In May 2025, the Institute of Postcolonial Studies in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia, hosted a book launch for Micaela Sahhar’s Find Me at the Jaffa Gate, a graceful and steadfast work of bearing witness to a diasporic Palestinian family from Jerusalem. A discussion of what it means to write about histories of dispossession while living on stolen lands, a powerful display of Aboriginal-Palestinian solidarity, and an intergenerational celebration of writing and resistance, the launch was emblematic of a recent shift in ethos for the Institute. A transformative campaign had reformed the Institute’s board and ushered in new leadership by Indigenous women and accomplices committed to anticolonial and antiracist work, including the 2023 hire of chairperson Evelyn Araluen, Goorie and Koori poet, editor, and researcher.
Interviewing Micaela that May 14 evening was novelist André Dao, launching his own book that spring—or better to say his novel was emerging from, emerging in conversation with, that dynamic moment of Aboriginal and global anti-imperialist organizing. Dao’s Anam, initially published in Australia in 2023, awarded the nation’s Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2024, was released in U.S. edition by Kaya Press in April 2025.
An excerpt of Anam appears in the Summer 2025 issue of The Georgia Review. This companion interview was conducted over the course of several virtual meetings in spring 2025, with Dao calling from the lands of the Wurundjeri Woiwurrung and Bunurong Peoples of the Kulin Nation, whose sovereignty has never been ceded, also known as Naarm/Melbourne, Australia, and interviewer lawrence-minh bùi davis calling from the ancestral and unceded lands of the Piscataway Nation, also known as Prince George’s County, Maryland, USA.
Also coinciding with the conversation: the fiftieth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, the official end of the Vietnam War, also known as the American War, sometimes also called the War of American Aggression, on April 30, 2025. In the days prior, Dao was invited by the Guardian to pen a short reflection on the anniversary, the subjects and subtexts of which wind through the memoryscapes of Anam. Dao and davis were also part of a roundtable session on the anniversary in relationship to the genocide in Gaza for the April 2025 Association for Asian American Studies conference in Boston.
It feels obligatory to note one other backdrop: the opening months of the second Tr&$p presidency, with all their cascading executive orders and tariffs and varied world-derangements. Note, but briefly, with a desire to escape their pull and the ontological primacy of settler-colonial frameworks more broadly, and instead set the clock of the interview by something closer to native and Indigenous and Aboriginal time, place, and worldmaking.
Following such an impulse, this interview opens with, in the light and warmth gifted by, Evelyn Araluen’s wondrous long poem “TO THE PARENTS,” from her 2022 Stella Prize–winning poetry debut DROPBEAR.
* * *
TO THE PARENTS
By Evelyn Araluen
I’m writing this book in the shadow between deaths. I live in middle place. In country that I must care for but that doesn’t suit the colonial appropriation of our ancestral. Between totem and cryptomythology, between native and notfor.
After work J and I go back to his apartment in the outer- inner-west. It’s the charming sort of dilapidated, where most of what is claiming back the crumbling stone is pretty and green, wrapped around a done-it-yourself balcony where we feed the brushtails and water the currawongs and listen to the angophora dance heavy limbed in the wind. It feels enclosed and away, but never quiet. Shapes flicker corner-eyed and mirror-edged here like the streetlights smudged by the jacaranda weeping through the garden wall. The cat only knows how to scream. J talks to the lorikeets that crowd on the windowsills he’s lined with seed. We’re curled here in the safest site of our everyday struggles with infinitude. At this distance we can justify all manner of intellectual and cultural isolations. We write poetry here, and about here.
