Interview #222 — Roanna Gonsalves
by Sonia Nair
Roanna Gonsalves is the award-winning author of The Permanent Resident (2016), published in India as Sunita De Souza Goes to Sydney, which won the 2018 Multicultural NSW Award as part of the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and was longlisted for the 2018 Dobbie Literary Award. A recipient of the Prime Minister’s Australia Asia Endeavour Award, Roanna teaches creative writing at UNSW, and is the co-founder of Southern Crossings.
Roanna speaks to Sonia about the erroneous conflation between “young” and “emerging”, how the status of migrants is intertwined with the experience of class, and the many nuances that come with Indianness.
This interview was conducted in 2021, for Liminal Volume II.
You have an exceedingly diverse writing practice that spans novels and short stories, scholarly pieces, radio documentaries and even Bollywood reportage. How did you first come to writing, and do you have a favourite form?
I first came to writing from reading. My parents and teachers put books and magazines into my hands, including Enid Blyton’s backlist and magazines such as Tinkle, Target and Eve’s Weekly. As a child, it was intensely pleasurable and addictive to get lost in the worlds of those books and to be immersed in the stories in those magazines.
I think powerful writing kindles a creative flame within readers, makes us want to follow the writer and tell our own stories, render our own ideas on paper, too. I was already a reader by the time I began to write, as a very young child. I was lucky to have a family who encouraged this, who praised me when I wrote even the most clichéd poetry. I quickly realised that the practice of writing brought me joy, pleasure and applause, an irresistible combination for a child. So I continued along this path.
The consideration of form is crucial when deciding how to sustain and hold an idea. Often, it is the careful consideration of the pulleys and levers of a form, its rigid or shifting boundaries, its frames and its porosity, that enable an idea or a story to be developed to its fullest potential. I love the short-story form because of its affordances: brevity, embryonic potential for illumination, capacity for a controlled uncoiling at its close. But some ideas need other forms. Sometimes, the work suggests the form, the home it needs, right from its inception. At other times, I love testing out ideas and considering how they might come alive in different forms, how the form may help the idea breathe differently.
In other interviews, you’ve discussed The Permanent Resident’s 18-year journey and your experience of being a single parent supporting your family. What do you think we lose when we conflate the term ‘emerging’ with ‘young’?
Writers seem to come into their literary prime, so to speak, later than other artists because it can take time and long years of lived experience to create something fresh and moving on the page. Of course, there are many exceptions, but it can take years, decades, to have a work published because of the time-intensive process of reading through the history of literature, then creating nuanced and complex characters, working out a fitting shape for the story, refining the story, writing drafts, polishing them, finding a publisher—not to mention external systemic constraints.
However, it seems like, once it begins, the writer’s prime is unending. The more we read and the more we marinate in the stew of love, longing, life, the better the work seems to get. Also, I think ‘young’ is such a subjective term. The boundary of the word ‘young’ keeps being extended as I grow older. The terms ‘emerging’ and ‘young’ can be synonymous but often they are not, nor should they be limited to the bounds of each of these words.
Literary success can mean getting rich through book sales. Literary success can also mean being conferred prestige through reviews in publications and can be completely detached from financial gain. In fact, throughout literary history, poverty as a result of holding oneself aloof from the market was often seen as the mark of a real writer. Literary success can also mean churning out work in order to help keep one’s byline in circulation, but there is the risk of being ignored, without certain kinds of promotion, in our saturated digital literary sphere. All of this is inextricably bound up with the material conditions of a writer’s life and how much time they can afford to spend on developing their work before the debt collector comes knocking at the door.
In a 2013 interview, you described yourself as “not a very good migrant”; in what ways have you debunked this migrant stereotype in your pursuit of being a writer?
I may have misrepresented myself there when I said that. I have always worked more than full-time, and always in multiple jobs. I don’t have a partner to feed my family, pay my rent and support my writing practice, as many writers do. I also don’t have inherited family wealth. So I’ve always had to work in multiple day jobs in order to merely survive. What I meant, but didn’t articulate unambiguously, was that my commitment is to my writing practice and to issues of social justice at the cost of my own financial and housing stability. Living as we do in a neoliberal world where the arts are essential but undervalued, this has meant that I, like many, work under precarious financial conditions so that I can continue writing. It’s the question that many artists grapple with: to sell one’s soul in order to earn a living but have no time for one’s art practice, or to dedicate oneself to one’s art practice but live in poverty. I live in the shifting sands between these two extremes.
