Distant Warriors
http://indi.ca/2005/07/book-review-distant-warriors/
http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/TIIKMConferences-2115711-sri-lanka-imagined-homeland/
In the Same Boat
http://transcurrents.com/tc/2010/09/bedevil_in_the_same_boat_by_ch.html
Asylum
Authors’ pick 23: Sharon Rundle
Asylum, by Channa Wickremesekera
A message for everyone on multi-culturalism
– Yasmine Gooneratne, Sunday Times , Sri Lanka, 29.06.14
The peace of a quiet Melbourne suburb in which Rustum Khan, his wife Mehri, and their two teenage children Khalid and Aisha live quiet, ordinary lives is abruptly shattered one bright Friday morning by the arrival on their doorstep of an unexpected and unwelcome visitor. The Khans are normally a hospitable family, and have some acquaintances among their Australian neighbours, but this is different. The intruder is a stranger, instantly recognizable as the criminal whose image has just appeared on a TV newsbreak: a boy , ‘tall dirty blond hair, the face skinny, kinda malnourished, lots of freckles’, who has made the news by breaking out of a juvenile detention centre in Victoria, shooting a guard, and evading capture. He is now ‘on the run’, and is supposed to be dangerous. As, indeed, he is, for in his hand is a gun.
This description is given us by Khalid Khan, the narrator of this delightful book, and it is through Khalid’s intelligence and observant eye that the reader registers the dramatic events which follow the runaway’s appearance. By the end of the day, the Khans have lost their TV and computer monitor (shattered by gunshots) and their mobile phones (which have been flung into the fire): ‘No TV, no telephone, no Internet and no texting, and hopefully nobody will know he is here pointing his gun at us’. Their sofa is in shreds. What they have not lost is their dignity, their sense of humour, their courage or their compassion. As their front and backyards fill with policemen armed to the teeth and a police helicopter patrols their roof-top, good sense asserts itself. Mehri, an orthodox Muslim who wears traditional hijab and niqab, speaks her home language of Dari when everyone around her (including her family) speaks English, whose preferred domain is her kitchen, and whose strict religious principles guide her in all situations including this one, sees to it that the runaway is given food and drink, and insists that the family will on no account hand him over to the police.
“We can’t hand him in,” she says. “It’s not right.”
I look at mum in disbelief. Is she crazy? I mean, the little prick comes into our house, holds us at gunpoint, threatens her and shoots up our TV, computer and sofa and throws our mobiles in the fire and she thinks we shouldn’t hand him over!
But it’s Aisha who puts it into words. “Are you crazy?” she asks, in Dari. “After all he has done?”
But mum is unmoved. It takes a lot more than an indignant son and daughter to move her. Like a cowering, beaten kid, for instance.
“Look at him,” she says. “He is helpless. We can’t hand him to the police. He depends on us.”
Unexpectedly, the Khan family and their ‘guest’ find common ground. To start with, in a coincidence of names: the Australian Russell (or ‘Rusty’, as the gun-toting visitor calls himself) has never heard of Allah, yet discovers that his reluctant host, an Afghan named Rustum, is also known to friends and associates as Rusty. The Afghan’s son and daughter, distanced from Russell by their skin-colour and clothing, share his devotion to football:
“Which footy team you go for?”
“Essendon.”
“Oh, really?” I say. “So does my sister.”
Rusty looks at Aisha over his shoulder. He seems interested in her for the first time. The power of footy.
“That’s cool,” he says. “Who is your fave player?” he asks her.
Aisha glances in the direction of the kitchen to see if mum is watching. Dad is watching her but she knows that the power of mum is greater than the power of Dad and footy put together. Confident that mum is not looking, she answers.
“Howlett.”
“Yeah, he is good,” Rusty agrees, and returns to his food. “Aisha!” cries mum from the kitchen.
“Howlett is shit.” I have to say that. For the sake of my team, even though I think Howlett is good.
“Howlett is better than all of Carlton shits put together,” Rusty sneers through a mouthful of rice. I look at Aisha, and she is rapt.
“Aisha!” yells mum. She is obviously not happy about Aisha getting too cosy with Rusty and Howlett. Mum wouldn’t know Howlett from Harry but she knows we are talking about footy players and that footy players are young men running around in skimpy shorts. Not the kind of thing a Muslim girl should get excited about, at least not in her presence.
Considerations of football apart, Rusty has created a moral dilemma for the little family. It should be easy to call the cops in, and surrender the runaway. The Khans are certainly tempted to do so. Their captive obviously expects that they will, and finds it hard to understand why they do not. The answer to the question is to be found in Verse 6, Chapter 9 of the Holy Koran, a well-thumbed copy of which lies on the dining-room table of this Muslim family, but of which young Russell, of course, has never heard:
If one amongst the pagans ask thee for asylum, grant it to him so that he may hear the word of Allah; and then escort him to where he can be secure.
That is because they are men without knowledge.
Slowly, but surely, the balance shifts, its movement directed chiefly by Khalid’s niquab-wearing mother who stands firmly by her religious principles (‘the power of mum”, says Khalid), by Russell, who discovers that this “f—– weird” family of foreigners care deeply, as all right-thinking Aussies should, about the football results, and by Khalid himself, who feels a sneaking admiration for the young man who can still show fight when all the cards seem to be stacked against him.
The end of the book, when it comes, packs a surprise which I will not spoil by revealing it here. I would only urge readers to get several copies of Asylum for themselves and their friends – it has a message for everyone who can read and think beyond the confines of their own limited conditioning, and understand (as Russell did, and Khalid eventually does) the value of a multi-cultural experience.
Asylum and Tracks
Mediating literary borders: Sri Lankan writing in Australia
– by Asociate Professor Chandani Lokuge, Monash University in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 08 December 2016 (published online)
Abstract
The current Australian political and news-media agenda is very much about “outside” views, tending to treat migrants – including refugees and asylum seekers, for example – as one category of “others” devoid of race, culture or psychological specificities. A compelling aspect of literature’s power is that it transforms such encompassing public issues into humanist stories whose affective and cognitive resonances transcend the limits of political propaganda. It can communicate transculturally, establishing intimate, interpersonal and intercommunal conversations across time and space. Framed by theories of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism in the contemporary Australian context, this article looks at the recent work of two Sri Lankan-born Australian novelists – Michelle de Kretser and Channa Wickremesekera, who write about migrants, refugees and asylum seekers – with the aim of exploring their alternative understanding of multiculturalism in Australia.
