What Comes Next? Some Thoughts On Diversity
By Robert Wood
Hollywood has the peculiar ability to milk, so to speak, the cow and the goat
at the same time—and then to peddle the results as ginger ale.
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son.
‘Diversity’ is having a moment. Implicated with the race consciousness led by Black Lives Matter activists, there is a literary reckoning that is playing out in public right now. There have been so many articles on it, from left and right, people of colour and white, focused on representation and structures. ‘Diversity’ is everywhere and it is exhausting, not only to keep talking about it but to experience it, to keep educating people, to refuse the weight of whiteness as it interrupts and silences our work in the community. This latter point is important as it is often well-intentioned liberals wanting to listen and learn who paradoxically reinforce burdens of marginalisation and privilege. It has gotten loud and it has gotten hot. So, what is the ‘diverse’ writer to do in ‘Australia’? After all, it seems that Australian literature has the peculiar ability to exploit, so to speak, people of colour and First Nations writers at the same time, and then to champion the results as diversity. But maybe we don’t want this ginger ale. It must be said that this conversation has been happening for a while and there are so many voices taking part in it.
To answer the question of diversity, I will focus on race because of my own lived experiences. I’m a Malayali. My ancestral village is Puthucurichy in south-west Kerala in India. I am accepted by that community, have ancestry, and self-identify as a Malayali. There are written records of my family there for six hundred years and I first went there as a child. My mother came here in 1976 and married my white Australian father who is himself a second- generation Scottish immigrant. Being Malayali does not change the fact that I am also mixed if not-quite white. My work in the diverse sector has included writing, but also being Politics Editor of Peril, an interviewer for Liminal, and in my current capacity as Creative Director with the Centre for Stories. In the last position, I have coordinated and mentored emerging writers in a few projects that were explicitly for CaLD communities—Indian Ocean heritage, Inclusion Matters for thirty writers from many backgrounds, and Journal, which publishes stories mainly from marginalised people. My main place for publication for my own poetry is in India where I work with Hindi, Malayalam, Marathi, Bengali, Urdu, and other languages. For a more in depth self-positioning dating back to the earliest days of my published writing in 2015, see Mascara, Peril, Liminal, Boundless, and BLARB. I cannot speak for anyone but myself, and it is up to other own voice writers to represent their views. If anything we need to hear multiple stories.
For me, diversity is a principle not an essential identity. In the industry today, diversity goes with identity. It is a term that is inclusive of sex, gender, class, race, accessibility, status, lifestyle, location, privilege and so on. And, all of that intersectionally too. Yet, diversity as a proposition is not inalienable. There are people who have assimilated, those who have returned to homelands, others yet who negotiate race in their own personal ways. We should encourage all of that, and, there is no right way to express one’s cultural and linguistic position. That much is easy enough to understand, and from it, diversity becomes about a principle founded in community relations and not only an unchanging identity one expresses as a liberal author. This is why it is historical rather than essential.
To think now about the second term, ‘Australia’. It is the settler colonial apparatus that sits atop the continent. A recent imposition. A white expression. A misnomer for what is really here but not a fiction. A construct, which means we can change it. A type of illegal occupation with shallow roots and no self-governing authority. A middling power. A co-ordinated set of unconscious tastes, judgements, networks, relations, and people that establish what is acceptable to write through structural judgements and normalised expectations. A field. A paradigm. A false sovereignty. The times I have felt most Australian are at opposite ends of the spectrum—as an international student at an Ivy League university in the United States, and as a ward of the state in a public hospital. If the first was an obvious privilege, the second was a clarifying experience that I will always be grateful for. In a locked ward, I realised in a meaningful way, what the state was and the ongoing and fundamental race conflict that exists here—white settlers and First Nations people. I saw that I was subject to the violence of the state as well, but my skin in the game was somewhat different. I am and will always be a recent arrival for whom Australia is not my home. It revealed to me that the process of oppression affects us all, but some of us disproportionately and in a systemic way as well. The issue of diversity cannot be separated from racial justice, most especially for First Nations people.
To return to the question then but in more personal terms: how is this Malayali able to survive the white racism of this place? By situating and being situated as ‘diverse’ precisely because that is a political grouping that offers possibility and comfort. It gives a community to speak of, to and with, which respects my people and works in solidarity for the end of white supremacy, even as it cannot see all the parts of my ethnicity. I am happy then to rest in terms like Asian-Australian not because they are ends in themselves but because they are useful heuristics that help frame the conversation.
A HISTORY
In one way of telling it, the revolutionary change for race relations here was the end of the White Australia Policy in 1973. Yet that minimises the presence of diverse people before that. There have long been non-Indigenous, non-white people on this continent. When you start looking for us, you will see us everywhere. We are here as Macassar fishermen trading with Yolgnu people; as African Americans on the First Fleet; as Afghan cameleers in the centre; as Japanese pearl divers in Broome; as Chinese gold miners in Queensland; as Anglo adjacent groups like Greeks, Jews, Italians, Slavic people on railways all over; as Caribbean factory workers; as Vietnamese refugees; as Latinx fleeing dictatorships; as Sudanese people more recently. We have been here since before white settlement and have participated every step of the way in making this place. My argument is not that this is unacknowledged, or that we have been forgotten; it is that there are people here from all over, which complicates national political shibboleths including the bipartisan soundbite of being ‘the most successful multicultural nation in the world’.
