Anne Brewster reviews Daisy and Woolf by Michelle Cahill

August 1, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments

Daisy and Woolf

by Michelle Cahill

Hachette

Reviewed by ANNE BREWSTER
 
 
 
 
 
Michelle Cahill’s debut novel Daisy & Woolf is accomplished and exhilarating. A re-reading of Virginia Woolf’s iconic modernist novel Mrs Dalloway, it excavates and reconstructs the literary worlding of a minor character, Daisy Simmons – the ‘dark, adorable’ Eurasian woman that Clarissa Dalloway’s longtime admirer, Peter Walsh, plans to marry. If you are thinking about the coupling of Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre you are on the right track.

Daisy & Woolf relates the journeys of two Anglo-Indian women – Daisy, as she travels from Calcutta to London in the 1920s to meet her beloved Peter Walsh and her subsequent peregrinations in England and Europe – and Mina, the present-day writer recreating Daisy’s story in her own novel as she follows in Daisy’s footsteps, and as she re-traces the geographical trajectories and geopolitical underpinnings of Woolf’s writerly life.

The novel has been widely – and mostly positively – reviewed. Reviewers have acknowledged the significant cultural work that the novel undertakes in investigating the impact of race on women of colour. Marina Sano, for example, praises the novel’s ‘organic’ treatment of this issue (Books+Publishing) and Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen in the Sydney Morning Herald comments on the book’s challenge to the whiteness of the western canon, saying that there is something ‘wonderfully subversive’ about taking ‘a well-known Western text and flipping it inside out to reveal societal truths’ as Cahill does in Daisy & Woolf. 

An exception to these reviews is a review which simply fails to recognise the workings of race as they are laid bare within the poetic aesthetics of this powerful and complex novel. Attending to this omission is important, I suggest, as it indicates to us how resilient white power is in reproducing itself and how the operations of race remain invisible and unremarked in so many locations. It prompts me to respond by analysing the novel’s deconstructive aesthetics and how Cahill skilfully borrows from Woolf to rewrite the racialising narrative.

***

I was more than a little taken aback by the reviewer’s comment that the novel offers 

‘scant insight into the degree to which Daisy’s race (as opposed to her class or the scandal of her adultery) affects either her social standing or her eventual fate. The only time we are jolted into acknowledging the social and political repercussions of her Anglo-Indian heritage is when she is refused the designation “British subject” on her passport because her ‘skin colour is too dark.’
(Stubbings, 2022)

I was surprised that anyone could miss the novel’s forensic examination of the multiple ways both Daisy and Mina (and their families) have been racialised through the operations of the category Anglo-Indian/Eurasian. 

Mina, the young writer whose story becomes intertwined with Daisy’s reflects, in the first few pages of the novel, on Australia’s colonial history and the little-recorded history of the early migrants on the south coast of NSW where her family lived. She thinks about the Bengali lascars who, as indentured non-Indigenous labourers in the British colonies, represent ‘the invisible ink in the history of cross-cultural connections between India, China, Australia and England’ (6). The novel introduces us early to the tropes of migration/travel and ‘cross-cultural connections’ which comprise the overarching narrative framework of the novel and inform the character arcs of three central writerly female figures of the novel (Woolf, Daisy and Mina). Each of these women is cosmopolitan, cross-hatched by multiple cultural connections, translations and globalised histories. 

The canonical weight of Virginia Woolf and the privileged sure-footedness of her creation, Mrs Dalloway, serve as both inspiration and challenge to Mina and to Daisy. Cahill’s novel excavates Woolf’s familial connections (via Empire) with India and Sri Lanka/Ceylon. While Mina acknowledges, in the first pages of the novel, that ‘Woolf sought to question … empire’ (13), the novel proceeds to demonstrate the shortcomings of this enterprise. It problematizes Woolf’s representation of India and Anglo-Indians and demonstrates that, in Mrs Dalloway, Woolf ultimately could only ‘ke[ep] Daisy stunted’ (75), rendering her through the trace of stereotype. It would seem that Woolf did not have the imaginative resources – that is, an adequate political understanding and knowledge of the classed and raced history of empire – to create for Daisy any substantive ‘interior space’ (248) within the novel in spite of its experimental approach to literary realism. Ultimately, Mina insists, Daisy’s world was impenetrable to Woolf: ‘Daisy walks the streets of … postwar London in a way that Clarissa Dalloway cannot appreciate’ (177). Woolf’s apparent cosmopolitanism was marked by classed and raced elisions and disavowals which reproduced the hegemonies she aimed to challenge. 

This cultural blindness is understood by Mina as Woolf committing a discursive violence on the Anglo-Indian gendered subject, of whom Daisy is indexical. These discursive elisions become wider acts of gatekeeping by the literary industry; Mina reflects on the fact that Woolf and ‘the critics that came after her’ in effect ‘refus[e] to let Daisy in’ (69) or to give her a substantive presence within the narratives and the literary worldings that comprise the Anglophone canon. As Mina observes, ‘there’s barely a critic who is aware of, let alone interested in, poor Daisy Simmons’ (76). Indeed, in reality, even in progressive criticism Daisy has been mis-read, for example as ‘an English woman in India’ (Reed Hickman, 65). We can understand Daisy’s exclusion from canonical literary texts as being aligned with the exclusion of Anglo-Indian (along with other BIPOC) writers from the canon.

In her depiction of Daisy’s world, Mina, in a corrective move, decenters Mrs Dalloway’s hegemonic view of the ‘post-war London’ (177) to showcase the other aspects of that city and its denizens that Woolf’s novel largely omits – the many exiles, activists and impoverished people who call it home (however partially or temporarily). Cahill’s novel (like other literary work by BIPOC writers in other contexts) brings the spotlight to bear on the histories and bodies of minoritised people and their struggles against the hegemonic cultural and political histories we see enshrined in the literary canon and its aesthetics. 