Keywords: Sri Lankan Australian literature, diaspora, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, Michelle de Kretser, Channa Wickremesekera
The challenge [ … ] is to take minds and hearts formed over the long millennia of living in local troops and equip them with ideas and institutions that will allow us to live together as the global tribe we have become. (Appiah 2006 Antor, Heinz. 2010. “The Ethnics of a Critical Cosmopolitanism for the Twenty-First Century.” In Locating Transnational Ideals, edited by Goebel Walter and Saskia Schabio, 48–62. New York: Routledge., xv)
Australia is “home” to over 150 ethnic minorities. However, although Australian public Annandale: Pluto.) observes in his critique of governmental multiculturalism in White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, on an “internal orientalism”. Evolving from the concept of European orientalism as theorized by culture is becoming less Anglocentric and more cosmopolitan with the acceleration of migrant, refugee and asylum flows in recent years, monoculturalism continues to flourish, inciting racism leading to hostility and violence. This article is set at this controversial juncture of Australian multiculturalism.As is commonly understood, multicultural societies are those that “harbor different cultural, racial or ethnic communities who live together in a common polity” (Ang 2014 Ang, Ien. 2014. “Beyond Unity in Diversity: Cosmopolitanizing Identities in a Globalizing World”. In Diogenes 60 (1): 10–20.[CrossRef], [Web of Science ®], 14). However, in Australia, the term “multiculturalism” raises contested debate because the “common polity” – the nation state – is based, as Australian anthropologist Hage (1998 Hage, Ghassan. 1998. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Edward Said, it invests in the self-appointed white “masters of the national space” with the power to decide “who stays in and who ought to be kept out”, as well as to reduce the ethnic “other” into passive “objects to be governed” (Hage 1998 Hage, Ghassan. 1998. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Annandale: Pluto., 16–17). Admittedly, with the final demolition of the White Australia Policy in 1973, successive Australian governments have assiduously played up the multicultural slogan, promoting various strategies that are meant to provide, as Australia’s Racial Discrimination Commissioners continue to assert, “a strong structural foundation for tackling racism in Australia at a national level” (Szoke 2012 Szoke, Helen. 2012. “Racism Exists in Australia – Are We Doing Enough to Address It?” Address to Queensland University of Technology, February 16. Australian Human Rights Commission. https://www.humanrights.gov.au/news/speeches/racism-exists-australia-are-we-doing-enough-address-it, 4; Soutphommasane 2016 Soutphommasane, Tim. 2016. “Is Australia a Racist Country? On the State of our Race Relations.” Address to the Crescent Institute, Brisbane, April 7. http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2016/04/08/4439686.htm). Among them is the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act (RDA), that aims to “prohibit discrimination against people on the basis of their race, colour, or national or ethnic origin (Szoke 2012 Szoke, Helen. 2012. “Racism Exists in Australia – Are We Doing Enough to Address It?” Address to Queensland University of Technology, February 16. Australian Human Rights Commission. https://www.humanrights.gov.au/news/speeches/racism-exists-australia-are-we-doing-enough-address-it, 4). However, white racism is strongly supported by a substantial part of the voting community, as is evidenced in the 2016 federal parliamentary elections at which the former Member of Parliament Pauline Hanson was elected to the Senate along with three members of her One Nation party on the strength of the party’s extreme anti-Aboriginal anti-Muslim/Asian ideologies. In addition, public uprisings instigated by racism continue to occur on a regular basis throughout Australia, particularly in the migrant stronghold states of Victoria and New South Wales (Clarke 2016 Carter, Paul. 1992. “Lines of Communication: Meaning in the Migrant Environment.” In Striking Chords: Multicultural Literary Interpretations, edited by Gunew Sneja and Kateryna Longley, 9–18. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.; Lopez 2005 Lopez, Mark. 2005. “Reflection on the State of Australian Multiculturalism and the Emerging Multicultural Debate in Australia 2005.” People and Place 13 (3): 33–40.; Szoke 2012 Szoke, Helen. 2012. “Racism Exists in Australia – Are We Doing Enough to Address It?” Address to Queensland University of Technology, February 16. Australian Human Rights Commission. https://www.humanrights.gov.au/news/speeches/racism-exists-australia-are-we-doing-enough-address-it; Soutphommasane 2016 Soutphommasane, Tim. 2016. “Is Australia a Racist Country? On the State of our Race Relations.” Address to the Crescent Institute, Brisbane, April 7. http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2016/04/08/4439686.htm).
Cosmopolitanism, as the concept is applied in this article, is a challenge that, as Ghanaian-American philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has propounded, relies on the practice of entwined ideals of “universal concerns and respect for legitimate difference” (2006 Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: Norton., xv). As Appiah asserts,
[w]e have an obligation to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind [ … ]. [W]e take seriously the values not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in what lends them significance. (xv)
Narrowing it down in terms of migration, cosmopolitanism would be about our maintaining ancestral and cultural roots, while simultaneously being part of the larger host community. Aware of the contentious debates around it, I use the term “cosmopolitanism” with caution (see, for example, Ang 2010 Ang, Ien. 2010. “Between Nationalism and Transnationalism: Multiculturalism in a Globalising World.” In Institute of Culture and Society Occasional Paper Series 1 (1), edited by David Rowe and Reena Dobson, 1–14. Sydney: Institute for Culture and Society. University of Western Sydney.; Ashcroft 2009 Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: Norton., 13; Werbner 2006 Watkins, Alexandra. 2016. “The Diasporic Slide: Representations of Second Generational Diasporas in Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies (1991) and Chandani Lokugé’s If the Moon Smiled (2000) and Softly, As I Leave You (2011).” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 52 (5): 577–590.). It is conceptualized in this article as a functioning philosophy that inspires any individual, from a global traveller/tourist to a refugee/subaltern, “to enter something larger than their immediate cultures” through sincere curiosity about and empathetic understanding of cultural difference (Appiah xviii; see also Malcolmson 1998 Malcolmson, Scott L. 1998. “The Varieties of Cosmopolitan Experience.” In Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, edited by Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, 233–245. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press., 240; Giffard-Foret 2016 Giffard-Foret, Paul. 2016. “‘The Root of all Evil’? Transnational Cosmopolitanism in the Fiction of Dewi Anggraeni, Simone Lazaroo and Merlind Bobis.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 52 (5): 591–605.). Considered in this way, cosmopolitanism challenges monocultural politics of assimilation that encourage, as Carter (2006 Carter David. 2006. Dispossession, Dreams and Diversity: Issues in Australian Studies. French Forest: Pearson Education.) has discussed, “alienation and separatism among migrant groups” in Australia (338). Rather, it embraces hospitable and open-minded transcultural conversation between multicultures without the imposition of boundaries or centre–periphery politics (Ang 2010 Ang, Ien. 2010. “Between Nationalism and Transnationalism: Multiculturalism in a Globalising World.” In Institute of Culture and Society Occasional Paper Series 1 (1), edited by David Rowe and Reena Dobson, 1–14. Sydney: Institute for Culture and Society. University of Western Sydney., 48).
