5 Questions with Michelle Cahill
Michelle Cahill is the author of fiction, essays and three collections of poetry, including Letter to Pessoa, a short-story collection that won the 2017 NSW Premier's Literary Award (Glenda Adams Award) and was shortlisted for the 2017 Steele Rudd Queensland Literary Award.
Born in Kenya, she attended primary school in London before migrating to Australia. She lives in Sydney, where she graduated in Medicine and Arts. She is artistic director of the online literary magazine Mascara and co-editor of the anthology Contemporary Asian Australian Poets and the series deciBels3.
Michelle was awarded the 2020 Red Room Poetry Fellowship. Her short story 'Duende' won the 2014 Hilary Mantel International Short Story Award and 'Borges and I' was shortlisted in the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Prize.
No.1
To start, Daisy and Woolf gave you so much scope to expand on a character that’s been basically entirely overlooked by the literary canon for the last 100-ish years. What were some of the challenges of writing back to a book with such a long legacy?
Thank you for this question. In many ways the research was retraumatising and disheartening as I had to familiarise with histories of recurring discrimination, deprivation, and regulatory class control. These were measures that adversely affected many Anglo-Indians and Eurasians, causing patterns of migration that led to stigmatisation. Many were displaced and ghettoised in railway colonies located outside of the caste system. This was the story of comprador or métis peoples: the gradual loss of culture and language, as they became an in-between community whose purpose was co-opted. European colonisation ofIndia created what Gayatri Spivak called ‘irretrievable heterogeneity’.
Yet this is also the site of hybrid and unique cultural production. I recall the first year of my research feeling powerless to tell a story that at so many levels of discourse, narrative, and even scripted into law, has been reduced and stereotyped. One also feels isolated in this type of research though I was also fortunate to have wonderful supervisors during my Doctorate of Creative Arts. Michael Griffiths pointed me in the direction of Anglo-Indian history and postcolonial theories. These are of limited use to the novel, but they do inform and layer the work. This is more crucial when characters such as Daisy have not been granted the complexity of their white, and ethnically pure counterparts. I was fortunate with my other supervisor, Catherine Cole. Cathy is a formidable international writer and scholar who gave me encouragement and ‘permission’ to begin my task. To inaugurate Daisy’s voice was probably my most difficult challenge; to situate her in her culture, in her family; to allow her to assume individual voice and action. This wasn’t going to be my voice: it was hers and I was calling her up out of the obscured past.
I suppose there was also critical resistance amongst a few peers to even accept that Daisy Simmons is a brown woman. Surprisingly, I’ve experienced this from researchers, including an expert in South Asian Australian writing for example. Readers of this novel may be knowledgeable. They may be students, Woolf enthusiasts, academics or fellow writers. It does not always follow that readers who identify as BIPOC or LBTIQI are more supportive. There’s a phenomenon that when a brown woman creates work that is analytical and innovative, she may be seen to be stepping beyond her perceived limit.
No.2
The novel spans years and continents, but finds its way back to present-day Australia, where you are based. How do you think your own background here influenced the way that you perceived Daisy (and by extension, Woolf)?
This is an interesting thought: is it ever possible to entirely separate characters from one’s own background? Mina and her family have migrated from Kenya, via London. Perhaps Daisy’s character is inflected by my experiences of racism and minoritism. She and her cousins do feel the pressure to conform to societal pressures: to marry, to disavow their heritage, to assimilate to an English-speaking ruling class. Daisy’s life in Calcutta is precarious because of her minority status, amid the throes of the Indian freedom movement. In London she expects to be impressed by the architecture, the grandness, but she is equally disappointed by the coldness of her lover when she arrives.
My experience of living and working in a country where First Nations people have been denied their rights and where sovereignty was never ceded also feeds into the passion of the story. Australia is home to many writers of colour and mixed ancestry people who face daunting obstacles in speaking their stories and holding their truth against nationalism’s official cultural representations. In Daisy and Woolf it becomes apparent that Daisy and her community must endure similar social pressures; they are mocked by Hindu youths; the violent backdrop incidents point to longstanding rivalries ignited by caste.
Although I did live in London for some months whilst writing the novel, I also spent time by the sea at Tathra, on the South Coast of NSW. This is where Mina’s family lives, so I was able to structure that part of the novel against a backdrop of shipping journeys in the 1920s; the First Nations peoples of NSW who interacted with colonialists, with lascars. I was able to read diary entries of the time. Travel and sea passages in the novel are metonymic of personal quest and mark how the margins and islands of empire are written into the centre.
