If Every Portrait is a Self-Portrait
Khalid Warsame on Christos Tsiolkas
Kogonada’s 2021 film, After Yang, begins with a multi-racial family out in the park, posing for a family photo. Behind the camera is the titular Yang; he sets the timer on the camera and joins his family. Soon we learn that there is more to the family than we thought: for one, Yang isn’t merely brother to Mika (played by Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja), but is her android babysitter, an ‘older brother’ purchased by Jake and Kyra (Colin Farrell and Jodie Turner-Smith) to help raise their adopted daughter and provide a connection to her Chinese cultural heritage.
The film is set in a future that seems very near a mirror to our own: people zip about in driver-less cars, and cloning seems to be a valid way to have children. Unlike their neighbour, whose daughters are clones of his wife, Jake and Kyra are the sort of couple who insist on the more progressive option adopting a child from China. In the short story the film is very loosely based on, ‘Saying Goodbye to Yang’ by Alexander Weinstein, this dynamic is more explicit (the film is considerably more restrained, to superior effect). Like the film, the short story is told from Jake’s perspective:
When we adopted Mika three years ago, it seemed like the progressive thing to do. We considered it our one small strike against cloning [...] It was Kyra who suggested she be Chinese. The earthquake had left thousands of orphans in its wake, Mika among them. It was hard not to agree.
In the film, there are hints of a world that seems to have also been inspired by the short story: unmentioned global environmental catastrophes, mature technologies that imply unknown decades of war, even sophisticated water-reclamation systems in houses which hint at some severe rationing. In Weinstein’s short story, it’s more straightforward: America invaded North Korea, and an earthquake killed millions in China.
There are many other differences between short story and film. For one, Kyra is played by a black actress in the film, and her role changes subtly with this choice; instead of working at Wholefoods, Jake owns a small tea shop (at one point, he reveals to Yang that he was inspired by a very old Werner Hertzog documentary—complete with an impression that Colin Farrell must have kept in his pocket for years). Yang is played by Justin H. Min, who like the film’s writer and director, Kogonada, is Korean-American. yet in accordance to the short story, he plays a Chinese character. In an interview with Slate, Min seems slightly bemused by this choice:
That sense of dislocation was complicated and compounded by the fact that Kogonada chose to keep Yang’s ethnic identity constant from the story, despite the fact that both he and Min are of Korean descent. ‘I brought that up,’ Min recalls, ‘and I was like, “This robot is Chinese and I’m ethnically Korean. How do we feel about this?” With the rise of K-pop and Korean cinema and TV shows, we thought, OK, if there was a group of people creating this robot, number one, they wouldn’t even be able to distinguish Chinese features from Korean features, because a lot of non-Asian people can’t. And if this Korean wave was still happening, in many ways that would be the more trendy option.’
When I saw the film, that was my thinking too. I thought it was a particularly clever joke by Kogonada. In the short story, interestingly, Weinstein writes a cruder, less fully formed version of this joke; Yang breaks down early in both the film and short story, and Jake’s neighbour suggests taking the non-functioning Yang to his friend Russ, an oil-stained boiler-suit-wearing back-alley mechanic type, who works in grey-market android repair. In the film he’s a slightly batty and probably libertarian white guy, played by character actor Ritchie Coster, but in the short story he’s a full-on QAnon type:
Russ stands next to me, with his thick forearms and a smell of tobacco, and lets out a sigh. ‘You brought a Korean.’ He says this as a statement of fact. Russ is the type of person I’ve made a point to avoid in my life: a guy that probably has a WE CLONE OUR OWN sticker on the back of his truck.
‘He’s Chinese,’ I say.
‘Same thing,’ Russ says. He looks up and gives the other man a shake of his head. ‘Well,’ he says heavily, ‘bring him inside, I’ll see what’s wrong with him.’ He shakes his head again as he walks away and enters his shop.
