5 Questions with Divya Venkataraman
Divya Venkataraman is an Indian-Australian lawyer and writer from Tintenbar. Her writing has been published in the Sydney Morning Herald, The Lifted Brow, Time Out, Meanjin, The Big Issue and Sweatshop Women. She was a finalist for the Newcastle Short Story Award and the Premier's Multicultural Media Award.
Divya is a member of Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement and has a degree in Law and Arts from the University of New South Wales.
No.1
What was your journey to being a writer like?
I was—and maybe still am, to an extent—motivated by a fearful kind of desire to capture moments, because I didn’t always feel like I was experiencing them thoroughly enough while they were happening. Writing words down on a page was a way of resisting the transience of everything, the only way of getting at something like indelibility.
In a more practical sense, I started writing because I was always reading (insert clichés about being the only brown girl in a series of primary schools around Australia, my family moved towns almost every year). I found friends in the white children of old, English fairy stories and novels about midnight feasts in whimsical boarding schools.
Then, when I was fifteen, I read The God of Small Things, which felt like a shot to the chest. I spent the rest of the summer mimicking Arundhati Roy’s prose and trying to write something that would make someone else feel like I did when she wrote about the smell of “old roses on a breeze”.
No.2
How does Sweatshop Women: Volume Two pick up where Volume One left off?
If Volume One was about women of colour asserting our voices in this space—really, calling out in what seemed like the void of the Australian publishing space and saying, hey, look, we’re here—Sweatshop Women: Volume Two is about re-imagining what we can be after having carved out that little square inch for ourselves. I think it’s lighter, freer, a little less burdened with expectations of what women of colour are supposed to be. From the incredible cover art, to the book’s design, the writing and the editing, we WoC are able to exist in a space without feeling the need to reclaim it from somewhere or someone else.
No.3
Tell us a bit about your piece in the anthology. And, what other pieces did you personally enjoy reading?
My piece ‘Syrup’, is about an Indian-Australian girl who’s just had an abortion. She’s fine with her decision—she’s just terrified of her mother finding out. They’re at a dinner party with their arch nemeses, keeping up appearances and praising the gulab jamun, but the façade might to fall apart at any moment. The story is about how we communicate with those who know us intimately, the self-censorship and the assumptions which take their seat at the table in any conversation we have with people whose identities we’ve decided on, before allowing them any chance to show us who they actually are.
All the other pieces in the anthology are so worthwhile—I got so much out of each story and poem—but I especially loved Sheree Joseph’s story ‘Siti Meet Baby’, which was so excellent and funny that it made my own mother follow me around the house cackling and reading out her favourite lines. I think it’s because she realised how similar Lebanese and Indian grandmothers are.
No.4
As we know, calls for diversity are slowly leading to a more robust literary landscape in Australia. We are seeing more organisations dedicated to uplifting marginalised voices and as a result, more published writers of colour. What else do you hope to see?
Now that the Australian literary landscape is slowly blossoming with the talent of writers of colour—for example, I’ve loved Vivian Pham’s The Coconut Children this year—I’d also like to see a different kind of person occupy the critic’s chair.
Cultural criticism is a powerful tool in that it’s able to distil the work of creators and allow broader audiences access to it, especially in the case of ephemeral art like music and theatre. It’s a form that carries responsibility. And the power to construct an understanding of art and disseminate it to audiences who haven’t experienced, say, a book or a play themselves is carried too often by the same type of person in our society. They become the arbiters of what kind of art is and isn’t valuable, and this power becomes trapped within certain, concentric parts of society as a result.
We need to broaden not only the perspective of the creator, but also of the critic. What’s the point of people of colour creating art if its merit and myriad meanings are interpreted and judged exclusively through a white gaze?
No.5
Do you have any advice for other young writers of colour?
Ask for things you don’t think you deserve.
Find out more
Buy a copy of Sweatshop Women: Volume Two direct from the Sweatshop website, or from all good independent bookstores. Don’t know which ones will deliver to you? Check out this very good bookshop map by Alan Vaarwerk.