and “have, at times, grated against the constraints that a ‘true’ historical play requires”. Would you like to expand upon this?
RA: This is a tricky question to answer. It’s easier to explain if I begin with the fact that I did try my hand at journalism when I started writing but found reporting quite hard. It requires meticulous research and a dogged adherence to facts that often lead to a tedious and ultimately inconclusive story. With fiction and drama, you tell stories that excite you, that create an illusion of pattern or a meaning that makes sense of our time on earth. You can invent a character; even one based on a historical personage gives you the space to explore all its potentialities through invented moments of doubt and irresolution, of regrets and joy, passion and hesitation that constitute the fundamentals of his or her journey/lived experience. When I am researching a story or a play, I need simple nuggets of information; the bare facts that will help me build a credible framework for the situation I am recreating and will spark off the trajectory of that character in my imagination. Just to be able to exercise that freedom, I would rather work on a play or a novel that is “based on a historical incident”: a mixture of facts and fiction, rather than one that claims all the weightiness of a “purely” historical document.
MM: The narrator of your short story “Confessions and Lullabies” is an inanimate object, a lace doily. Why did you decide to use this technique?
RA: It was an experiment in the creation of a narrative voice that appears to have the objectivity of an omniscient narrator without all the knowledge you would associate with a true omniscient narrator. It only knows the world it inhabits. Both my characters in the story were too unselfconscious to function well as first person narrators. The lace doily served them both well, I think … as the link between the hard-pressed creator and the fragile consumer. Adi’s character and her story were inspired by a book entitled The Lace Makers of Narsapur by Maria Mies (2012), which I was invited to review a few months earlier. The statistics on labour and wages had left me utterly enraged.
MM: You have spoken about how, when writing radio plays, it is important for you to read the dialogue aloud to yourself. Is there any difference in your approach to writing dialogue when working on a novel or a short story?
RA: In fact, I do read my work aloud to myself quite often, whatever the genre. It helps me focus on the material itself, to hear the voices of my characters more clearly and to catch any superfluous words and repetition. One of the dangers of hovering over a text is that you can write the same thought in more ways than one. (A habit in which Urdu literature often indulges.) Hearing the dialogue is, of course, doubly important as you do not want all your characters to have the same vocabulary, inflections and patterns of speech. It does need to express who they are.
MM: Please tell us about your current project(s).
RA: At the moment, I am working on a play commissioned by Kali Theatre Company, entitled From Kabul to Kunduz, and am developing a screenplay treatment of the same story for myself, with the help of a lovely mentor. Fiction is very much on the back burner at present as I am also reading scores of novels for the HWA Endeavour Ink Gold Crown 2018.2
MM: Ms. Ahmad, thank you very much.
Acknowledgements
This publication is supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Bibliography
Ahmad, Rukhsana, ed. and trans. 1991. We Sinful Women: Contemporary Urdu Feminist Poetry. London: Women’s Press.
---. 1996. The Hope Chest. London: Virago.
---. 2008. Mistaken …: Annie Besant in India. London and New York: Aurora Metro Books.
---. 2014. The Gatekeeper’s Wife and Other Stories. Lahore: ILQA Publications.
Altaf, Fatima. 1993. The One Who Did Not Ask [Dastak Naa Do]. Translated by Rukhsana Ahmad. Oxford and Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
De Beauvoir, Simone. [1949] 2015. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovaney-Chevallier. London and New York: Vintage Classics.
Mies, Maria. 2012. The Lace Makers of Narsapur. Melbourne and Geelong: Spinifex Press.
1 The Women’s Action Forum (WAF) was formed by a group of 15 women in Karachi in September 1981. It was initially established to respond to the Hudood Ordinances (part of military ruler Zia-ul-Haq’s “Islamization” process), and to promote women’s interests in Pakistan.
2 The Historical Writers’ Association’s (HWA) Gold Crown for best historical novel was won in 2018 by Ralf Rothmann for To Die in Spring, translated by Shaun Whiteside, and published by Picador.
The Aesthetics of Fragmentation:
Michelle Cahill in Conversation with Chris Ringrose
Photograph of Michelle Cahill by Nicola Bailey
Michelle Cahill has lived in the UK and Australia. Her collection of short stories, Letter to Pessoa (Cahill 2016b), won the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) Glenda Adams Award for New Writing in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Her interest in the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1885–1935) derives in part from his use of a series of masks, or “heteronyms”, to write via other selves with different lives. He is one of a number of “companion” writers, including Coetzee, Woolf and Borges, who are woven into her own work. Her novel Woolf is soon to be published with Hachette.
Michelle Cahill has received prizes and fellowships in poetry and fiction, notably the Red Room Poetry Fellowship, the Val Vallis Award, the Kingston Writing School (KWS) Hilary Mantel Short Story Prize and the Australian Book Review (ABR) Elizabeth Jolley shortlist for the story “Borges and I”. Vishvarupa (Cahill 2011) was shortlisted in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. She co-edited Contemporary Asian Australian Poets and Vagabond’s deciBels3 series of poets and is the founding editor of Mascara Literary Review. She is also a stimulating critic and theorist, whose essay “The Poetics of Subalternity” appeared in Mascara (Cahill 2012). In it, she undertakes a critique of contemporary Australian literature, which she sees “in its orientation and its networks of power and interest […] a subject [that ignores] the divisions of cultural capital and labour”.
Her poetry collection, The Herring Lass (Cahill 2016a), takes an original approach to the topic of migration, reflecting on the way animals and birds are able to survive extreme climates and resist assailants, using this to consider human global engagements and the exodus of refugees. As elsewhere in her work, women’s experience of fragmentation, exile, divorce and motherhood provides an undercurrent of meaning. In his review, the Australian poet John Kinsella saw it as “a superb and complex book, deeply intelligent, pluralistic, linguistically rich, political with a sophisticated way of seeing place and space, intense in its convictions”.
Michelle Cahill and Chris Ringrose talked in August 2018; at the time she was writing a novel as part of her Doctor of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong. A few responses have been revised in 2021, to reflect on her developing craft as a writer.
The Interviewer, Chris Ringrose, is a poet and fiction writer from Melbourne, Australia, who has lectured in literature at universities in Canada, the US and UK. He is currently Adjunct Associate Professor at Monash University. With Chandani Lokuge, he is the co-editor of this volume; his biographical notes can be found in “About