***

However, this is not to argue that Mina or the novel, Daisy & Woolf, rejects Woolf and her work tout court. Mina avers an affiliation with Woolf as a feminist who fought against ‘the gender binary and patriarchy’ (175). She affirms that Woolf  ‘knew that women’s bodies are exploited and pursued’ (118). For example, she salutes Woolf for her efforts in testifying to the sexual abuse hidden beneath the niceties of upper-class English life, acknowledging Woolf’s courage in disclosing her sexual abuse at the hands of her half-brother (18).

Nor, despite its criticisms of Mrs Dalloway, does Daisy & Woolf advocate casting Woolf on the scrapheap of what we might call dead white women, or banishing the novel in disgrace. As well as mounting a sturdy and unflinching critique of Woolf’s classism and racism as they manifest in her representation of Daisy, Daisy & Woolf constitutes a homage to Woolf’s radical modernist aesthetics. Mina’s writing is an important and generative site of experimentation and subversion of literary realism (175). Mina admires Woolf’s interest in what she calls ‘the malleable nature of experience’ and ‘the trick of narrative’ (176). Further, Mina applauds Woolf’s efforts in forging a ‘new form’ (118), hailing her as ‘perhaps one of the first to attempt the novel-essay’ (176). 

Woolf’s aesthetics, I’d suggest, have deeply inspired Cahill’s own work. I’d argue, for example, that the novel-essay intersects with and informs Daisy & Woolf’s literary project. In reflecting on how to shape and fashion Daisy outside the strictures of the orientalising colonial gaze, Mina says:

Is it right to assume that a story alone can liberate Daisy of race and gender? Without an argument, without a history, Daisy’s voice is exotic or historical fiction [my emphasis]. (176)

Mina explains that the novel-essay – made up of historical fact and documentary material which in turn is combined with fictional speculation – is the genre which provides the means to ‘liberate’ Daisy. So can we identify the two constitutive elements of the novel-essay – argument and history – in Daisy & Woolf, and what literary work they undertake there?  

As I have argued, the novel documents the historical operations of white power, race and class and their impact on Daisy and Mina. When Daisy writes to Peter Walsh of the Anglo-Indians/Eurasians in India that ‘all our communities have been woken to the politics and economics of the times’ (27), she is summarising what we could, in effect, describe as one of the novel’s implicit ‘arguments’ about minoritised identities in the aftermath of colonisation, namely, that minoritised identities are shaped on multiple fronts by racialising forces beyond their control. Further, they are cognisant of these forces which many white constituencies disavow. In her portraiture of Daisy, Mina documents the historical context of the Anglo-Indians/Eurasians in both India and the UK. For example, Daisy’s decision to leave India is motivated not only by her desire to be with Peter Walsh but by her sense of the precarity of the Anglo-Indians’ position there. Mina makes reference to the stirrings of the political unrest and violence – along lines of racial/ethnic and religious difference – that we know would lead, twenty years later, to Partition (33). 

Mina’s family (like Daisy’s) is constantly sensitive to racialised tensions in India (and in her case, East Africa), which impact on them as Eurasians and precipitate their multiple migrations. Racialisation meant that issues of citizenship and identity loomed large for both Daisy (55) and Mina’s mother (72). Mina describes the ambivalent positioning of Anglo-Indians/Eurasians within the colonial governance in India which had ‘taught them to assimilate and to behave in all ways as if they were English’ (50-51). She outlines the stigma of ‘mixed ancestry’ (51) and the structural poverty which beset Anglo-Indians after the late 1900s (50). Mina writes, ‘I felt ill when I was growing up encountering some Indians: the ridicule and scorn they heaped on us’ (51). When her family migrated to Britain the racism continued. She described how her mother internalised the ‘colour conscious’ (49) racism in Britain; how Mina and her siblings were teased for being coloured and how, as a result, Mina ‘avoided other children’ (50). These racialised tensions persist in the contemporary world. While researching Woolf in Britain some years later, Mina is acutely aware of the racialised violence constantly profiled in the media there (such as the Westminster attack by Khalid Masood) (20). 

I quoted above Mina’s statement – ‘without an argument, without a history, Daisy’s voice is exotic or historical fiction [my emphasis]’ (176) – suggesting that argument and history might be read as the core elements of the novel-essay. Daisy & Woolf, as a novel-essay, can be understood as emerging at the intersection of these two discursivities. In my reading of Cahill’s novel, to this point, I’ve argued that Mina’s documentation of how her own and Daisy’s complex worlds are shaped by colonial histories allows us to understand the two women’s fraught positionality as Anglo-Indians. This documentary discursivity, I’m proposing, could be identified as the ‘essayistic’ trajectory of Cahill’s novel-essay. Mina asserts that research on/documentation of Anglo-Indians is indispensable to her novel whose main work, she declares, is ‘the historical restoring of my community’ (75). There is a convergence here between her work and Cahill’s.

The relationship between Mina and Cahill is complex. At the core of the novel is Cahill’s project to resurrect Daisy. Daisy’s story is in part Mina’s story which in turn resonates with autofictional echoes of Cahill’s life. These complex layerings are mediated by the epistolary first-person address, which both Mina and Daisy adopt. We can note the significance of the analytical, investigative, first-person voice in the context of the documentary imperative of the novel where Daisy and Mina – in their letters and journal entries – observe, chronicle, and salvage the daily and the political life of the world around them. (They draw on the same style of ‘moments accruing’ (171) through which Mrs Dalloway records her world). Their end goal, however, as I have argued, is quite different from Woolf’s. It is to ‘refus[e] demise’ (291) of what Mina describes as ‘my people’ (16) and, further, to ‘control their own destiny’ (219) through acts of narration. The immediacy of the first-person in Mina’s and Daisy’s stories bears a personalised testimony to the silences, elisions and losses which, when exhumed, bring to light a newly recognised history. We must not forget that this is Daisy’s story too; the reviewer quoted at the start of this review comments that Mina’s story overpowers Daisy and ‘swamps’ her. This comment is hard to justify given the complex and rich evocation of Daisy’s journey and its beautifully elaborated water themes; her psychological journey through grief and spurned love which shadow her physical voyage, and the motifs of travel as survival and reinvention.

