‘Third world looking people’ talk race at Sydney Writers’ Festival

It took a widely criticised interview with ABC presenter Michael Cathcart to provoke novelist Paul Beatty to talk about race, and put his own Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Sellout in context. It is a pity that this happened just a day after the ‘Writing Race’ event where Beatty appeared reticent for most part about the topic, allowing the articulate Anuk Arudpragasam and the contemplative Ellen Van Neerven to take the centre stage.

In a well-attended event at the Roslyn Packer Theatre at the Sydney Writers’ Festival on 26 May, Indian-Australian writer and moderator Roanna Gonsalves attempted to stir the pot on writing about race from a group of non-white authors she described as ‘third world looking people’. None of them took the opportunity to open new doors on writing race though, with Beatty even questioning the need to write race. “Should you write race?” he asked, quoting an example of an Asianorigin student who has no Asian characters or perspectives in her writing.

Arudpragasam was the most vocal about writing race, lamenting the lack of efforts to preserve literary works in his native tongue Tamil. Neerven admitted that as an indigenous writer she can get pigeonholed and is often offered writing and review work only within the indigenous writing space. All of them agreed that as people of different ethnicities, they often present perspectives which are at cultural intersections with their readers.

“All aboriginal writing is relational,” said Ellen.

Anuk’s own work about a Tamil refugee in the Sri Lankan civil war fits the description. While the discussions were interesting, the event failed in stimulating the debated to the extent it intended to.

Krishna Neelamraju