The Oxford Centre for Life Writing, which is based, was incorrect.
Most recent publications for Schopenhauer, poetic reinforcement, two readings.
So strong connexion to the book, which we'll be talking about today.
She's a fellow fellow of our society of Literature and a fellow royalist society.
Some of the books include colonial post-colonial literature and the National and
the Post-colonial and the Prise winning novel The Shoutin In Didak to Riffel,
Volcano was highly recommended by for the Australian Review of Books.
It is a big Julia Award in 2019. Andrew Brink has described of Burma as a writer who I quoting brings to her stories two qualities that
all too often are mutually exclusive in lucidity of eye intelligence and the passion of our engagement,
unquote. So please join me in welcoming our guest for the fourth in this series this year.
Our diplomat today is as follows.
Our guest would do a short reading, which would then be followed by a conversation and then we invite questions from the audience.
You can either actually die contrary to your aunt or you actually do so by just hand so I can see you or you can take your questions and send it to.
I will be monitoring that. So if I can keep quiet during the process of question and answer, no inaccuracy.
Your question. That's why I'm returning.
So do allow me to be able to ask you to raise your question or to immigration question or eager to read out your questions that you have typed out.
So join me in welcoming person by today's Forcing Seminar series.
Welcome. Hi, Molly. Well, there's a bit of echo on the line.
Actually, no, it's gone. Excellent. Hi. Hi again.
Thanks. Thanks so very much to you for hosting me to talk about to the volcano.
Also to your colleagues, some in particular data protection for setting this up and and also to the African Studies Centre.
I wish we were there now physically in real time.
It's a it's it's a place I'm I'm so fond of and feel very at home.
But sadly, we all in this medium.
But in a way, thank goodness, because we can still talk and and and read books together.
This is a bit of a voyage of discovery for me. I've not done a reading on teams or wazoo or anything like this before.
So, you know, if I run it over or say too much, just just just stop me.
Hello to everyone out there. I'm sorry.
I can't see you all, but I'm really looking forward to this discussion, both with Bourland, with and with everyone else.
Just before I begin the short reading, we thought it might be a fun thing to do.
I have a free copy of the book to give away to anyone who's interested in it, and it too, to secure the book.
All you need to do is to be the first person to send me an email with the correct answer to the following question.
It's a question relating to one of the stories in to the volcano.
And the question is this. Who is John's true love?
I won't give this story away. There's only one character, Jill, in the in the story is who is John's true love?
And. Is my email.
So the first correct answer to the question, I'll repeat it again later on, will receive the book from me.
Okay, great. So what I'm going to do for this opening reading is to read from the very first story in the collection.
I've chosen it for a reason that I think people will very quickly cottoned on to.
I won't give it away. Other than to say that the story is set in a an old university town somewhere in England.
The story is called The Child in the Photograph.
I will read for about seven minutes and then I unfortunately won't be able to read the whole story in seven minutes.
But I'll read for seven minutes and then I'll just kind of stop and and invite you to to finish reading it in your own time.
The child in the photograph. From Africa is how they introduce me to one that tells her mother on her first trunk, call her.
Isn't it funny, Mo, just from Africa? Can you believe?
Crackles Zepps Her mother's reply after the Angolan port city, Luanda tells her fellow mosta students in development.
Yes. That's my name. But Angola is not my country.
See if you can guess my country. For starters, it's landlocked and dry.
And farther south than the Sahara hitting warmer.
Luanda loves my country, also has diamonds.
That's a dead giveaway. What you call yourselves development students.
My country has loads of diamonds. You tell them.
Her mother says Dona Suddenly clear phone lines. Your country's brightest diamond, easily brighter than any star.
Luanda shuts her eyes. Her mother's voice is as close as if she were right here beside her in the college phone booth.
She pictures her there in the living room at home. Her big thighs spread across the fake leather easy chair beside the TV.
She sees the black plastic mouthpiece wedged between her cheek and her shoulder in that clever way of hers.
Like the P.A. she is, she sees her red painted fingernails twisting around the black telephone cord.
On the wall across from her mother, all her own framed certificates,
Luanda pictures them clearly the certificates arranged on the wall in two columns,
university medals and honours and essay prises, the rungs of the long ladder.
She has climbed to get to this ancient stone college with its single shabby telephone booth and muddy MacDonald's wrappings thick on the floor.