All of these groups represented and continue to represent their experience in writing, but as a distinct historical paradigm, we only get to see non-white, non-Indigenous writers as a collective after Gough Whitlam. This is ‘ethnic literature’ which turns into ‘multiculturalism’ which turns into ‘diversity’. What do we mean when we say as a paradigm? It exists as a collective reality that is organised. I think what we are seeing now is the attempted white reification of diversity, where it is assimilated into the mainstream while being paradoxically resistant. In other words, it is becoming legible even as it is antithetical.
We experience racism but are complicit in settlement. We are ethnic and have suffered from colonialism but not always ongoing genocidal practices. We are here but have homelands elsewhere. Our role can be to support peace in this country by living and representing our values of justice, healing, equity, fairness, non-violence, in addition to diversity and inclusion. That means, more than ever, we need to take the lead from First Nations people. That also means knowing First Nations contains its own internal heterogeneity—Ngarluma people are very different to Yindjibarndi people, and, so when we think of First Nations we need to think hard about the specificity of those experiences that are not simply decolonised but indigenised. In either case, being non-Indigenous people of colour means being a guest on sovereign land.
Diversity matters now because of the hard work of our community. To explain it historically though, demography is the driver that gives us enough people to voice who we are. This is because of recent experiences of migration, including the emergence of a coloured middle class, the massification and accessibility of universities, and the rise of internet platforms democratising access. All of these open up the literary sector to diversity as a historical paradigm even as there are precedents when we look for them.
A CONCEPT
The champions of diversity can point to some very major benefits of including Other people in the conversation. This is a principle that extends to many identity categories and has been ascendant for a while. Now though, with specific anthologies, we see the cultivation of diversity as a marketable response to the lived reality of Australian change.
The good parts of acceptance, inclusion and tolerance include greater access for those of us who were previously marginalised, which means more and different people in the sector. It includes changes to aesthetics itself, which necessitates a re-reading of the historical canon and a shift in what good writing is and can be. Diversity can make us feel heard and recognised no matter the pitfalls of what that means. There is too, the success of remarkable individuals who make sense of wider narratives. There must also be a critique of the assimilationist tendency, which is to say, our voices should not simply be heard by unchanged audiences. It is not a question of white Australia accepting and sanctioning me, nor even of holding onto the idea that we are dangerous or different. In other words, diversity can neither deny where it comes from nor hold onto nationalist fantasies. If it is about autonomy and anti-racism, it also needs to be about community support and repatriation. I find it remarkable how little encouragement is given to writers to publish beyond Australia, let alone in their ancestral countries, not as a retreat but as a spiritual ballast and to change their perspective. For me, and the reason why I publish mainly in India, is that it is important to be in a place where white people are not the majority, and, not even relevant; where English is a minor language; where decolonisation happened in 1947 and we are faced with different challenges. And yet, I do not think I would have ended up back there if it had not been for the space my diverse community opened up for me right here in Boorloo/Perth. Being surrounded by other people of colour encouraged me to feel proud of my people and it has been my journey to engage back home most of all.
As for diversity, right now it feels that white critics and readers and supporters, have cottoned on to the opportunity it represents. Often this sympathy reads as tone deaf and inauthentic, an attempt to yet again take power away from us, all in service to the market or to critical taste. Diversity too flattens specificity and hence denies individuals to be part of a people with greater depth. That is where we get things like ‘Asian’ or even ‘Indian’ rather than ‘Malayali’ just as ‘First Nations’ is not ‘Aboriginal’ is not ‘Ngarluma’. To deny people the opportunity to represent themselves as a people over, above, before the nation itself, undermines some of the political and historical agency we continue to enjoy on the inside of our own communities most of all. Moreover, diversity can often sideline issues of justice precisely because it accepts polite ways of relating to the white world. This in turn reinforces race as a paradigm, which undermines our power in the first place. And so, diversity comes to rest in symbolic gestures that do not overturn the conservative tendencies we are forced to live with and try to dismantle on a daily basis.
In that way, diversity seems to be a national literature in Frantz Fanon’s definition, but is anti-nationalist. It is critical of, rather than transcendent from, Australia, locating that in white settler conceptions of place. It is not then about assimilating to an unchanged structure, yet nor is it about being a part of diaspora seeking a connection to homelands. What is striking is that the languages, networks, and so on are all Australian with precious little international engagement, which if and when it comes, is centred on American narratives of identity politics. And so, Australia even as we negate it comes into historical consciousness of us as a group at specific moments like the present even as we have long been here, only serving to reinforce the fact that diversity is a thing right now.