Daisy and Woolf is an outstanding contribution to the global literary canon in general, and to localised and specific canons such as Australian literature, women’s literature, and literature by people of colour (POC), to name but a few. Cahill’s ground-breaking novel, in its layered inter-textuality, in effect maps out the dialogues and traffic between these various canons, outlining the discursive politics which inform their (troubled) white histories of inclusion and exclusion, of orientalism and subordination.

Works Cited

Cahill, Michelle. 2022. Daisy & Woolf. Sydney: Hachette.
Hickman, Valerie Reed.”Clarissa and the Coolies’ Wives: Mrs. Dalloway figuring transnational feminism.” Modern Fiction Studies 60.1 (2014): 52-77.
Stubbings, Diane. July 2022. “Delible Impressions Liberating Daisy Simmons”.  Australian Book Review.

ANNE BREWSTER is Honorary Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales. Her books include Giving This Country a Memory: Contemporary Aboriginal Voices of Australia, (2015), Literary Formations: Postcoloniality, Nationalism, Globalism (1996) and Reading Aboriginal Women’s Autobiography (1995, 2015). She is series editor for Australian Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Adele Dumont reviews A Kind of Magic by Anna Spargo-Ryan

July 12, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments

A Kind of Magic

by Anna Spargo-Ryan

Ultimo Press

ISBN: 9781761150739

Reviewed by ADELE DUMONT
 
 
 
From its outset, A Kind of Magic establishes two distinct kinds of language. There’s Spargo-Ryan’s narration, as she recounts meeting with her new therapist: this voice is warm and confiding. The language she employs is vibrant and all her own: she likens her anxiety, for example, to ‘being trapped in jelly and also being allergic to jelly’(6). It’s laden with humour and irony, too: the narrator worries that the thongs she’s worn to the appointment are going to make a bad impression, and what’s more, their slapping sound might disturb the ‘sick people’ in the medical centre; the ‘patients with actual problems’(4). Within this same opening chapter, we’re introduced to a medical lexicon, which Spargo-Ryan informs us she’s become well-versed in: ‘I feel dissociated, I have intrusive thoughts’(6). These two sorts of language indicate two spheres of knowledge: the first, clinical and official; the second, intimate and embodied. The therapist’s PhD in clinical psychology is displayed on the wall; she is a ‘specialist in anxiety and psychosis’(4). But Spargo-Ryan tells us she is ‘also a specialist’ in these conditions, ‘but in the other way, where sometimes they try to kill me’(4).

This juxtaposition of the official and the personal persists throughout the book. Chapter headings borrow from technical definitions of various mental illnesses: ‘recurrent and persistent thoughts, urges or impulses’; ‘a mood disorder associated with childbirth’. The chapters themselves flesh out how these symptoms and diagnoses manifest in Spargo-Ryan’s lived reality. Though this reality is often incredibly difficult, its domestic, suburban trappings will be familiar to readers: for a period, driving her kids to school feels insurmountable; she develops an intense fear of Sundays, and spends her entire weekends curled on the couch; at one point, she celebrates being able to walk to the end of her verandah. Other sections of the book – particularly those detailing breaks in conscious thought – describe a reality that will be less recognisable to many readers: she describes, for example, watching her fingertips melt into the floor. One of the book’s overarching achievements is to illustrate just how individual and multifaceted the one illness (and even the one feeling) can be. Her mother’s way of being anxious (worrying about others’ safety), for example, is different from her grandmother’s (checking things). Psychosis for one person might involve grand delusions, but for Spargo-Ryan, it is more ‘quietly disruptive’ (101), involving a fogging of her senses. When she experiences post-natal depression, she realises there are different ways to feel sadness: her usual, existential dread now co-exists with another, more acute despair. And while A Kind of Magic is ostensibly about darker emotions, Spargo-Ryan makes room for pleasure, tenderness, desire, and fun. It’s possible, she tells us, to be at once depressed and optimistic; sometimes she is ‘overwhelmed by a kind of uncut joy’ (316).

In this way, A Kind of Magic works to undo and complicate some of the entrenched and insidious stereotypes associated with particular mental illnesses. But more than that, by choosing to foreground her personal (messy, chaotic, magical) reality, Spargo-Ryan exposes the (sanitised, cold) reductiveness of standard medical literature, with its tendency to generalise, and to deal in abstracts.

Underpinning A Kind of Magic is a search for the right words; ones that will do justice to the author’s experience in all its specificity. Society, according to Spargo-Ryan, will only tolerate ‘a few of the broad-brush words, like depression and anxiety’ (132) but we are still ‘a long way from having an accepted vocabulary to describe mental health concerns’(134). The words we do have can have too vast or muddy a meaning, or they can carry stigma and value judgement; what’s more, these labels are routinely revised and re-categorised. Spargo-Ryan’s solution to this deficiency of language, both in the therapeutic space and within this book, is to create a language for herself. Often this language is richly allusive: she describes feeling ‘like my soul is a few inches to the right of my body’(205); elsewhere, she tells us that ‘all the breath was pulled from my body like a clown’s infinite handkerchief’(232). Aged nineteen, before she’s ‘learned any of the vocabulary for this’, she tells one therapist, it’s ‘like there’s a layer of cling film over everything’(120). Some passages, mirroring the author’s state of psychic disorder, fragment syntax and loosen the rules which usually govern written language: ‘…get out of my way don’t breathe just force the air in grab it fistfuls of it shove it drink it punch it you will suffocate…’ (17).