I suspect the differences between Kogonada’s film and Weinstein’s short story are necessary to some extent, as the film’s tone is considerably more understated, and the clean retro-modern set design makes the whole narrative feel plausible. The story is one that needed to breath, and the detail of cinema certainly lends substance and context and, perhaps, understatement. Colin Farrell plays a mild-mannered Jake, who he barely says a word against clones, projecting a distinctly middle-class reticence and confusion about the things in the world that affect him.
What is undeniable, however, is that Kogonada’s vision is more conceptually complete. Weinstein’s story is lurid and the plot orbits moments of spectacle, such as the opening scene where Yang shuts off mid-breakfast, his face falling into his bowl of Cheerios while the family continues eating. It’s also worth noting that Weinstein’s story lacks the specificity in ways that seem to be tied to differences in the interests of the author and director. I think the reason why that joke worked better in the film was because the short story is almost entirely uninterested in the key issue that the film explores, namely, identity.
In one scene from the film, Yang is walking Mika through a small apple tree grove, and points out to her the way an entirely different tree is grafted onto another tree, making both whole. He points out that every apple tree produces fruit this way. For Mika, the metaphor is one that allows her to possibly see herself as both part of her family, and also part of her birth parent’s cultural heritage too. For Yang, however, it is an incomplete explanation, one that frustrates his programmed objectives which don’t allow him an elegant metaphor: he must have a complete answer for her.
In another scene, Jake prises a memory crystal from Russ, who seems concerned chiefly with privacy and spyware implications of the device he found deeply embedded in Yang’s chest cavity, a mess of wires and fake flesh. The sophistication of such technologies in the film makes Jake’s quaint existence selling boutique loose-leaf tea in mason jars somewhat jarring: one wonders who’s footing the bill for his comfortable existence? Inside the memory crystal are snippets of memories Yang has collected over the years, revealing how little Jake knew about his android property. He’d imagined Yang dreamt, if at all, of becoming human, but instead Yang’s question was a much more essential one: he wondered if he was truly Chinese, if his programmed language modules and thousands of facts about China amounted to anything, and if it did, how much?
It’s strange to watch such a question being asked from another perspective: unlike Yang, I don’t keep a hard drive full of facts about the country my parents are from, but I still keep up to date with goings-on, still refer to Somalia as ‘back home’, still think of my presence in this country as a multi-generational contingent enterprise. What do these little rituals account for? I don’t know. For Yang, the question is doubly important, because apart from his own questions about his own identity, he’s also programmed to help an adopted girl feel simultaneously Chinese and American, an impossible task her well-meaning parents have assigned to him.
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Zadie Smith, in a New York Review of Books essay a few years ago, ‘Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction’, provides the most compelling yet vague argument in defence of a fiction writer’s so-called ‘right to presume’. She writes of her instinctual inhabiting of people’s lives, a mode that she carries into her writing life and unpacks into an ethic of writing:
And what I did in life, I did with books. I lived in them and felt them live in me. I felt I was Jane Eyre and Celie and Mr. Biswas and David Copperfield … I’ve never believed myself to have a voice entirely separate from the many voices I hear, read, and internalize every day.
Her argument for the freedom to ‘presume’ as a writer of fiction, alongside her conceit that we have ‘moved swiftly on to what [we] perceive to be safer ground, namely, the supposedly unquestionable authenticity of personal experience,’ begs the question: Is there such thing as an ethic of writing fiction that is separate from the social context in which fiction exists? And, who is being censored here? So often it feels like any attempt to recontextualise or refigure an issue as highly relational as cultural appropriation does so by ignoring the absolute dominating presence of power as the third rail of any exchange, cultural or otherwise. It’s always the bottom line, and its omission often betrays an incoherent argument.
