Michelle Cahill
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Michelle Cahill is a Goan-Anglo-Indian poet and author who lives in Sydney. Her first collection of short stories is Letter to Pessoa (Giramondo). She received the Val Vallis Award, the Hilary Mantel International Short Story Prize and has been shortlisted in several prizes including the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Prize. Her most recent poetry collection is The Herring Lass (Arc, UK.)
All essays by Michelle Cahill
Interceptionality, or The Ambiguity of the Albatross
My activism has been a way of protecting my creativity; it is a way of nourishing and reviving what withers, interiorly, when we are silenced by ideologies, or when we become centred ourselves within cultural frames.
Who is lobbying for migrant writers?
‘It’s been my experience that the Australian literary world and the journalists who cover it overlook the more complex perspectives and needs of those who are marginalised in our literary communities.’ Michelle Cahill on the myopia of the current arts funding debate.
Intimate perspectives
The vanishing of expression, voice and authorship is integral to El-Zein’s writing. There are arguments being made in The Secret Maker of the World for the aesthetic, ethical and political aspects of the encounter between world and text, though without any kind of polemic. We sympathise with the characters’ flaws and vulnerabilities, but we are never asked to excuse them.
All essays featuring Michelle Cahill
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.’.
Letters to Who? On Michelle Cahill
‘Pessoa’s heteronyms owed their existence to his theosophical beliefs, modernist aesthetics and his translation work as much as to his bicultural upbringing. In Letters to Pessoa, Michelle Cahill anchors his spirit figures in history and her own life. At the same time, the kaleidoscope of identities assumed in relation to the canonical names they write to are merely spectral mediums: they do not cohere into a stable entity, nor do they have any direct tie to the author. They do, nonetheless, allow her to work with and through aspects of her postcolonial, diasporic selves. Her family’s origins in Goa, once a colony of Pessoa’s Portugal, and her own birth in Kenya, another ex-colony of Britain, like Pessoa’s Natal, make her another potential avatar of his many heteronyms, as he becomes one of hers: another figure for whom writing offers both exile and private homeland.’