This search for a more precise language is more than a literary exercise; according to Spargo-Ryan, language matters deeply when it comes to a patient’s treatment. Correct diagnosis relies on an individual’s capacity to articulate their experience, ‘and if you can’t find the words (medical professionals) will find them for you’(129). Because the vocabulary we have to hand is so limited, ‘what we mean could be worlds apart from what they hear’(135). Further, clinical language can strip a patient of ‘autonomy, boldness and authority’(139).

While Spargo-Ryan doesn’t privilege clinical language, not does she completely discount it. Her idiosyncratic personal narrative is interspersed with sections breaking down technical terms such as ‘identity diffusion’, ‘complex post-traumatic stress’ and ‘autonoetic consciousness’. Readers of Spargo-Ryan’s previous works of fiction won’t be surprised by her literary flair in A Kind of Magic, but here she demonstrates a separate skill for the pedagogical. In highly accessible language, she’s able to explain, for example, how memory is critical to the formation of identity; the phenomenon of mental time travel; how a fear of abandonment can develop.

In interrogating the intersections of medicine, language, narrative, and selfhood, A Kind of Magic represents a vital contribution to the emergent field of ‘medical humanities’. It is part of a growing body of nuanced, personal accounts of mental illness by Australian writers. From a medical humanities perspective, such accounts are valuable in enriching medical practitioners’ understanding of particular conditions and highlighting how professional, technical language can create a gulf between doctor and patient. One of medical humanities’ hopes is that an emphasis on subjective experience will lead to more compassionate, communicative doctors, and better health outcomes for patients (1). In an interview, Spargo-Ryan expresses delight at some readers reporting having used her book as a tool to help explain their experience to loved ones, or to psychologists. Even if her words don’t quite fit someone’s own experience, she says, still ‘it gives them a starting point to go: yeah, that kind of is what it’s like, except for me, maybe it’s a little more like: I’m the colour blue!’2.

A memoirist must always grapple with memory’s instability and fallibility, but particularly so when the author’s mind is afflicted by serious, chronic mental illness. Spargo-Ryan is acutely aware of this, repeatedly drawing attention to the constructed-ness of her written narrative and pointing out that trauma can have the effect of melding an individual’s past and present. She’s quick to acknowledge that which she doesn’t quite remember (often the who/ when/ where) and that which she does (often sensory details, like ‘the sound Dad’s wipers made as they slapped against the rain’ (196). She includes alternative possible origin stories for her own illness, and in some instances even provides multiple versions of the one specific memory. Aged nine, she believed her mother had literally died on the couch; as an adult she reframes the scene thus: ‘She had panicked, and I had understood that to mean she was dead/ in danger/ unable to take care of me/ didn’t love me’ (34). Crucially, Spargo-Ryan points out that her adult understanding doesn’t negate her child’s experience: to this day, this is the most distressing childhood memory she holds; ‘in reality, the lasting impact was as traumatic as I felt it was’ (35). Most compelling of all, she questions whether the unverifiability of memory even matters. At a psychological level ‘even if I recognise the events never happened, the foundations they created for me are real’(36).

Spargo-Ryan’s sparkling optimism infuses A Kind of Magic. The personal narrative she charts — from her grandparents’ generation, to her own upbringing, and through to her own parenting — parallels a broader evolution in mental health literacy, an evolution which books like this one will surely contribute to.

Cited
1. “The medical humanities: literature and medicine”, Femi Oyebode, in Clinical Medicine, 2010.
James and Ashley Stay at Home Podcast, May 2nd, 2023.

ADELE DUMONT is the author of No Man is an Island. Her second book, The Pulling, is forthcoming with Scribe in early 2024.

Alison Stoddart reviews After the Rain by Aisling Smith

July 1, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments

After the Rain

by Aisling Smith

Hachette

ISBN 9780733648793

Reviewed by ALISON STODDART

After the Rain is the debut for Melbourne-based author, Aisling Smith, a previous winner of the Richell Prize for Emerging Writers. The novel is an enticing exploration of diaspora and all its inherent obstacles encountered by migrants, including the internalised racism that simmers beneath benign white Australia of the 1970’s. 

After the Rain exposes generational trauma, but not in the traditional sense.  Its themes are childhood angst and the way childhood parameters influences our adult lives.  Family life is explored: divorce, raising children, sibling rivalry, all the usual expectations and disappointments.  

The narrative point of view rests with its three female protagonists and is mainly focussed on Benjamin, Malti’s husband and father of their two daughters Ellery and Verona. Each women’s relationship with Benjamin alters the different ways they perceive him.  His presence is felt in every facet of the novel, but the reader only gets to know him through the eyes of the three women.  Benjamin does not have a direct voice or point of view.

Malti Fortune is a young woman of Indian-Fijian heritage who moves to Melbourne from Fiji in the mid 1970’s to study law at Melbourne University.  At university that she meets Benjamin, an aspiring linguist who likes to draw attention away from himself with clever use of language. The pair fall in love and marry despite Malti being in contempt of the institution.

The novel opens with Malti and Benjamin taking possession of their new home and Malti is pregnant, a harbinger child who doesn’t come to fruition. We see how she views the actions of Benjamin for this brief period of time, the first year in their house. Malti, a lawyer, is calm and matter of fact. But there are contradictions in her personality. She carries superstitions from her childhood growing up in Fiji. She is also unreliable as a narrator, as disturbing aspects of her marriage are easily noticed by the reader but seem to pass Malti. Benjamin is not present for the relocation to their new house which Malti conveniently makes excuses for. This suspicious behaviour which Malti doesn’t seem to be able to recognise, is readily apparent to the reader.  