We are all made up of so much outside ourselves, and to write fiction is to train oneself to inhabit perspectives outside of your own, but perhaps more than ideological arguments about the place of fiction, it is the ways in which I can never escape my own perspective, in reading, in writing, and in living that preoccupy me. While it is the work of our imagination, our empathy, and fundamentally, as Smith reminds us, our compassion to put ourselves in the perspectives of others, in attempting to inhabit another person’s hypothetical reality (and it can only ever be hypothetical), it has always seemed necessary to interrogate the ways in which that notion breaks down in a real flesh-and-blood way.
What I’m proposing is this: what if we can only ever model another’s perspective? What if every portrait is a self-portrait? What are the implications of this? I don’t believe myself when I write fiction: I feel limited by the knowledge that I can only know others through myself, that to put myself in another person’s shoes, I first have to inhabit my own body, and try on this thing outside my body—shoes. I’m not saying the characters in my fiction are me, not exactly, but they are extrapolations of possible conditions of living and being that fundamentally reflect who I am, and it’s up to me as a writer to find a way to write fiction that rings true despite this (or because of this), to write in a way that doesn’t undermine my credibility, and that it does the compassion and care-work necessary to justify itself. Our capacity to imagine is limited in certain inescapable ways by the borders of our being, and for us to suddenly set this notion aside isn’t so much a failure of wokeness but a failure to fully embody our own capacities, and, I’ll contend, responsibilities, as writers.
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I have an ambivalent relationship with reading: a lot of the time, I find myself struggling to really ascertain whether I’m wasting my time, a perennial concern with almost anything but particularly stories that don’t really have much to offer me in return. Or worse, only offer cruel and small things. I once read a George Saunders story published in the New Yorker, ‘The Semplica Girl Diaries’, (2012) about a bunch of white people who lobotomise young brown and black women and display them in their yards. The narrator offhandedly reveals the nationalities of his ‘Semplica Girls’ and even before he got to the Somali girl, I put it down.
We step out. SGs up now, approx. three feet off ground, smiling, swaying in slight breeze. Order, left to right: Tami (Laos), Gwen (Moldova), Lisa (Somalia), Betty (Philippines). Effect amazing. Having so often seen similar configuration in yards of others more affluent makes own yard seem suddenly affluent, you feel different about self, as if at last in step with peers and time in which living.
I don’t think it’s strange to say that I don’t like my people existing in the cruel fantasies of other people, and further, I don’t think it’s unfair to say that Saunders’ story feels undercooked. In interviews, he often points out the story’s conceptual pivot is actually a combination-metaphor for class anxieties and capacity of capitalism to breed endless cruel novelties. In one interview with the New Yorker, he describes the story coming to him in a dream:
The minute I woke up, I knew that the women in the yard were symbols for, you know, ‘the oppressed,’ and that the whole story, as I was imagining it at that moment, would be ‘about’ the way that people of means use and abuse people without. So that was the danger—that the story might turn out to be (merely) about that. In which case, who needs it, you know? If the only thing the story did was say, ‘Hey, it’s really wrong to hang up living women in your backyards, you capitalist-pig oppressors,’ that wasn’t going to be enough. We kind of know that already. It had to be about that plus something else.
Einstein said (or, at least, I am always quoting him as having said), ‘No worthy problem is ever solved within the plane of its original conception.’ So this was an example of that: my ‘original conception’ (i.e., the dream and its associated meaning) had to be outgrown—or built upon.
When the interviewer asks about this ‘original conception’ where ‘instead of being virtually invisible to the middle-class and the rich, these immigrants are given pride of place as decorative elements,’ Saunders points out that their jobs are in many ways worse than the way our societies currently treat immigrants—invisible cogs in our machine, working the most dangerous and least desirable jobs:
They’ve got holes in their heads, for one thing; the surgery is risky; they’re away from their families for years at a time; it’s incredibly boring; and all the while, they have to watch this other family happily living right over there, in that warm, cozy house. Although at least they’ve got health insurance, ha ha ha.
‘The Semplica Girl Diaries’ reminds me a lot of ‘Saying Goodbye to Yang’: both are set in a strange near-future, and both feature non-white characters written as props in the stifling lives of some white folks. But it’s a kind of story some writers love to write, and when you point out the obvious—that it’s boring, distasteful, and commonplace—you’ve already lost a completely different made-up argument.
