Saturday was my busiest day at the Festival. I had four sessions booked and then was given tickets to a fifth. There were three writer-in-conversation sessions and two panels about current politics. This post is about the former.
10 am Amitav Ghosh in Conversation
Amitov Ghosh was ‘in conversation’ with Michael Williams.
Michael Williams set up the conversation by suggesting that Amitav Ghosh had a kind of double vision: on the one hand he is a journalist with a PhD in social anthropology and a commitment to knowledge; on the other he writes fiction that involves ghosts and other supernatural phenomena. After Ghosh’s initial smiling response that writers are not normal people, the conversation expanded to take in elements of his biography, the genesis of his novels (including the brilliant Ibis trilogy, which wasn’t originally intended to be about the opium trade, but the facts got in the way of the other story), his love of travel, the absurdity of colonialist thinking, the British Empire as the world’s second narco state, the importance of Indigenous knowledge systems, and at last his most recent novel Ghost Eye.
I could have listened to him for hours. Here are some highlights:
- A British reviewer of his first novel, The Circle of Reason (1988), commented that poor benighted third worlders could only write about politics, they had no inner life. Ghosh laughed and said, ‘Look at the United States now. They’re experiencing what we did then.’
- Ronald Ross was a British doctor who was awarded the Nobel Proze in 1902 for discovering the malaria parasite. When Ghosh read his case notes, he found that all his major findings were in fact made by his Indian servants – who were given no credit.
- He spoke about language in the Ibis trilogy. In colonial India, there were many Englishes. The multi-ethnic ship crews, the English colonisers who adopted Hindi words, etc. He said of those glorious passages where the language goes wild, that they don’t advance the story: Language is like white noise sometimes, its purpose is not to convey meaning but to establish the context in a kind of background hum. He referred us to Melville in Moby Dick for a similar use of language.
- He mentioned his non-fiction book addressing climate change, The Great Derangement, which he wrote after the Ibis trilogy. I hadn’t heard of this book, and wonder of Ian MacEwan’s use of the phrase in his future-looking-back novel What We Can Know owes something to Ghosh.
- In Western thought the world has come to be regarded as a machine whose function is to have goods extracted from it. We badly need to pay attention to First Nations / traditional ways of knowing, where teh world has not been desacralised. This is happening to some extent – he gave the example of the Wanganui River in Aotearoa/New Zealand being acknowledged as having legal personhood. But mining Indigenous cultures for their knowledge can be another form of extraction. The knowledge can’t really be separated from the stories by which it is communicated.
- In the same reasonable tone, he told us that he doesn’t believe in reincarnation, but numerous studies in India and elsewhere have recorded phenomena which can only be explained by the existence of past lives: children suddenly recite long passages of classic books they can’t have read, etc.
I felt like we were in the presence of a great mind, who manages to communicate important, difficult ideas with an extraordinary lightness of touch and generosity of spirit, and also enjoys stirring the pot a bit.
We had a cup of tea with a friend, and a bite to eat, then off to Track 8, where train carriages were once built:
1.00: Melissa Lucashenko: A Writing Life
Winnie Dunn, author of Dirt Poor Islanders and an important part of the Western Sydney literary movement, was on stage with Melissa Lukashenko. As the session got under way, Melissa called out to people up the back to come and fill empty seats down the front – eventually people bowed to her benign authority and the front rows, perhaps reserved for celebrities who didn’t show, were filled.
The reason for the pairing of these two writers soon became apparent: Melissa lived for some time on Tonga, and Winnie is the first Tongan Australian writer to have a novel published. There was a relaxed vibe between the two of them: Winnie maybe not all that experienced at interviewing in front of a big, mainly white audience, and Melissa seeming competely comfortable in her own skin, right from that early moment when she beckoned us closer.
Melissa was there partly to promote her most recent publication, Not Quite White, a collection of essays, and she read beautifully from two of its essays. But the guts of the conversation was the story of her writing life.
