event we get an email do you go to these things? We haven’t yet but we need to find out what’s I think you should go yeah? Yeah. Well he’s been to a few films. I would like to go to some of the dance events because I do like bhangra, I mean the sort of UK interpretations of it. There’s a band I love playing here while we’re away. Oh no they’re called Asian Dub Foundation and would be great to see live. So I do quite like dance music in its context, not necessarily in the home, but certainly for a night out. Not in the home? That’s so
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funny. Well I do play ADF at home a lot but I wouldn’t necessarily create the full-on dance environment in my living room! Why not! No, I don’t listen to it at home but I’m interested in it as an idea as well. Would you go to these sorts of things? I’ve never gone.
Anyway, as Homework was published pretty much simultaneously in Australia and the US and then in the UK shortly afterwards, could you comment on how you feel it was received in these locations, were there any differences?
Look I feel, even with time having passed, that the harshest criticism came from Australia. Really? Yes, and that was what I was hurt about most, that it came from Australia, I mean at least it should have come from somewhere else, but no that was naïve as well. It’s likely that your home country… and because it was set here. But I also just didn’t know how to manage that whole thing of even reading the reviews. A reviewer for the New York Times when I was living there wrote, ‘the book is all head and no heart’, which I thought was a particularly American [comment], about American realism and what they expect fiction to be doing. I can’t remember who the reviewer was. I’ve suppressed it. But Australians were much more incisive about what I was trying to do and how it had failed. It’s a difficult question to consider. Something I noticed in the few short things I found from the US is that the Australianness of the book would be emphasised and for example Mum would be in quotation marks oh really? I didn’t see anything with that. I was wondering if the Australianness of it would have been, I’m sure it would have been interesting for people in…because Australian writers are not so well known overseas. And they often write for a local audience whereas this was pitched almost to this weird Australian slash international audience just by virtue of how I’d written it. And then the fact that how it was published. I think people in the US were probably less harsh about it because of that exotic aspect of it being Australian as well as Indian and all the rest. So they neglected to see what it may have really been about and also in their criticisms, and I think this was all round, focused on its use of language and how it worked or not worked or whatever. But yes I’m imagining that it must have been…but isn’t there a breed of novels internationally that are sort of about suburbs and people leaving them, or living, I suppose not living an immigrant life, that’s a pretty… I’m not sure but I guess what struck me in these couple of things is that koalas, boomerangs the Sydney Opera House and so on were more important than the Indian or Goan stuff except that these myths are really cracked open in the book, these myths of national identity. So it is peculiar. I think that’s more likely to be picked up on here not there as much, possibly. I think there was a sense, I must add, of cynicism to reviewers here thinking that I’d placed those things in there as particular sign-posts to the international market, ‘it’s about Australia’ which I had not done at all.
Now you mentioned that Homework has been translated into German, has it been published in English elsewhere other than here the US, the UK? No. And has it been translated into any other languages? No. Did you choose that, I mean do you have any control over these things? No, there’s a foreign sales agent at the publishing house. The distributor in Australia was actually Allen & Unwin not Bloomsbury, because there’s no Bloomsbury in Australia. So the agent in the UK who’s the foreign sales person… I’d had a world rights deal, so they own all rights to the book. So they have a right to then sell on, as they did with the German rights. That’s how the German rights were sold and
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it happened very soon after the deal with Bloomsbury was made even though it was a year later that the publication ended up taking place.
So could you comment on the strategies employed by your agent or publisher in promoting your work?
Bloomsbury were really really nice. I was not made to do anything I didn’t want to, that goes without saying really. They’re very clear about what the writer should do and I was happy to do what they asked me. At a certain point I would decide myself if I wanted to do something or not after the book tours and things had happened. And they weren’t very vigorous book tours or anything, just a few cities in a couple of days or something in the US and then in the UK for six days which was really, it was just fun, it was so much fun being in that lovely hotel, Hazlitt’s.
So did you have to make any compromises during the editing process of the novel?