THE INDUSTRY
The literary political claims of diversity have been about representation grounded in the figure of the charismatic author, often a novelist, who then speaks on behalf of an interest group. There are, of course, related and other propositions that have us negotiate the emphasis on authors including a desire to see greater diversity at all levels of the literary industry—editors, journalists, publishers, boards, and so on. We could then say, diversity as a principle grounded in lived experiences and legible as identity, needs to be extended beyond the idea that we get to make our own stories. We also need our own platforms, spaces, audiences. So we could ask for diversity in:
networks—the bureaucracy of literature, which is where taste is made, including editors, communications and marketing, publishing, agents.
patronage— including on boards and funding bodies so we change how resources are distributed.
taste— this is about audience and who buys our books. Not to deter white middle-class boomers, but to ask if their approval, desire, outrage, should govern what makes it onto festivals, bestseller lists, and bookclubs. Don’t assume there is a general reader in the first place.
That might be the agenda as it stands, and, which people in articles, conversations, and panels have articulated. It goes without saying, that there is nothing new in this view, simply a summary that one can return to without desire to be comprehensive or total.
So what comes next? ‘Diversity’ might not be here to stay as an organising principle, and, surely its uptake by white people signals some sort of transformation if not a death knell. What will stay however, are questions of race and the role of non-white, non-Indigenous writers as well. From here, we might say there will be:
hybridity that emerges both at the level of identity and aesthetics, the first coming from new relationships between diverse people, and the second coming from the interaction between respective traditions and influential authors.
opportunity that comes with an expansion of the sector as a whole and the desire for people to keep making it worthwhile
proliferation of diverse types of diversity - —if people want to assimilate they can; if they want to return to motherland they can; if they want to self-determine or rage against the machine they can. Our presence at the table means new conversations most of all.
All these things are already happening. Best to welcome the future as it starts and stands.
As for me, my grandparents did not help India gain independence or for my mother to play a role in decolonising Singapore, for me to be ungrateful. That does not mean I am the model minority, or the angry one at that. What it means is that I am thankful most of all for the ongoing custodianship of First Nations people. Diversity means we cannot be complicit in an ongoing genocide. My mother does not put up with abuse on a daily basis to build a society led by mediocre white men who look after their mates. I do not get up every morning to deal with institutional forms of violence and be silent. We do it because we value our lives and it is our privilege to work with the oppressed in our midst. That means our role is to contribute to decolonisation and leave indigenisation to the people who know it best. That is why I, like many other diverse writers, will always be a guest. Not because of or in the hostility of the nation. I am not asking to stay the night in the house the empire built. I am a guest on Noongar country, which means I follow the law here as I can best understand it, informed, of course, by familial Birdarra practices along saltwater further north. Reflecting more on the role of the guest is something that I would like to see other diverse writers explore.
The role of the diverse write remains then to elevate, enlighten and liberate their people through sustained reflection that takes power as its ultimate subject. The point is to change the world of suffering we experience on a daily basis. Through writing, including criticism, we see our community and raise it up spiritually, materially, and historically. That is the mission and purpose that comes from being of a people who knows it’s a people. This is not the earlier national liberation of the first generation of decolonising activists, but a repatriation to one’s embodied reality. I am interested then in Malayali freedom not Indian independence and write out of that knowledge as a guest on sovereign land.
CONCLUSION
There is no pure identity from which to speak with absolute authority. But it does not invalidate the frame of lived experience informing expertise. Ideally, there is a synthesis of the two that allows new readings of critical and aesthetic texts to speak back to ethics, community, and history. If there are problems with everything and everyone, then the proposition is for education not condemnation. That can be exhausting. We are not tired because we are brown. We are tired from being oppressed because of our brownness. Anyone trying to school white people can suffer from fatigue, but it also gives the diverse writer a mission, which might account for the energy in this part of the literary ecosystem. The other animating impulse is, of course, justice for your community, being able to reflect back that strong sense of self as it overcomes real obstacles in the world that are grounded in beliefs of race.
At the same time, identity has been described in rich detail and that is the liberal bedrock upon which diversity is built. It is thick with explanation but perhaps it needs interrogating as the basis for a new coalition of representation. Elsewhere, I have turned to lifestyle but others will find other concepts upon which to build, intersectionally or otherwise. For me, lifestyle is the reconciliation of class and identity politics that recognises group and individual ways in the world without collapsing into the divisions between working class straight white men and a perfectability crisis about speaking on behalf of a raced essence, of being the model minority Malayali. That is, at least for me, one attempt to diversify the philosophical concepts beneath diversity itself. Call this a meta-diversification project emerging from life here as it critiques the labour-liberal divide that results in bipartisan inaction on First Nations genocide and the laissez-faire acceptance of white supremacy. And so, in that way, we can return to the question posed at the beginning of this essay: what is the diverse writer to do in Australia? The answer is simple: keep writing and bring your people with you. ●
Robert Wood is a poet. He is interested in dream, enlightenment, nature, suburbs and philosophy. Robert is a Malayali with connections to the East Indian Ocean. He lives on Noongar country in Australia.