Twenty minutes or so on the old Koori road they keep paving over til I’m back on the M4, on my way home to endlessly trace more footsteps between my bed and the bush, to get the last bit of the story before I can finish this. Traffic stacks up outside the Institution where a single gum sprawls its pale arms up to the sky. South Creek is running low and dry, and my uncle up at the farm says he’s had to sell off the cattle that he can’t afford to feed. I go the tree-lined road and drive slow for the dusking roos bounding into the ironbarks. Every few seconds is a flicker of scribbly gum, white and stark and inscripted in the distance. Mum and Dad have just come back from a community meeting—there’s spagbol on the stove, the jack russell bounces back-leggedly at the screen door, and the blue heeler is watching patiently at the back. The sky is vermilion behind black silhouettes. The walls are lined with family photos and the decades of Mum’s cross-stitching that she made for the childhood room where we would curl in each other’s beds to hear stories of our bush friends—Blinky Bill, Snugglepot, Cuddlepie, pastoral homesteads, native florals and bush bandits. There’s more in the shed, and more again in my car. My baby book features a charmingly chubby, blushing knock-off May Gibbsesque babe playing cheerily with a young brushtail beneath my names and descriptors—Evelyn (for my great-grandmothers) Araluen (for waterlilies) Ane (for habit) Corr (for the Irish refugee, for the mission worker, for the absences of history by which a name will refuse to abandon whatever it can claim). Hair, dark. Complexion, dark. Eyes, dark. Folded inside is my first fat-faced photo, my birth certificate, and my Common Seal Confirmation of Aboriginality (for convenience, in case of fire).
Here’s the entanglement: none of this is innocent and while I seek to write rupture I usually just rearrange. I can name the colonial complexes and impulses which structure these texts but it doesn’t change the fact that I was raised on these books too. They tell me they never chose them to hurt us, and I never thought they did. History is a narrative and they did everything they could to write a new one for us with whatever tools they could find. They both grew up surrounded by the bush in country New South Wales towns. None of my grandparents finished school and they all had very low levels of literacy. Books were one of the many things my mum never had growing up but made sure to give her children. She chose them for us around what we could afford, but always looked for stories of the bush she knows and loves with intimate detail. She read them to us with care and patience, even in all the years she was working two jobs to put those books in our hands. Her hands ache every night from years of labour that began at a sheep station at eight years old. Each night after work she sews us quilts with native floral prints, cuts stained glass to give us windows of our totems, cross-stitches gumnut patterns to hang in whatever houses we might one day live in. She named us each so tender, with such vision of the home she will never stop making for us.
Dad remembers having books—a few from his parents, and some from a teacher boarding in the same house when he was a child in Penrith. She shared the colonial books that he would go on to read to us with salt grains and disputations. He built word-worlds of fae and foe in both the forest and the bush. As a child, I enjoyed those stories. I enjoyed the lands they peered into, the adventures they described. He made room enough for us to scribble our own stories into their pastures. He taught us how to care for our country, but he let us learn how to love it. I missed all this nuance and allowed myself to think we were losing to the settlers when I discovered theory. I learnt new words to write down and explain everything that I felt departed from my notions of the Authentically Aboriginal. The books, the cross-stitching, the childhood home bursting at the seams with national ephemera they had collected over the years.
It was an easy sort of antagonism, where I could see my parents as the victims of a colonial condition, and not agential selves who had sacrificed everything to give us something. A tidy narrative that forgot the decades of work they did writing curricula for Aboriginal education across New South Wales, creating programs to bring Elders into schools, developing resources for communities to address drug abuse through cultural learning and safety, going to meetings and bushcare, picking up the pieces, being there to remind and remember. Dad tells me that these were the stories told to stop kids like him from dying and disappearing into the bush, to the closed fist of the state. His story will never fit into a poem. It’s too heavy to dangle from an ear.
While my siblings and I consumed those stories, we were never taught to settle for them. My parents never pretended these books could truly know country or culture or : : me—but they had both come from circumstances in which literacy and the access it affords was never a given. They just wanted me to be able to read.
I unpack the car and everything spills out, back to where it belongs. No reconciliation, no rupture, just home.
* * *
lawrence-minh bùi davis (lmbd): To start, why this poem?
André Dao (AD): Whenever I do writing workshops in Australia, I always start with acknowledgment of country, and it’s become really important to me to not only do that formal protocol, but also think about, and help workshop participants think about, what it actually means for us as writers.
