Cirrus@Austlit

This article notes the powerful international impact of the attacks on the USA on 11 September 2001 and their literary aftermath. Beginning with The 9/11 Commission Report, the article considers literary responses to the events of 9/11 five or six years later by five Australian novelists. Their work ranges from fantastic satire to espionage thriller and psychological problem novel. A critical spirit informs each of these works - Andrew McGahan's Underground (2006), Richard Flanagan's The Unknown Terrorist (2006), Janette Turner Hospital's Orpheus Lost (2007), Adib Khan's Spiral Road (2007) and Adrian d'Hage's The Beijing Conspiracy (2007). Adib Khan's novel Spiral Road is especially interesting for its examination of the dilemmas and difficulties faced by a Muslim Australian when he returns to his homeland Bangladesh. Like the other novels considered in this article, Spiral Road explores the clashes between political events and the realities of everyday living for individuals buffeted by the cross-winds of an American tragedy.

Malacca, through five centuries an important trading port, was conquered by the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British and the Japanese in turn, so that while it is part of contemporary Malaysia it has maintained a sense of distinctive identity, the home of Baba-Nonya culture. The poet Ee Tiang Hong, the novelist Simone Lazaroo, and Shirley Geok-lin Lim, both poet and novelist, all have their roots there but each left, at different ages and for different reasons. They are of slightly different generations and have different personal histories, but each has been drawn back to Malacca in their writings, as if this was necessary to make sense of themselves and their own view of the world. Ee claims Malacca as 'a state of mind' which enabled him to 'draw strength from many cultural springs.' For Lim her Malaccan self has remained 'a fugitive presence,' not so much 'a town but... a familiar spirit.' In Lazaroo's The World Waiting to be Made, Malacca is a site of myth and mysterious supernatural power. For all three, Malacca is to some degree chthonic, traditional, bearing markers of another time. In a post-modern, fast-paced, high tech world what resonances can these ways of conceiving life have across borders? This paper explores the meanings of Malacca in the three writers' poems and novels to see what is common and what is different about the Malacca they present, and to what extent it has continuing importance, for them and for us.

This paper focuses on the fiction of the multi-award winning Bangladeshi-Australian novelist Adib Khan. From the plurality of cultures in which Khan's fiction is embedded, the paper draws out its subcontinental philosophical and aesthetic dimensions. The paper hypothesises that in Khan's fiction, the diasporic's return to the 'imaginary homeland' is triggered by the desire for self-knowledge and self-fulfilment. It extends to an analysis of the aesthetics of this return journey. The paper will be framed by the classical Indian theories of Rasa (Aesthetics).