Sydney Writers’ Festival 2024: My day two

After just one session on Tuesday and nothing on Wednesday or Thursday, Friday was all systems go for me at the SWF, with five sessions, starting at noon and ending just after 7 in the evening. Please excuse the length of this post.

---

12 pm: The Gift of Greek Myth

I first heard Kate Forsyth talk back in the day when she mainly wrote for children (starting with Dragonclaw in 1997). More recently she has appeared on radio and podcasts as a writer of historical fiction. She has always been good value on fairytales and myth. In this session she chatted with playwright Tom Wright about her most recent book, Psykhe.

If Psykhe is as interesting as this talk, then it’s a brilliant novel. Here are some scraps I gleaned.

Kate Forsyth describes herself as playing in the borderland between myth and history. She is concerned to reclaim ancient stories from their patriarchal interpretations. Fairytales, she says, are myths drained of their sacred meanings, because they are mostly concerned with women’s issues.

In this book, the dividing line between gods and humans is porous. It tells the story of Psyche/Anima and Cupid/Eros/Amor as a historical fiction – Psyche becomes Psykhe and Amor becomes Ambrose.

I’m not sure how much of this is from the original myth and how much from the novel, but here’s a broad plot outline: Venus’ son Ambrose falls in love with Psykhe, a human woman; he keeps her in luxury in his palace, but as a prisoner; he comes to her bed every night, where she is not permitted to see his face. One night as he is sleeping, she looks at him by the light of a candle, and spills wax on him. For the first time he feels pain, and flees. Having broken free of her imprisoned state, she now can love him, and goes searching for him.

Forsyth says this is the only ancient myth that is gynocentric – woman-centred. Whereas in androcentric myths the hero breaks, kills, and conquers (and, I’d add, rescues), in gynocentric myths the female protagonist sets about healing, repair and recovery. This story is about the importance of consent, the transformative potential of pain, the need for love to be more than physical (the reductiveness of that is mine, not Kate Forsyth’s or Tom Wright’s).

Kate Forsyth has a lovely phrase for her creative process. She says she spends a lot of time ‘daydreaming a story to life’. In this talk, she allowed us to witness part of that daydreaming.  

---

2 pm: Abdulrazak Gurnah: Afterlives

I’ve read and loved two of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s ten novels, Gravel Heart and Afterlives.

This urbane and amiable session focused on Afterlives. Gurnah kicked it off with a reading. Though he read beautifully, it was a strange passage for the occasion as very little happens in it: there is a boat and a harbour town, the sun sets, the main character has trouble sleeping because of unspecified pain. This from a book where there is so much wonderfully dramatic or tender writing he could have picked (see my blog post for an example).

Sisonke Msimang, his interlocutor, asked the pertinent question: why this passage? He said it was the first part of the book that he actually wrote. He knew that Hamza had been wounded and was returning to his childhood home after fighting for the Germans in World War One: what came before and after that was yet to be imagined.

After that insight into the book’s origins, we learned that Gurnah had wanted to write about the German schutztruppe for a long time. (Not quite right to call them ‘the German schutztruppe‘, he said, as only the officers were German, the troops were African.) He had known from his childhood about the ferocity of these soldiers, who fought for the colonisers – his grandfather (or more precisely his mother’s uncle) had been one of them. But when he got to the UK and had access to books, he found that there was nothing written about the way Africans were drawn into the wars between the colonising European nations. He had intended his fourth novel, Paradise (1994), to be on the subject, but he realised then that he didn’t know enough to write about it. It was nearly two decades before the time was right.

A question animating the book is: Why did people join a force that was going to end up dominating them/Why fight in a war that will determining who will be your coloniser? ‘That’s how we put the question now,’ he said. The book offers no simple answer, but a lot of what the two speakers had to say echoed what I have heard and read about the Queensland Native Police: apart from the attraction of being part of a new, powerful force, or various kinds of of coercion, it’s important to remember that people didn’t think of themselves as African, any more than the Germans and French identified each other primarily as fellow-Europeans: many of the African nations had been at war with one another for centuries.

