{"id":135574,"date":"2019-04-30T11:00:11","date_gmt":"2019-04-30T15:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=135574"},"modified":"2019-05-01T18:31:02","modified_gmt":"2019-05-01T22:31:02","slug":"who-gets-to-be-australian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/04\/30\/who-gets-to-be-australian\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Gets to Be Australian?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

David Malouf. Photo: Conrad Del Villar. \u00a9 Conrad Del Villar.<\/p><\/div>\n

There he is, in his fat golden tie, accepting the honor of his lifetime (so far). In his steady, high-pitched voice, David Malouf delivers his Neustadt Lecture at the University of Oklahoma, under the aegis of World Literature Today<\/em>. He speaks of \u201cthe power of language as a means of structuring, interpreting, remaking experience; the need to remap the world so that wherever you happen to be is the center.\u201d Later, he describes himself as \u201ca writer whose immediate world and material happen to be Australian.\u201d<\/p>\n

Happen to be<\/em>. In the precise, lapidarian chiselings of Malouf\u2019s prose, this repetition takes on special significance. Happen<\/em>, as in deed, but also as in happenstance. Something occurs and something is. This is the accepted order.<\/p>\n

What occurs\u2014in this instance\u2014is Australianness. And here, at this point of deep concurrence, Malouf and I most meaningfully part ways.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Concurrence first. For his Complete Stories<\/em>, a collection that gathers up at least three decades of work in the short form, Malouf picks his epigraph from Pascal\u2019s Pens\u00e9es<\/em>:<\/p>\n

When I consider the brevity of my life, swallowed up as it is in the eternity that precedes and will follow it, the tiny space I occupy and what is visible to me, cast as I am into a vast infinity of spaces that I know nothing of and which know nothing of me, I take fright, I am stunned to find myself here rather than elsewhere, for there is no reason why it should be here rather than there, and now rather than then.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There is, in Malouf\u2019s work, an innate awareness of the arbitrariness of things. An awareness that each of us\u2014and what art we might make\u2014is a product of chance and random concatenation. That against the questions of why here and not there, now and not then\u2014there is no reason<\/em>. This is the first, and prerequisite, principle of moral awareness. For first-worlders, especially, it slows us from thinking we deserve what we\u2019ve merely happened into: our bodies and brains, with what faculties they possess; our genealogical, cultural, and linguistic inheritances; our situation in place and time, with its appurtenant advantages in health, education, and technology; our array of advantages themselves. <\/p>\n

So when he talks of himself as a writer who \u201chappens to be\u201d Australian, Malouf is foregrounding the rule of accident. As his doppelg\u00e4nger remarks in Johnno<\/em>: \u201cIf my father\u2019s father hadn\u2019t packed up one day to escape military service under the Turks; if my mother\u2019s people, for God knows what reason, hadn\u2019t decided to leave their comfortable middle class house at New Cross for the goldfields of Mount Morgan, I wouldn\u2019t be an Australian at all.\u201d (This account is authenticated in Malouf\u2019s nonfiction and interviews.)<\/p>\n

The point is: no volition is aroused in the fact of a writer\u2019s nationality, only in our spin on it. The fact itself is only as important as the writer\u2014and we\u2014decide.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

What, then, of cases where volition is<\/em> involved? A perfect case study comes to hand: J.\u2009M. Coetzee, who immigrated to Australia from South Africa in 2002 and naturalized in 2006. All evidence confirms he is both Australian and a writer. Not only that, he has written a substantial number of books here\u2014including books set in Australia, featuring Australian protagonists, litigating Australian issues. At his citizenship ceremony, after making a pledge of commitment to Australia, he averred (albeit in generalized language) that any new citizen must \u201caccept the historical past of [his] new country as [his] own.\u201d He even offered obiter courtesies about \u201cthe free and generous spirit of the people \u2026 the beauty of the land \u2026 the grace of the city\u201d\u2014which was Adelaide\u2014\u201cthat I now have the honor to call my home.\u201d<\/p>\n