As we are aware, literary fiction often plays a politically and culturally activist role; it has the power to interrogate the templates of received wisdoms and offer fresh new perspectives that may enlighten and transform us. Another of its compelling powers is that it transfigures encompassing public issues into humanist stories, whose emotive and cognitive resonances transcend the limits of political and media propaganda to communicate cross-culturally, establishing intimate, interpersonal and intercommunal relationships across time and space (Stearns 1995 Stearns, Peter. 1995. “Emotion.” In Discursive Psychology in Practice, edited by Rom Harré and Peter Stearns, 37–54. London: Sage.). This article examines the intermediary role that Sri Lankan Australian fiction assumes in developing intercultural conversations in Australia as a conduit into national harmony. I have selected three recent novels as case studies: Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel (2013 De Kretser, Michelle. 2013. Questions of Travel. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.) first published in 2012, and Channa Wickremesekera’s Asylum (2015 Wickremesekera, Channa. [2014] 2015. Asylum. 2nd ed. Armidale, NSW: Palavar, an imprint of Ethica.), first published in 2014, and Tracks (2015 Wickremesekera, Channa. 2015. Tracks. Self-published. https://www.amazon.com/TRACKS-Channa-Wickremesekera-ebook/dp/B01ER5C2VS#nav-subnav).
Michelle de Kretser and Channa Wickremesekera are Sri Lankan-born Australians. A “Burgher” descendent of Dutch settlers in Sri Lanka, de Kretser migrated to Australia in 1972 facilitated by the White Australia Policy, just after the youth insurrection instigated by the Janatha Vimukti Peramuna (JVP) that commenced in Sri Lanka in 1971. A Sinhalese, Wickremesekera migrated in 1990 when Sri Lanka was wracked by the war between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The authors are the products of these histories, as well as of evolving contemporary Australian migrant realities. At the intersection of social activism and psychological realism, their fiction empathizes with characters damaged or alienated, marginalized or inconsequential – the ever-increasing cohort of refugees and asylum seekers, families, professionals and students. This article will now discuss the ways in which the authors challenge Australia’s malfunctioning multiculturalism with humanist alternatives leading to constructive cosmopolitan cultural interchange.
Michelle de Kretser, Questions of Travel
Questions of Travel (De Kretser 2013 De Kretser, Michelle. 2013. Questions of Travel. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.) tracks two 21st-century travellers from different parts of the world. My focus is on the university academic Ravi Mendis, whose story commences in Sri Lanka and continues into Australia. A substantial section of the novel that is set in Sri Lanka prepares us for Ravi’s exit from there to Australia. In it, De Kretser envisions the disillusioning effect on Ravi of the fractious racial and communal tensions that have crippled the country. When his wife, employed in a non-governmental organization (NGO) devoted to international aid, speaks out of turn, “against the terror of the terrorist and the terror of the state” (De Kretser 2013 De Kretser, Michelle. 2013. Questions of Travel. Sydney: Allen and Unwin., 181), she and their little son are brutally murdered. Finally, in fear of being persecuted by the undetected assassins, Ravi escapes to Sydney on a bridging visa to seek asylum in Australia.
If the novel lacks depth of engagement with the cultural specificities of one or the other of Sri Lanka’s diverse cultures (as explored by other Sri Lankan diasporic novelists, such as Ratjith Savanadasa in Ruins [2016] or Michael Ondaatje in Anil’s Ghost [2000]), by immersing us unflinchingly in the minutiae of Ravi’s life it provides us with the means better to understand how a country can be so crippled by internal politics that it neglects the well-being of its inhabitants. In addition, Ravi is highly individualized by De Kretser as an introvert who is also unable to claim support from any one culture or religion in a time of crisis due to his diffused Burgher-Sinhalese, Christian-Buddhist mixed race/religion parentage. Trapped in Sri Lanka’s political agenda as much as by his own introverted nature, Ravi drifts existentially in a spatial vacuum, disengaged from everyone, exemplifying, in general terms, the “diasporic unhoused character” (Ashcroft 2009 Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: Norton., 18) even within the confines of his own home and country, defined by Said (2003 Said, Edward. 2003. Freud and the Non-Europeans. London: Freud Museum.) as “the wandering, unresolved, cosmopolitan consciousness of someone who is both inside and outside his or her community” (53). Not unexpectedly, his great hope is embedded not in humanity but in its abstraction – the wave of new technology that he encounters through his involvement with the university website: the “digital revolution” (De Kretser 2013 De Kretser, Michelle. 2013. Questions of Travel. Sydney: Allen and Unwin., 101) that, with the flight of speed, gave him the power of undoing the fixedness of place into the “everywhere and nowhere” (137) of global travel. It has the effect of effectively shutting him out from interpersonal conversation and intercommunal exchange.
De Kretser perceives several impediments to Ravi’s “homing” in Australia, and through her account of this process censures what she perceives as the facade of Australian multiculturalism. Narrowing her representation down to the individual experience of Ravi, she creates empathy for the racialized migrant whose psychological growth is deadened by the formidable force of white Australian hostility. Ravi’s professional personality is diminished by his first job in Sydney as a lowly kitchen hand in a care facility for elderly people. Added to this, at this place of work and in the wider community, Ravi is often stereotyped from the standpoint of white cultural superiority. Alongside an Ethiopian colleague, he is insultingly colour-coded by an inmate at the care facility: “Black shits [ … ] don’t you dare put your black hands on me! I’m warning you!” (De Kretser 2013 De Kretser, Michelle. 2013. Questions of Travel. Sydney: Allen and Unwin., 291). Contrary to the stereotypical category of Sri Lankan refugees and asylum seekers – the “boat people” from the subaltern classes – Ravi is an educated middle-class Sinhalese, speaks fluent English, lives free of a detention centre, is a wage earner and wears expensive Reeboks. The employees at the care facility are confused about his “refugee” status:
He was a nice guy but not the right kind of person; could it be that he was not the right kind of refugee? His co-workers had welcomed him with little bouquets of compassion. But the films that were screening in their minds had shown long dangerous journeys and cyclone wire. [ … H]is colleagues had expected to hear of suffering. (473)
In addition, Ravi is unable to evoke the formulaic response that the stereotypical refugee encounters in Australia. Rather, he is censored by acquaintances as a “queue jumper”, a status that, De Kretser ironically observes, is unacceptable in an Australia that offers a “fair go for everyone” (291). Although it is little more than a passing reference in the novel, the negative response of Australians to this “irregular” entry into Australia by racially differentiated asylum seekers, however desperate their reasons for it, exemplifies Australia’s centre/periphery relationship. Ghassan Hage sees queue jumping as a threat to the status quo of white Australian supremacy. In his view, it demonstrates the dangerous obstruction by the “ethnic other” of “the order imposed by the national will for entering the national body” (1998 Hage, Ghassan. 1998. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Annandale: Pluto., 113).