There are some essential qualities of good writing, and stories can be considered good in many ways and still be heartless. Maybe it’s not true that cruel and lazy stories are often also bad, but so very rarely do the people who insist on their right to cruel stories actually end up writing good stories that I can’t help but suspect that the two are related.
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Christos Tsiolkas’ latest novel, 7 ½, begins auspiciously, with a series of clear and beautiful sentences sweeping across a bucolic sea-side, before we abruptly meet our narrator:
I pour a wine. I light a cigarette. The computer sits on the long hardwood table of the deck. I walk over to it, finger the pad and turn it off. I am in no mood for writing this evening.
Soon we learn the narrator is none other than Tsiolkas himself, apparently in the midst of attempting to write a novel. The title and conceit of 7 ½ are inspired by Italian director Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963), where Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido, a director at the height of his powers, yet who finds himself unable to finish his latest film. Tsiolkas finds himself in a similar situation: he has a novel he wants to write, called Sweet Thing, but it’s still coming to him as he is writing it. Like in Fellini’s film, 7 ½ feels deliberately loose, the novel flowing easily between past and present, between memory and dreams and scenes from his novel-in-progress, as well as scenes where he is deliberating over choices in his novel and dealing with distractions.
I suspect directors would feel similarly watching Fellini’s film as I did reading Tsiolkas’ novel. I can clearly imagine a director watching the scene where Mastroianni is dancing through a crowd of actors, aides, and film personnel, all of whom are clamouring for his attention—and feeling the same kinship I felt reading about Tsiolkas sitting down to write but instead becoming entranced by a print of Édouard Manet’s House at Rueil, which later ends up in his novel.
This story, whose ‘call has never weakened’ in the ten years he’s been attempting to write it, is first travelling the breadth of his life before it gets to him. The scene in the novel-within-the-novel where we encounter Manet’s House at Rueil is completely different to the context the author encounters it in, yet when it appears in the story, it feels profound and coincidental.
In one chapter, Tsiolkas remembers a young boy who once sat next to him on the bus after being shunned by the other boys. Tsiolkas sinks into the memory, picking apart details, turning them over, and considering their implications while out for a swim. Other characters in his novel-in-progress form in similar ways, out of a gestalt of memories and experiences, some of them poignant and some mundane. Tsiolkas lets each memory swell before stitching them into his novel.
In another scene, a friend of his is apprehensive on his behalf. ‘I had no idea that you no longer consider yourself left-wing. It came as a surprise.’ She is referring to the other theme in 7 ½, one that dominates any reading of the novel: to Tsiolkas, politics and beauty are in opposition nowadays. Tsiolkas’ narrator is frustrated and sees the loss of something vital, even beautiful, when we read and write toward politics and find ourselves mired in dogma, which is, to him, anti-art:
I shut my eyes and recited her list. ‘Crisis and revolution, war and bushfires, the pandemic and the shifts in the superpowers. All that and more. But there is nothing I can offer anymore to illuminate any of that. And these days, when I read novels that are all crisis and revolution, war and bushfires, I am nauseated by their arrogance and their naivety. Every bloody novelist sounds the same now, whether they are American or Austrian or Angolan or Andalusian or Australian. All the same cant, all the same desire to shape the world to their academic whims and aspirations. All this compassion and all this outrage and all this empathy and all this sorrow and all this fear and all this moralising and not one sentence of surprise in any of it.’ I puffed furiously at my cigarette. ‘Not one moment of beauty. I don’t want to write that fucking novel.’
I’m confused by this perspective: it feels like he is mistaking his ungenerous reading with a broader decline in the novel. What is causing this decline?
