Adib Khan, Trends in Australian fiction

Adib Khan, Trends in Australian fiction There is an image in Saul Bellow's novel, The Dean's December, which reminds me of the changes that have gradu...
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Adib Khan, Trends in Australian fiction There is an image in Saul Bellow's novel, The Dean's December, which reminds me of the changes that have gradually occurred in Australian fiction over the past two decades. The central character in Bellow's work, Corde, hears a dog barking. He reflects on the sound and concludes that the barking is a protest against the limitations of canine experience. 'For God's sake,' the dog is saying, 'open the universe a little more.' Well, the universe in Australian fiction has begun to creak open, but not without protests and frenetic writing about the perceived threats to mainstream culture. It would appear that there are writers who are supposedly on the periphery, clamouring at the literary gates, waiting to burst into an already overcrowded arena. Despite indignant bristling and the noises that continue to be heard among the alarmists and the self-proclaimed defendants of Australia's national literature, writing itself is beginning to assume more importance than the obsession with an ossified literary identity that is presumably meant to define the core of Australian culture. This is more evident in contemporary Australian fiction than in any other form of writing because of the variety of voices that has gained prominence in recent years. To a large extent, this 'opening up' of our literary universe is due to the incentives that new writers from different backgrounds have received from the Australia Council for the Arts and the willingness of some enterprising publishers to establish the kind of literary heterogeneity that is compatible with a multicultural society. In Australia, the term multiculturalism has undergone recognisable shifts in both its denotative and connotative meanings since the end of the Vietnam War and the increased influx of Asian migrants. Before that, there was not the same intensity of focus on race, since cultural differences were perceived to operate within a European framework and derived from Judeo-Christian traditions. Anglo-Saxon imperatives had to accommodate Mediterranean and Southern European migrants, mainly from Italy and Greece. But in the wake of Asian migration, race became a crucial factor, and

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debates on immigration placed the emphasis on racial differences that were deemed to be more critical than ethnic differences. This shift was not only a reflection of the gradual changes in the cultural context of the nation, but also symptomatic of the unease that is still perceptible behind the image of a confident and extroverted population, diverse in its ethnicity, beliefs and social practices. To add to the complications, there is a painful awareness of the marginalisation of the indigenous inhabitants, the aborigines, who should rightfully be at the centre of Australia's pluralistic society. For all its cultural merits and the sheer necessity of being a racially diverse society, given Australia's geographical location in Asia, multiculturalism remains a contentious issue. It is inevitably politicised and is vulnerable to racial exploitation. It is interesting to note the political slant in the social commentator, Andrew Jakubowitz's critique that multiculturalism functions as an ideology by appearing on behalf of the disadvantaged migrants, though in reality it leaves essential social relations and an unequal distribution of power in Australia unaltered.' In 1990, when the Australian Law Reform Commission decided to plan a study of multiculturalism and the law, it was immediately criticised by the then president of the Return Service League, Bruce Ruxton. Until his recent retirement, Ruxton was one of the country's foremost mouthpieces for xenophobic nationalism. His comments on the Australian Law reform Commission's proposal were reported by one of the newspapers, The Western Australian on 1 March 1990. 'The minorities and their cultural values are of no concern to the Australian people,' Ruxton reportedly said. 'If these newcomers are not satisfied with the legal system in this country they know what they can do.' Ruxton has often advocated that migrants should go back to their countries of origin if they are unable to conform and be eventually assimilated into Australian society without voicing their opinions and manifesting their ethnicity. This kind of simplistic but arrogant thinking makes no allowance for the complex problems of assimilation. It requires migrants to forget the perceptions of their own history and the values of their indigenous cultural traditions. It demands that they forget the experience of displacement and live as though they were non-thinking and non-feeling entities, eternally grateful for whatever the new country has to offer them. If this were the case, creativity for migrant writers and artists would suffer because the tension of polarisation

