Australian School Library Association > Publications > Commentary Vol 18 Issue 1 2004

Literature, transformation and unease (Volume 18 Issue 1, 2004)

Eva Sallis

Eva Sallis is a writer. Novels include Hiam (winner of Vogel and the Dobbie Literary awards), The city of sealions (2002) and Mahjar (2003). Literary criticism includes a book on the Arabian Nights. She has co-edited several anthologies, most recently Dark Dreams. She travels regularly to the Middle East. She is current president of Australians Against Racism.

(The views expressed in articles are those of the author(s) concerned and do not necessarily represent the views of ASLA.)

Literature is profoundly transforming. At first, this statement seems so true that it is hardly worth saying. We all know that literature puts the real, the invented and imagined into words, and this is an obvious transformation. Literature takes the words of men and women made in a moment, or imagined to have been made in a moment, and presents them in a form that has allows them to speak, a form with the capacity to speak uncountable times, renewed with each reading and with each reader. Literature transforms the evanescent into the durable, the forgotten moment into the memorable, the lost-in-time to the revisitable, and it does all this in a form very different from its sources, whether those sources are in the invention and imagination of the author, or in his or her direct experience.

Meaning from chaos

Transformation does not involve merely making the equivalent of something in a different form. Transformation adds something new to what is made, just as it loses elements of what was experienced. In the end, looking at a work of art, there is a huge gulf between the bundle of experiences the author used as the raw material for a story, and what that story, standing independent from the author as a work of art, has to say. A story written is both much less than the same story lived or imagined, and much more. A story makes form and meaning where perhaps there was chaos. And a story leaves much to a reader’s imagination. It takes fewer words to construct the impressions necessary to tell a story than it would to record faithfully every experience that would go into living that story, and this immediately suggests another dimension to the way in which literature is transforming. Reading literature is transforming. The individual reader does not receive the whole story, only those sketches in words that are necessary to evoke the story, to have the reader imagine it for him or herself. The story comes into being in the mind of the reader – it cannot be a story just in the black marks on the page. The story encounters the reader in all his or her uniqueness and, through the shared medium of a known language, provokes that reader to respond. The reader’s prejudices, knowledge, fears and hopes all come into play in the meaning he or she makes from the marks on the page. The reader, even if feeling angered by the story, is changed in the act of reading it – and this too is transformation.

Literature is a profound kind of translation. Due to these transformations of the material and the reader, literature can bring to the reader what he or she knows little or nothing about, and can bring to the reader what he or she would rather not know or face. Through literature, a reader might experience and be moved by something that was unknown, disregarded, or even feared and condemned. All writers know this. In some cases, this may have influenced them to become writers. When there are changes in any country where, on one hand, people are being hurt and, on the other hand, people ignore or are blind to that hurt, you will find that writers and artists of all kinds are driven to create the works that provoke encounters that provoke thought and engagement for readers. This is, I think, one of the primary tasks of a writer. I’ll try to explain this compulsion.

Collision course

In the last few years I have sought the characters, situations, landscapes, metaphors and interactions that will make the full humanity of individuals real and present to readers. My experiences in the Middle East and among Australians whose parents came from the Middle East have given me a massive burden of pressure to write. People ask why I write about Arab people, as if it is an exotic thing to do. I answer that this is not a matter of choice. My characters present themselves to me demanding to be written about. The only explanation I have is that I carry with me this huge burden of experiences that runs counter to the prevailing attitudes in Australia, and in that collision between what I know and the conflicting information that I hear and see, I am driven to write. When I hear from refugee families about what they saw and felt in the journey to Australia, the humiliation they felt in detention, the hopes they have now on temporary protection visas, and then I repeatedly hear and read the term ‘illegal’ and the definition ‘terrorist’, then I feel not only that I have to find a means to communicate what I know in art, I also feel that it is my calling – a compulsion. The war compelled me. Australia waged proactive war, the worst war crime, against Iraq. Many Australians believe that liberating Iraqis from a terrible regime is a justification, but I can see and hear clearly how little the deaths of Iraqis mean in Australia and how far we are from recognising their full humanity in the way that we recognise our own. Amid such disequilibrium, I am, again, compelled to write. I am not alone. Richard Flanagan, Linda Jaivin, Tom Shapcott, Tom Kenneally, Sandy McCutcheon and Peter Mares are just a few of the writers who are working under the same pressure from this disequilibrium in our society. David Malouf, John Kinsella, Geraldine Brooks, Helen Garner and many others have sought means to protest and help work towards change.

