struck by the global “reach” and settings of your poetry and fiction, as well as your travel and research. A number of reviewers have remarked on this as a strength of your poetry collection The Herring Lass. How significant is the notion of “South Asian Diaspora” for you and your writing?
Michelle Cahill (MC): I don’t know if it is for me to say. Perhaps that is a question best left for critics. I don’t think of myself in terms of an identity when I am writing creatively because writing is a process of becoming, a postponement of my “self” in the material and functional sense. In many ways it is depletion, really, of those parts of myself, and who the author is, or who she becomes in that process, feels remote from me. Perhaps that is why I enjoy it; because it is liberating to be free of oneself. However, when I write an essay about race and literature, that involves performing arguments about, or against, notions such as “authenticity” and “identity”.
I can say that at least two of my published books explore the South Asian Diaspora: I’m thinking of Vishvarupa and the novel that I am currently writing, but there are also several stories in Letter to Pessoa that explore the world of the South Asian diaspora and its travel narratives through the lens of Sarita, Hemani, and Nabina. And in The Herring Lass, a book about migrations from the Global North, there are poems conversing with the South Asian diaspora, “Youth, by Josephine Jayshree Conrady” and “Mumbai by Night”. My sense of home is located in language and is contingent. I am cautious of committing myself intellectually to defined categories. Whether this is symptomatic of Buddhist conditioning or whether my thinking is sympathetic to post-structuralism, or an inherent scepticism, who knows? Does it matter? If you read “Letter to Derrida” you may find a trace of Derrida there, and perhaps a trace of his translator, Spivak. She was a young French-speaking Bengali scholar forging a singular career in the United States on a regimen of European philosophy and social theory. So, there you have another iteration of the South Asian diaspora. Actually, Spivak has inspired me quite a lot; from an early essay I wrote on “The Poetics of Subalternity” to what she describes as the “irretrievably heterogeneous” in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and my theorization of interceptionality. I don’t think of myself as a scholar but conceptual language can be useful in one’s praxis. I don’t want to have to answer to categories. My evidence has been in language and what it can do.
CR: You’re also diverse in that you write successfully in so many genres and modes—short fiction, essays, poetry, a blog and (I think) a novel. Do you see this versatility and variety as essential to your creativity? Is any one genre the most congenial to you?
MC: That’s an interesting question. Supposing that the whole notion of genre is imposed on the text; suppose it is a contrivance? Our relationship to language certainly tethers us to the world and to each other; partly it’s through language that we begin to know the real and the abstract. Of course, there are different genres: the novel can be thought of as quite distinct from a collection of short stories, or from a collection of poems. My process relies on concentration, being attentive to what each piece of work requires: whether a poem, a short story, a novel, or whether it is an essay. I like to enter the process fluidly, without excessive preparation; I like to improvise. But with a novel, it helps to have a sure sense of what you want to do. There was a time when I believed that anything is possible in language. Writing enables possibility and the more one writes, the more skilful one becomes. I think of writing in a technical way; when I write I am like a gymnast; over time my language develops strength, flexibility, balance, so that it can perform with grace, with speed and precision so that it can fly, dance and jump. Poetry is a powerful form but the reception afforded to some poetry is problematic; deeply so; there are distortions. This matters because we draw from the world of poetry to write new poems. Fiction is the most technically demanding genre and, I think, also the most satisfying because of its craft and scope. I’ve always loved prose writing but that is different to a novel. I think a novel can be transformative in a way that a book of poems can’t be; even though poetry can be very striking, and necessary.
CR: In your essay “The Colour of the Dream”, you are severely critical of aspects of Australian literary culture and its stultifying “whiteness”. Do you see yourself as an Australian writer? or as a global one, or as something else that won’t be reduced to that kind of labelling?
MC: Thank you for reading the essay. I think there is insufficient analysis of trauma, and what that does to our writing; how it morphs for better or worse. Some degree of trauma deepens our understanding, but too much can mutilate our work or silence us. That’s why self-care matters. That essay was written during a stage of my career, having spent ten years waiting for and working towards a break through with my fiction. It was only after that break though that I realized the extent to which writers of colour are being filtered, curated and mediated. Very few of us can even find a good literary publisher or agent. We have to achieve something extraordinary. The late Candy Royalle wrote in one of her performance poems: “We search for truth but we’re forced to jump through mainstream hoops and loops, daily”. I think the process of fighting those systems can have adverse effects.
Critics please themselves and sometimes exploit the hermeneutic privilege. Some have no qualms about overwriting me, but when you look at the history of how the western canon sustains its authority you understand that it is not simply individual critics who are positioning us, it is the “his-story” of erasures, reductions, that goes back centuries, how those marginalized by hybridity or class are written over by those with more agency. This can happen at the administrative level of the industry or the editorial level. How minority narratives are framed by the canon-makers mediates those stories and becomes equally, sometimes more powerful than the stories themselves. So, agency is very much located in theoretical and industry frames.
Ultimately, however, this is not my problem. I usually work on more than one project and I have found that writing criticism, for the present, is a necessary part of my work. Fiction is demanding and also immensely pleasurable. I try to just focus on my work, on my writing. It’s very demanding to give oneself to writing and to develop a manuscript. I am not receiving much of an income these days so that is also a challenge.
CR: I wondered whether, in that essay “The Colour of the Dream”, you are a bit hard on a review of Maxine Beneba Clarke’s collection of stories Foreign Soil? You say that “Wright’s verdict [on the book] hinges on a single word. She pegs Foreign Soil as ‘flawed’”. It’s just that I remember thinking that was a perceptive and enthusiastic review, even though it expressed certain reservations.
MC: “Flawed” is a conspicuous description for Foreign Soil given the anti-immigration rhetoric and the White Australia Policy. Also, to be fair to the context of my essay, “The Colour of the Dream” is about gatekeeping and policing Australia’s cultural borders, the stereotyping of the refugee narrative contrasted with a personal experience of travelling to Indonesia in 2012 and visiting the Belawan Detention Centre. I had spent several days visiting refugees from Afghanistan and Sri Lanka who were being housed outside detention.
Underpinning all racism is the notion that others are “flawed”. Structural racism is not simply an abstract jargon. It is about restricted rates of inclusion in immigration, in industry, within the literary workplace, and in academia. At a micro level it is transacted through seemingly neutral discourse: conversations, reviews, articles, reports. There is an accumulation of archival and administrational subtexts, paratexts, errata and erasures that accrue to devalue the narrative legitimacy of those who are marginalized and to delimit how they can move across narrative subjects and genres. What is difficult to appreciate is that filters are not always intentional;