In one passage the Tsiolkas character rails against ‘the puritan elect’ who judge prizes and give out awards to safe and dead art, in another absurd moment he finds perfect symmetry between the right’s ‘entanglement with the vilest of racist dogma’ and the ‘equally cataclysmic failure of the left [with] its derision of the notions of individual freedom and of independent thought.’ In a recent interview for The Guardian, Tsiolkas expands on this point:
‘At writers’ festivals over the past few years, I’ve felt as if I was disappointing people if I was expressing doubt or nuance. I felt a certain pressure to articulate certain positions in politics that I didn’t yet know what I felt about.’
‘In life, things are very nuanced but in the public sphere or on social media, the nuance disappears and it becomes either/or. The writing of [the novel] Damascus clarified for me how important doubt is. I’m really scared of surety—because of the consequences of surety in religion and politics.
At 56 and the author of seven novels (this week he won the $60,000 Melbourne prize for literature in recognition of his work), Tsiolkas defends his right to write from different perspectives, genders and sexualities (he draws the line at ‘First Nations stuff’ because ‘there’s so little I know’ but ‘everything else is allowable’).
In a 2008 essay On the Concept of Tolerance, Tsiolkas argues that the role of an artist is an anti-political one, at odds with the stifling and totalising dogmas of the left and right:
The tolerance of the radical artist cannot be a liberal tolerance. It is a radical, disturbing, dangerous tolerance; heretical, blasphemous, cruel. It has to speak on behalf of not only the oppressed, the imprisoned, the condemned, it also has to refute the silencing of the racist, the inhuman, the murderous and, dare I say it, even the fascistic. It is this aspect of radical tolerance which distances the artist and writer from politics, which makes our involvement suspicious, tentative, infuriating.
There is a similar energy here: on one side, you’ve got the forces of entrenched dogma and ideology, and on the other hand, you have an artist, who somehow exists outside of that. There’s even an implied moral equivalency between the left and right, a lazy statement that is repeated often enough but makes no sense at all. One wonders: who are these artists who live in and write about communities they have no stake in? Who are these artists who spend their time equally defending ‘the oppressed’ as well as fascists? If George Saunders is right, and Einstein really did say that ‘no worthy problem is ever solved within the plane of its original conception,’ then perhaps we need to turn to an earlier version of this argument.
Theodore Adorno, for all that he was also wrong in his essay On Commitment, did at least give us another lens into this perspective. Responding to Jean Paul Sartre’s 1948 essay What is Literature? (that argues for the idea of a ‘committed artist’ whose work is intrinsically tied to political ends), Adorno lays the battleground before arguing for his idea of an autonomous artist—a category which mainly seems to consist of Kafka and, of all other writers, Samuel Beckett, whose work even in the sixties he admits ‘everyone shudders at’:
There are two ‘positions on objectivity’ which are constantly at war with one another, even when intellectual life falsely presents them as at peace.
A work of art that is [politically] committed strips the magic from a work of art that is content to be a fetish, an idle pastime for those who would like to sleep through the deluge that threatens them, in an apoliticism that is in fact deeply political.
For autonomous works of art, however, such considerations, and the conception of art which underlies them, are themselves the spiritual catastrophe of which the committed keep warning. Once the life of the mind renounces the duty and liberty of its own pure objectification, it has abdicated.
For Adorno, an autonomous artist might produce better art, perhaps, but I’d say there’s very little difference between the autonomous artist he conjures and, well, a political artist. Any differences seem to be a matter of technique and, to a larger extent, how they are received and read by audiences. For Tsiolkas, however, it’s a matter of… what exactly? The claim that, of all things, political correctness and its newer incarnation ‘wokeness’ (a word stolen from, and now used against, black people,) is stifling writers from being bold, creative, new etc. is an argument so hollow that it’s almost not worth engaging with. It’s a boring, dominant idea that has been repeated uncritically or disingenuously for decades. Tsiolkas’ argument in the novel is deliberately incoherent, complete with the narrator railing against ‘those who rail against the biology of gender and sex,’ likening them to pious Christian scolds.
