“BLOOM” and “SO WHERE TO NOW?”: THE FEMALE BILDUNGSROMAN AND THE MISSING CHILD.” KERYN CLARK 10404230 Bachelor of Arts, University of Western Australia, 2006 Bachelor of Arts, First Class Honours English, University of Western Australia, 2009 This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The University of Western Australia School of Social Sciences (English and Cultural Studies) 2012 ii Abstract Bloom is a fictional autobiography narrated from the perspective of South African Grace Little who immigrates to Australia in the last years of Apartheid. Grace, runner, writer and self-confessed coward with an acute fear of bridges, returns to Canberra on a four day research trip after an absence of 20 years. She is writing a book about flying ants, a troubled African country and the eXperience of migration but suffers from writer’s block. Many things haunt Grace; a disappearing mother, the loss of family, country, the collapse of her marriage and the memory of a pair of butterfly wings. She returns to Canberra in the hope of making sense of her fractured life. As she runs loops of Lake Ginninderra, Grace’s life is revealed through flashback and fragmented memories as she meditates on friendships, motherhood, betrayal and homesickness. In June 1976 Grace sleeps through the Soweto riots that would begin the political upheaval in the country and lead to her reluctant immigration. But the riots have also affected the lives of other characters whose stories are told through Grace’s recollections. They are Barbara, a black woman who befriends Grace, Simon, a would-be Jewish activist who wants to sleep with Grace and Walter, a black freedom fighter with a penchant for Russian dolls who lives next door to Grace in a grubby building at the beach. However it is Hèléne, a Melbourne lesbian who changes the way Grace thinks about her eXperiences and how they link to the memory of one night in November 1961, the night she wore the butterfly wings. The novel is loosely based on my life under Apartheid, my years in London as an eXile and as an Australian immigrant. My eXegesis is a meditation on Grace’s loops of memory and shame, which are linked to ideas of place, loss and belonging. I consider the writing process in and iii through the works of authors Nadine Gordimer and Phaswane Mpe amongst others and draw on recent theorising on shame, trauma and abjection to reflect critically on how South Africa, and in particular the suburb of Hillbrow in which Grace grows up, has been represented in the knowledge of Apartheid and (post) Apartheid. It also seeks to eXamine the relationship between narrative and the self in very specific ways; of Bloom as fictive autobiography and of Grace as a white South African immigrant whose eXperiences complicate both easy assumptions of privilege and traditional modes of story telling such as the Bildungsroman. iv DECLARATION This thesis does not contain work that I have published, nor work under review for publication. v vi AcknowlEdgmEnts This is not a journey I accomplished on my own. To my Doctoral and Honours supervisor Professor Tanya Dalziell who I was fortunate to have met in my first class eight years ago and who has since suffered calmly through a dizzying array of my unintelligible drafts on a variety of subjects, I eXtend a heartfelt thank you. Her support, advice, guidance, emotional and theoretical intelligence above and beyond the call of duty, leaves me in no doubt that without the ability to quickly synthesis a problem, to motivate and provide sincere and honest feedback, not to mention her generosity with her time, this project may not have been completed. To say I stumbled around is to understate the case. To Professor Van Ikin for the endless paperwork he has sifted through on my behalf, his open door policy and his enthusiasm in matters great and small, his help and advice in negotiating the tricky subject of scholarship applications a big thank you. While I doubt I will ever receive a high distinction for patience, Van’s mentoring has prevented me from self-immolation on a number of occasions and has at least inspired me to try. I thank the staff and my fellow students in the English and History departments of the University of Western Australia. My grateful thanks to the Graduate Research School of the University of Western Australia and the Australian Government for the funding I have received which made the journey possible along with the sanctuary of a quiet space and the time for contemplation. vii I thank my readers Colin McGee and Sarah Lane for their time, their ongoing support and their helpful feedback. To those who have allowed me to pillage and change to my own ends the conteXt of their funny, sad and sometimes unbelievable lives and who have given me free range over their characters, I offer a special thank you to David Sash, Barbara Tladinyane, Bruce Clark, Hanna Du Toit, Donna George, Wendy Duncan and Walter Cello. I thank Alison Georgeson into whose Creative Writing class I stumbled one cold July Saturday in 1993. It was she who told me that when a student is ready a teacher will come. She was the first and her faith in me has never wavered. Also Remo Romeo whose unquestioning loyalty and support has eXtended to retrieving 175ml tubes of Jurlique Moisture Replenishing Day Cream from the hot clutches of irritable customs officers at Perth International Airport at midnight. His good nature and enduring friendship sustain me daily. As do the meals he’s cooked, the tea he’s made and the wine he’s poured as I followed him around the house reading my drafts out loud. To both of them I owe a debt I can never repay. Thank you. Finally, in advance, I eXtend my appreciation and thanks to my eXaminers for their helpful consideration and comments. viii CONTENTS BLOOM 3-225 “SO WHERE TO NOW?” 227-340 BIBLIOGRAPHY 341-348 ix X for Tanya Dalziell 1 2 BLOOM First houses are the grounds of our first experience. Crawling about at floor level, room by room, we discover laws that we will later apply to the world at large; and who is to say if our notions of space and dimension are not determined for all time by what we encounter there…. David Malouf. 3 4 Prologue 5 December 1995 - Perth It all started to change about a month before the murders began. It started on that day I stepped out from the cool dark lobby of the hospital. The things I remember with clarity about the preceding two days were the teXture and colour of my jade green smock imprinted with bunches of tiny white flowers, the smell of apricot scented toilet paper, that it was a public holiday in another part of the world, that I would never again see my mother, nor would I ever be a mother. I knew with detached certainty, as the doors slid open for me, that nothing would ever be the same. I remember the street with the occasional joggers and the early risers walking past carrying newspapers and polystyrene cups of steaming coffee. I realised it was Sunday. I noticed the sky was the usual unremitting blue. The sun was hot even though it was not yet 8.00am. I watched two women with bulging bellies smoking in their slippers, talking and sitting on a wall. They looked at me in my jade green smock then looked behind me to see what followed. When nothing did, they turned to each other with raised eyebrows and lapsed into silence. Josh picked me up and we drove into town. It stalled the inevitable trip to the house. I’d sent him home the night before because his presence was worse than his absence. His fidgeting got on my nerves. I didn’t want breakfast. I wasn’t hungry. Josh parked the car and crossed the road to buy a newspaper. The world was strangely silent and appeared to drift in slow motion. It was as if I were watching it from a distance, as if I walked three feet behind myself, 6 unable to catch up. I’d always been able to cope; no drama was so big that I couldn’t take it all in my stride. Grace, you always cope so well with everything, people said. It was true - everything bad that happened for as long as I could remember was gathered up, slammed down, and snapped tight. I simply got on with things. I eXpected that of me, and so did everyone else. Now, I felt odd. Different. It was as if my brain had cracked wide open and the substance that held it together was beginning to spill. A Hari Krishna with a shaved head and orange robes jumped out at me as I wandered in a daze down St Quentin’s Avenue. We’d gone there for coffee, but when it arrived I didn’t want it. I left Josh to drink his alone while I walked up and down the street with no particular purpose. The Hari Krishna waved a pamphlet in my face and pressed a prayer into my hands. I was going to need it but I didn’t know it then. He told me I should smile more, that it would never happen. I turned on him, not comprehending. That’s when the journey began. Somewhere between good intentions and double speak. 7 8 Sunday – Long Run – 24kms 9 Canberra 1991 ‘This looks like the arse end of nowhere.