She sees the gold embossed lettering on the certificates, catch the horizontal light of the setting sun.
Nothing short of a fancy sundial. Her mother's boyfriend, Paul, once mocked, scolded.
Look, the letters even cast a shadow proud of her.
Her mother staunchly said. A pink and white hand beats against the glass of the phone booth door.
The glass is cloudy with condensation. You and I can't see the body behind the hand.
You can hardly believe it being here, she yells over another school of static on the line.
The other students can't believe it either. I mean, me being here when I walk into a room, they stop talking.
They all stare. So you're educating them.
No matter how ancient and clever, they have something to learn. Delenda laughs at her mother's jokes.
If it was a joke, she laughs. The open mouthed laugh that she shares with her mother.
Ha ha ha. It goes rasping to a close. Some days even Nana can't tell their laughs apart.
I must go more next time, NUNNA will come say hello.
Sorry, Lou. She was here, but she's runnels. The swallow Luanda now makes hits her chest, the hand again slaps the door.
Her mother is calling. Bye bye. Over and over again by Luanda.
Ekos by. Then she presses the Silva next call button and her mother's voice cuts out.
She stands holding the receiver in her hand. The dial tone purring.
She rubs the condensation on the glass with her sleeve. Whoever was out there has given up.
The foyer is empty. She scrapes off the McDonald's wrapping, sticking to her shoe and takes the stairs up to her room two at a time,
breathing hard with relief, almost laughing as if she has escaped.
Something has got through an obstacle course without injury.
Luanda relies on her laugh in the days ahead.
At the hundred Ice Break-Up parties and inductions, she lists in beautiful schoolgirl cursive in her diary.
She laughs and watches her laughs effect on people, how it makes them turn towards her and smile, laughing.
She slides across thickly carpeted rooms between shuffling clusters of guests like a rain droplets down a windscreen.
Laughing when they stumble on her name. Laughing when they ask about her course.
And then forget to ask again. Laughing. Laughing till the other students start calling her.
Laughing. Luanda laughing. She asks them to stop.
She wonders around the old university town, her university town.
Believe it or not. But no, she doesn't laugh. A dream is beyond laughter.
And all this is beyond a dream. It's beyond imagination.
Not in a thousand years.
Could she have dreamed up this perfect green grass in the quadrangles or the spreading trees like pictures or the all surrounding stone,
the stone walls, stone flags, the Gothic stone arch of her bedroom window looking like it was stamped out with a cookie cutter.
The stone steps up to her room, worn away by the numberless footsteps of numberless students.
I mean, stone wall cut a stone wall and stone like it's melting.
She said on the phone and still couldn't quite believe it.
She could not have dreamed up the pure coldness that rises from the stone and instantly chills her hand when she touches it.
Anything could be so cold she could not have imagined the cold, dark shadows would wait in the corner of the stone and never shift.
Even at noon, they don't shrink away. A university before this one where she received the trophies and certificates on her mother's
wall is no more than a cluster of single storey prefab blocks built on the surrounding red sand.
On the side of each building, a single huge air conditioning unit sticks out like an air stunt.
The dusty area in front of the Edmond buildings is called the English Garden.
The only plants that grow the cactuses, the English garden.
Looking around at the green grass spreading oaks, Luanda wants to laugh, remembering, but catches herself in time and feels ashamed.
I'll stop there. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Later. First, let me see how much I can turn reading this book.
And so I'm very happy that we are having a conversation about it.
Almost in every single story in the book,
we encounter characters who are struggling with as well as can the cause and what might cause the cause of life.
But in its every everydayness and also so in the long, long term.
So in writing these stories, I'm wondering, what were your overarching reflections about the narratives?
Were you thinking about the implications of the everyday for the larger structural challenges of human life or the obverse?
Whoo! Thank you for the question. I mean, it's it's a huge question and we could take it in different ways.
If I if I look back across this collection, I mean, it might be helpful for people who don't know it.
To say that there are there twelve stories, twelve stories in the in the collection.
And, you know, twelth suggested to me it was a good number.
It suggests to me, you know, a year, 12 months and a year.
It suggests to to kind of off an all of time, you know, and and in fact, the door due to more or less I mean, isn't a rigid pattern to this.
But they do more or less lead us from stories of of young people.