So is Coetzee an \u201cAustralian\u201d writer?<\/p>\n

That it\u2019s even an open question\u2014and the most cursory consideration admits it is\u2014speaks to a bankruptcy of basic agreement on what the question\u2019s asking. This, to me, speaks in turn to the underlying illogic of nationality. Coetzee is not an Australian writer because he doesn\u2019t pass some test of \u201cAustralianness.\u201d Okay then: what is this quiddity, how is it manifest, who gets to judge? Obviously passport-backed positivism isn\u2019t enough. Nor is civic or cultural engagement\u2014Coetzee, it\u2019s fair to say, knows and does more in this regard than most Australians (who never need prove they belong where they are). And it can\u2019t be because he wasn\u2019t born here, or hasn\u2019t spent enough time here, or is affiliated with another country: this applies to plenty of Australians and Australian writers.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a drift at work here, and it mirrors the drift of our current moment toward what might be catastrophically referred to as the black hole of nationality. The closer anything comes to its event horizon\u2014not excepting any universal principle or logic\u2014the more deformed it becomes. Even among the cognoscenti (i.e., those who should know better), \u201cnational interest\u201d now liberally overrules other political or ethical imperatives (with \u201cnational security\u201d the trump); \u201cnational unity\u201d is unanimously invoked as pure good. To be called a \u201ctrue [insert nationality]\u201d is both highest approbation and empty of normative meaning, as every nation is exceptional: every nation boasts the friendliest people (with \u201cfree and generous spirit\u201d), the deepest drinkers, the richest history, the most stunning natural beauty, the most beautiful beaches (if they have a coast) in the world, and all these claims are not just unchallenged, they are correct\u2014because they are protocol.<\/p>\n

Literature is not protocol. But it\u2019s not immune to it. If writers are constantly considered through the lens of nation, nationalism and its protocols will eventually refract logic, sense, and proportion. Think of the mountain of scholarship on Malouf that treats solely or significantly with his Australianness. Hyperspecialization has balkanized university departments and journals to the point where it\u2019s a specialization in itself to consider literature \u201ccomparatively\u201d\u2014that is, as readers and writers do: as part of an enterprise that is ongoing, accretive, atomistically autonomous, reflexive, conglomerate. The result is a kind of rigged exegesis, whose main mode is to bend books into thesis. \u201cOnly an [insert label of choice] author could have written that<\/em>\u201d is its catchiest jingle. And where that label is national, how effortless the transition into themes of contested identity, historical trauma, border politics, home, and belonging becomes. The articles write themselves!<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s call this, offhandedly, the Kafka Fallacy. Per this approach, all insights and assertions about literature are ex post facto and therefore infallible. What do I mean? Kafka\u2019s writing, let\u2019s say, explored existential themes through fantastic motifs of nightmarish bureaucracy. It becomes self-evident, surely, that only a German-speaking Jew straddling the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries \/ Bohemian-born writer \/ ex-lawyer with career experience in insurance \/ writer several times engaged but never married \/ writer with schizoid traits \/ tuberculotic writer\u2014choose your own causality!\u2014could have written it. Each of these propositions is irrefutably true (each having set its own truth conditions) and each is also fundamentally arbitrary. There are tons of tomes out there stuffed with this post-hoc preening and confirmation bias. What they ignore is the thing that most matters: the deep idiopathy of originality. Kafka\u2019s work could not have been imagined to exist\u2014in all its genius and particularity\u2014until Kafka came along and wrote it. His life led him to it, yes, but his life was convolved and exponentially complex in its causes and effects; it was\u2014and is\u2014unknowable. All serious art, in this way, is anomalous, is outlier art.<\/p>\n