The conversation roamed over the more personal elements of the book. These are the things that Gurnah says he likes writing about most – the everyday, the interior, the domestic, the intimate – and it’s them that gives the book its power as it tackles broader issues. All of this brought the pleasures of the book back to me – I hope it inspires people who haven’t read it to pick it up.

One final question from Sisonke Msimang: Was he expecting the Nobel Prize? Writers don’t work with the hope of winning the Nobel Prize, he said. They’re in for a hard time it they do. And he did a quick impersonation of someone responding to the phone from the Nobel Committee by exclaiming, ‘Well, at last!’

---

3 pm: Nam Le: 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem

This wasn’t a session for the faint-hearted. Felicity Plunkett, herself a poet, set the ball rolling with an opaque quote from ‘On the line’, an essay by Kasim Ali, and things only got more erudite, recondite, convoluted and polysyllabic from there.

When someone at a session later in the day half apologised for the comparatively straightforward terms ‘methodological’ and ‘epistemological’ by adding ‘as we’d say in the academy’, I realised retrospectively that this conversation was being conducted as if in a specialist academic context.

For instance: ‘The line can put things into differences of ordinality … You can have a chiasm … ‘ I managed to note down terms like ‘autofictive’, ‘metafictive’, ‘preambular’, ‘the trauma plot’ (which is ‘too easy’). All of this has meaning, but I found it impossible to keep up.

What emerged is that Nam Le’s poems are ‘destabilising, elliptical, constantly questioning’. ‘How is it possible to say anything at all,’ he asked at one stage,’without being undermined by your own self-consciousness?’

There was a lot of talk of violence, which may or may not have a technical meaning. I think Nam Le was joking when he asked, ‘What is more violent than meiosis?’ (Meiosis is the process by which cells split.)

As a counterbalance, Le read four poems to us – or more accurately he read four parts of what Plunkett said is the long poem that constitutes the book 30 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem. It was wonderful to hear his performances. The one with which he wound up the session, a lullaby with the title ‘Matri-Immigral’, was all anyone could have hoped for.

That broke through my exasperation with the session’s obscurity and recursiveness and convinced me to buy a copy of the book.

---

4 pm: Feminist Firebrands

Each of the day’s earlier sessions featured one author talking to one other person about one book. This session was a panel of three plus a facilitator.

A panel is a hard gig: you run the risk of only half-hearing each of the participants, and hearing no one’s thinking in depth. If the subject is books, you can get some idea of whose writing you might want to follow up, but this panel barely mentioned the participants’ books. All the same, it worked.

Hannah Ferguson, who is in her late 20s, abandoned her law career soon after graduating and is now a podcaster and person in charge of something on the internet called Cheek. Sisonke Msimang, among other things, writes a regular column in the Guardian offering wisdom about racism and related issues. Jennifer Robinson has offered legal advice in high profile cases of alleged sexual abuse. Jo Dyer, among other things former CEO of the SWF, facilitated.

The conversation revolved around issues raised by the Brittany Higgins and Bruce Lehrmann court cases, the allegations of historic rape against Christian Porter, Grace Tame’s advocacy, a little of Amber Heard’s case against Johnny Depp, and a sulphurous whiff of Donald Trump. That is, the way the criminal justice system here, but also in the USA and Britain, treats women, specifically when they allege sexual abuse or rape. And not just the criminal justice system, but the media and the culture generally.

The first thing that struck me was the stark contrast with Nam Le’s approach. Here there was no uncertainty, no self-undermining, no painful self-consciousness. Everyone spoke forcefully, definitely, and – alas for my note-taking – fast. I couldn’t possibly give a decent summary, but here are some gems:

Jo Dyer on recent news about the Queensland police force: ‘How many bad apples do you have to have before you cut down the f*ing orchard?’

