Panel #1 Session 1
Wednesday 29 November - 11:30
Building 25, Room 1
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Chair: Atul Joshi
The fractured Immigrant; exploring a life re-examined
- Kim Novick
Sydney University
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Home, identity, and belonging are three concepts inextricably linked yet unquestionably fractured for an immigrant. People living outside their country of birth now make up the fifth largest population on earth; a population of varied cultures that must adapt and integrate into their new home and its constructed cultural habits. As posited by theorists including Berry and Ahmed, this is a complex undertaking and has far-reaching ramifications. This is relevant particularly in a country such as Australia, which has a controversial history of immigrant policy and, as theorised by scholars including Schech and Harris, and Ang and Stratton, positions multiculturalism as a centerpiece of official government policy. This paper explores the trauma of immigration as expressed in a series of essays written as memoir. The paper will engage with memoir scholarship by Smith & Watson, Couser, Eakin and others. It will reflect on the value of memoir as a medium for the displaced immigrant to consider a life re-examined, mourning the loss of one culture and discovering the values of an adopted culture. Australia needs to keep the conversation open regarding its controversial relationship with race and prejudice. The internal reflections of an outsider should be part of that conversation, given that this is a country of outsiders. The paper will comprise of extracts from the essays and an analysis of both the content and the medium of memoir and its ethical considerations.
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Kim Novick emigrated to Australia eleven years ago. She worked as a print and radio journalist, editor and presenter in South Africa. Since moving to Sydney, she has completed a Masters in Creative Writing. Kim is currently a PhD student at Sydney University.
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Australia my home through my poetry
- Sunil Govinnage
Curtin University
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The purpose of my talk is to present landmarks of my journey to Boorloo (Perth) from Sri Lanka in 1988, explaining how I have worked, studied, and encountered overt and covert racism over the last three decades through my published poetry anthologised in Australia, India, Sri Lanka, Singapore UK. My poetry covers core themes of home, exile, diasporic existence, and Perth as my sense of place. In my talk, I would primarily use my award-winning poetry collection, Perth: Village Down Under (2011) and a translation of my Sinhala poetry written in a language older than 2,500 years, representing my home and why I call Australia home. My poems have been read in Australia, Canada, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines and published in Australia, Canada, India, Japan, Singapore, Sri Lanka, the UK, and the USA.
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Sunil Govinnage (PhD) is a bilingual poet and writer. Born in Sri Lanka, he migrated to Boorloo (Perth) as a skilled migrant with his family in 1988. He has been writing poetry in Sinhala since 1965 and in English since 1989, with work exploring the core themes of diasporic identity and belonging. He worked as a full-time civil servant in Western Australia from 1988 to 2014. He also worked as a visiting lecturer teaching sociology and social justice from 2005 to 2008 at Notre Dame University, Fremantle. He completed a residence under the Elders-in-residence program at Centre for Stories in 2022.
Writing refugee lives – shared vulnerabilities
- Rosemary Sayer
Curtin University
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Globally much of the popular narrative about refugees and asylum seekers has become politicised, negative, and dehumanising. It is easy to ignore the individual person and their story. In this paper I will discuss collaborative life writing and how the refugee storyteller and the researcher capture the story. I argue that there needs to be vulnerable writing and research in engaging with people. Vulnerability is not only the experience of the refugee but is also experienced by researchers and life writers. Collaborative life writing highlights the interaction between the researcher and the refugee in this instance. I also propose that by combining collaborative life writing, testimony and memoir vulnerable writing can produce richer stories with people of a refugee background. I concur with other researchers (Schaffer and Smith, 3) who write that through acts of memory, both individuals and groups of people can “narrate alternative or counter histories coming from the margins” especially if they have suffered persecution, torture, or displacement. In this paper I will share stories of people from Afghanistan, Burma and Iran to highlight our shared vulnerability through collaborative life writing.
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Reference:
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Schaffer, Kay, and Smith, Sidonie,”Conjunctions: Life Narratives in the field of Human Rights.” Biography, 27, no.1 (2004) 1-24.
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Dr Rosemary Sayer is a former journalist who has written three non-fiction books and a number of articles centred on her dual interests of human rights and creative non-fiction. She has worked as a sessional lecturer, tutor, and research assistant in the school of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry, and at the Centre for Human Rights Education at Curtin University. She is currently an Adjunct Research Fellow.