There are several other obstructions to a migrant’s psychological settling in Australia. De Kretser is right to show that settling into a new country is a two-way street. In Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society, Hage raises the provocative question, “Can migrants be racist?” Drawing support from a number of examples, he concludes that the migrant’s own mindset can adversely affect the processes of cosmopolitanism as much as the host culture’s negative response to the migrant (Hage 2003 Hage, Ghassan. 2003. Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society. Annandale: Pluto., 115–119). This is evidenced in Ravi’s attitude in Questions of Travel. While not blatantly racist, he still nurtures the ghettoized mentality that, as Salman Rushdie (1991 Rushdie, Salman. 1991. “Imaginary Homelands.” In Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1980–1991, edited by Salman Rushdie, 9–21. London: Granta.) claims, leads to an “internal exile” (19). Admittedly, Ravi remains excruciatingly chained to the homeland by his personal memories, and this makes him unsociable in Australia, but he is also guilty of living within the narrow boundaries imposed by homeland cultural subsets that migrants carry within them – such as ranked elite, middle- or working-class social structures. Implying her higher social status in the homeland, the Ethiopian character Hana in Questions of Travel notes after a brief exchange with some Ethiopians tradespeople at a Sydney multicultural festival that “at home I’d never speak to people like that” (De Kretser 2013 De Kretser, Michelle. 2013. Questions of Travel. Sydney: Allen and Unwin., 396). Ravi obliquely recalls Hana’s cryptic self-assertion during a visit to his Burgher relatives, the Patternots in Sydney, even as their ossified Sri Lankan-Burgher idiosyncrasies ignite nostalgia in him for his own family back home. With characteristic insight, De Kretser highlights other segregations and seclusions that wall out any possibility of conversation or negotiation with the “other”: “Look at Desmond Patternot [Ravi thinks]: he had spent two thirds of his life here [in Sydney] and still lived in another country” (436). Meanwhile, the courtroom scene in which Ravi’s application for asylum is rejected is a classic parody of justice, and illustrates the non-meeting of cultures radically alienated from each other. If anything, this important and telling scene of the failure of productive dialogue is reminiscent of the courtroom scene in Leonard Woolf’s (1913 Woolf, Leonard. 1913. The Village in the Jungle. London: Edward Arnold.) novel, The Village in the Jungle, set in British-colonized Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), demonstrating that little has changed in the centre–periphery incompatibilities of the postcolonial relationship. By the time he is finally granted resident status on appeal, Ravi has decided that he will never feel at home in Sydney: Though “gift wrapped and tied with a sparkly ribbon” (De Kretser 2013, De Kretser, Michelle. 2013. Questions of Travel. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. 436), he had no claim to it.
In conclusion, then, De Kretser’s vision for the first-generation migrant’s aspiration to feel at home in Sydney is plainly dystopian. Enslaved by the complexities of home and host cultures, racialized migrants live peripherally. They “circulate between ports” without anchor or destination, seeing Australia “through glass” (De Kretser 2013 De Kretser, Michelle. 2013. Questions of Travel. Sydney: Allen and Unwin., 438). If there is a ray of utopian hope in this novel, it is for the next generation,11. The complexities that surround the second-generation migrant are considered in detail below in the investigation into Channa Wickremesekera’s work, since it deals more comprehensively with them.View all notes the migrant child growing up in Australia such as Hanna’s little daughter, who is as yet unburdened by parental baggage:
A boy was guiding a kayak among bobbing white yachts. Ravi realized he had just been granted a vision of paradise: it was a Sunday afternoon of a boy in a boat on Sydney harbor. [ … I]t was to Tarik that Sydney would belong. The child’s imagination would transform things that were of no significance into touchstones: the swamp of a summer day, the jingle that advertised a theme park, a derelict roller-skating rink seen from a bus. The city would be inseparable from her private myths. (438)
What alternative, if any, does the writer offer that may assist the migrant’s search for belonging in Australia? De Kretser’s scepticism with regard to Australia’s well-meant but ineffectual effort to celebrate multiculturalism is visible everywhere in the novel. Here is one telling observation: “What Australia took away [from migrants], it tried to make up for with food fairs, tree guided walks, concerts in parks” (De Kretser 2013 De Kretser, Michelle. 2013. Questions of Travel. Sydney: Allen and Unwin., 331). Her criticism here runs parallel to Hage’s caustic observation that multicultural food fairs, carnivals and the like, that Australia encourages as part of its multicultural programme, “conjure the images of [ … ] various stalls of neatly positioned migrant cultures” exhibited for the “real Australians [ … ] bearers of the White nation and positioned in the central role of the touring subject, [to] walk around and enrich themselves” (Hage 1998 Hage, Ghassan. 1998. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Annandale: Pluto., 118). However, De Kretser seems to make a genuine effort to construct a less trodden route into cosmopolitanism by setting the scene for several racially differentiated migrants living at the outer rim of Australian society to interweave in a constellation in which hierarchies play no part. In an interesting diversion from the main story, Ravi attends a picnic organized by Abebe and his sister Hana (former Ethiopian detainees in Australia) in celebration of gaining Australian citizenship status. Among the handful of invitees are Sri Lankan Ravi, a few Ethiopian and Chinese first- and second-generation migrants/refugees/workers, two white children, and the young woman Jodie, also presumably white. We are led to anticipate an exciting new interweave from this microcosm of four disparate cultures meeting around a woven mat. The scene recalls the reed mat as a gacaca, a “dialogical site” – a place of in-betweenness conducive to “discussion, dispute, confession, apology and negotiation’ (Bhabha 2009 Bhabha, Homi. 2009. “In the Cave of Making: Thoughts on Third Space.” In Communicating in the Third Space, edited by Ikas Karin and Gerard Wagner, ix–xiv. New York: Routledge., x–xii). The picnic does promise productive conversations across cultures, as when Hana offers to Jodie a bowl of azifa that she has “made specially”, and later, when she places a bit of bread and stew in Jodie’s mouth: “This was a goorsha, an act of friendship, she explained” (De Kretser 2013 De Kretser, Michelle. 2013. Questions of Travel. Sydney: Allen and Unwin., 331–334). But, unlike Merlinda Bobis (2008 Bobis, Merlinda. 2008. The Solemn Lantern Maker. Sydney: Pier 9.) who, in The Solemn Lantern Maker steers her characters to attain even fleetingly what Giffard-Foret notes as the “cosmopolitanism of the wretched” through moments of “freely intersecting and parting” (2016 Giffard-Foret, Paul. 2016. “‘The Root of all Evil’? Transnational Cosmopolitanism in the Fiction of Dewi Anggraeni, Simone Lazaroo and Merlind Bobis.