I think being a ‘good migrant’ often means putting one’s head down and unquestioningly obeying the government of the day because we feel grateful to be allowed into this country. Dissent is often conflated with ungratefulness. However, I think we need to change the story around dissent in relation to immigrant groups. Dissent must also be a form of migrant gratefulness, an expression of love. As migrants who love Australia, it is essential to safeguard the rights that are our privilege, to question our own positions as beneficiaries of Indigenous dispossession, and this might mean being willing to dissent. True love, of a person or place, must always include the capacity to ask questions of oneself and of the state. True love, of a person or place, must always include the right to dissent. I’ve tried to put this into practice in my own life, but, more importantly, I’ve tried to render this on the page through the lives of my characters.
The Permanent Resident’s migrant characters inhabit a liminal space wherein they regard Australia as home but often feel like they don’t belong, and find the privileges they had in India diminish when they arrive here. Why did you choose this lens through which to explore prejudice, displacement, violence and heartbreak?
The status of migrants is intertwined with the experience of class. I’m particularly interested, through all my work, in how our class positions shape and influence our responses to prejudice, displacement, violence and heartbreak, as you put it so well, both in relation to the self as well as in relation to our social interactions. In my book, my characters are accustomed to being the masters, rather than the servants, in India. They are mainly from the English-speaking middle class. However, when they arrive in Australia, a switch seems to happen. They find that their sense of entitlement and privilege is completely disrupted, particularly when they find themselves near the bottom of the race and class hierarchy rather than near the top. This immigrant position is fertile ground for comedy because it presents opportunities to explore the hypocrisies of our communities. But it is also fertile ground for exploring how a sense of belonging to a new place is affected by the entitlements learned in the homeland and how we are perceived by the mainstream. In a land where sovereignty has never been ceded, I’m interested in how much of our sense of entitlement and privilege we are willing to cede as new migrants trying to make sense of our new surroundings.
The Permanent Resident focuses on the labour that first-generation migrants, particularly international students, provide to Australia. You’ve talked about how a sense of belonging is contingent on reciprocity; how can marginalised Australians claim to belong to Australia if Australia doesn’t claim them?
International students are often seen as ATMs for Australia. We know that education is the third-largest Australian export. International students are also a particular subset of first-generation migrants, the people who do Australia’s dirty work—precarious work that others with a more secure footing may be unwilling to do. In this way, the image of international students as outsiders, particularly those whose differences from the mainstream are visualised explicitly, is further reinforced. The characters in my book attempt to find a comfortable space in which to exist in Australia, but have to contend with being seen as different, people who don’t belong. It is only through an insistence on claiming a stake in the life of this country, through political and cultural engagement, through dialogue, through small and large acts of kindness that are then reciprocated, that my characters begin to feel at home
Why did you choose to ground your stories within the highly specific social milieu of Goan, Mangalorean and Bombay Catholic communities?
The Indian Catholic communities in Sydney enjoy many privileges, but they are minorities in India as well as in Australia, and therefore also face many constraints. Indianness is often conflated with being upper-caste, upper-class and Hindu. Australianness is often conflated with being white. I wanted to explore the many other ways of being Indian and the many other ways of being Australian today, the social latitude these positions offer as well as the social reins these positions must contend with. Also, these are the communities I am a part of. While I don’t share all their beliefs, I certainly cannot ignore their influences on me and my writing. It was a way of honouring my heritage while also looking at some of the problematic aspects of it.
The Permanent Resident’s characters are constantly manoeuvring the chasm between right and wrong. How important was it for you to depict characters that don’t inhabit easy moral positions?
As a reader, I’m interested in characters that surprise me, characters that don’t always conform to expectations, characters that are complex, just like real people. So, as a writer, I deliberately set out to chronicle this complexity, the pragmatism that is sometimes necessary, the ethical and unethical choices being made when navigating a new culture, the need for survival first even if it means forgoing one’s principles. This has to be the work of fiction: to infuse characters with complex inner lives, to spurn the neat and predictable rendering of character and place, instead to always choose a messy complexity.
How has the reception to The Permanent Resident differed between Australia and India?
