A good Australian read
In his award-winning novel, The Slap, Christos Tsiolkas writes in the authentic voices of Australia's new polyglot surburbia, the home of Greek-Australians, Italian-Australians, Indian-Australians and other relatively newly-arrived immigrants. It also features an indigenous Australian, Bilal, who has converted to Islam.
The book takes its title from the punishment meted out at a suburban barbeque when a particularly irritating child, the offspring of Anglo-Australian parents, is disciplined by someone other than his parents. Given its iconic setting, it reads like "a satanic version of Neighbours", according to the blog . It has fast become the most talked about book in Australia.
But don't judge this book by its title, for it is not primarily about the rights and wrongs of smacking errant children. Nor do I necessarily agree with the publisher's blurb that it is about "love, sex and marriage, parenting and children, and the fury and intensity" - a discourse on the "modern family". Instead, it is Tsiolkas' closely-observed take on race and multi-culturalism in modern day Australia.
Told from the conflicting viewpoints of eight protagonists, none of whom are portrayed as Aussie archetypes, the book provides insights into the tensions, anger, frailties and prejudices of an inner suburb of Melbourne in the Howard era - although it could just have easily been written in the present. As George Megalogenis wrote in a brilliant essay in the Australian Literary Review, its central observation is that "middle Australia is becoming more brown than white". You can read Megalogenis .
Launching into the novel with high expectations, I was disappointed with The Slap. The writing is deliberately harsh and confronting, but arguably gratuitously so in parts. In its rendering of the tensions of suburbia, whether familial, generational or racial, I did not find it particularly artful or subtle.
Yet as the discussion in my book club revealed (there's an admission), the solitary member whose family hails from a Mediterranean country (there's another admission) thought it was brilliant. I've spoken to other first generation Australians who loved it, because they instantly recognised the voices. Perhaps for the first time, an Australian novel spoke to them and of them. In it, they heard a literary voice which they have not necessarily been exposed to before.
Certainly, it's instructive to read and reflect on the novel in the context of the Hey Hey blackface row. For one, racial attitudes are inverted. It is the Anglo-Australian family which is portrayed as the social outcasts, and widely viewed as the second-class citizens. Uncouth vulgarians, scoff their friends, colleagues and neighbours.
To use a word that I would never utter at home, but which is part of everyday speech in Australia, this is a book where the "wogs" end up on top. To give voice to that word in Britain, of course, is to immediately identity yourself as a racist. Yet in Australia, it has come to carry little, if any, malevolence - and certainly not for Australians who happily describe themselves as "wogs". For sure, it started out as a derogatory slur directed at immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Before their arrival, "wog" was more commonly used to describe a medical ailment or germ. But now the term has been embraced by many Australians who can trace their bloodline to southern and eastern Europe as an expression of their identity. Indeed, For some, it has become a proud boast.
The commenter, irisav, was onto to this when she or he noted: "The [racist] perception also relates to the cultural sub-text of words. For instance in Australia the term 'w-g' can be used derogatorily, affectionately or as part of cultural ownership/pride."
It's interesting to ponder on how a term of derision came to be adopted by those being derided. I do not know the answer. Perhaps you can help? But I dare say humour was part of it. Part of the Australian way is to not take yourself too seriously. And perhaps part of the assimilation process for southern and eastern Europeans was to show Anglo-Celtic workmates and neighbours that they were prepared to embrace that side of national life. What better way to demonstrate their own sense of humour and self-deprecation, what better way to show they belonged, than to turn a slur on themselves?
If there is a high level of low-level racism in Australia, as Waleed Aly suggests, I often think it stems from the kind of "humour" that does not necessarily have a high degree of malevolence but does suffer from a high degree of insensitivity and flippancy. It is the kind of "it-was-only-meant-as-a-joke" racial slur, easily brushed away with a laugh or a friendly punch to the upper arm. JP Wallace put it really well: "[I]t is a very mild kind of racism, more a patronising ignorance than any kind of virulent, potentially violent xenophobia..." Rosco 737 touches on the same theme: "The blog has the wrong title. It should be 'Is Australia un-ashamedly un PC?'. To which the answer is a resounding YES."
Thanks for all your comments. I read every one. I loved parragirl picking me up on the use of the adverb "unusually" in the title of the blog; I take on board Wallsy's observation that new arrivals can be racist, too; surtr catches me out on the claim that the Hey Hey skit was a "testament to the changing face of modern Australia" (because of the "performers" mixed ethnicities), since the same doctors performed much the same skit on the show 20 years ago. Wollemi is helpful, as ever, on the history. More deserve to be quoted again, but I'm running out of space, and I dare say you are running out of time and patience.
As for a final word on The Slap? For me, it was not the great Australian novel. But to many, it was the new Australian novel, and I suspect that explains much of its commercial and critical success.
PS: I've blogged before on how Australian polticians often try to out-hardline each other when it comes to boat people heading this way. That has been the big running story this week, of course, and it's an off-shoot of the same debate. A number of you commented on that in the Afghanistan blog, so feel fee to weigh in again.
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