There is foreshadowing early in the novel of impending trouble in the marriage with a recounting of their wedding anniversary dinner. Malti and Benjamin’s exchange of gifts is suggestive of where this marriage is heading.  A boring unimaginative pair of cufflinks for Benjamin ‘she had been working in the CBD too long, this was a present for a lawyer rather than a linguist’ (p 7). And a foreboding filled present of sharp kitchen knives for Malti ‘sharp presents sever relationships’ (p 8).

Smith does not assign blame wholly to one party but rather hints at a lack of insight in Malti’s character as well.

Ellery, the elder daughter takes up the perspective in Part 2. Her’s is a troubled relationship with Benjamin as she experiences early on in her childhood the unreliable and undependable aspects of her father’s nature.  Facets which she cannot find within herself to understand and forgive.

Part 3 is by Verona, the conflicted youngest child who likes to think she is Benjamin’s favourite. Like all last born, she struggles with her own worth and the jealousy that is inherently present in the youngest.  These children who carry the legacy of coming into the family last and therefore not establishing themselves fully in parental eyes.  Ellery and Verona both struggle with the highs and lows of their upbringing and all three women are seeking answers, each haunted by her own ghosts, and by Benjamin.

An overarching theme of the novel raises the question of where does a person feel most at home? Is it in their culture or in their geographical location? Where does one get a sense of place? Do you need to have ancestors to appreciate a country, and if this was so then would new migrants ever be able to settle, to feel a kinship and love for a place?

Smith cleverly references this idea of inherited superstition with the inclusion of three different takes on Fijian folklore that impact each female character.  Early in the novel we learn that Malti believes in Udre Udre, a famous cannibal who pursued immortality by eating 1000 bodies.  Malti is taken to visit his grave as a child and upon driving away, glances uneasily over her shoulder, checking that he is not following. The unwitting handing down of Malti’s belief in Udre Udre, Ellery’s discovery and entertaining of the belief of Kuttichatham and Verona’s ghost Bhoot cast a dark cloud over all three women.

Smith also makes reference to the Fijian coups that occur in Malti’s homeland three times over the course of her adult life.  Although she is a citizen of her new land and a willing participant in its daily life, she still takes interest, and is drawn constantly, to her homeland, helped along by the fact her parents still live there.  With Malti’s reading in newspapers of the coups, Smith is able to draw a parallel between the despair felt by a child of a country that is slowly cannibalising itself and the same sense of despair Malti’s two daughters feel about their father’s diminishing interaction in their lives.  He too is becoming a shrinking image in their rear vision mirror.

While thought provoking and well executed, the novel lacks some punch in the engagement of the reader. Its timeline jumps around the linear progression of the narrative arc, which is sometimes hampered, and which in turn can lose the interest of the reader.  Smith does get back on track with the switching to each new narratorial perspective.

Further, the storyline does not build to any sort of crescendo or climatic ending.  It is more about families, relationships, generations and inherited familial traits like superstition. A strength of the novel lies in how the characters reconcile differences between family members and find ways around the disparity in expectations to move forward. 

Smith’s debut is very much a generational novel although Smith does not seem to explore fully the relationship between Malti and her own parents.  Noticeably strange was that Malti never takes her own daughters back to Fiji to visit.  But there is a definite impact of Malti’s childhood on the family.  The feel of Fijian/Indian culture is dotted throughout with the references to blue water and yellow sands and childhood superstitions like Udre Udre.  And when the girls are older and the perspective switches to Ellery and then Verona, they often mention Fiji when they are thinking about their mother.  They even ask their mother why they never went to Fiji and how they would have liked to have visited. Perhaps this can be answered by the act of sole parenting which if Malti is to undertake successfully, she has to take into account her feelings for Benjamin, and also to understand the role her relationship with her parents has in her own parenting.  

There is a coda chapter at the end of the novel that serves to bring the story arc full circle but also provides some lovely insights into the forgotten aspects of a broken relationship.  Smith beautifully alludes to memories that were never made. One such example is the miniscule event of her first baby, the one that never came to pass. Malti refers to them as ‘fermented wishes and lost hopes’ (p 353). When timelines abruptly stop, something that is often forgotten can whisper through the mind when one is looking at old photos. 

Ultimately the reader is left with the melancholy feeling that Malti is also thinking of Benjamin as well, the father of her children and someone she once loved deeply, who will forever hover as memories but also in the faces of Ellery and Verona.

After The Rain is a moving and thoughtful journey from an exciting new literary talent. It raises the question of generational trauma.  Is childhood trauma ubiquitous? The influence of parents is undeniable, yet their own trauma and manifestations always need to be taken into consideration when reflecting on diaspora and migrant life.

ALISON STODDART is a country born and bred, Sydney writer currently undertaking a master’s degree at Macquarie University which she is hoping to finish soon. She completed her BA Degree majoring in Creative Writing in 2020. Twitter @a_hatz5