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between an active memory and contemporary reality that is fundamental in any art form would be missing, and the country would be culturally poorer. But such views as Ruxton's are not necessarily undesirable in any community because they lead to frictions that precipitate the sparks for creativity, especially in literature. Australian fiction is a complex phenomenon. It is a rich but fragmented assortment of literary accomplishments that frequently echoes a tortuous history with an inception in imperial motives. Beginning with the memoirs of early settlers, Australian fiction, with the exception of aboriginal writing, has been the work of immigrants and their descendants. Anglo-Saxon institutions, which were grafted into the social structures of the new colonies, shaped the attitudes of the settlers and determined the normative way of life that is now classified as mainstream culture. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that literary works, reflecting this mainstream culture, continues to dominate the publishing scene. But, in the last fifteen years or so, there has been an acceleration in the proliferation of cross-cultural voices in fiction, underlining the diversity that reflects the type of society that Australia is. That is not to say that everything is harmonious in the literary world, for we continue to agonise and debate over what is Australian and the intrinsic cultural merit of what is published as fiction in the country. Understandably there is a small market for serious fiction in a population of around nineteen million people. It has to compete with grunge, crime, horror, romance and science fiction, to say nothing about the glut of publications from the United States and Britain. And, rather peculiarly, it is only in serious fiction and poetry that we find the ethnic diversity of writers who represent the minority migrant cultures of Australia. There are those who become very agitated about ethnic writers who find prominence either in terms of a wide readership or media attention. We have a renewed and somewhat narrow emphasis on nationalism that betrays an uncertainty about our place in the world. And, after the recent events in Bali, that is perhaps understandable. One of the ways to counteract this crisis is to reaffirm established myths about origins and consolidate them through works of literature. It is never easy to define identity when geographical factors and inherited cultural traits are not compatible with one another. More than two hundred years after the arrival of the First Fleet, there appears to be a prevalent mood, especially in fiction, to

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celebrate the struggles of colonial settlement. It is as though the endured hardships and sacrifices of the early settlers are worthier of imaginative representations than the cruelties and injustices inflicted on the indigenous people of the land. For the time being, it is fashionable and, indeed, desirable to legitimise and reaffirm the perceptions of colonial achievements rather than question what has been documented by historians. And one must never forget that written history that survives is usually the work of those on the winning side. This direction in literary fiction had its legitimacy in an event that was celebrated for an extraordinary length of time. Australia chose to commemorate its Bicentenary year of 1988 in a way that was not accorded to the centennial year of the founding of the nation. The decisive event of invasion rather than the fact of independence was deemed to be more significant. Almost in anticipation of the bicentennial celebrations, there were several significant literary publications throughout the 1980s. Among these was the Oxford History of Australian Literature in 1981, followed by the Oxford Anthology of Australian Literature in 1985. Then, in 1988, to coincide with the bicentennial year, there was The Penguin New Literary History of Australia. The first two publications are sparsely dotted with references to aboriginal and migrant writers, and although Penguin makes a better effort, there is no attempt to distinguish between migrant literature and non-Anglo-Celtic writing. Migrant writing is associated with the terms 'Asian' and 'European', and is definitive in its implied conclusion that migrants invariably come from Europe or Asia. What is even more simplistic is the contention that migrant writers tend to repeat issues that concerned the first settlers. The observation is remarkably similar to the American critic, Werner Sollors' assertion that ethnic literature is a reminder to all Americans of their rites of initiation and entry into a new land. In the late 1980s, two successful anthologies, Faber Book of Contemporary Australian Short Stories, edited by Murray Bail, and Helen Daniel's Expressway, followed the established trend and featured token aboriginal and migrant writing. In a 1991 essay, entitled Nice Work If You Can Get It, the writer and broadcaster, Robert Dessaix, observed that 'The reason so much migrant writing is marginalised is that . . . it's often not very good- and for obvious reasons: the author's English simply doesn't allow him or her to produce meaning at the same number of levels- to intersect with the same

