Featured Australian writers essays
Literary Migrations
Sakr’s novel is teeming with the feelings of its characters: anger, despondency, ambivalence, shame, joy; with cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and school friends; with Arabic and Turkish phrases: Jamal has Lebanese family in and near Lurnea in Western Sydney, and an estranged Turkish one; with familial expectations; with violence, both threatened and enacted; with sexual acts that transgress cultural proscriptions; and with a shifting, sometimes lush literary style.
For There She is, Out of the Shadow
The underlying structures that led to Woolf’s thinly veiled racist depiction of Daisy in Mrs Dalloway have reconfigured to shape Mina’s existence in the world as a woman writer of colour. Writing Daisy’s story is a way for Mina to push back and resist the daily draining forces of racism and sexism. Writing is revival, ‘I know what I have to do: tracking her voice, channelling her vibe; that is what matters’, Mina hypes herself, adding ‘[r]esearch seems to work when I’m stuck, turning history, allowing the creative nexus to thrive, to flower, for Daisy to intone leaving her husband, her son, and her household behind.’.
Seeking Derangement
In her presentation of Anja, Howell has fallen into a contemporary trap, which is to presume that in modern literature a woman losing it is inherently understandable. That to shoulder a great emotional burden makes a female character three-dimensional and complex. Rather, Anja who apparently has always operated on a self-sufficient basis, continues over the course of this book to isolate herself and to consider herself set apart from the world.
Australian writers
Literary Migrations
Sakr’s novel is teeming with the feelings of its characters: anger, despondency, ambivalence, shame, joy; with cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and school friends; with Arabic and Turkish phrases: Jamal has Lebanese family in and near Lurnea in Western Sydney, and an estranged Turkish one; with familial expectations; with violence, both threatened and enacted; with sexual acts that transgress cultural proscriptions; and with a shifting, sometimes lush literary style.
For There She is, Out of the Shadow
The underlying structures that led to Woolf’s thinly veiled racist depiction of Daisy in Mrs Dalloway have reconfigured to shape Mina’s existence in the world as a woman writer of colour. Writing Daisy’s story is a way for Mina to push back and resist the daily draining forces of racism and sexism. Writing is revival, ‘I know what I have to do: tracking her voice, channelling her vibe; that is what matters’, Mina hypes herself, adding ‘[r]esearch seems to work when I’m stuck, turning history, allowing the creative nexus to thrive, to flower, for Daisy to intone leaving her husband, her son, and her household behind.’.
Seeking Derangement
In her presentation of Anja, Howell has fallen into a contemporary trap, which is to presume that in modern literature a woman losing it is inherently understandable. That to shoulder a great emotional burden makes a female character three-dimensional and complex. Rather, Anja who apparently has always operated on a self-sufficient basis, continues over the course of this book to isolate herself and to consider herself set apart from the world.