Paul Giffard-Foret reviews Anam by André Dao

June 25, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments

Anam

by André Dao

Penguin

ISBN:9781761046940

Reviewed by PAUL GIFFARD-FORET
 
 
André Dao’s debut novel Anam is like a house with many rooms and windows, to use an image employed by its author. Its multiple locales account for the shattering, scattering, and smattering of Vietnamese people across the globe, and their resettlement in outer migrant suburbs, in Paris’ Boissy-Saint-Léger or Melbourne’s Footscray. Alongside a distinctly cosmopolitan, diasporic feel, the novel opens up a thought-provoking cultural conversation on Vietnam’s colonial and postcolonial histories – and in so doing, digs up a lot of mud. This endeavour may have been facilitated by Dao’s outsider perspective as a Viet Kieu (Overseas Vietnamese) born and having grown up in Australia, which provides him with sufficient hindsight. It is no surprise, then, that the names excavated from Vietnam’s past ought to be figures of exile, beginning with Dao’s grandfather. While a Penguin review noted how this “work of autofiction, this part-memoir, part-novel is twelve years in the making”, Dao’s grandfather spent ten years throughout the 1980s at the infamous Chi Hoa jail located in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) as a political prisoner of conscience under the Communist regime, before being sent away on a plane to France upon release. The narrator compares his grandfather to those decimated Angolan antelopes who are the victims of inter-imperialist rivalry and proxy wars in Africa – “he, a colonial subject of an empire that no longer exists, a forgotten ghost of an already embarrassing past”.

Exile
Despite associating with a political current of anti-colonial Catholic nationalists, his grandfather collaborated both with the French and Americans in their fight against Communism, failing to understand, after the Fall of Saigon in 1975, that he was now on the losing side of history. Identified as a traitor, he is reluctant to leave the scene and defers his departure from Vietnam. The themes of losing, failing, and waiting (until it is too late) recur over and over again in Dao’s novel. This makes his characters all the more humane and sympathetic as anti-heroes. Dao’s grandfather’s failure to exist in the nation’s archives echoes a fêlure (French for crack, a homonym of the word ‘failure’) in Vietnam’s psyche through its inability to reconcile both streaks of its identity: North and South, East and West. In identifying with none, the narrator looks up instead to interlopers such as Tran Duc Tao or Ngo Vinh Long for authoritative models. The former’s life as an intellectual trained and versed in Western philosophy but keen on liberating his country from colonialism led to the silencing of his voice and turned him into an outcast, both in France and Vietnam. The latter became the first Viet to go to Harvard on a scholarship, in part thanks to his role as native informant (“at fifteen he convinced American officers to hire him as a map-maker”) and ‘mimic man’ (“He taught himself English with a bilingual dictionary and a copy of Great Expectations”). Yet his later involvement in, and commitment to, the anti-war movement would be mocked and dismissed at Harvard, while “on the anti-war speaking circuit” he remained sidelined as a “token Viet”.

Much of the story’s appeal precisely comes from Dao’s refusal to play the token Viet in the eyes of Australia. Indeed, can a narrative taking place to a large extent in France and in Cambridge, England – where the narrator writes his thesis and contemplates settling down on a permanent basis – still be called Australian, or Asian Australian for that matter? Do these territorial labels still make sense when one is aware, as Dao is, of the fact that mapping (of the imagination) precedes and to a certain extent forecloses the possibility of place? When asked whether Australia is home during an interview with an academic researching on an oral history of second-generation Vietnamese in Australia at a community centre in Footscray, the narrator’s answer is no:

She didn’t seem convinced. She pressed me: But you were born here, you grew up here, didn’t you? Your family lived here. Your daughter was born here. How can you say Australia isn’t home for you? Haven’t you had a good education here? Haven’t you prospered here? If Australia isn’t your home, then what is it? A playground, or a marketplace from which you grabbed what you needed? And now you’re off to England, to Cambridge. Will that be home? Or will you wander the earth like – she stretched for the right words – like a rootless thing, like one with no place to rest?

The narrator’s superficial emotional attachment, though, does not stem from lack of care or cold materialism but from the multiple fêlures opened up by the failures to remember and to forget/forgive the past at once. One therefore cannot be nostalgic about home when home no longer exists or never existed, except as a figment of the imagination. One can only melancholically mourn the ghostly traces of that which remains, those haunted fragments or slices of life we dare to call memory, and which make Being a deeply traumatic, problematic event in itself. Though chiefly focused on an attempt at memorialising his grandparents’ and grandfather’s life in particular (whose half-effaced photo features on the book cover), Dao’s novel thus raises metaphysical, existential questions that are larger than the merely anecdotic. In researching on memories of his grandfather, the narrator ends up projecting his personality onto him as a prodigal son of sorts, feeling guilty about endlessly postponing the writing of his memoir. Yet the exercise remains an arduous task, akin to observing far-away galaxies, which, owing to the speed of light, may already be long gone and dead by the time their image reaches the astronomer’s telescope. It means accepting to warp and write oneself into another’s spatial temporality in the disjointed mode of future anteriority. The narration of the novel, indeed, starts off by means of such a mode and creative black hole: “This will be the last time that I will have begun again – the last, because I will have learnt to see what I failed to see at the beginning.”