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 52 (5): 591–605., 599), De Kretser’s initiatives are stillborn. Conversation around the mat is desultory; connections are ambivalent and transient. De Kretser effectively interprets and improvises the known and the familiar with regard to the personal losses that migrants endure in their adopted countries. We listen to the tangled stories of marginalized individuals lost between being and becoming. The Chinese migrant has surrendered his real name Rong and his hometown Ningbo for “Ron” and “Shanghai”, in order to be accepted in Australia. Paul Carter (1992 Bhabha, Homi. 2009. “In the Cave of Making: Thoughts on Third Space.” In Communicating in the Third Space, edited by Ikas Karin and Gerard Wagner, ix–xiv. New York: Routledge., 12–13) has noted in relation to migrants in Australia that one’s name is an important signifier of self-identity and that its loss could be the dangerous source of one’s tragic unbecoming (a theme sensitively explored by Yasmine Gooneratne in her 1991 novel, A Change of Skies [see Lokugé 2000 Lokugé, Chandani. 2000. “‘We Must Laugh at One Another, or Die’: Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies and South Asian Migrant Identities.” In Shifting Continents/Colliding Cultures: Diaspora Writing of the Indian Subcontinent, edited by Ralph J. Crane and Radhika Mohanram, 17–34. Amsterdam: Rodopi.]). The children’s innocent singing of the Australian and British national anthems, “Advance Australia Fair” and “God Save the Queen” – that, positioned alongside one another, ironically deconstruct Australia’s own uneasy self-identity caught between settler and original homelands – is rudely shut down by a stranger in the park. Overall, there is a sense of defeat. The picnic is a failed attempt at transitive dialogues between people thrown together by their peripheral status. It resembles the Internet and Circular Quay as Ravi imagines them – illusory and delusionary cities of “strangers and connections” bearing more promise than achievement as platforms of interaction and negotiation (De Kretser 2013 De Kretser, Michelle. 2013. Questions of Travel. Sydney: Allen and Unwin., 284). There is no recognition or space in the hostland for heterogeneity or diversity. Ravi is an exile everywhere, utterly dislocated. No doubt the Australian community is familiar with these issues, yet the fact that this novel was a recipient of Australia’s highest literary honour, the Miles Franklin, awarded for “highest literary merit” and presentation “of Australian life in any of its phases”, acknowledges their impact on current Australian literary culture.
Channa Wickremesekera, Asylum and Tracks
Channa Wickremesekera is the author of five novels. A scholar specializing in South Asian military history, he has also published three monographs including The Tamil Separatist War in Sri Lanka (Wickremesekera 2016 Wickremesekera, Channa. 2016. The Tamil Separatist War in Sri Lanka. New Delhi: Routledge.). Although little known as yet, and under-researched, his novels have been critically reviewed or commended by a few important literary critics in Sri Lanka and abroad, such as professors Yasmine Gooneratne, Sivamohan Sumathi, Suvendrini Perera and Frank Schulze-Engler. For instance, in an important essay titled “Transnational Negotiations: Their Spaces in Modern Times”, Schulze-Engler includes a critique of Wickremesekera’s novel Distant Warriors (2010). Discussing its portrayal of racial tensions between the Sinhalese and Tamil communities in present-day Melbourne, and of both communities within Australian society at large, Schulze-Engler commends the author’s experimental engagement with one of the impediments to cosmopolitanism – the migrant tendency to build walls rather than bridges: “The social imagination present in the novel [ … ] move[s] beyond an ossified cultural memory and towards a possible process of negotiated reconciliation” (Schulze-Engler 2009 Schulze-Engler, Frank. 2009. “Transcultural Negotiations: Third Spaces in Modern Times.” In Communications in the Third Space, edited by Ikas Karin and Gerhard Wagner. New York: Routledge., 161).
In his two most recent novels, Asylum (Wickremesekera 2015 Wickremesekera, Channa. [2014] 2015. Asylum. 2nd ed. Armidale, NSW: Palavar, an imprint of Ethica.) and Tracks (Wickremesekera 2015 Wickremesekera, Channa. 2015. Tracks. Self-published. https://www.amazon.com/TRACKS-Channa-Wickremesekera-ebook/dp/B01ER5C2VS#nav-subnav), Wickremesekera focuses on the second generation of Sri Lankan migrants growing up in Australia, through whose points of view the stories are narrated. This is a challenging contribution to Sri Lankan-born Australian fiction, where stories are told mainly from the points of view of first-generation migrants whose children play a secondary role. While they are not trapped in an ambivalent “liminal third space” between home and hostland like their parents (see Wilson 2016 Wilson, Janet. 2016. “(Not)being at Home: Hsu Ming Teo’s Behind the Moon (2005) and Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel (2012).” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 52 (5): 541–554.), second-generation migrants encounter their own problematics as they face the challenge of the “diasporic slide” that Alexandra Watkins defines as “the slip of the diaspora from parent-child” (2016 Watkins, Alexandra. 2016. “The Diasporic Slide: Representations of Second Generational Diasporas in Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies (1991) and Chandani Lokugé’s If the Moon Smiled (2000) and Softly, As I Leave You (2011).” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 52 (5): 577–590.). As Watkins notes, among their problems is the burden they share with parents of being “othered” by the host community, and the frustration they encounter with their parents’ imposition on them of homeland cultural expectations and cultural mores. In addition, they struggle against parental opposition to the “bicultural”, “blended” or “multicultural identities” that they develop as they manoeuvre between parental and peer influences. Such fluidity, however, also warrants effortless cultural border-crossings, making second-generation migrants potential cosmopolitans, or “transnationals” as labelled by Bill Ashcroft:
The closest thing we have to [the] transnational citizen/subject is a member of the second-generation diaspora, who offers the most interesting possibilities [ … ] of the actual liberating ambivalence of diasporic subjectivity. The second generation finds itself born into a transcultural space and indicates an interesting way in which the borders may be crossed. (2009 Ashcroft, Bill. 2009. “Beyond the Nation: Postcolonial Hope.” Journal of the European Association of Studies on Australia 1: 12–22., 17)
As Watkins observes, the second-generation diaspora has so far received minimal critical attention. The following section of this article contributes to “correcting this imbalance” (2016 Watkins, Alexandra. 2016. “The Diasporic Slide: Representations of Second Generational Diasporas in Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies (1991) and Chandani Lokugé’s If the Moon Smiled (2000) and Softly, As I Leave You (2011).” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 52 (5): 577–590.).
