I fell in love with stories before I could read. When I was two we moved house, and my father kept my sister and I entertained by reading The Hobbit to us every evening. I still remember imagining the golden wings of Smaug beating across the humid Queensland sky, accompanied by the thrum of a thousand raucous cicadas. Later, I tried to recapture that magic, raiding my parents’ bookshelf in the early hours of weekend mornings before they were awake. I would trace the lines of the Odyssey with my limited vocabulary, puzzling out the shapes of sea monsters and Poseidon and conjuring the bright eyes of Athena.
By the time I reached university, the glamour of the marvellous had started to fade. I grew up middle class in a working-class neighbourhood while being biracial in white Australia. I questioned both the parameters of the world around me and the power structures that governed the haves and the have-nots. In my late teens I read Betty Friedan, Malcolm X, and Karl Marx, and I briefly doubted the validity of fiction. But when I was twenty, a friend who was one of the few multiracial women I knew, lent me a copy of Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. I absorbed the shapes and sounds of Coulibri, ‘the orchids and the stephanotis and the jasmine and the tree of life in flames’ (Rhys 1988, p. 155). When Antoinette took flight over Thornfield Hall, her hair lifted up into wings of fire, I knew I wanted to be a writer. For the first time, I saw the full power of a story and felt that fiction had the ability to capture the fraught liminality of someone like me. I started chasing the paeans of postcolonial fiction, seeking works that gave shape to ambiguity and questioned the stark dividing lines that carve up our world. I read Michael Ondaaatje, Zadie Smith, and Arundhati Roy, and I realised how deftly the universe could be distilled down to a few words on a printed page, and how just as swiftly it could be expanded into someone else’s consciousness. Within the space of several sentences I was transported to the dry sands of Egypt or a street in Kilburn or a window in Southern India at a pivotal moment in someone else’s life.
I realised, too, that all fiction is marvellous and delves, to some degree, in the fantastic. The work of the most quiet and detailed realism still asks us, at some point, to suspend our disbelief. But in saying that, realism can also restrict us. In its focus on replicating life, it can limit itself to repeating all of those small delineations and divisions that, as a multiracial person, I have tried to overcome. I have started to look anew at the dragons and the sea monsters, the fairy tales and surreal occurrences I loved so much as a child. In these tales, I see possibilities for telling stories that challenge our preconceived ideas of the world and our understandings of race, identity, and who we are. I see possibilities for making the world anew.
Writing, like love, is complex and fraught with ambivalence. It can feel elusive, intangible, and it can make us doubt. But, like the best kind of love, it can also raise us up. It can help us figure out who we are, and who we have the potential to be. It can give us hope; it can make us believe all things are still possible.