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number of other texts and contexts as a native speaker's.' Dessaix's generalisation does not contend with the fact that there are large numbers of migrant Australians with a background of the British colonial experience that has commonly entailed an education in which English has been the medium of instruction. And, in view of what has occurred in Australia's migrant writing and publishing in the last decade, Dessaix's comment is inaccurate and truly dated. There is a tendency among literary editors (and in Australia they are a conservative lot) of the so-called prestigious magazines and newspapers to minimise the exposure of migrant writing. 'It's a question of literary worthiness,' they tend to argue, and in some cases they are probably right. But I suspect that most of them still view the relationship between mainstream writing and migrant literature as an uneasy association between the central and the peripheral instead of a reticulum of relationships between different cultural coordinates. A former literary editor of one of the country's most influential newspaper, The Australian, was alarmed into expressing the view that there far too many books, written by blacks and migrants, were being published in the country. There is a powerful literary coterie of editors, reviewers and academic members of that sacrosanct and reactionary establishment, the English Department at various tertiary institutions, which act as custodians of what it considers to be Australia's literary culture. These are powerful people who, I suspect, have considerable influence on what is perceived to be Australian overseas. There is no better example of this than the publication of the British periodical, Granata in the summer of 2000. This particular edition was devoted to Australian writing, but it comes as no surprise that there is no representation of migrant or aboriginal writing in the publication. The editor, Ian Jack, was not ignorant about the omission of aboriginal writing. But, in an unconvincing statement, he justifies his decision by saying that aboriginal writers 'do not represent themselves.' The questions immediately raised are: How rigorously did he look? What was he trying to present in this edition? If it was the best of Australian writing, then how did he view the composition of Australian society? And who advised him? In an interview, published on September 7 this year in the Melbourne newspaper, The Age, Jack admits that this particular edition of Granata did not sell well. He goes on to say that 'Australia- seemingly indistinguishable from other affluent, urbanised, secular societies- just doesn't

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have "the pull of difference"'. I would suggest that he is not very perceptive in his assessment. Australia is very different from other secular societies primarily for its location in Asia and for its diversity of ethnic population that writes in English. The problem is that there are influential promoters of mainstream culture in the media, people who subvert the publicity of literature that contradicts their views of cultural relevance and literary excellence. 'Self-definition,' contends Edward Said, 'is one of the activities practised by all cultures.' Unfortunately, there are occasions when such a practice can result in caricatures and inaccurate images of what is intended to be the representation of national identity. Over the years, there has developed a stereotypical image of the unsophisticated Australian, usually someone very practical, who can raise laughter with his behavior and speech, but not someone particularly renowned for his intellectual qualities. We have had Barry Mackenzie, Crocodile Dundee and now Steven Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter. For far too long we have also had the literary depiction of the socalled 'typical Australian' located in the outback. This character is a Caucasian adult male, uncomplicated and forthright in his views, suspicious of anything outside his domain, and at home in the rural areas. Luckily, in contemporary fiction, this prototype has been marginalised and there is now more emotional and intellectual depth and subtlety as well as variety in the characters of those who are depicted as Australians. Fiction that is overtly critical of contemporary Australian society is likely to receive less favourable attention in the media than publications that present aspects of the community without commenting on its shortcomings. There is a preference to fictionalise the past, especially the convict days. and to set such a novel in Tasmania is a current fad. There is sameness about some of these novels that are being published, and it is only recently that that there has been concerns about the lack of tough novels fictionalising contemporary Australia. We would do well to remember Kafka's observation that 'a book is like an axe for the frozen sea inside us.' It is not always easy to detect the underlying tensions in Australian society. It is made all the more difficult by the paucity of vigorous discussions or imaginative representations that concern the wider community. As long as Australia was clearly the economically dominant country in the region, there was

