'A woman who can’t swim wades into a suburban pool. An Indian family sits down to an Australian Christmas dinner. A single mother’s offer to coach her son’s soccer team leads to an unexpected encounter. A recent migrant considers taking the fall for a second generation ‘friend’. A wife refuses to let her husband look at her phone. An international student gets off a train at night.
'Roanna Gonsalves’ short stories unearth the aspirations, ambivalence and guilt laced through the lives of 21st century immigrants, steering through clashes of cultures, trials of faith, and squalls of racism. Sometimes heart-wrenching, sometimes playful, they cut to the truth of what it means to be a modern outsider.' (Publication summary)
Dedication:
For
my children, Kirk and Jadyn
and
my parents, Rose and Richard
We live in a mobile world characterised by the mass movement of people - both voluntary and involuntary—on an unprecedented scale. One billion people cross borders every year and international migrants account for 3 percent of the world’s population (Standing 90). This diversity is reflected in the Australian population where one in every four workers is a migrant (Standing 90). Roanna Gonsalves’ collection of stories The Permanent Resident (2016) focuses on the so-called ‘second wave’ of Indian immigration to Australia from the 1990s onwards and reflects the ways in which migration impacts one particular community in Australia, namely the Goan Catholic community.1 While one reviewer qualified her whole-hearted praise of Gonsalves’ book with the reservation that, in their focus on Goan Catholics, the stories were ‘limited to one tiny subset of the Indian community’ (Prakash n.p.), I suggest that this targeted focus allows Gonsalves to drill down into the racialised, gendered, class, religious and historical specificities of this community as it negotiates its position(s) within the post-settler white nation. If in this process Gonsalves critiques racialised power relations between the dominant culture and minoritised peoples within the white nation, her fiction also excavates power hierarchies and complicities within the diaporic Goan community. In turn, situating the Goan community as embodying one of the many histories of migration in Australia, this essay takes up literary theorist Jumana Bayeh’s call to theorise minoritised literatures in Australia through the concept of diaspora in order to counteract and challenge the operations of racism in the public sphere. Bayeh quotes Stuart Hall’s comment that ‘diaspora identities are those that are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference’ (Bayeh 85) to argue that the concepts of diaspora and transnationalism can provide an antidote to racial essentialism (Bayeh 85). In their focus on ‘transformation and difference’, Gonsalves’ stories investigate the ways in which migrants remake themselves and develop many different forms of belonging (both to the post-settler Australian nation and to their countries and cultures of origin) as they insert themselves into Australian suburbia. The stories thereby challenge fixed and essentialist categories of race and whiteness in their exploration of the production and reproduction of diasporic identity and subjectivity. In its thematising of diaspora and transnationalism, The Permanent Resident contributes to and extends both the transnational history of Australian literature and the global field of diasporic South Asian literature.' (Introduction)
'In June 2009 Eureka Street published a short story entitled 'Curry Muncher'. Its author, Sydney writer Roanna Gonsalves, had come to Australia from India as an international student, and her story stood in part as a response to a much publicised spate of violence against Indian students in Australian capital cities.'
'Jen met Roanna Gonsalves in 2007 when she came to the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP) conference, hosted at the University of Canberra. Her paper used Bourdieu’s constructs in a genuinely fresh way: examining the relationship between the literary field, and how creative writers produce their works, from the original story idea all the way through to editing and publication. So Jen knew back then that Gonsalves, too, was a huge Bourdieu fan; but didn’t know she was also a writer of sharp, smart, moving short stories.' (Introduction)
'As the date of the twenty-first anniversary of my arrival in Australia approaches, I acutely sense the space between ‘Asian’ and ‘Australian’ in ‘Asian Australian’, which is how I refer to myself. This space divides not only two words but two worlds, a fact that I, as a bilingual writer and translator of more than two decades, know only too well. Crossing this space is a process of positioning, consciously adopting and abandoning a myriad of reference points between common perceptions of what it means to be ‘Asian’ and ‘Australian’.' (Introduction)
'As the date of the twenty-first anniversary of my arrival in Australia approaches, I acutely sense the space between ‘Asian’ and ‘Australian’ in ‘Asian Australian’, which is how I refer to myself. This space divides not only two words but two worlds, a fact that I, as a bilingual writer and translator of more than two decades, know only too well. Crossing this space is a process of positioning, consciously adopting and abandoning a myriad of reference points between common perceptions of what it means to be ‘Asian’ and ‘Australian’.' (Introduction)