As well, I spent several months in 2020 at Vivonne Bay, Kangaroo Island on Kaurna and Ngarrindjeri country during the pandemic working on my structural drafts. That was magical. The Southern Ocean was an inspirational place to be rewriting Daisy’s sea-borne journey.
By the end of the novel, after living in London and returning, Mina is in a writer’s retreat in Katoomba, on Gundungurra country, working on her novel. Talking to Neil, a stray camping on the outskirts of the town, she takes issue with his white assumptions around settlement of Australia and first world tourism of India. So, Mina’s reality as she attempts to write Daisy’s story is informed by ‘Australia’, the nation, and its racist underpinnings.
No.3
Your previous work has been in poetry and short fiction. Do you think you’ll continue in fiction? What were the biggest differences for you in the process of writing Daisy and Woolf as opposed to your previous work?
I am enjoying the scope of fiction to create sustained imaginings so I would like to write another novel. Writing a novel is a physically demanding, exhausting project. There is pain: the neck and the back suffer. I write mostly standing and after a few hours my legs become heavy and ache. I was repeatedly fatigued from the many ‘deaths’ brought about by each structural revision. As a novelist I was living with incompletion and uncertainty, and yet that is a rich place where complex meanings are reconstituted, hard-won, and resisted for the new life a text organically breathes, and the reclamation of lives erased. This is what I love about writing fiction; that it challenges me and in a strange way, that it takes over.
There was also the difference of writing as homage, a subtle and insistent variation kept in balance. There were nuances to bring to the novel’s pages; shadow stories of grief, of the servant Radhika, of the bisexuality and transsexuality transforming the characters. Language and the story become an argument with Virginia Woolf. My task was to give Daisy a voice and a body. It was also to undo the binding between book and author, or as Gayatri Spivak writes to create “a scene of writing” between Woolf and Mrs Dalloway; between Mina and Daisy, so as to render the writing life, despair, grief, exile and textuality as differences rather than opposites in language. From this emerges the dramatic tension and the characters.
No.4
A recurring theme in Daisy and Woolf is how history often writes us, people of colour, into the margins. I really loved how you also included Ling Shuhua and her contributions to literature in your novel. It expands on the racism that permeates the historical canon. In your research, were there other sidelined writers, novelists, or artists in history that stood out to you?
We don’t have to turn to history to find the sidelined writers; I’m thinking of how prize culture has privileged elite white people; and white women. In A Room of One’s Own the women writers whom Woolf refers to are all Anglo-Celtic in their heritage, though Aphra Behn came from a poor Anglo-Dutch background.
In my research I focussed on the fictional life of Daisy, and the real lives of two side-lined modernist authors: Jean Rhys, a Dominican novelist, author of Wide Sargasso Sea, and Shuhua Ling, a modernist Chinese author of short stories and translator. She also wrote a memoir, Ancient Melodies, published in 1953 after Woolf’s death and after she had been mentored and introduced to Bloomsbury. Shuhua was described as the ‘Chinese Katherine Mansfield’. Her husband and her, along with other Chinese writers, belonged to the Crescent Moon Group of experimental bi-lingual (English, Chinese) transnational artists and writers, and they had corresponded with Rabindranath Tagore who travelled to China. There was a rich cultural dialogue and exchange between England, Europe, India and China. Yet Shuhua Ling’s literary reception in England was limited to the story of her life as a Chinese gentlewoman from an illustrious family.
There are some fantastic memoirs and essay collections published by CaLD writers but pressure on non-white people to write about their ethnicity and their lives may severely limit the range of their writing repertoires, and this ‘othering’ also functions to define ‘white’ nations like Australia.
No.5
And finally, what's next for you? Are there other historical figures that you'd love to write on or are you thinking of pivoting into a different genre altogether?
I have the idea of a novel in mind but am cautious to share the early abstract. My task at present is to share readings of and conversations about Daisy and Woolf.
Find out more
A meditation on art, race and class in a postcolonial world, Daisy and Woolf is a masterpiece of postmodern fiction to rival The Hours or Wide Sargasso Sea. Powerfully recentring those in the margins of Anglo-centric histories and fictions, its exquisite telling demands we listen.
Get it from Amplify Bookstore here.