Tag: Roanna Gonsalves

Why do we bother to write?

SoutherlyBlog

by Roanna Gonsalves     A few days ago, the National Human Rights Commission in India noted the suspicious deaths, over the course of a decade, of 500 indigenous (tribal) girls in government-run Ashram schools in the state of Maharashtra, India. In Australia we heard that a white supremacist was stockpiling weapons with the intention of carrying out a mass shooting in a shopping centre on the Central Coast of New South Wales. On the 26th of January, Invasion Day / Survival Day / Australia Day 2017, a group of concerned citizens issued statements condemning the physical and psychic violence…

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Tracing body-and-bloodlines

SoutherlyBlog

by Roanna Gonsalves     A book, like a person, holds a tangle of ancestors within it. Sometimes, tracing the literary influences and resonances in a book, its bloodlines, is as straightforward as tracking back through the parish register of births and marriages. Often, the process is slightly more complicated, involving a piecing together of half-remembered conversations, silhouettes of words, a sifting through the obfuscations of the imperial project imbricated with patriarchy, in order to get to the greatest grandparents. Since its publication about three months ago, my book The Permanent Resident has elicited questions from some readers about its…

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The double lives of writers

SoutherlyBlog

by Roanna Gonsalves Most aspiring writers across the world face conflicting demands in the pursuit of a literary career. We must work to develop our skills as writers, get published, hope to achieve recognition from peers and from the literary establishment, gain a wider local and global readership, while at the same time trying to sustain ourselves financially usually from work other than writing fiction. In effect, we lead what the French sociologist Bernard Lahire calls a “double life” [1].   This mobility in and out of the field is such an ordinary aspect of writers’ lives that it is…

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“Humor is vengeance.”

SoutherlyBlog

by Roanna Gonsalves The first time I heard the line “Humor is vengeance”, something surged in my brain and my body. I understood its outside as well as its inside, the pitter pat patter of its near perfect dactylic feet, the subatomic particles in its electric charge. Hunting it down, I found it in the second part of Paul Beatty’s Introduction to Hokum: An anthology of African American humour (Bloomsbury, 2006). I knew what Beatty meant by “Humor is vengeance.” I’ve channeled his words to explain my own work in The Permanent Resident, a collection of short fiction published in…

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