Of course, the bogeyman he constructs isn’t real, or at least is far more toothless than the incredibly put-upon Mr. Tsiolkas character himself. If anything, 7 ½ is a novel that insists on being legible only on its own terms, and its inherent contradictions (for both Adorno and Tsiolkas, the best argument against them is their own writing) could be read as a feature, not a bug. Interestingly, Tsiolkas—both author and character—makes the same argument against the ‘puritan elect’ that I often make against people that agree with him: that the stench they raise is often just that, a stench, that they’re safe, antiseptic, boring, etc. I’m fascinated by this, of course.
I think the line about the $60,000 prize in his Guardian interview is telling, but also unsurprising. The sort of people who claim that their ideas are becoming too dangerous for the mainstream are often the same people fêted at festivals, showered with awards, and interviewed at length in The Guardian about just how capable they feel writing from the perspective of Indigenous people. It’s not surprising that this happens—it’s beyond the scope of this essay to go into all the ways dominant narratives are, well, dominant. They’re baked into the founding of this country, as Jeanine Leane points out in Overland,
Much of the Australian white-settler canon reads for the first one-hundred and fifty years as a litany of othering. Beyond the First Australians, settler fictionists have depicted, almost, if not entirely carte-blanche, the representations of further diasporas arriving – ‘the yellow peril’, for example; as well as elements within Anglo-European society itself, that were/are somehow, in some way, at some time, othered.
According to an early study of Indigenous representations in Australian literature, Leane describes a national literature that, from the very beginning, had an obsessive, laser-like focus on attempts to ‘overcoming the tyranny of cultural distance’ between settlers and Indigenous people. This ‘distance’ is, of course, primarily a white problem. Embedded in this relation is this desire to know, to possess, and to extract. Reading these accounts, it’s impossible not to be astounded by the conviction of the white settlers:
In 1857, English journalist and author Frank Fowler visited the colony of NSW and wrote with much excitement that ‘our fictionists have fallen upon the soil of Australia, like so many industrious diggers and though merely scratching and fossicking the surface have turned up much precious and malleable stuff.’
Leane is writing during the moment when writers David Marr and Anna Funder resigned as judges for the Horne Prize, when Erik Jensen, then-editor of TheSaturday Paper, announced that the prize would not be open to
Essays by non-Indigenous writers about the experience of First Nations Australians. Essays about the LGBTIQ community written by people without direct experience from within the community. Any other writing that purports to represent the experiences of any minority group of which the writer is not a member.
In a later email Jensen sent to the judges and representatives of Aesop (who were bankrolling the prize), Jensen explained that the ‘guidelines attempted to reduce the number of essays we received that offered chauvinistic or condescending accounts of particular groups of Australians, especially First Australians.’ At the time, both Marr and Funder resigned from the judging panel in protest, leading to Jensen and The Saturday Paper later reversing their decision. In his Guardian column, Marr recounts his response to Jensen’s announcement:
I messaged Jensen at once: ‘I’ve been a big critic of such restrictions. Men can write about women, gays about straights, blacks about whites. You judge, as always, by quality. That’s likely to be higher when there’s direct experience. But you can’t disqualify for lack of it. And if we’re not going to accept whites writing about Indigenous experience, how can we have whites judging Indigenous writing?’
Funder echoed Marr’s sentiments, telling Fairfax, ‘I see all these prescriptions and I see that my own work transgresses them. If you look at my writing, it's personal and political. It's lyrical. It's about people who aren't me.’ Unsurprisingly, both Marr and Funder’s fail to address the actual substance of objections to appropriation: it’s not what they are writing, it’s the context in which they are doing it that matters. It’s also interesting to note that, despite later reversing his decision, Jensen’s initial reasoning for restricting the prize entry conditions imply both a qualitative and quantitative difference between the entries he regarded as offering ‘chauvinistic or condescending accounts of particular groups of Australians, especially First Australians,’ and other entries. In none of their responses do Marr and Funder appear to have considered whether chauvinistic and condescending writing is likely to be any good, or why it seems to make up a substantial portion of entries.