Use also children, as in the child in the photograph,
running through middle aged to to old age of two stories are quite preoccupied with questions of legacy and end of life.
I suppose they could say quite quiet stories, whereas there's a sort of visit.
There's a liveliness at the start. So it was interesting to me to explore, I suppose, through the different characters in the 12 stories,
the dimension of the dimensions of an individual life.
That of of people who, apart from the character in the final story of the biography and the wife of people who are not.
Kind of living in any kind of limelight or, you know, in any kind of flash point of history.
In fact, on the country, they coming in from the edges of the continental masses, in some cases, the kind the provinces, if you like, of the world.
So. So I was interested also, I think, in putting the accent there on life.
I was interested also to think about you. You're talking about the course and the curse of life there.
And that relates absolutely to something that I was trying to do with, you know, exploring how life isn't really set up for us human beings.
This is something I was reflecting on when Louise Glueck won the Nobel prise for literature last week, because her poetry is so, you know,
powerfully, painfully about this this thing, too, that that, you know, often with all our hopes and dreams, our conditions are set up.
You know, of, you know, individual life. It doesn't always lead to the fulfilment of those dreams.
It often takes a lot of pain and and and sacrifice before we get there.
And that's what I think you see in the case of a number of the characters in these stories.
They are. And this short story is a great medium for really homing in,
really bearing down on some on some of these questions as they relate to individual lives.
You know, people Enquist of love, Enquist of certain ambition, Enquist of family.
You know what it takes to get to that point. So definitely course.
And also curse of life. Yeah. Thank you.
So in the title photograph, which you just read to us, it seems to me that this is a story about the struggle with hope.
As a concrete manifestation of issues, obligations, loftiness, including,
of course, turned down tensions regarding how one reconcile oneself with movement.
We move on to our relationships, obligations and responsibilities in light of these.
I was wondering about one. Does choosing a graduate course?
Because developping came to me to be a major force that raises questions about how to reconcile Justices' in addition to NetSol application.
So of course we'll call it an opportunity. So do you think this is a possible way to read this story, Portugal?
I mean, if I should probably save it.
First of all, in response, will that every reader's response is a valid response?
You know, I'm very I very much believe that the writer works together with the reader to get at the meaning of a story.
And often the reader can find meanings that the writer may not at least consciously have have thought of that.
But, you know, to pick up on some of the key words in what you just asked, you know, home and away.
This question of development and this question of belonging in a development is such a loaded word as as as as you know.
I'm sure everyone, you know, listening can relate to, you know, the division of the world in a developed and undeveloped developing countries.
I mean, the implication always is developed as against undeveloped. But, you know, the the the polite P.C. word is developing.
You know, the question that we always want to ask then is by whose criteria developed?
You know, who sets the standards, you know? And development always seems to imply a kind of slope of progression,
which in the case of the character in the story, the central character becomes, you know, extremely complicated.
Her development studies programme acquires her, too, if you like, hold her life, develop,
you know, put a pause to her life development, had her development as an individual in a family,
her relationships with the rest of her family because she has to travel so very far away and make so very
many compromises and sacrifices in order to take her degree to study towards that degree in development.
So the experience also asks questions of, you know, what is developed land, as in, you know this you know what is you know,
what are the raw materials that need to be extracted for development to take place?
And I think most of all.
Lost in the process, you know, development is always judged really by capitalist criteria of onwards and upwards and farther and better.
So the story, ask the questions, Will. Oh, you will then watch, you know.
And what is lost in the process? Watching our humanness in that process.
Yeah. When I was reading the book, I kept thinking about Milan Kundera especially.
There'll be every lightness of being.
So the paradox is that while many of the characters reflect what you might call lightness of being, that, you know,
recurring in nature of each individual lives, each individual lives, whether the authorities also have the background or most of these lives.
That is what is being described as the happiness of life and the consequences, of course,
of my crew decisions I can never take on society for individual lives, such as opportunities for each to collapse wall and none of that.
So my question is, is this perhaps what you had in mind in portraying Lena where she says that if she didn't fly away,
and I quote I yes, she mickeys or the US would swidler. I think my my I think when I was reading that,
I was thinking about the fact that she's reflecting that despite the likeness that we
oftentimes have to continue that heavy Noyce's would actually determine our lives.
Yes. I mean. Thank you.