No not really. Other than a few small things like changing English words to American words, like quarter-notes and half-notes instead of crochets and quavers for the musical notation. A couple of things like that. And I think my vocabulary is even more English, British than Australian because of my parents. So the order of chapters stayed the same. Yes, they’re all my mistakes, I take full responsibility. But that’s good that you didn’t have to argue anything through. Oh no, at an editorial level it was not intrusive at all. There may have been a few things outside the actual textual stuff. Like say the US cover that came out, the paperback cover, it had this woman, on the second edition not the first edition, who was much older than Mina. And they told me it was to sell it, to make sure [it sold] Really? But all books do that, I’m just too much of an idealist. And it was the second edition.. See I love that cover that Sara Fanelli designed it’s perfect. [First edition Australian paperback cover].
And the next question I was going to ask was did you have a role in the design of the novel?
Well it was very smooth because I simply said ‘yes I love it’ and then that was it because she’d only really had one idea for it which came out perfectly the first time. So why did she choose to go for a blond snail? Well a student of mine asked me the same question. And I just said ‘oh I didn’t realise’. I guess it doesn’t seem to me that she’s white because she’s made up of these different bits and pieces. It’s metaphysical! So hair is hair. So it was something that didn’t register? No I didn’t even register and in the end like I was saying about those last six chapters, they’re about universal family, not just about them [the Pereiras]. And so the fact that she looks a particular way… Did you have a problem with it? Well it didn’t register with me immediately either but only, long after I had first read the book, when I was picking it up again to consciously look at the design, when I was thinking about this question. And what I noticed first was the eye and then the hair. It doesn’t matter in the end, it’s the work itself. I was just really lucky actually that I had much more autonomy than I think a lot of writers do, because I have great agent as well. I think you’re right to say that you have to be pragmatic and that you can’t insist on controlling every yes exactly and all the comments the editor made with regard to the text were in keeping with, they just improved the text. The German translation improved it even more do you read German? No, my boyfriend at the time was German and he made comments, I could tell from the way that they were
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talking about it that the woman who’d translated it had improved it. She’s probably added things in and you’d never know yes, good things though and taken things out, got rid of the feelers.
So have you received any correspondence from readers? Does that happen, I’m never sure if these things happen?
Oh it’s not as magical as you’d think. In fact the whole process would make you, if you believed that that was a huge part of it, would make you wonder whether you should write again. No, I got really nice letters. One was from my old English teacher from years and years ago, she was a real favourite of mine. It’s really very different to how it must have been years and years ago where you’d get mysterious letters because your book would be obscurely found by someone. I think people are cynical, I think audiences are. There are writers who I would want to write to and then with mine most people probably thought, I could do that, so why would they [write]. Oh I don’t know about that. But I’ve never written to an author (obviously contacting you and others is different in this context) even when it’s been a book that has knocked me sideways or whatever, I guess I wouldn’t want to engage in a dialogue because it might no you don’t and I think that a lot of the novels you like are also to do with the privacy of reading and the privacy of experience. And then often they’re dead anyway. But so no comments from reader stand out? Look people said nice things in some of the forums we had for different things but no one really stepped out. I think I may have wanted that and that it didn’t happen. I guess you have this romantic idea that these things happen but perhaps they never do. You do, because you think of doing it, I mean not that I ever have and this is why it never happens. No that’s not true, mine’s a pathetic novel, that’s why. But if it’s a really good writer we should do it, shouldn’t we. I think that you are being over harsh on your own work, something doesn’t have to be perfect to be enjoyed.
Ok my final question is where do you see your work taking you in the future? Are you going to continue do more on this idea of fictionalising theoretical figures? I think it’s an intriguing subject.
How fascinating to take something we think we know about, anything, whether it be… Do you ever read Marguerite Yourcenar’s work? She’s a French modernist writer. She did this thing called Memoirs of Hadrian which was a novel written from the Emperor Hadrian’s perspective, memoir, and it’s amazing. To re-enter history, whether it be through the eyes of a famous person, or someone who is unknown in a famous person’s life, or a famous event through the unknown person’s eyes, like Scarlet and Black, Stendhal, it just allows you to…because our past is who we are, so if you think like that you can enter anyone’s [reality]. So that’s why I would imagine transmigrating my characters anywhere whether historically or geographically. So I am currently working on the Lucia Joyce narrative and I’m interested in narratives that correct the official version and that sort of stuff, yes.