Johnno<\/em> again: \u201cI had once found it odd, gratuitous even, that I should be an Australian. I found it even odder, more accidental, that I should be anything else.\u201d To understand that arbitrariness is no impediment to the sanctity of what is<\/em> is one definition of grace. One suspects that wherever else Malouf might have been born or raised, he would have, given the chance, arrived at the same restless and replete accommodation with that place. \u201cTemperament,\u201d he calls it. Nature unshaped by nurture. It\u2019s easy, employing the Kafka Fallacy, to imagine a Canadian or Rhodesian or Burmese Malouf writing An Imaginary Life<\/em> or Ransom<\/em>, word for word. But let\u2019s extend the thought experiment: What if these two books had been the only ones an Australian Malouf wrote? Neither was deemed, by the country\u2019s preeminent literary gong, to \u201cpresent Australian life in any of its phases.\u201d Should the \u201cAustralianness\u201d of such a Malouf be correspondingly curtailed? What would it take for this hypothetical Malouf\u2014or the actual Coetzee\u2014to convincingly demonstrate his \u201cAustralianness\u201d?<\/p>\n

Invariably, the quest to answer this question sees us shepherded into mythic terrain\u2014a land bestridden by nebulous incarnations of \u201cnational character\u201d and \u201cnational values.\u201d As Les Murray memorably described it: \u201cThe Melbourne Cup and the Fair Go and a myriad gum trees live there, along with equality and Anzac Day and the Right Thing.\u201d Fair enough. Sounds like a nice enough place. But folk myth tends to pull double duty as nationalist myth. And when nationalism finds it hard to find room for a celebrated, committed, white, fellow postcolonial citizen like John Coetzee, what hope for immigrants, or non-Anglos, or the growing number of Australians who subscribe less and less to such \u201cvernacular\u201d self-conception?<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

A brief aside on the semiotics of hyphens.<\/p>\n

Coetzee is never referred to as \u201cSouth African\u2013Australian.\u201d If, like me, he was born in one place and migrated to another, why should I be the one stuck with the hyphen?<\/p>\n

What does the hyphen actually signify?<\/p>\n

\u201cAustralian\u201d is geopolitical fact (even if its appellation may be contestable).<\/p>\n

\u201cVietnamese-Australian\u201d is historical inference, compressing within it war, aftermath, the converse migration where left to right across the hyphen brings you East to West. Other hyphenations mean mixed parentage; not this one (in America, the offspring of local Vietnamese and American visitors are called \u201cAmerasians\u201d; in Vietnam, these children are referred to as b\u1ee5i \u0111\u1eddi<\/em>\u2014\u201cdust of life\u201d). \u201cVietnamese-Australian\u201d also changes complexion depending on who\u2019s saying it. Say it about yourself and you\u2019re asserting hybridity or acknowledging heritage; having it said about you is being subjected to a racial charge. (\u201cVietnamese,\u201d which I get a lot in Europe, brings the charge right to the skin.) No matter how it\u2019s said, there\u2019s a subservience built into \u201cVietnamese-Australian,\u201d a hum of model-minority conditionality.<\/p>\n

(Note that Malouf is almost never referred to as Lebanese-Australian.)<\/p>\n

\u201cAsian-Australian\u201d\u2014bandwagoning \u201cAsian-American,\u201d which didn\u2019t even exist until the sixties\u2014seems little more than fuzzy, clumpy identitarianism.<\/p>\n

\u201cAustralian-Vietnamese\u201d doesn\u2019t exist. This is interesting, and surely bears thinking about. The politics of orientation, of ordinalism: people don\u2019t migrate from West to East; their stay is understood to be (indefinitely) temporary. As for West to West: by far the greatest numbers of migrants to Australia are from England and New Zealand and yet you rarely come across \u201cEnglish-Australians\u201d or \u201cNew Zealander\u2013Australians.\u201d Coetzee is not \u201cSouth African\u2013Australian\u201d\u2014he\u2019s just somewhat less than a dinky-di, true-blue Australian. There\u2019s a clubbiness at play here, coupled with a mutual accord that if you\u2019re from the Anglosphere, your origins are never superseded, let alone renounced\u2014they remain your enduring birthright.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