Hannah Ferguson (I think): ‘Men are 230 times more likely to be raped than to be falsely accused of rape.’

Hanna again, on the ‘If you don’t know, say no’ slogan: ‘Everything I do is to fight the notion that you should back off if something is hard.’

Jennifer Robinson: Only 2% of rape cases arrive at a guilty verdict, but the current defamation laws in Australia mean that only those 2% of survivors can talk about their experience without being sued. A not guilty verdict in a rape case does not mean that the woman lied.

All the panellists agreed that it is important to have conversation about these issues. I think it’s right to say they all felt that it was a mistake to pile on Scott Morrison for framing his empathy for sexual assault victims as resulting from his wife asking how he would feel if it was his daughter. The conversation is important, and it doesn’t move things forward to attack imperfect contributions that are still in a good direction.

I learned about the ‘Man or Bear’ meme on Tik-Tok. Women are asked if they would rather be alone in a cave with a man or a bear. A typical witty answer is: ‘The bear, because at least I know what it would do.’ There was some dark humour about how some men have responded – one teenage boy asked (the question I’m embarrassed to say came immediately to my mind), ‘What kind of bear?’

---

An hour’s break to attend to bodily needs and get from Newtown to the City, and then off to:

6pm: Richard Flanagan and Anna Funder on Writing

Given that Richard Flanagan was scathing about writers’ festivals in Question 7 (a book I didn’t warm to), it’s interesting that he still agrees to appear at them. I came to this session mainly for Anna Funder. The Emerging Artist read quite a lot of Wifedom to me last year.

Clare Wright was in the chair. As a historian, she was interested in the way both books move around in genres, part history, part novel, part memoir, part autofiction. Both writers resisted any attempt to classify, saying they had followed where the books took them. Funder, for example, said she wasn’t writing autofiction in the parts of Wifedom when she wrote about her own life: it was a device to bring the questions about how women were seen in her subject’s time into focus.

Richard Flanagan was entertaining. My impression is that he came armed with a number of set pieces. He told us, for instance, that the history of publishing in Australia differs from the history in Britain and the USA in that key roles have been played by strong, intelligent women. He didn’t mention the fabled Bea Davis, but he named others, including the woman who had edited both books featured in the session: he asked her to stand up to take a round of applause, and though I couldn’t see her from my seat up in the gods she apparently complied, I can only imagine how reluctantly. Later he told his version of the story of being mistaken for a different writer in a signing queue – he duly signed the proffered book as Bryce Courtney.

In the long and interesting conversation, Clare Wright asked Flanagan two questions about Question 7 that touched directly on my issues with the book. Did he introduce Rebecca West as a way of countering the all-male patriarchal narrative of the origins of the atom bomb? Nothing so programmatic, he said, and went on to talk about how remarkable Rebecca West was. Then he reminded us that for the last 20 years or so women’s writing has been front and centre in western literature, so our collective sense of history has changed – so not programmatic, but responding to the zeitgeist. Wright framed the other question by asking him to read a short passage (sadly, this was the only reading in the session) describing the bomb being dropped on Hiroshima. As a historian, she was not interested, as he first thought, in whether he had got the number of people killed right, but the origins of his image of survivors walking the streets calling for their mothers, juxtaposed poignantly with the fact that plane that dropped the bomb, Enola Gay, had been named after a crew member’s mother. He was able to say that both those images came from historical records.

Wifedom has 400 endnotes: ‘If you want to destroy patriarchy you have to have endnotes.’

The patriarchal manifestation she attacks in the book is the erasure from history of George Orwell’s wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy by Orwell’s many biographers. She had a number of Eileen’s letters and some few other sources, so she had to resort to ‘making shit up’, to use the words Clare Wright put in her mouth. The made-up bits are clearly indicated in the book, being set to a narrower width. Before she made this controversial decision, the writing was flat and dead on the page. Her writing about her own status as wife played a similar role.

---

And so out into the crowds in George Street, possibly there for the Vivid Festival, to dinner and eventually home.