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consolation to be derived from a perception of strength. But the emergence of China as a viable superpower of the future is deemed to be a potential threat. The shadows of Vietnam hover over us and the turmoil in Indonesia is a cause for alarm. Indonesia also happens to be the largest Islamic country in the world. One of the ways to counteract this unease is to cling to established and identifiable myths about the past and consolidate them by works of literature, especially fiction. It is no mere coincidence that the last two decades has seen a glut of historical novels written and published in Australia. Among those who have been fictionalised are not only the popular figures of Ned Kelly and Banjo Paterson, but convicts, early settlers and soldiers. There has been an array of novels from Thomas Keneally's The Playmaker and Roger Macdonald's Mr. Darwin's Shooter to Peter Carey's The True History of the Ned Kelly Gang. One of Peter Carey's characters, Herbert Badgery, in Illywhacker, remarks at one point, 'I have a salesman's sense of history.' It would appear that some writers have, perhaps, inadvertently, adopted this sense of history and sanitised and glamorised the past, giving their cast of imaginary real people characteristics that are sometimes too generously noble. There is a school of thought that advocates a greater recognition and a strengthening of Australia's ties with Asia. Fiction has not been slow to respond to this idea. There are a limited number of fine contemporary novels, landscaped in regional Asia, as evidence of the country's imaginative engagement with our northern neighbours. Among the more accomplished examples are Brian Castro's After China and Alex Miller's The Ancestor Game. Both novels were published in 1992 and belied the notion, inherited from imperial European powers, that there is an unbridgeable gap between 'East' and 'West'. But both these novels were the exceptions rather than the norm. But the fact remains that Asia is still an amorphous enigma, a vast and diversified continent that must be treated warily. Some years ago, in a perceptive essay, Robin Gerster pointed out that 'the Australian imaginative encounter with Asia typically attests to one thing- continuing national insularity.' He then goes on to say that 'The Western construction of "the East", as Edward Said demonstrates in Orientalism, is essentially a narrative act of self-definition. In "representing" the orient as its "contrasting image, idea, personality, experience", Said argues, the West has succeeded only in describing itself.' And one might add that this self-description has a high moral tone and is

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designed to lead the reader to an impression that it is justifiable to conclude that the institutions, values, beliefs and lifestyles of one civilization is better than the other. The East is exotic, unpredictable and potentially explosive. One tends to be fascinated by its diversity and teeming masses, but the experience is one of a tourist who will be glad to return home to an insulated society of order, rationality and all that goes with Australia being the best country to live in. Novelists like Blanche d'Alpuget and Christopher Koch, who have been critical of Western journalists coverage of Asian events, have themselves succumbed to definitive cultural judgements. Political and social unrest in Asian countries make us nervous, but, ultimately, it is precisely the unpredictability, instability and violence that affirm the positives of Australian society- its institutions, its system of government, lifestyle and humanness. We have been forced to confront the authenticity of the self-image that we have created. There has been considerable communal debate about the treatment of the refugees from Afghanistan and the Middle East. Some conservatives, who consider Australia as an outpost of Europe, would argue that a tough response was necessary because, in part, it had to do with the preservation of our way of life as a civilised nation. After all, to use a line from Thomas Keneally's novel, Passenger, Australia is 'that great capsule of European values,' and we do not wish to adulterate those values with alien influences. Asia can remain where it is and go on its own way while we continue on a different path. How abruptly those illusions were shattered by the recent events in Bali! We simply cannot remain untouched by events in our region. Despite the revival of conservatism in various spheres of Australian life, our imaginative engagement with Asia is finding broader and more subtle perspectives that are not based on contrasts and simplistic conclusions about a superior civilisation, but one that seeks to present the interaction between different cultures, between characters with different values and the necessity of understanding Australia in its regional context. And it is not only Asia but also parts of the Middle East that are slowly coming into focus. This shift owes a great deal to a new breed of writers, among them Lau Siew Mei, Abbas El-Zein, Loubna Harkal and Eva Sallis. These are novelists who do not suffer from hang-ups about their ethnicity and nor do they seek to create a fuss about their backgrounds. They write with assurance and verve about places and situations that

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are not familiar to most Australian readers. And while they may not be widely read and perhaps not categorised as Australian writers by overseas publishers, they are nevertheless slowly opening up vistas that lead to further debate and self-questioning about identity and belonging. And such an awareness of cultural complexity can only point towards a dynamic mutability and growth of a society that is not unnecessarily restrained by the singularity of a mainstream tradition. I think that recent political events in our region, involving Australians, will persuade writers to explore our contemporary situation far more seriously than they have done in the past. The present may not offer the same sense of security that the past has provided, but there is the starkness of a new reality that is a rich mine for serious fiction. I imagine that the next decade will produce a crop of powerful novels, set in contemporary Australia, that will make people uneasy because they will drag us out of the comfort zone and force us to reexamine ourselves and our possible directions in the future.

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