Why do writers get involved? And why do they almost invariably do more than write? I can answer for myself, but I think this will be true for many. Dehumanising a religious and racial group is a very serious matter, and I think everyone knows, in one form or another, that this is what is going on. I cannot accept it. I feel daily unease from it and can find no peace. And I can answer for myself that I do more than just write for two reasons. Firstly, writing a book takes me, on average, four years, and I feel that we must respond to what is happening in Australia more quickly than that. Secondly, my ego is massively caught up in the making of my books––I am not sufficiently independent from them. I co-founded Australians Against Racism (AAR) in 2001 after the sinking of Sievx, an asylum-seeker boat making its way to Australia. Three hundred and fifty-three people drowned. This tragedy, and the lack of reaction to it in Australia, made me feel I had to do more than make art.

Open and positive

AAR is an organisation that runs projects in the arts and in the media. I was driven to find means not of protest, or of activism, but of transformation, and this meant having people encounter, and engage, and read and write, and make up their own minds. Australia is refugees! Our second major project was a nationwide schools competition in 2002. It harnessed all the transforming possibilities of creativity, of making literature. We asked children to find someone who had come to Australia as a refugee, interview them, and, in whatever form they liked, write their story and submit it for the competition. My first experience in setting this up was how hungry many Australians were for something so open and positive. All the prize monies, which were considerable, were donated in a matter of two or so months after the launch of the project in February. This even included a trip for the senior winner to the United Nations in Geneva, sponsored by Margaret Reynolds, president of the United Nations Association of Australia. Education unions and individuals made extraordinary donations and support. The judges––Tom Shapcott, Helen Garner and Phillip Adams––donated their time and skills, as did the team of people who co-ordinated, disseminated, sorted, edited, organised the prize presentation event in Melbourne, and produced the booklet in which we published the winning stories. I had no hate mail for the project.

The project allowed children and young adults to make their own discoveries, and write about them, transform them, and offer the transformation to others in art. The stories were stunning. The core team––Jenni Devereaux, Sonja Dechian, Heather Millar and I––read through these piles and piles of stories, openly weeping. Writing these stories was an amazing experience for the authors. Many wrote of encounters that challenged their own preconceptions and the views presented in the media, and then, feeling the pressure of the same disequilibrium I feel, wrote startling, revelatory stories. Many others wrote their own or their parents’ stories, responding, as I had hoped, to the importance the competition attached to a refugee’s story.

In the end there were nine winners and 60 runners-up. At least 100 more stories were publishable. We had to make a book, so Heather, Sonja and I edited Dark Dreams: Australian refugee stories by young writers aged 11-20 years, in which 37 of these stories were published. And this, it seems to me, is the final act of the transformation of these stories into art, for these young writers’ provoking, shocking, challenging, beautiful, hopeful, despairing work is out there for their peers, their parents, and general readers to bring to life in the act of reading. And I felt that I had really done something in response to the unease I feel in Australia. We all did. The unease did not go away.

Another schools project

This year, while writing the novel that is taking me four years to write, and writing the script for a film documentary on Iraq, AAR will run another schools project. It is called There is no place like home. We will ask children and young adults to find someone who was either taken or forced from their original home and who had to rebuild a life among strangers, interview them, and write their story. We are encouraging the writers to seek out Indigenous and refugee stories. We are hoping for encounters, discoveries and stories that will help transform Australia that little bit more. And we are hoping to edit a book from the stories that will be like no other. Already Geraldine Brooks and Nicholas Jose have volunteered their time as judges. Already prize monies are being donated and skilled volunteers are designing the flyers. There is no place like home will absorb much of my time and energy in 2004. Finishing the novel The Marsh Birds (which has a sad ending), and the documentary Saddam’s wives will take up all the rest. In the strange cross-currents we are experiencing now in Australia and the world, I feel that I will be doing my job as a writer.