Exist
The novel’s title, Anam (otherwise spelled Annam), once referred to the French protectorate for Vietnam, which was part of French Indochina. Its lost currency as a term allows Dao to recall the spirit of Vietnam, which under its spectral shadow becomes the site of an aporia. Dao throughout the novel asks: What makes a people’s collective unconscious when riven by guilt and strategic amnesia and erasure of its own past, as is Vietnam? Can it possibly be based on remembering, on traditions passed on from one generation to the next, when this heritage appears dubious and truncated? As a result, Anam is not a hagiography of Dao’s grandfather, who never had the benefit of having his bronze statue sitting “in pride of place” in the middle of his relatives’ wealthy home in Hanoi, unlike his brother, a former general to Bac Ho (Ho Chi Minh). Nor is it, strictly speaking, a biography since Dao is aware of the shortcomings of reception and representation of someone else’s experience, especially one as incommensurate as the collective famine that took place in 1944-5 and is believed to have killed between one to two million Vietnamese (about one tenth of the total population). Instead, Dao in his writing deploys a number of devices to circumvent some of the pitfalls associated with the literary genre of the memoir. To start with, he makes frequent use of interpolation (i.e, the insertion of something of a different nature into something else) by interweaving and blurring borders between sundry narratives (actual, remembered, imagined), discourses (academic, historiographic, personal) or registers (factual, introspective, fictitious). Interpolation can be opposed to interpellation, that is, the hailing or arrest of the sign and memory attached to it, thereby leading to its reification as monument (like his great-uncle’s bronze bust at the narrator’s relatives’). Another device related to that of interpolation between the author-as-narrator (Dao) and the narrated (Dao’s grandfather) is anamnesis (i.e., the recollection, especially of a supposed previous existence). Dao is acutely cognizant of those filial echoes of the past repeating upon the present and does not seek truthfulness at all costs, only its effects and affects, instead working in part through blind faith in his task as ghost-writer walking in the footsteps of his predecessors and eager to repay his debt. He will work as a lawyer, partly to please his grandfather and partly because his father had failed to do so, owing to the interruptions of war. As a review of the novel by Tess Do reminded, Dao is “a refugee advocate who co-founded Behind the Wire, an oral history project documenting people’s experience of immigration detention”. The narrator’s function is that of an amanuensis (i.e., a literary assistant taking dictation). Hence, the narration bears from within a ventriloquising resonance as Dao records his grandparents’ voice in their tiny apartment on the outskirts of Paris in Boissy-Saint-Léger, where the Eiffel Tower can be seen in “the far distance, a little upright prick on the horizon”, or as he listens to the audio recordings of S., a refugee from Sri Lanka indefinitely stuck in an offshore prison facility by Australian customs on the remote Pacific Island of Manus.

Exit
S.’ reported predicament operates a further line of flight as parallels are made with the narrator’s grandfather’s time at Chi Hoa, and with other celebrated manuscripts about, or devised in, jail, from Gramsci to Mandela. Dao does not seek to hide the traces of these multiple transfers but instead questions his legitimacy upon visiting and inhabiting them through his writing, having never been incarcerated himself, albeit also hailing from a family of refugees. Thus, Dao’s novel is also a book about other books (yet another interpolation), besides dealing with family. His philosophical musings embrace the thoughts of Derrida, Levinas, or Arendt, but Dao is especially interested in phenomenology (i.e., an approach that concentrates on the study of consciousness and the objects of direct experience), perhaps because in so doing, he hopes to grasp the unfathomable trauma endured by jailed refugees or political dissidents lingering in limbo, or the shared atrocities of the Indochina and Vietnam Wars. Though we may wish to rank one atrocity above the other in a magnitude scale of suffering, pain can hardly be measured up. Eventually, it has little to do with issues of right or wrong, with political or ideological affiliations and leanings, harkening back instead to our being (all too) human as suggested in this exchange between the narrator and his Vietnamese Australian interviewer in Melbourne’s Footscray:

When we compared crimes – me, the 1945 famine caused, I said, by French and Japanese and American imperial policies, her, the kangaroo courts and summary executions of landlords and wealthy peasants and the socially unpopular during the mid-fifties land reforms in Communist DRV, me, the Agent Orange and the millions of tons of bombs dropped on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, her, the massacre at Huê during the Têt Offensive, me, Lieutenant William Calley and My Lai, her, the re-education camps and prisons like Chi Hoa where for years and years men and women, including my grandfather, rotted away (a mistake, that, to use the cliché about rotting – it made it so much easier for me not to hear, not to feel, the sting in her words) – when we compared crimes like that, we were really trying to interrupt the other’s nostos, their return home.

While indicative of a failure to commiserate with the Other, these interruptions (from the Latin inter ‘between’ + rumpere ‘to break’) are also the site and the expression of a reciprocal fêlure, thus marking the possibility of an exit breakthrough in the form of a pause or a cesura – a suspended truce of sorts for want of reaching a final truth, which would allow for redemption. A small victory still for a hugely promising debut novel and writer.
 
 

CITATIONS
“This ‘transcendent’ new novel is a must-read for literary fiction fans.” Review of Anam, by André Dao. Penguin Books Australia, 12 May 2023.

Do, Tess. Review of Anam, by André Dao. The Conversation, 30 April 2023.

PAUL GIFFARD-FORET obtained his PhD from Monash University, Melbourne, on the subject of Southeast Asian Australian women’s writing. He lives in Paris, where he teaches English across various academic locations and carries out research on postcolonial literatures while being politically committed as an activist on the French far left.

Marie-Claire Colyer reviews Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens by Shankari Chandran

June 13, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments

Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens

by Shankari Chandran

ISBN 9781761151408

Ultimo Press

Reviewed by MARIE-CLAIRE COLYER
 
 
 
Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, Shankari Chandran’s third published novel, is a narrative of substance. You could be excused for expecting a light-hearted romp through an old people’s home, if you judged this book by the cover and title alone. Indeed, there are light-hearted moments. But this is so much more. Beyond its cover illustration lies a powerful and interlaced tale.

Encompassing years of the Sri Lankan civil war, dispossession and migration, Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens presents the hurdles many migrants to new lands face in merging with the accepted norm. The characters have powerful narratives to tell. Secrets that they hold close and divulge only in cathartic moments of revelation. A layering of two timelines, past and present, this is a novel about people and their stories, set against a backdrop of personal and national histories. Stories of resilience, sorrow and depth told with warmth and gentle humour. Darker moments are offset by the diverting interactions of the colourful residents of a nursing home in Western Sydney. The characters weave their lives into a rich tapestry offering insight into the dynamics of family and friendship, racism and identity.

