writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

Identity politics: Mosaic or melting pot
Writing the Papua New Guinea memoir, and considerations of its reception and context,
contributed to an ongoing inquiry in my work in both fiction and non‐fiction forms into questions of
identity politics, writing the “Other” and transnational values and sensibility.
As an Australian writer of immigrant background who has lived in many places internationally,
writing books that vary in genre and approach, and being considered hard to classify in the standard
taxonomies of nationality and genre, my work was described by the handy label “multicultural” when
multiculturalism became the fashion. I came to reject Australian multiculturalism for its “mosaic”, the
government’s official designation for its multicultural policy since the 1970s. I have long suspected
that this is far from an ideal. In this mosaic, ethnic and national immigrant groups were meant to
remain separate and unchanging, keeping up their cute folk‐dancing, cuisine and other‐language
newsletters. Note that the separate tiles of a mosaic can each be seen to retain its own separate
shape and colour. In the Australian mosaic there was of course a dominant colour, thus ensuring a
continuing Anglo hegemony. Compare this to the real ideal of the melting pot. In a melting pot all the
ingredients break down and mix and form a new dish. Anglos don’t want to melt. The mosaic also is
marked by its ignoring of the multivalent phenomenon of, and contentions about, globalisation.
(Baranay 2004)
My own writings, somehow rooted in my advocacy of hybridisation, fusion and the melting pot,
reflected an increasingly fluid identity as my works were increasingly read, critiqued and published
outside of Australia, particularly in India.
Writing the 'Other', writing as another
Writing an Indian character as a non‐Indian raises issues that arise out of this cultural moment of
anxiety over representation, appropriation, identity politics and so on.
Uh‐oh, hang on a minute, she checks herself, am I allowed to think of Jolly as sweet?
Sweet, that word meaning a gentle, attractive demeanour, you can't call just anyone
sweet; sinister meanings are attributed to adjectives applied to identifiable Others. Let's
decide, she decides again, that there are sweet people in all the locations of the world and
that I mean the same thing by it wherever I am, though that's not the end of it according
to the professional perversities of certain pundits, critics keen to crow over forbidden
perceptions, and whatever you might say about Others is forbidden. Never mind. 1
This passage from Neem Dreams recognises that the very idea of an identifiable Other is a
problem.
People are otherised according to certain categories such as nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, and
so on, all of them reflecting, and/or constructed by, particular cultures, and disguising at least as
much as they reveal about a person, or indeed, a character, which to a novelist is the same thing.
I find that the same kind of problems with this kind of taxonomy as I have with the standard
categorisations of sexual character as gay, straight or bi.
In Neem Dreams, this is Andy:
He knows he is not obvious, he keeps checking. …If he takes some pride in passing for
straight, it has something to do with the fact he would feel a more honest unease being
identified as anything else. He just happens to live with a man. He just happens to think
even man and woman are categories that conceal suspicions that identity is not contained
in them. Let alone that sexuality is not a category that tells the truth about the selection of
urges and actions that it, sexuality, is supposed to contain. 2
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, writing on sexuality and pure difference, in her brilliant essay 'Axiomatic',
provides a long list of dichotomies that could be substituted for the heterosexual‐homosexual one,
beginning thus:
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