I'm very flattered that you were thinking of them of of of Milan Kundera through these readings.
And certainly structurally, in terms of the narration in these short stories, lightness is really what I wanted to achieve.
I wanted the stories, as it were, likely in to the readers kind of consciousness mindset,
you know, so that they they they come across as, you know, stories as a tale told.
But then they likely begin to ask some questions that then we think about them bear down quite heavily.
The story. South north that you mention, which is from my from my memory, is it?
That's right. It's the second story. It is really it's very in some ways, it follows a similar trajectory to the child in the photograph.
It's about a young woman who who travels from, as you were saying, the extremities of the Earth from very,
very far away to come to what we would call the centre or the metropolis or indeed
the developed world in order to pursue a dream or two or to pursue an ambition.
And in that process, begins to encounter, if you like, the heaviness of history, you know, the the heaviness of history,
often of violence or of war or of possessiveness that has been contested often around the kind of the places of greatest concentration.
So the metropolis at it. So.
So your likeness, lightness of touch and the, if you like,
goofiness of the blowback from these stories or the heaviness of of the kinds of questions that I hope they they ask of the reader.
I actually think that is your greatest achievement in this book is the way in which you deal with happiness to likeness,
which is why I was interested in that.
Because even in the most I know of circumstances, you know, we see many characters reflecting what you describes as passionate intensity,
which he seems resourceful into reflecting kind of setting.
You know, I see that your characters. So I'm wondering is is your subject more about general offering or some course setting to in life,
or do you want precarity that is reflected in some of the characters?
So are you concerned about the general sort of cool questions or more about specific,
you know, the clarity that people have to face as reflected in some of these characters?
And I must kindies, because, you know, you're also a critic and professor.
I'm wondering whether what was most striking as you were composing these in your mind and these questions that you ask?
It's called I would be concerned with or the question, you know,
the more empirical questions that you think that are reflected in the characters, I suppose.
Well, this is a big no.
Okay. Very well. Okay. So.
It's in a way, but it's both.
One, if I'm if I'm dead honest and and give a kind of very straightforward answer, that I will then kind of, you know, unpack a bit.
It's both with the important proviso, I think, that when I go in to, you know, my my left,
my eerie to write stories, I leave my professional other professional roles at the door.
May I know? In other words, I cannot I can't bring the philosophical questions in with me into that space, if you like,
because I think that would that would simply compromise the the the process of story, of storytelling, of putting the stories together.
I am I do think, though, that every writer has it has it has an ethical mission.
We wouldn't write if we didn't. And yes, I am incredibly preoccupied as a as a writer, as a human being, by precarity, by the precarity of the of,
you know, the huge majority of individual lives on this planet and of our lives and community to which,
of course, this crisis, the crisis that we're all in now, the the Korona crisis kind of brings, you know, brings powerfully to mind.
So. So. Each each life, I think, or even some of the stories are to do with, you know,
a group of people or a pair of people or a pair of individuals characters.
Every every character in in to a greater or lesser extent is confronting questions of fragility,
vulnerability and precarity on on this planet and in society.
So that I suppose if I step back, it is something that I'm preoccupied by that I keep coming back to.
Yeah, definitely. But the the bigger philosophical questions.
You know, I I wouldn't say that they're not in my mind at some level in the process writing.
Inevitably they are. And I'm always very pleased when later I come back to a store when I finished writing a story.
And I've you know, I've edited it to a point where I'm more or less satisfied with its shape.
I then tend to put it to one side and then later when I come back to it to see how it fits,
you know, where it might where I might place it in the mosaic of a collection.
It's then that I encounter with a greater or lesser degree of interest was and satisfaction with it.
It speaks to, if you like, my my ethical concerns.
You know, I'm always very pleased when it does me some of the stories doing it, or this is a story about somebody suffering from dementia,
which is still quite, you know, moves me and makes me quite tearful sometimes when I when I reread it.
I wouldn't say that that has a particular.
You know, philosophical question to ask, but it does it does it does bring the reader into a situation of empathy.
I hope with with the characters.
An old woman on a knee and her grandson. So.
And that empathy is, as I suppose, part of my my ethical mission.
Yeah. Yeah. But it's like do I want to move on?
But I'm wondering whether it is absolutely impossible to live to professor behind when you enter the model.
Right. That's another question.