The specific topic of the workshops is writing autofiction, or auto-theory. Which in some iterations of the genre can be . . . somewhat navel-gazing, right? What I want to do in my own approach, and what I think Evelyn does, so wonderfully, is write the auto, the self, in relation to theory and politics. The self-writing becomes the way out, to a larger family, a larger community, a larger tradition.
And then for me personally, there are a couple of really key moments in the poem. The first is when Evelyn writes, “Here’s the entanglement: none of this is innocent, and while I seek to write rupture I usually just rearrange.” Since I first read this poem, that word, “entanglement,” has been echoing in my mind as the way to think about the particular kind of relationships I have with various things from colonial literature to the traumatic family histories I’m writing about. These things are all entangled. I really love the way she situates the writer as trying to do this thing, trying to rupture, but realizing that perhaps the best we can do is rearrange.
The other key moment for me is when she describes that process of being a younger or emerging writer and discovering theory, and thinking that theory places this sort of distance between yourself and perhaps your own histories, or your own family. That really, deeply resonated with me, and my own experience of leaving home, and going to university, and discovering all this theory and other experimental writing, and thinking that if I could just master that, it would give me distance from these entanglements I was trying to get myself out of. The poem shows how wrongheaded that understanding of what theory or writing gives us is. You can try and use it that way, but . . . Perhaps what the poem shows is theory can be a way to let us sit with those entanglements, and in particular, let us sit with, come closer to, family and land.
I also just love the line, “His story will never fit into a poem.” This is about her father, you know. “His story will never fit into a poem. It’s too heavy to dangle from an ear.” . . . It’s just great. Just a great line.
lmbd: The “entanglements” feel reminiscent of a passage early in Anam, the one asking, What is complicity?
“Remembering is complicity. Making art is complicity.” Layer upon layer of unexamined complicity. It’s like a complicity poem. A complicity compendium. It’s the novel staging—much as the poem does, so powerfully—a grappling with one’s relationship to coloniality. Sometimes, as you say, through theory . . . also across generations and other positionalities. What are one’s responsibilities? And recognizing the complexity of trying to pass judgment, or having passed judgment, on where others sit vis-à-vis colonial violences and exertions of power. Acknowledging the impossibility, sometimes, of reaching certain sureties.
And viewing the passage through the lens of the poem, and vice versa, it’s like a kind of amplification is going on. Back and forth.
I wonder if you could say more about Anam in relationship to Indigenous life and justice and relationship to land?
AD: I remember having an early reader of the novel say to me that one of the things she really enjoyed about the manuscript was—the way she put it was the ontological status of the ghosts was left unresolved. I was really pleased that that had come across. Because the journey to get to that point ran through my engagement with Indigenous cosmologies on the Australian continent.
In particular it came through my law work. I was working for the federal court in Australia, and we would hear native title cases, which is the land rights system, the system for recognizing Indigenous land rights in Australia, an extremely flawed system. But one of the privileges of working on those cases was that I got to hear elders giving evidence about their cosmologies related to specific sites. Some judges recognized that there was some importance to hearing evidence about land on those sites. So we would travel to these remote, sacred sites and hear evidence about the spiritual forces that moved through and made those places and the artifacts that they left behind.
Somewhere between being a young lawyer and a secular, agnostic, lapsed Catholic—who had gone through a journey of, in a way, despiritualizing—I had to make sense of this evidence I was hearing. There was that moment, and then I guess it was really reading the work of Alexis Wright. She’s a Waanyi writer who takes her Waanyi cosmology and treats it coevally with Western literary traditions. She’s someone who reads Joyce and Seamus Heaney, and appreciates that tradition, and then accepts the Waanyi cosmology as coeval with it, and both of those appear in her work. To get back to ghosts, throughout her novels, throughout all of her work, spirits, or ghosts, or other forces, the Rainbow Serpent, for instance, simply . . . exist.
lmbd: Mmm. Simply exist. Like the unresolved ghosts in Anam. It’s such a deliberate, and weighty, political choice.Ontological status as political. Foregrounding diverging understandings of how this world operates, what is possible. And what you’ve described says something wonderful about the refugee condition: the possibility of finding a way to the spiritual, a way back to the spiritual, by listening to and learning from Indigenous cosmologies.