To me, Coetzee, like Malouf\u2014like me\u2014is a multivalent writer who happens to be<\/em> Australian. As writers, both of them hold and are beholden to multiple \u201clines\u201d of affinity and identity\u2014\u201cAustralianness\u201d is only one of them. And it is relevant only inasmuch as their work renders it so. I\u2019m not being facetious when I say that writing this has made me (feel) more \u201cAustralian,\u201d just as writing a recent poem about Collingwood made me (feel) more \u201cMelburnian.\u201d Intentionality\u2014volition\u2014has to be in the mix. Without it, any campaign of cultural nationalism can only be conscriptive. And I\u2019d be useless, anyway, in any such campaign. \u201cWhen I look at the body of my writing,\u201d Malouf once said, \u201cI want to say to myself: \u2018This is one person\u2019s attempt to give an account of what being an Australian is\u2014this particular Australian.\u2019\u2009\u201d Despite the mildness of the language, what I feel when I read this is forcible constriction, coercion. I hardly want to give an account of being me<\/em>, let alone me as any single, separable strand of identity.<\/p>\n

Shirley Hazzard said of Patrick White that \u201cfrom the literary standpoint,\u201d his Australianness was \u201cboth essential and irrelevant.\u201d Only essential<\/em>, I\u2019d argue, because White himself made it matter: it was a lifelong irritant he kept agitating into fictive nacre. He was scathing about what he called the \u201cGreat Australian Emptiness,\u201d scathing of complacent, falsely confident efforts to colonize it with the chimaera of \u201cnational identity,\u201d scathing of his own monstrous and conflicted role in the campaign. When handing White his Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy declared that his art had \u201cintroduced a new continent into literature.\u201d They could not have chosen a pithier way to prod the beast.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

About this point I\u2019ve got to check myself. Obviously, in opposing nationalism\u2014and straining against the naked singularity of nationality\u2014I\u2019m indulging a prerogative granted to me by that same nationality. I\u2019m an Australian citizen, and to be an Australian today is to have it pretty good: strong, stable democracy; peaceful, prosperous country. By every objective index, the average Australian is packed with privilege. On the hierarchy of needs, we base-camp at summit.<\/p>\n

Another acknowledgement: national consciousness can be a positive force\u2014especially during times of war and disaster. Part of me wonders if I am, in decrying it, debasing the sacrifice of my parents, who fought in a civil war waged over competing visions of nation. For them, nationalism wasn\u2019t an option but a necessity, a survival stance. They lost, here I am. (Here I am, among the chin-stroking cosmopolitan classes who can afford to treat nationalism abstractly, as something for third-worlders.) Here we all are, in this small nation in this huge country, this island continent (we say \u201coverseas\u201d while our British and American cousins say \u201cabroad\u201d) that\u2014in comparison to almost every other nation on earth\u2014has never known existential border war, civil war, or revolution (it should be obvious by now we\u2019re talking about \u201cmodern\u201d Australia). How lucky are we?<\/p>\n

I love this country. I feel lucky to be here. And I hate feeling at all compelled to say it\u2014I hate the inferred ingratiation. I\u2019ve been here long enough to know that as soon as you try to prove you belong, you don\u2019t. (\u201cA mug\u2019s game, a mugger\u2019s game.\u201d) \u201cI actually like Australia very much,\u201d Malouf says in an interview, a small ridge of surprise in that \u201cactually\u201d\u2014it\u2019s not easy abandoning old defenses. I want to belong, and I\u2019m wary of this want in me. So (like Malouf, perhaps) I take my belonging in a spirit of play. The sporting analogy is apt: the high-grade tribalism, the manufactured all-or-nothing stakes and emotion in a match are real\u2014and not to be belittled\u2014but it\u2019s a bit pathetic, isn\u2019t it, even pathological, when people take it too seriously?<\/p>\n