The book has been really well reviewed in Australia as well as in India. I was fortunate that it reached readers and reviewers who understood what I was attempting to do in the stories. From what readers and reviewers have said, I found that, in Australia, the stories are seen as an outsider’s view; in India, the stories are seen as an insider reporting back, so to speak, on a foreign culture. This difference in reception, while always couched in complimentary terms, was quite striking to me. What this suggests to me is that there is an interest among communities of readers in both countries in being surprised and in encountering fresh perspectives of different cultures that challenge tired stereotypes.
There is often an assumption that fiction by women writers of colour is autobiographical. Why does this perception exist?
Like many first-time authors, particularly women from minority groups, I have often been asked if my stories are true. Sometimes, when I insist they are made up, the questioner insists on finding some way to prove that they are autobiographical. There seem to be two almost contradictory things going on. First, it is the assumption that the imagination is something that only white writers can access. This insistence that women writers from minority backgrounds are capable only of writing our own lives reveals deeply ingrained stereotypes about creativity and artistic excellence being bound exclusively to white masculinity. People seem to think we suffer from an impoverishment of creative agency. Second, to quote the title of David Shields’ novel, there is a ‘reality hunger’ in contemporary society—a need for representations of factual truth, in a time when the truth has been abandoned by most of the media and politicians. This is a misrecognition of the power of literature.
Could you share some of your favourite writers from the margins who are gaining a foothold in the publishing landscape, both in Australia and India?
The publishing of writers from minority communities is but the first step towards a more solid foothold. It’s only with multi-pronged support from the whole literary field, the same kind that big mainstream writers get, that we will see change in the way Australia imagines itself through its literature.
There are many writers who challenge stereotypes and blinkered views of all kinds in a fresh and engaging way. Here are some whose work I enjoy. In Australia: Michelle de Kretser, Melissa Lucashenko, Alexis Wright, Rashida Murphy, Julie Koh, Eileen Chong, Shastra Deo. In India: Arshia Sattar, Annie Zaidi, Kynpham Singh Nongkynrih, Jerry Pinto, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Ranjit Hoskote, Paul Zacharia.
Your contribution to the anthology After Australia (2020) is about an Indian servant and an Indigenous woman who reversed the process of colonisation and went on to build their own commercial empires. What were you trying to do with this story?
I had a lot of fun speculating how we would be in a different kind of world had one or two key historical events been altered slightly by those you would least expect it from. In this story, I was attempting to reimagine what it would have been like at such a tumultuous period of history, particularly for two ambitious and super smart women. They are business partners and have the drive and the skill to compete with the big businesses of that time.
However, despite being fettered by their race, their class and their gender, they are committed to their entrepreneurial vision. I try to complicate things, though, by making them complicit in the exploitation of their own workers. I was also trying to write a love letter to the printing press, to the practice of building what Benedict Anderson called “imagined communities” through the technology of printing in the early colony of NSW.
This story was a project of recuperation and memorialisation, told with tongue firmly in cheek. I hope it comes across as such.
What does being Asian Australian mean to you?
For me, being Asian Australian is a political affiliation in addition to being a racial, cultural or geographic one. I identify with it because of the solidarity I have experienced with others who self-identify as such, particularly through Asian Australian artistic and scholarly communities. It means being part of a heterogenous group of often formerly colonised communities, folks who share similar experiences of being a particular kind of outsider in Australia while navigating these experiences based on different intersectional identity positions. I think the term can often evoke orientalist stereotypes, from being considered exotic to being considered impure and inferior, often at the same time. I find solidarity and reassurance within Asian Australian artistic communities through a shared tiredness with these particular clichés and through a shared resistance to them.
Australia has always been in an Asian century, so to speak, because of the location of this continent within the Asian region and the long ties of Indigenous communities with Asian neighbours. So the term ‘Asian Australian’ should really be semantically incoherent. It’s like saying ‘Asian Indonesian’ or ‘Asian Chinese’ or ‘Asian Indian’. However, because of the history of colonisation and immigration, and because of the historically European associations of settler-colonists in Australia, the term has assumed political significance. It can offer political reassurance for those who need it. It can also offer a recuperation of the memory of ancient ties that bind this continent to the landmass from which it once broke away, the ancient human and non-human ties that it can now revitalise through connection and solidarity between Indigenous and Asian communities in contemporary Australia.
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Interview by Sonia Nair
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