As opposed to tacitly accepting, in the process of resettlement and assimilation, a kind of baseline of—epistemic antagonism. Antagonism toward certain kinds of spirituality, Aboriginal cosmologies definitely included. Viet ghost practice, for sure. Ghosts and the idea they might be something other than psychological projections or metaphorical representations. Any possibilities of existence and regimes of knowledge-making outside officially accepted domains.
To segue: the moment in which we’re talking is one of commemoration, of a major world-historical event, and how it might be remembered and understood. Or in other words, whether it might be resolved, or left un-resolved, or newly de-resolved. Ghosts and other ontological dimensions included.
To properly set the frame: we’re talking the day after the fiftieth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, May 1, 2025. It’s evening, for me, just outside Washington, D.C., Piscataway lands. You’re on the morning of May 2, in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Two days after? I have so much trouble with the time zone difference (!).
AD: Yes. May 2.
lmbd: And you have a new piece the Guardian invited you to write, reflecting on the anniversary.
AD: I do. You know, just before we started recording, you . . . hesitated, over the kind of adjective to apply to fiftieth anniversary–related mourning. I think you said “poisonous.”
lmbd: Poisonous, yes.
AD: In the process of writing the Guardian piece, it was useful to realize, okay, this is going to be quite public. I have to remember to give the mourning its due. Give our community’s pain its due as well. Because once you take that critical path, right, where you start to say the ways that your own community falls short, one of the sad or scary things is feeling unmoored from your community. A central thing that really defines the community is this mourning, and I’ve set myself in opposition to it. Which is to say, being forced to write something publicly about the anniversary was useful in finding the paths back in, and the more useful position from which to say, “These are the ways we fall short.”
Rather than setting myself up as the outside critic who says, “Your mourning is violent and exclusionary . . . You’re a settler colonist, and you don’t ever acknowledge it,” it was really nice to write myself back into the community and our pain. And then say, “These are ways I hope we can do better.”
lmbd: When did you get asked to write it?
AD: A week before the anniversary, a little more than a week. Really right around the same time that I was writing the responses for the Boston conference. In fact, if I hadn’t been preparing for the Boston event, and the particular framing of the event, I think ordinarily—if I’d been asked last year, say—I would say no. I’m not really someone who wants to write about the 30th of April for an outlet like the Guardian. Only being able to make the connection to the present, and in particular, the connection to the genocide in Gaza, made me want to write this piece.
lmbd: It’s so lovely to hear. The curious circuitry. The Guardian has its huge readership. Our early April session at the conference had a comparatively tiny audience, mostly younger viet scholars and writers, a number of Palestinian writers—I mentioned our comrades George Abraham, the Gazan poet Tariq Luthun. Twenty or so people squeezed into a small conference room.
And somehow, part of what made the Guardian piece feel possible for you was developing it through the prism of the session? Making the connection to the present and Gaza. It’s so lovely to hear.
AD: That question of starting points . . . For the Guardian piece, after a first draft, I thought, I have to explain: what war are we talking about? What’s the Fall of Saigon? There’s lots of folks for whom this isn’t and was never a central event. Then there’s the passage of time. Writing something like this in 1985 is very different from writing it in 2025.
It makes me think about the decisions I was making in Anam. What’s the assumed knowledge of my imagined reader? I found that a really difficult question to think through when writing a kind of “migrant novel.” Veering from doing the historical explaining and cultural translation work for an audience for whom these events come with no particular baggage, no particular context, then veering to the opposite end, thinking, that’s not my role. I don’t want to be the native informant. I don’t want to be positioned in that way. Leading to some real oscillations in the kind of manuscript I was producing. For so long, my presumed audience was a very white one.
lmbd: I think readers can feel you grappling with these questions in the novel. The tensions you’re talking about rise to the surface—the narration is questioning its own ethical operation. [laughs] Or sometimes the narrator’s partner, as a character, is questioning it!
