or protect her, and things are spiralling out of control, but there is a sense that Lulu’s illness is part of what’s wrong in society. There is a sense of repressed sexual tension and a betrayal is implied. Sometimes the most ethical people in our lives are considered dysfunctional and pathologized because they subvert or fail to conform to an insensitive system of values.
A gap between the upbeat, vernacular tone and the seriously disturbing themes makes it provoking and poignant. I’m glad that it works because it was risky to write in second person, and in such a brief, poetic form. It could have been a standard-length short story of 4,000–5,000 words, but the brevity and intimate second person address make it an affecting and unique narrative.
CR: In an article “Interceptionality, or The Ambiguity of the Albatross” (Cahill 2018) published in the Provocations series of the Sydney Review of Books (SRB), you develop the concept of “interceptionality” and its special usefulness today—for example in relation to other concepts like “intersectionality”, which was broached in a 1989 essay by Kimberlé Crenshaw and has been much used since then. Is it possible to briefly outline the importance of “interceptionality” for you?
MC: Interceptionality is a communications tool using social media, email, written correspondence also phone conversations. It’s about speaking as an equal and reclaiming one’s subjectivity as a minority individual or it could equally apply to a minority argument in contentious issues, for example arguments about cultural privilege or even issues on climate. Minority positions and arguments get flattened and homogenized or reduced by mainstream frames and paratexts within the publishing industry, the media and education. Interceptionality ruptures through the frame repeatedly to change the status of the speaker. It is also a decolonizing strategy because when used to question the assessment of merit, the distribution of cultural capital or structural racism it resists the silencing of voices that are already positioned with less agency within discourse. Inspired by narrative theory, it uses narrative to mediate oppression; and it has a spatial appreciation of representation: an understanding that there are master narratives that hierarchically position and validate all the stories we are permitted to tell. Interceptionality enters the methodological gaps of intersectional discussions, which have been powerfully descriptive, but which have failed to address arts policy. An example of interceptionality is the work of the Kurdish author, Behrouz Boochani, detained on Manus Island since 2013. He has used the technology of a smart phone to write stories, articles, interviews in international media to send messages to the world on the atrocities happening there daily, to write a book, No Friend But the Mountains and to send videos via Whatsapp to produce a documentary film, Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time. Because they are remote it is easy to lose sight of what is happening in the detention camps on the islands; his work intercepts that framing to expose the cruelty of the state, to show from the centre of his subjectivity how fragile and humane the refugee’s experience is in detention. This is not without personal risk; but it is more powerful than journalists or refugee advocates speaking on his behalf.
CR: In that essay you move from a fascinating account of the possible meanings of the albatross in Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, through conceptual bearings and contemporary social commentary, to a powerful statement of your own personal experience in relation to these things. That seems to me one of the strengths of your writing—that you bring together other writers, ideas, creative fictions and personal experience. Is that a fair comment? Or are you thinking “that’s just what writers do”?
MC: I don’t have an overarching plan for my work. I work from within my creativity outwards. My strength is from within; focussing on my creative task and working outwards. I don’t want to lose that deep connection with my work, and I don’t think I possibly can, entirely. Interceptionality teaches us to believe performatively in what is vital: our truth, reclaiming our subjectivity. Even when we are displaced within the master narrative, if we are centred within our own process, it becomes deeply meaningful and it can survive. My preference is to write fiction, but I have learned that discourse is a powerful moderator of fiction and I have used language and theory to intercept the cultural frame that colonizes and reduces myself and others. Understanding more about the canons and master narratives has really questioned my understanding of what history is and what authorship means.
CR: In the poem “The Sound of Our Brown Bodies” you address (among other things) Australian border policies and bullying, saying “how hard on the body / being brown is in this white country”. In terms of your own writing, you write in the SRB essay of the experience of being “marginalized as a literary writer of colour in a culture that seeks to limit its migrant authors to the closed narratives of immigration, assimilation and consumption”. This is obviously something you feel strongly about and want to explore …
MC: Yes, as a migrant, I came to Australia, studied a profession and was treated as an equal in that industry. Citizenship enables me to become a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, a dentist, an accountant. But if I enter the arts, if I enter literature, I am immediately disadvantaged by the canon; my voice is not recognized by the literary representations that our culture knows and endorses. I must work several times harder; the measures of appraisal are rarely on a par. This is strenuous physically and psychologically. It is becoming increasingly harder to deny class privilege and Eurocentric privilege; and to this I would add canonical privilege. There is a policing and punitive dynamic if you are critical in a public space. I felt it was my responsibility to share these dynamics. To be able to map our history of erasures, oppressions, to talk about entitlements, and how they work in the arts industry, this will serve our communities as we go forward towards a more inclusive, participatory arts culture.
Bibliography
Cahill, Michelle. 2011. Vishvarupa. Perth, WA: UWA Publishing.
---. 2012. “The Poetics of Subalternity.” Mascara Literary Review, May 23.
---. 2014. “The Colour of the Dream: Unmasking Whiteness.” Southerly 74 (2): 196–211.
---. 2016a. The Herring Lass. Todmorden: Arc Publications.
---. 2016b. Letter to Pessoa. Sydney: Giramondo.
---. 2018. “Interceptionality, or The Ambiguity of the Albatross.” Sydney Review of Books, August 7. https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/interceptionality-or-the-ambiguity-of-the-albatross/
Clarke, Maxine Beneba. 2014. Foreign Soil. Sydney: Hachette Australia.
Rózewicz, Tadeusz. 2013. Mother Departs. London: Stork Press.
Wright, Fiona. 2014. “Listen: Foreign Soil by Maxine Beneba Clarke.” Sydney Review of Books, June 25. https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/foreign-soil-maxine-beneba-clarke/
Writing One Reality, Returning to Another:
Shankari Chandran in Conversation with Birte Heidemann
Photograph of Shankari Chandran by Clare Lewis Photography
Shankari Chandran is a novelist and a lawyer whose experience in the field of social justice informs much of her creative writing. Born in London to Sri Lankan Tamil parents, her life and work have been shaped by the cultures of three countries in three continents. After growing up in Australia, she spent ten years in London working as a lawyer before returning to Sydney in 2010 where she started her writing career. Her debut novel Song of the Sun God (Chandran 2017a)—a family saga chronicling Sri Lanka’s war through the history of a Sri Lankan Tamil family—was recently commissioned for television. It was short-listed