‘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

Durga-Chew Bose’s fragmented identity and contradictions are the main protagonists in her writing

BY R AKA SARKHEL L AHA

he was named after Durga, the sister in Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali. At Starbucks, she often avoids giving out her name, which has been contorted to Durva, Jerga, even Derika, and likes to keep it to “Just D”. The weight of her name and identity is carried in a gold ring embossed with a D, passed down to her through a lineage of her women, her mother, grandmother, great grandmother – Dolores, Dulcie and Daisy - on whose shoulders she lives and decodes herself a little every day. A first-generation kid born in Canada to an Anglo-Indian mother and a Bengali father, Bose muses in her essay ‘D As In’ that “First-generation kids are the personification of deja-vu. It’s as if you have inherited not just your family’s knotted DNA but also the DNA acquired from their move to a new land, from veritable mileage, from the energy it took your parents to reestablish their lives.”

Writing in first person often eschews her. She is conscious that her “I” may not be able to express and contain all the fragments and contradictions in herself and the other selves of her that are yet undiscovered.

In her collection of essays, Too Much and Not The Mood (a phrase borrowed from Virginia Woolf from A Writer’s Diary describing how tired she was of editing her writing to please readers), even Bose is conscious of this constant, mindless selfdeletion. Her essays, however, trace this selfdeletion and document her subconscious, in turn, preserving her fragmented identities. Her first inclination is to let ideas sit and then slowly outpace her. Talking to author Australian Maria Tumarkin at the Sydney Writers’ Festival this year, she says, “Writing is unconscious for me; it gives you a moment to pause and meditate. The process though is very chaotic.”

She claims to be a fiction writer writing non-fiction. And rightly so, for her sentences are long and lyrical, like her thoughts full of memories of lives lived by her parents and her 29-year-old heart that beats tirelessly as she curates her “heart museum” in one of her essays bearing the same title.

Her essays linger on like poetry. Her images of her parents sitting at their kitchen island and her longing for that comfort zone, and yet the need for her to live alone, are witness to the identities of which she is trying to make sense.

Of the act and choice of living alone, she remarks that it makes her find interest in her own story where she repeats the same actions every day, rearranging them as and when she likes. She is fickle, difficult, thoughtful and often revels in her invisibility. Invisibility makes her invincible inside.

Appearing in two sessions Difficult Women and Advice from Nasty Women to talk about women and feminism, her women are the kind who derive power from remaining in the background, from their smallness and the choice of invisibility. They are not afraid of changing their minds and they do that often. They enjoy emotional elasticity, levity of the mind.