Leane highlights the strange eliding of vital facts in abstract ‘debates’ about cultural appropriation: that exercises in cultural appropriation are almost always unimaginative, lacking in credibility, and demeaning, serving no real purpose but to reinforce whatever stifling thing the writer is invested in:
These fictional representations have never been benign; they have impacted on the represented in ways that settler writers could not possibly imagine. White writers have the freedom to imagine what it might be like to be Aboriginal at any given time; as Katharine Susannah Prichard did in Coonardoo. But can she, or any other settler author, know how the subjects of their imaginations affect real people? Can the settler author really imagine how an Aboriginal reader might feel to see claims about their lives on a page, or what imagined representation might do to an Aboriginal student in the classroom? Freedoms of settler imaginations come at the expense of containing and curtailing Aboriginal stories and voices.
Aboriginal characters were ‘constructed, produced and used as “vehicles” to write about issues that cut right to the core of non-Aboriginal psyche, and how this shaped the emerging construct of a national consciousness – of the white nation.’ In other countries, there are similar histories, similar cruelties. Literature isn’t so far from real conditions: it is part of the process of reinforcing, resisting and reifying conditions. This is where any idea of an artist, separate and at odds with their total environment, begins to break down.
Here’s what I think: I don’t believe Christos Tsiolkas when he implies the only thing stopping him from writing from ‘someone else perspective’ is how much or how little he knows about them or how interested he is in writing that story. There’s nothing stopping any writer from doing the same: Weinstein does it in Saying Goodbye to Yang, and he wrote a fine, if not great story. The same story from Koganada, someone with a more nuanced, personal, and interesting ideas on the topic, was better for the exact same reasons. George Saunders wrote a story about a bunch of people so abstract to him that they came to him in a dream. Those same writers have written stories from other perspectives too.
The line Tsiolkas draws at what he calls ‘First Nations stuff’ is as fake as David Marr’s declaring that his writing about the Catholic Church or political parties are relevant to this conversation: there is no line, he can write whatever he wants. Less talented writers than him do it all the time. If he does choose to write ‘First Nations stuff’, I think it’ll be his weakest novel yet, but he’ll continue to sell books because he’ll still appeal to people who don’t care about any of this stuff, or others who despise ‘identity politics’ or are otherwise invested in pointless and cruel culture wars. The former group includes most people and are decent enough I guess, but the latter group is almost entirely composed of people without imagination, people of casual cruelty and malice: our Prime Minister is one of these people, and so are the men and women in his party. Of course, we are getting political again, something Christos Tsiolkas the author is happy to do but his novel analogue claims to despise, but there must be a point where you find yourself agreeing with charlatans and villains, writing the worst novel you’ve written in years, and wonder where you went wrong in your crusade against the (at this point) purely hypothetical and imagined moral outrage of your peers.
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Works Cited
✷ 8 ½, dir. Federico Fellini, 1963.
✷ After Yang, dir. Kogonada, 2021.
✷ Alexander Weinstein, ‘Saying Goodbye to Yang’, Children of the New World, (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2016).
✷ Christos Tsiolkas, 7 ½, (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2021).
✷ Christos Tsiolkas, ‘On the Concept of Tolerance’, Tolerance, Prejudice and Fear: Sydney PEN voices: The 3 Writers Project, (Sydney: Allen & Unwin 2008).
✷ George Saunders, ‘The Semplica Girl Diaries’, New Yorker, 8 October 2012.
✷ Jeanine Leane, ‘Subjects of the imagination: on dropping the settler pen’, Overland, 5 December 2018.
✷ Theodore Adorno, ‘On Commitment’, trans. Francis McDonagh, Performing Arts Journal 3:2 (1978).
✷ Zadie Smith, ‘Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction’, New York Review of Books, 17 October 2019.
Khalid Warsame is a writer of fiction and essays. He lives in Naarm.