When I was writing my second novel, Australiana, I deliberated over the title for a long time.
I had many stories that were set in a regional community, and I had an essay and then a whole series of poems. The essay I ended up publishing separately as The Conquest of Land and Dream, and the poems are a largely unpublished sequence called Dispossession.
As for the stories, my working title was My Face is Nameless, which was a reference to James Baldwin. The issue with this as a title was that it didn’t bring together all the aspects of the book, and so I went searching for another title.
I struck gold in an early interview with Don DeLillo. He is the author of Cosmopolis, Underworld, Libra and White Noise, but this interview was about his first book, Americana, which was released in 1971. DeLillo, as the son of Italian immigrants to the US, says in the interview that he titled his book Americana because he intended to write about all aspects of his country, and that title is a statement of intent.
And it is then that I thought perhaps Australiana could work as a title, and if it’s good enough for Don, then it’s good enough for me.
But still I hesitated because in my head was this question: can I, the daughter of migrants from Lebanon, call my book Australiana? The book itself is about a regional community during a period of bushfire, drought and floods. In the end, I thought the title was fitting because it is also an engagement with the portrayal of this country itself.
It was around this time I was thinking a lot about how Australia portrays itself. Every country in the world has a narrative about itself, and these narratives usually focus on the positive aspects and things like bravery and heroism. I am willing to bet that no country includes war crimes, genocide and dispossession in its national narrative, even though every single country has violence in its history.
So what is the Australian narrative? Probably it’s about mateship and a fair go or something along these lines.
And what is the narrative set for migrants to Australia? It is head down, gratitude, immediately contributing to the economy and under no circumstances standing out too much. And by extension, as a migrant or a child of migrants, you’re Australian if you’re winning medals or curing a disease – but at the sign of any trouble, your conditional belonging is revoked and your overseas origin is blamed for anything troubling.
This could be if you protest or criticise your government, or it could be if you need social or financial support, as most people will need across the course of their life. It could be committing a crime, and in this instance, the source of the crime is your life overseas and has absolutely nothing to do with most of your life, lived in Australia.
I am a fiction writer, and when I hear any politician announcing a tough new migration policy, I start thinking dystopia. People are sorted according to their country of origin. Some are desirable and others not so desirable, and I assume that underneath such tough new policies is a chart that is really about culture, appearance and skin tone. And also in this dystopia, there’s a simple mechanism that sorts the good migrants from bad migrants. I am sure there are certain politicians that would love a machine that sorted people into two groups: these ones good and these ones bad.
In this hypothetical dystopia with the migrant-sorting machine, life becomes simple. It becomes about binaries. It sure is a lot easier dealing with good v bad than having to consider the complexity of why a country as wealthy as Australia has a housing crisis, why there is growing homelessness, why human rights, dignity and freedom are not a reality for the majority of the world’s human beings.
That is asking a difficult question, and in lieu of being able to grapple with that question, it is preferable to announce simple policies and for countries to stick to their simple narratives.
Yumna Kassab was the inaugural Parramatta Laureate in Literature. She is the author of The House of Youssef, Politica, The Lovers and The Theory of Everything. Her next book, Goodbye, My Love, will be released at the end of April