Maya and her husband Zakhir are Tamil refugees, forced to flee the Sri Lankan civil war and settle in Australia. There they resurrect a neglected nursing home, providing a place of peace and inclusion for many senior residents, including other Tamils. We learn that Maya, matriarch, and owner of the nursing home, grieves for the loss of her husband scarred by his past. Their pasts unite and yet in many ways isolate the residents, haunting many of the characters, underpinning daily life. What is unresolved, what needs rectifying drives Maya’s husband Zakhir to return to a homeland where he is considered a traitor. And it is the interweaving history of Zakhir and another central character, Ruben that simmers until boiling point.

A Tamil refugee, Ruben is one of the many who fled under duress from a country divided. Chandran keeps us waiting to discover how Ruben is connected to Zakhir. Unravelling these interlocking experiences over the length of the novel, she provides flashes of the trauma so many Tamils endured. A trauma that few privileged within Australia know intimately.

Maya is a strong woman, with an empathy for history; both of country and of individuals. She unearths personal pasts, using these observations in the creation of a nursing home that best embraces each of the inhabitants’ needs. Facing inequality as an ethnic author, alongside her focus on the nursing home, Maya comes to write successfully under the pseudonym of a white Australian. A name that gives her national standing and influence when later confrontation erupts. As such she is a projection of writers of ethnic background straining to find a foothold in western literature.

A subplot is revealed through the course of the novel. Maya’s daughter Anjali and her husband Nathan are buttresses for their friend Nikki navigating her own loss. The devastation of parents whose estrangement becomes pronounced in suffering the death of a young child. Recriminations and blame eventuate, locked behind the cold demeanor of unburdened grief. Nikki acknowledges the distance between her and her husband Gareth, as she turns to the comfort of Ruben. Gareth lashes out at Ruben in his own struggle to cope with the loss of his daughter. The gulf between Gareth and his wife, Nikki propels the novel into an exposé on tolerance.

In the novel, Gareth is the antagonist. He counts Maya’s family as friends, offering the outward appearance of inclusivity. But by the close of the novel his reticence is unveiled, shouting through the cracks in his façade. Fuelling his indignation is the discovery of Maya and Zakhir’s toppling of a statue of Captain Cook. When he brings an accusation of anti-colonialism before The Human Rights Commission the national backlash is immediate. These incidents are sparks that set aflame smouldering racism in a community that now feels justified to revile immigrants. It is an excuse for open expressions of hatred, leading to the response of those taking a stand for minority groups.

In Gareth and the xenophobic we see the ugliness of fear. A mistrust of those that are unlike us. Just as we can in the flashbacks to scenes in war, recognise a universal fear. The apprehension of not being accepted, the trepidation of loss. We glimpse a part of ourselves. An embodiment of humanity at its worst. And a wish to do better. This vulnerability makes Gareth human. His clinging to the world as he knows and wants it to be.

Tensions are visible threads that emerge as a wider description of Australia as a whole, exposing an often-shunned view of ourselves. The ways in which the diaspora is integrated into the fabric of society; the way they can be stymied by our reluctance or resistance in accepting those with differing backgrounds. Perhaps more so because of physical dissimilarities than culture.

Chandran’s willingness to bring these incidents to light, is commendable. Events and prejudices are revealed from the perspective of the Tamil people of her ancestral home. Though not always the case, Chandran here presents intolerance towards migrants entering a culturally different established group. She explores how through familiarity and routine people tend to hold to what they have been informed is their birthright. Whatever that upbringing may be, whether born into this society or assimilated into it. It is this turning over of the histories we have been aligned with, those indoctrinated through our education and the nation’s psyche where the book finally comes to rest.

Shankari Chandran paints a picture of Australian society that bares the fissures and flaws, the divisions that we tend to gloss over and hide. She states her position with a willingness to see beyond embedded opinions to the more subtle layering of what drives behaviour. And as such, her work is an exploration of human nature.

Chandran’s work addresses nationality, that of the Australian and Sri Lankan people. It offers glimpses of history; the histories we’ve been taught and those that have been rewritten or suppressed. It shows alternate notions of what we have taken for granted. And through the eyes of its characters allows us to experience cultures and antipathy many have never been exposed to.

The only comment that I would give is that I would have liked the inclusion of an intolerant, less obliging character of ethnic origin to offset the real bigotry in a segment of white society. But that perhaps is the mirror to discomfort in my own evaluation of the divisions inherent in the society I live in and my placement within it. There is in Chandran’s story, a wide margin in likeability between the main characters of different cultures, with Nikki being the chief favourable representation of white Australians. That is not to say that Chandran’s depiction of immigrants is homogenous. There are minor characters with personalities that I would find testing. But there is a tendency, which aligns with her message, to portray more racial acceptance or at least amiability from ethnic people and more intolerance from white. This though also relates to the pressure placed upon her characters to prove themselves as Australians grateful to be given sanctuary. Something that white Australians are not obliged to do.

It is refreshing to read a novel that calls us out on ingrained prejudice or habitual ways of thinking and regarding the world. Like in all Chandran’s work, Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens turns a spotlight on the judgement, rejection and antagonism towards a minority ethnicity wanting only to live a peaceful life. It poses questions we as Australians and indeed those of other nations should contemplate. History is written by the victorious. This book asks us to contemplate parallels between the suppression and alteration of histories and identity of both Tamil and First Nations people. Ultimately, the question of who we are. To quote the novel in Maya’s words, ‘…we are all immigrants on stolen land.’ (p310). Further, a quote by Maya’s father, ‘…possession of land is nine-tenths of the law; possession of history is nine-tenths of the future.’ (p 233).

Disclosure: The writer knows the author personally, however the opinions expressed are her own.
 
MARIE-CLAIRE COLYER is an award-winning Australian wildlife artist and writer. Her work covers personal essay, memoir, poetry, mainstream and literary fiction. Her writing and art have been published in magazines, journals and newspapers both in print internationally and online. www.marieclairecolyer.com