Some highlights:
- At a time of her life when she was newly divorced and living poor, she earned a living by driving an Uber and wrote her fifth novel, Mullumbimby, in her spare time. By the time it was published she was tossing up whether to go (back) to a life of crime [my brackets represent her smiling retraction of the word]. Then it won some significant awards and she was out of the poverty trap.
- The story that’s allowed about Aboriginal people has shifted enormously in thirty years. When she wrote Too Much Lip, which also won substantial prizes, she feared that she would be attacked for its portrayal of family sexual violence, but she felt it had to be written – partly because of her activism with Sisters Inside. It turned out the attack didn’t come.
- Asked how she found the voice for the main character in Too Much Lip, she said that character was written in anser to the question, ‘Who might I have become if I hadn’t gone to uni?’
- Asked what she wanted from white readers, she said, ‘Stop the deficit narrative!’ (This was a nice echo of Amitav Ghosh’s mockery of the assumption of white superiority.)
- On awards culture, she said that when her first novel, Steam Pigs, was short listed for a number of prizes, she had no idea what it meant. She kind of thought, ‘Oh well, you publish a novel, and then it gets listed for prizes.’ What mattered to her, then and now, is the response from readers, especially Aboriginal readers and family.
- Advice to new writers: Have a second job!
- When Winnie Dunn asked how she approached community responsibilities in her writing, she turned the question back on the questioner, ‘How do you do it?’ This came across as a real question, and Winnie Dunn took it that way and spoke eloquently of her own writing about and for the Tongan community. Melissa did say that when she writes she always has the voices of a couple of Elders in her head, especially one scathing old man. Sadly, she didn’t elaborate.
There were a couple more sessions, to be discussed in my next post, and then, after dark, with a ticket I had been given unexpectedly:
8.00: Maria Reva: Endling
Literary critic Beejay Silcox was on stage with Maria Reva, Ukrainian Canadian author of Endling, a book that I have read for the Book Club and enjoyed enormously. The book is about snails, the trade in brides in Ukraine, the Ukrainian war, and the impossibility of writing a novel about all that.
There were some nice moments of comedy. When Beejay spelled out her understanding of how metaphors worked in the novel. Maria said, . ‘You should have written it!’ This became a running joke, I’m not sure at whose expense.
They discussed the process of writing the novel, which felt oddly like a synopsis of the novel itself, though its most splendid twists and turns were not revealed.
The novel started from an article about a scientist in Hawaii who had a project of saving snail species from extinction. And it also started out as a novel about ‘romance tours’ in Ukraine, where men from the USA come on tours wth the aim of finding a wife. She found a way of combining these two themes and was feeling pleased with her plot-making abilities, as three of the young women from the romance tour kidnap a van-load of bachelors. Then Russia invaded Ukraine and she couldn’t see the point of the novel any more. She gave up on it and wrote the draft of something completely different – that went nowhere. Then came the moment of decision: ‘If the genre was imploding on me, I would take the reader down with me.’
She read a passage from the novel which, she said, was mostly verbatim from actual email correspondence, in which a journal editor wanted her to write what, in order to make the connection to the two other speakers today, I’ll call a ‘deficit model’ account of the Canadian Ukrainian community’s response to Russia’s invasion. It was funny when I read it a couple of weeks ago. It’s much funnier when you know it really happened! Maria Reva was clearly enjoying her revenge.
There was a lot more. I’ll mention just two things. One, the structure of the novel was inspired by the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once. I knew it was familiar from somewhere! Two, the book started out being about women’s oppression in Ukraine, but once the war started, Maria Reva forgot about gender and the question became, ‘How do different minds cope with the cataclysm?’
My companion had read one book from Ukraine, ‘the one about tractors’. I had also read one, the one about bees. This was a whole other version of Ukraine and Ukrainians.
And so to bed.
Me fail? I fly! 