Asylum
Asylum (Wickremesekera 2015 Wickremesekera, Channa. [2014] 2015. Asylum. 2nd ed. Armidale, NSW: Palavar, an imprint of Ethica.) is an emotionally poignant novella with a clever satirical edge. As mentioned by Wickremesekera in an email to me (June 12, 2016 Wickremesekera, Channa. 2016. The Tamil Separatist War in Sri Lanka. New Delhi: Routledge.), the novel was inspired by his experience as a teacher at a co-educational Islamic school in Victoria, where the majority of the students are of Afghani descent. Asylum offers a more optimistic view than most recent Sri Lankan-born Australian novels (including those of De Kretser, as discussed above), pointing Australia towards an exciting utopian multicultural national harmony through two minority communities in extended conversation with the dominant white culture.
Most significantly, this is done in Asylum through the Sri Lankan author’s chameleon-like absorption of the consciousness of the quirky Afghani boy, Khalid, aged 17, growing up in a conservative Muslim family. This is an innovative narrative strategy that demonstrates the effortless transculturality of young second-generation migrants – their fluid understanding of “the other” as part of themselves. It recalls contentious debates on “cultural appropriation” instigated by postcolonial resentment of the European colonizer’s harmful and offensive misrepresentation of the colonized “other”. However, as Edward Said has argued, while members of one culture are apt to create stereotypes about other cultures, they also have the capacity to understand another. Going by this, Said (1993 Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf.) unequivocally denied that “only women can understand feminine experience, only Jews can understand Jewish suffering, only formerly colonial subjects can understand colonial experience” (31). Concurring with Said’s argument, Young and Haley (2009 Young, James O., and Susan Haley. 2009. “‘Nothing Comes from Nowhere’: Reflections on Cultural Appropriation as the Representation of Other Cultures.” In The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation, edited by James O. Young and Conrad G. Brunk, 268–289. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.10.1002/9781444311099[CrossRef]) generalize that “humans, for all of their cultural differences are not so different that they are incapable of understanding each other” (276). In relation to cultural appropriation by literary artists, they argue that an artist/writer who is capable of writing sensitively may produce a work of real value about the culture whose privacy the artist has “violated” by appropriating it. They note as an example William Faulkner’s imaginative exploration of being African-American in Light in August, that compares most favourably with Tony Morrison’s Beloved (Young and Haley 2009 Young, James O., and Susan Haley. 2009. “‘Nothing Comes from Nowhere’: Reflections on Cultural Appropriation as the Representation of Other Cultures.” In The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation, edited by James O. Young and Conrad G. Brunk, 268–289. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.10.1002/9781444311099[CrossRef], 275, 277). This strategy of writing the “other” is also successfully executed by Hsu-Ming Teo in her novel Behind the Moon, through her depiction, albeit in third person, of the white Australian character Gibbo, who yearns to be Chinese (see Wilson 2016 Wilson, Janet. 2016. “(Not)being at Home: Hsu Ming Teo’s Behind the Moon (2005) and Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel (2012).” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 52 (5): 541–554.). What is more inventive and daring is an author’s ability to narrate the “other” in the first person, thereby closing the gap between author and narrator. Young and Haley’s argument is very relevant here. They reflect that “armed with a creative imagination an outsider can even convincingly assume the persona of an insider and write about an insider’s experience in the first person” (2009 Young, James O., and Susan Haley. 2009. “‘Nothing Comes from Nowhere’: Reflections on Cultural Appropriation as the Representation of Other Cultures.” In The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation, edited by James O. Young and Conrad G. Brunk, 268–289. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.10.1002/9781444311099[CrossRef], 277; my emphasis), clinching their point by drawing support from Rushdie’s observation that “there are terrible books that arise directly out of experience, and extraordinary imaginative feats dealing with themes which the author has been obliged to approach from the outside” (quoted in Young and Haley 2009 Young, James O., and Susan Haley. 2009. “‘Nothing Comes from Nowhere’: Reflections on Cultural Appropriation as the Representation of Other Cultures.” In The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation, edited by James O. Young and Conrad G. Brunk, 268–289. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.10.1002/9781444311099[CrossRef], 277). As this article has already indicated, the permeability between boundaries is required for cosmopolitanism to flourish. The following analysis of Asylum will investigate the ways in which Wickremesekera successfully adopts this approach leading to the interweaving of cultural flows.
Asylum commences with the entry into a conservative Afghani Australian household of the Anglo teenager, Rusty, a juvenile delinquent fleeing detention. Charging into the Afghani home, he holds the family hostage at gunpoint. As the police gather outside the house to arrest him, the Afghani family decides to protect Rusty, who is, after all, “just a kid with an empty gun” (Wickremesekera 2015 Wickremesekera, Channa. [2014] 2015. Asylum. 2nd ed. Armidale, NSW: Palavar, an imprint of Ethica., 32). Thus we have members of three racially defined groups (the Sri Lankan author, the Afghani narrator through whom he speaks, and the white Australian teenager) in conversation, communicating and challenging one another on a subject crucial to cross-racial relations. The Afghani family’s solid anchor is Islam. It is undisputedly their religion as much as it is their culture. The author offers an empathetic if ironic insight into the family’s idiosyncratic practice of Islam through the wry voice of the narrator-protagonist, Khalid. Simultaneously, through Khalid’s self-parody, the author raises questions about Muslim/Islam conservatism and ghettoization, as well as about mainstream Australia’s ignorance and stereotyping of this community. Though the teenage narrator’s tone is light and humorous, his observations raise awareness as to why racial tensions develop between communities. They remind us of real-life consequences of such lack of conversation between cultures that have shocked Australia from time to time, such as the Cronulla riots in Sydney in 2005 between Caucasian gang members and youths of Middle-Eastern descent. The brief extracts from the novel given below exemplify the way in which the author unobtrusively speaks to the reader through the seemingly naive voice of his teenage narrator about cultural ghettoization and centre–periphery barriers that hinder Australian multiculturalism:
We do have Aussie friends but not the kinds that visit homes. Dad knows a few people [ … ] and I know a few guys at the local club where I play footy but they are not close enough for us to visit each other’s homes. I generally hang out with other Afghans and a couple of Lebos but friends of Mum and Dad are almost all Afghans. I guess it’s mainly an Islamic thing as well as a cultural thing. But it’s also a pity. You got to wait for some crazy kid to barge into your house to have an Aussie in your house. In Australia. (50–51)
Come to think of it I [Khalid] don’t think he [Rusty] had ever seen a Muslim – except on TV where they are mostly terrorists or terrorist suspects, blowing up things or planning to blow up things. (23)
He [Rusty] seems scared and uncertain. Must be wondering what we are going to do to him. Strange creatures from another planet feeding me water before they consume me, he probably thinks. (38)
Like De Kretser in Questions of Travel, Wickremesekera embeds his hope for a utopian multicultural future in the younger generation. Through their exposure to the wider community that instils in them an open-minded approach to difference, Khalid and his sister Ayesha may develop a more positive and meaningful attitude towards the “other” in their midst: “We go for these interfaith thingies from school, and you meet loads of nice people. Christians, Hindus, Buddhists. Even Jews. Hot chicks too. You get them all to cover up like mum where is the fun?” (Wickremesekera 2015 Wickremesekera, Channa. [2014] 2015. Asylum. 2nd ed. Armidale, NSW: Palavar, an imprint of Ethica., 116). A complex process of ironic deconstruction of events and epiphanies in Asylum leads to the ultimate humanism of the Afghani family that transforms racism and parochialism into social and cultural interactions across ethnic borders: “We are Muslims and Afghans. It is against our religion and culture to give up somebody who is at our mercy. [ … ] It is against God’s wishes to turn in a fugitive” (97–98), Khalid’s father informs Rusty, the “fugitive”.