The better analogy, though, is closer to home. As a writer, like it or not, you\u2019re born into a nation. At least at the start, you can\u2019t choose it. It\u2019s a lottery. Your earliest reality is all Rawlsian veil of ignorance without any agency or election. Nation just \u2026 is<\/em>. In this way, it\u2019s not unlike family<\/em>. Family environs you, brands you, enfleshes you. It conditions your beliefs and biases, your thoughts and your ways of thinking.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s utterly arbitrary.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also unfair. You\u2019re plonked in a tribe without consent. Once there, coercion frames your existence. You\u2019re cornered in a space pulsating with other people and odd laws, dependency and taboo, love and dread, consummation and quarantine. Asymmetry is the operative norm. There\u2019s no meaningful concept of justice that could possibly account for who goes into which family, or what goes on inside any family.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s irrational. You\u2019re meant<\/em> to be too close to family to be fair-minded about it. You\u2019re meant<\/em> to care too much. You\u2019re meant to be hypercritical, then hyperdefensive when anyone else dares criticize. Most of all, for your own sake, your own sanity, you\u2019re meant to accept it as it is. Bless it for being.<\/p>\n

As a writer, my take on nation is basically the same as my take on family. Acknowledge that it\u2019s always there, in the bones. Acknowledge its arbitrariness. Own the bad as well as the good, not as process of blame, but of truth. Don\u2019t get wholly sucked in: keep your self\u2014or some part of it\u2014sovereign. And even in the midst of mooning and moaning over who<\/em> you are, remember that<\/em> you are. That\u2019s where the real wonder is. It\u2019s people and places that are sacred, remember, not borders.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t police people\u2019s kinship with their own families. Nor should we police anyone\u2019s\u2014least of all any writer\u2019s\u2014\u201cAustralianness.\u201d (\u201cUn-Australian,\u201d as epithet, is pure dominance behavior. It\u2019s telling that what it attacks\u2014violence, gangsterism, non-neighborliness, unkindliness, cowardice, wankiness, wowserism\u2014is usually also demonstrably uber-Australian.) Nations, like people, contain multitudes. And late colonial nations hold the habits of self-hate deep inside their nationalism. We don\u2019t ask people to define themselves constantly against their families; let\u2019s not ask writers to do so constantly against their nations. Let\u2019s not make it the first thing we mark about them. For some people, family is a huge obsession; for others, background. Some families are consciously mythopoeic, reinforcing themselves through legend and lore and incanted ancestry; others, not so much. It\u2019s all good! Let\u2019s give writers the same freedom\u2014without threat of exclusion or attenuation\u2014to consider questions of national identity, national culture, national politics\u2014or not<\/em>. As they see fit. Or not.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Nam Le is the author of <\/em>The Boat.<\/em><\/p>\n

This is an excerpt from <\/em>Writers on Writers: Nam Le on David Malouf<\/a>, p<\/em>ublished by Black Inc. in partnership with State Library Victoria and the University of Melbourne, out May 6.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On David Malouf, nationality, and the sticky subject of labels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1744,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[776,32728,53138,53137,53136,5410,8952,2275,829],"class_list":["post-135574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-australia","tag-australian-literature","tag-australianness","tag-coetzee","tag-david-malouf","tag-franz-kafka","tag-identity","tag-immigration","tag-j-m-coetzee"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWho Gets to Be Australian? by Nam Le<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"On David Malouf, nationality, and the sticky subject of labels.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/04\/30\/who-gets-to-be-australian\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Who Gets to Be Australian? by Nam Le\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"April 30, 2019 \u2013 On David Malouf, nationality, and the sticky subject of labels.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/04\/30\/who-gets-to-be-australian\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2019-04-30T15:00:11+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2019-05-01T22:31:02+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/malouf.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1000\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"750\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Nam Le\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Nam Le\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"15 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/04\/30\/who-gets-to-be-australian\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/04\/30\/who-gets-to-be-australian\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Nam Le\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/85daaa7b12ec0513bb54c068cfd8b785\"},\"headline\":\"Who Gets to Be Australian?\",\"datePublished\":\"2019-04-30T15:00:11+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2019-05-01T22:31:02+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/04\/30\/who-gets-to-be-australian\/\"},\"wordCount\":3087,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/04\/30\/who-gets-to-be-australian\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/malouf.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Australia\",\"Australian literature\",\"Australianness\",\"Coetzee\",\"David Malouf\",\"Franz Kafka\",\"identity\",\"immigration\",\"J.M. 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