I imagine that the global south is that geographical even auto's with the epistemological centre of all of these stories,
especially to some extent in relation to the global not.
So I'm wondering why you think the South is critical to our understanding of the world, especially at this moment.
Thanks for the question. You're Christian. Very close to my heart.
I mean, you absolutely spot on most of this of the stories, the majority of the stories of visibly or audibly set in.
In some parts of the southern hemisphere. Botswana, Bupp Way.
Australia, Argentina, South Africa.
Amongst others. So.
They are taken together. Reflections on what I call softness with.
Impart means to me, the global south.
So. The two are at the non beneficial end of the unequal planet that we are all a part of.
But the South also signifies, in addition to or alongside global south.
It signifies something you already quoted the far extremities of the earth.
Those parts of the planet that have always been seen by the north or by the West or by the developed world,
or those difficult terms as infinitely exploitable.
And the people there as infinitely exploitable. And I said that I hope likely radiantly is something that I do explore.
I do kind of excavate and worry at and in in these stories.
You know what it means to come from there?
What it means to defend those spaces, to protect those spaces and how those spaces also become.
And we ignore what we in the north, located in the north, ignore this at our peril.
How those spaces are also a kind of barometer of, you know, the disaster that is awaiting this planet.
If we don't do something about the path we're on. Yeah.
Yeah. One of the good things about this book is also how it makes us laugh and particularly in love with Irish refusing to wash dishes for you, Joy.
Initially, I thought this was going to so to speak. That was a strongly held conviction towards this idea of, you know, wishy washy on issues.
Why don't you do it? Was it easy to keep your focus?
So you've been writing about this. Did you think of how we use that as as an element in the context?
Or was it just you might talk to let's listen to what I would call a moral imperative that you're going to have to oppose.
Really? And. Yes. Thank you.
Thanks for the naughty question. I don't mean Iris is standing upon her dignity.
You know, eat. Well. And and she also has a certain, you know, a kind of bone to pick.
A political bone to pick, a sexual bone to pick with both John and Patsy.
Yes, sir. I think I know.
She makes a statement about. About her own boundaries by refusing to wash the sheets.
Then pile up and lead to. You know, a minor, a minor crisis.
It turns out there was also a way of negotiating. You have been quite productive in both your creating your school, your quality of life.
In addition to of course, you're not going to need construction positions.
What do you have advice for young writers? Now to combine these two exceedingly demanding awards.
To achieve success in both. Well, thank thanks for the nice comment.
Well, a. I'm gosh, it's a big question.
We could be all afternoon really aware that some people may be tuning in.
You've only just started on the academic pathway.
Well, maybe you've only just started on their writing pathway. So you know what I say.
I think. It's when I was younger, I would have given a different answer, I think, to this question.
So I might have said that the kind of writing.
So the creative writing was rather different from the other kind of writing, the critical writing AM,
and that the two came from different parts of, you know, my life or my head.
But I no longer think so.
I think this being the kind of convergence and I hope this is helpful for people in how I understand these this this practise of writing.
And, you know, when when we're doing our critical writing, when we're talking about literature,
when we're writing history, writing about empire and new literature and goodness,
doing the right thing and and and and and writing is a process of it in which we use the page in our hands and our bodies to first of thinking.
And, you know, it's it's it's supremely worthwhile.
What what what if a mood is particularly suited to you or you find particularly congenial and both modes or the modes combined,
creative, critical, critical, creative, philosophical, historical.
They all require a kind of attunement to context and and and attunement to the now.
You know, when you writing this word now or speaking it now, you're absolutely in the moment of your life.
And in the end, that is that is what I love about about writing.
Mean sometimes you sort of you then take a step back, especially in critical writing,
and reflect again on what you or what you have, what you've just said, what you've just done.
And they are essentially similar processes of self reflection and attunement to
the now on running these two different kinds of writing alongside each other.
It's it's tough. It requires quite a lot of self-discipline, you know, and.
And I you know, I wouldn't be I wouldn't be honest if I didn't say there'd been moments of great
force when I felt I'd be the one kind of writing this block the other or,
you know, there's never been this. There's never enough time.
As I think many people would agree, that it's time for writing also demands time for not writing.
When you and you replenish your senses so that you can write again.
Thank you. Yeah. Let's open it up now, so please, if you have questions, can you Racey Diana.