Generally, the author’s agenda is unobtrusively didactic in the search for a cosmopolitanism that could bridge and unite Australia’s white/ethnic cultural divisions. This didacticism is indiscriminately and wittily sprinkled in the novella: the white teenager and Khalid’s father share the shortened name “Rusty”, suggesting that they are both, irrespective of race, essentially one and the same person; all religions finally lead to one basic truth: Allah is also God. Most telling is how the author paves the way to a fleeting dialogue suggestive of positive future relationships between the racially differentiated teenagers, Khalid, his younger sister Aisha and Rusty, across the common ground for all Australians – “footy” – the most popular and iconic Australian outdoor team sport. It is also realistic, perhaps, that the conversation, at least at this incipient stage of interaction, belongs only to the younger Australians; the parents are excluded. It follows that the older generation would have misunderstood and stifled the exchange before it had a chance to breathe. The clinching point of the novel is its play on the meaning of “asylum” as it is applied in Australia. With the Afghani family offering its protection to Rusty, Australia’s centre–periphery power relations are ironically reversed: the white Australian becomes the asylum seeker reliant on the patronage of the migrant family. Khalid’s appreciation of his father’s interpretation of his religious and cultural mores, one that accommodates the principle of protecting the fugitive, is indeed a hopeful gesture. It communicates the open transcultural space that can evolve between coexisting cultures.
Asylum thus offers a new route of hope into cosmopolitanism that is perhaps more effective than multicultural food fairs or festivals, because it offers a more intimate affective experience. It challenges Australia to recognize the development of vitally important relationships that bridge the cultural divide. As Yasmine Gooneratne rightly concludes in her review of this novel entitled “A Message for Everyone on Multiculturalism”, in The Sunday Times, June 29, 2014 Gooneratne, Yasmine. 2014. “A Message for Everyone on Multi-culturalism.” The Sunday Times Sri Lanka, June 29. http://www.sundaytimes.lk/140629/plus/booksarts-104929.html, “Asylum [ … ] has a message for everyone who can read and think beyond the confines of their own limited conditioning, and understand [as the characters in the novel eventually do] the value of a multicultural experience” (18).
Tracks
Channa Wickremesekera’s most recent novel, Tracks (2015 Wickremesekera, Channa. 2015. Tracks. Self-published. https://www.amazon.com/TRACKS-Channa-Wickremesekera-ebook/dp/B01ER5C2VS#nav-subnav), tells a confrontational story that shines a light on a cultural subset of Sinhalese-Buddhist middle-class migrants buried in a working-class outer suburb in Victoria. As in Asylum, the narrative point of view is that of a teenager, Shehan, aged 17, “one hundred percent Sri Lankan, second generation” (Wickremesekera 2015 Wickremesekera, Channa. 2015. Tracks. Self-published. https://www.amazon.com/TRACKS-Channa-Wickremesekera-ebook/dp/B01ER5C2VS#nav-subnav, 9), the only son of conservative middle-class Sinhalese-Buddhist first-generation migrants.
As in Asylum, a psychologically damaged white teenager from a dysfunctional family enters the story when he walks as a new student into Shehan’s school and class. Immediately infatuated by Robbie’s physical beauty and prowess, Shehan latches on to him. Shehan’s quick snapshot of their differences offers a realistic portrait of the mish-mash of cultures in contemporary Australia:
The five of us, four boys and a girl. All teenagers and except me, all mongrels.
Robbie, half Scottish, half Aussie, Mark, half Italian, half Aussi, Marty, half Aussie, half Islander, and Sarah, a mix of something that has left her dark blonde, green eyed and completely batty. (Wickremesekera 2015 Wickremesekera, Channa. 2015. Tracks. Self-published. https://www.amazon.com/TRACKS-Channa-Wickremesekera-ebook/dp/B01ER5C2VS#nav-subnav, 99)
The young misfits spend their evenings together in a railway station, but like de Kretser’s characters who meet around the picnic mat, they remain in their lost and lonely selves, but for fleeting moments of connection between Shehan and Robbie that come about mainly through Shehan’s almost pathetic hero worship of Robbie. More generally, the relationships falter in the setting of the railway station which in itself is a universal metaphor for transience and non-meetings, but also, in this particular case, a theatre of violence for damaged, lonely souls hovering on the edges of life and society:
I [Shehan] remember asking him [Robbie] once why he liked the station so much. He said it was because of the trains. It made him feel that if he ever got bored he could always catch a train and go somewhere, north or south. And sometimes in the evenings he walked home along the tracks. (38)
The novella unravels a powerful plot set against Anglo, Arab and Sri Lankan sociocultural contexts. Through the deeply private story of the development and degeneration of the highly charged sexual crush that Shehan develops for Robbie, the novel investigates the consequences of centre–periphery culture clashes. The first clash is physical and violent. It begins with Robbie’s unwarranted assault of upon an innocent “Arab dude” (Wickremesekera 2015 Wickremesekera, Channa. 2015. Tracks. Self-published. https://www.amazon.com/TRACKS-Channa-Wickremesekera-ebook/dp/B01ER5C2VS#nav-subnav, 12) travelling in the same train as the teenagers. Regretfully, but realistically, in the outer Melbourne suburb where the novel is set, logical reappraisal of the incident through intercultural dialogue that may have led to reconciliation seems an impossibility. This is perhaps exacerbated by the fact that none of the parents of the team (apart from Shehan’s) is made aware of the crisis. Robbie’s actions are hardly racist in that his violence against the Arab is nothing more than an extension of a teenager’s confused retaliation to domestic violence – his father’s physical abuse of him. However, in the circumstances, there is only space for retribution. The Arab community pursues Robbie relentlessly until, beaten up by them, he ends up in hospital. If the Arabs remain a faceless mass that unites in a vendetta, Robbie, whom we get to know at a deeper level through Shehan, evokes our reluctant empathy as a deeply troubled boy in dire need of adult intervention. He gets a taste of this from Shehan’s father, but it is fleeting and cannot sustain him.
