recognize the voice of structural racism? We have to record these things: the reductions, the erasures, the absences, which are often minor and anecdotal but which are sufficient to position us hierarchically and to disqualify us. Colonialism did not simply end with independence or with equal rights to citizenship. These spaces are being negotiated through a range of discourses, formal and informal, macro and micro. They are deeply rooted in our legal frameworks which are inherently racist and do not acknowledge the sovereignty of First Nations people in Australia. Our immigration laws enforced racial aspects until 1973. Now we are witnessing a revival of racist rhetoric concerning immigration and Islamophobia with Malcolm Turnbull’s paranoia about African gangs, with Fraser Anning’s “Final Solution” Senate speech, with the treatment of refugees on Manus Island and Nauru, and with Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party.
Analysing literary criticism may require us to adjust our focus to consider historical and legal frameworks, but master narratives and mainstream frames are less flexible.
CR: “Mumbai by Night” is an interesting example of your treatment of South Asia, because the title suggests a tourist trip, and there is that sense of the exotic in the “miasma of smog over the Dharavi slums, the marsh / redevelopment, the Indiabulls and Oberoi towers”. You even say you “catch [your] flight all the way back to oblivion until the next stop-over” and that your friend Sharlene to whom the poem is dedicated might just see you as a “foreigner [she’s] obliged to entertain”. Yet you’re not really (or quite) a “foreigner” in that environment …
MC: It’s a poem that expresses the disconnection that happens with diaspora. The poem is dedicated to my cousin, Sharlene, and it mourns the loss of family and time. The meeting of poet and cousin; or as you have read it, poet and friend, is so transitional and fragmented that it can be misread, and must be contained in the economy of verse, something the speaker regrets and resists by the telling of an ordinary experience: sharing a meal, going out to a club and dancing, having fun, packing, unpacking, falling short on what she can offer and how little she can take away. These are the conditions of diaspora; it doesn’t explore the reasons for leaving, but it tries to embody a way of not forgetting.
CR: I like the way in which you refrain from being “authoritative” about the city, while still giving a vivid impression of it that is more than that of a tourist. As with some of the stories in Letter to Pessoa, it conjures the experience of visiting, belonging, and not belonging … you are drawn to the way Pessoa used a series of masks, or “heteronyms”, to write via other selves with different lives. You write as Sarita (who also appears elsewhere), Jo, Nabina and Luke, as well as a number of others. Can you reflect on that writing process?
MC: Well, my heteronyms are not typical, but writing is an act of masking. The diaspora life splices narrative time and place, bumping my personas one into the other. Unlike Ricardo Reiss or Alvaro de Campo they do not have accompanying biographies or signatures and they are often narrated in the third person. And some of the authors whom I address become another aspect of themselves: Pessoa, Coetzee, Woolf, Nabokov, Borges, with resonances with the real persona. Do they become heteronyms (or homonyms) of themselves? I like the expansiveness of fiction and its suppleness, but no two writing processes are the same. It is organic for me: contradictory, fluid and broken, as time is. It is only structure that creates the appearance of being whole. That kind of architecturally stable narrative can be beautiful to read, particularly when done masterfully, and I deeply enjoy reading those stories; but is that my story? Is that my task?
I think that the diaspora narrative is interrupted and the minority narrative is fragmented. How can it be represented as a whole, without losing its contingencies, without being absorbed into larger stories that flatten its vulnerability, its gaps? Why are we so focussed on positive representations? Why are we afraid of the erasures in history, in coloniality, the silences? How can we find a language and a structure for the experiences that we, those of us who have been colonized and have suffered the loss of family, of language, of community, of culture, know best?
CR: Can we talk about your latest poetry collection, The Herring Lass? Tell us about the striking Winslow Homer painting of the same title that features on the cover—and provides the subject for one of the 48 poems.
MC: I didn’t want to use the Scottish images, as they are stereotyped. I admire Homer’s conjuring of the weather, the woman’s stubby hands and muscular arms in the painting, the way the net is draped over her shoulder. She is wearing ordinary working shoes, yet she is gazing outwards.
CR: “The Herring Lass” poem itself refers to “shoals of migrant herring” that provide the woman’s tough livelihood. Would it be fair to say that the collection as a whole is a meditation on the important and worldwide phenomenon of migration—forced as in “Harbour”, or occupational as in the title poem? Did you always have that overall design in mind, or is it the cumulative outcome of your artistic and political interests?
MC: I had the idea to write from the experience of northern migrations as I spent ten years living in the northern hemisphere. I thought this might be something of interest also for Australian readers, since as a nation, European invasion and settlement began with these migrations. I wanted to explore the brutality of territory and frontiers.
It seems to me that exploitation of labour and environmental impacts of migration are disturbing contemporary problems that remain unresolved. So, the fishing and sealing industry poems in “The Herring Lass”, “Bear”, “Day of a Seal”, “Pirogue”, and the refugee experience in “Interlude” cast historical shadows on situations like extinctions, corporate piracy, and the warehousing of refugees.
CR: I admire the way you blend different animal voices into the collection: the seal and the thylacine, for example. There is also the example of the journeying cat in the story “Biscuit” from Letter to Pessoa. Do those personae allow you to try out new things?
MC: In many of the animal poems, I wanted to write about violence. I was going through divorce at the time and I went through an intense, almost hallucinatory period of writing during which memories came harrowingly back to me, of male violence, sexual violence, domestic violence and the human exploitation of animals and their homelands; how it has endangered them.
To experiment with form in fiction is enjoyable and it can extend my skills. When I wrote “Biscuit” it was thrilling; I couldn’t wait to get back to the story when I was interrupted by housework or having coffee with a friend. It was also exhausting. Of course, sometimes it doesn’t work; at other times the result seems to exceed what I expect of myself. I don’t like to address subjectivity directly. I am not confessional as a poet. In fiction, I suppose I integrate figurative elements with plot structure and I am interested in prose writing that does this. I like to texture the writing; but it’s not really intentional.
CR: That’s interesting. I did feel, as I read “Biscuit”, that the story had a special significance for you. Do you want to say a little more about it?
MC: Well, it is partly autofictional, using elements of magic realism, and poetic tropes. The cat’s fantastical journey from Africa to England, with its coincidences and exigencies, is a way of telling a complex history of migration, without having to over-explain, digress or politicize the storytelling act of a minority experience. I use a simple, open-ended and sometimes ironic style for the story, allowing the reader to consider and to feel a range of possibilities and outcomes from the migration experience. It extends the limited migrant narrative we hear of through media reports or public talks. Hopefully, the reader can reflect through the cat’s perspective more freely about subjects such as home, coloniality, belonging and citizenship. But if I were to write in a realist mode about my early life journeys, the truth might be compromised by memory, the need to protect others, by the demands that conventional storytelling places on gaps, disruptions and conflicted emotions which result from a traumatized landscape. So, for me, it was a process of reinventing that landscape as playful, energetic and imaginatively reconstituted.