As in Asylum, the parents in Tracks too are anchored in a ghettoized mentality; all their friends are from the Sinhalese-Buddhist cultural subset, just as all their holidays comprise return trips to Sri Lanka. They also devotedly practise the humanist ideologies of Buddhism and instil them in Shehan by subtle persuasion and loving care rather than by imposition. Shehan sums up his parents quirkily:
They have this philosophy that is kinda weird but also cool. You are free to do what you like, they say. We can only tell you what is right and wrong, at the end of the day it is your life. Buddhism, says Dad. So they tell me that smoking is bad for me, drugs will kill me, studying is good for me, being nice to people is good for me, learning Sinhalese is good for me because it is part of my heritage, and of course curry is the best kinda food in the world. But I am free to decide. (Wickremesekera 2015 Wickremesekera, Channa. 2015. Tracks. Self-published. https://www.amazon.com/TRACKS-Channa-Wickremesekera-ebook/dp/B01ER5C2VS#nav-subnav, 22)
Though bored and irritated by their tactics to keep him on the straight and narrow path, Shehan eventually surrenders to Sri Lankan migratory requirements of a university education and the charm of a “respectable” middle-class girl. A small but sure move forward for Australian multiculturalism is the compromise that the Sri Lankan parents seem happy to make: Shehan’s new love for a white (Anglo) girl is definitely more acceptable to them than his previous crush for a white boy! On the other hand, regularly abused by his drunken father, Robbie develops as Shehan’s foil. Without the powerful parental support that Shehan receives, and deserted in the end by all his friends, Robbie degenerates tragically, passing his evenings alone in the station, and finally beats his father to death. Soon after, bashed by undetected sources, Robbie is left for dead in the railway station.
As the above discussion has revealed, Asylum and Tracks offer significant insights into Australian multiculturalism, steering us forward towards potential cosmopolitanism by advocating the combination of separateness and togetherness of disparate cultures. One feature that weakens both novels, however, is the author’s attempt to pit the positives of the minority migrant culture against the negatives of the dominant white culture through the prima facie irony of the narrator. Both Rusty and Robbie gradually recognize the strengths of the Afghani and Sri Lankan cultures respectively through their close personal associations with their friends; on the other hand, the white Australian culture to which Khalid and Shehan are exposed reflects broken homes, psychologically damaged children, and drunken and abusive parents who are indifferent to the well-being of their children. By this, Wickremesekera seems even to feed the prejudices of readers against Australian culture as the review on Tracks entitled “Darkness on the Edge of Town” published anonymously in Ceylon Today, April 26, 2015, indicates:
When we send our children to cities like Melbourne, driven by educational imperatives, we sometimes do not think of the social context in which they will be living; of the sometimes chaotic lives their peers will have experienced; of the dark side of liberated Western lifestyle freedoms and the confusions and complexities these freedoms can generate.
I conclude this article by highlighting a current weekly programme, Q&A, that is broadcast live on ABC TV, in which Australians are provided with the opportunity to question about current events a panel of “leaders” in their fields, among them politicians, journalists, humanitarians and artists. In an episode broadcast on August 19, 2014 Wickremesekera, Channa. 2015. Tracks. Self-published. https://www.amazon.com/TRACKS-Channa-Wickremesekera-ebook/dp/B01ER5C2VS#nav-subnav, the panel included Clive Palmer, a Member at the time of the Australian Federal Parliament as head of the Palmer United Party. When asked about his legal battle against a Chinese state-owned company, Palmer’s response showed that Australia still occupies an uneasy and shifting ground in relation to multiculturalism. His racist abuse of Australia’s close neighbours, the Chinese, as mongrels, bastards and murderers about to invade Australia en masse, resonates with the racist tirades of Pauline Hanson. A week later, on the same programme, and obviously intending to smooth the impending retaliation by the Chinese against Palmer’s racism, former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans, and current executive editor of the national newspaper The Australian, Paul Kelly, celebrated Australia as a successful multicultural society. In this confusion between the two ends of the spectrum represented by the media and political rhetoric – the successes of multicultural Australia on the one hand, and the outburst of racism on the other – is our literature that looks at gaps within our Australia–Asia rhetoric, investigating between and beyond stereotypes. As this article has shown, these three novels by Sri Lankan-born Australians illuminate the inexpressible heartbreak of the individual caught between home and hostlands, and envision roads not yet travelled, raising “the spirit of hope, and the essence of desire for a better world” (Ashcroft 2012 Ashcroft, Bill. 2012. “Introduction: Spaces of Utopia.” Spaces of Utopia: An Electronic Journal 2 (1): 1–17., 2) in those who continue to call Australia home.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
A former Australian Commonwealth Scholar from Sri Lanka, Chandani Lokugé is associate professor of Literary Studies at Monash University. She founded and directed the Monash Centre for Postcolonial Writing from 2002 to 2012 and currently coordinates the South Asian Diaspora International Research Network (SADIRN). She has published 14 books including the Oxford Classics Reissues series of Indian women’s writing, and three novels of which Softly, as I Leave You was awarded Sri Lanka’s Godage National Literary Award in 2013. Among co-edited special issues of journals are those in Moving Worlds, New Literatures Review and Meanjin. She has held visiting professorial/chair positions at Freie University, Berlin (2012) De Kretser, Michelle. 2013. Questions of Travel. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.; Le Studium, Advanced Studies Institute, Loire Valley (2012–13); Goethe University, Frankfurt (2015); and Harvard University.
Notes
- The complexities that surround the second-generation migrant are considered in detail below in the investigation into Channa Wickremesekera’s work, since it deals more comprehensively with them.
Tracks
https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/tale-class-and-lust-told-sardonic-wit
CHANNA WICKREMESEKERA 