I’m trying to be gentler with early diasporic writers who fall into explaining for a white mainstream—the “native informants.” You see the phenomenon across various bodies of migrant and ethnic literatures, this need, in early works especially, to legitimize, ask for approval. It’s not good! But I wonder if we can think more about the deep mechanics of how authors have felt pressured to do so. Why they’ve been pressured.
But Anam wraps layers of history around its narrative in a way that isn’t pandering, isn’t asking a certain kind of gaze to “please care,” “please see this as familiar, and therefore mattering.” The novel is so dense with unexpected histories, histories that even people who have some sense of the War and pre-War and post-War might not know. Hidden slices. Or seams through the histories—that I think might be bewildering to a diasporic writer from thirty years ago trying to tell this story. But now we’re in a place where you can hold up the old, bad impulses as moral questions, and ask a reader to read the book through the questions.
AD: Thinking back to the ten-year period of working on Anam, for a lot of the early years, now I realize, part of the struggle was I didn’t really have a sense of the tradition I was writing into. The book got better, and I became a better writer, as I read myself into traditions of Asian Australian writing, Asian American writing.
That’s still a process for me. In my literary formation, these weren’t traditions that were given to me, easily accessible, with canons clearly laid out, there for you to work your way through. I had other traditions, and I’ve written myself into those. But it was the process of working on Anam and struggling with all these questions and realizing there’ve been incredible generations of authors struggling with the same questions, maybe coming up with different answers, answers that were the right answers, or necessary answers for their time. And I had a freedom to come up with my own necessary answers for my time.
lmbd: It’s how the two of us met, through the crossings of traditions—connected by the Asian Australian critic and editor Leah Jing, and the magazine and antiracist organization she founded, Liminal, with its ongoing work to think very intentionally about what is Asian Australian literature, in concert with what is Asian Aotearoa NZ literature, what is Asian American literature, what is Asian diasporic literature . . .
You wrote this novel and published it prior to the current genocide in Gaza. Prior to the fiftieth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. But now Anam is re-releasing in the U.S. You’re going to travel in the U.S. and give readings from it in the very near future. Raising the question of the evolution of your thinking over that time, and going forward—what canons you’re newly tapping into, what audiences and traditions you’re increasingly in conversation with. Your relationship with Anam, your relationships with American audiences, your relationships with Asian American writers—how are these evolving?
AD: It ties in nicely to one of the key threads in the book—of inheritance. Right? If we’re thinking about inheritance and what we inherit in a literary sense, there’s something interesting about the timeline you’re sketching out. There’s a bit of nonlinearity to inheritance. Part of the joy of the book coming out in the States and my getting to come over and meet folks is I’m learning a lot about whole traditions of Asian American literature I hadn’t been aware of, that, in nonlinear ways, I’ve inherited from.
I’m becoming retrospectively aware. The book’s finished. In one sense new knowledges and connections I’m making with writers in the U.S. cannot affect the text. But in another sense they’re really re-informing my sense of what I was doing. It was not in my mind as such that I was talking to someone like Cathy Linh Che; I am now, in my subsequent thinking, and in some ways, there’s a thread back. Does that make—? It’s kind of a strange thing to think through . . .
lmbd: No, it makes perfect sense. Even the passage you read from Anam for the Boston conference—you’ve probably read it dozens of times before, and it’s different in each context, but in this particular moment, it had a particular charge and meaning, and I think that shifts forever how you understand the passage, how you might talk about it going forward. Even if the words on the page aren’t changing.
What also comes to mind—I’ve mentioned to you the Japanese American writer Brandon Shimoda. He has this idea about inheritance I love. About preparing to give inheritance. In his conception, we are always in the process of living up to—or dying up to—becoming an ancestor. Fulfilling a responsibility in a longer continuum of passing on inheritance. We’re not just the humble, passive recipients of inheritance. What are our roles as future dead, as future ghosts?
Which are, of course, questions very much on your mind throughout Anam.
AD: Yes, and in a sense that structure is literalized in Anam, with the narrator becoming a father.
It’s also one of the major narrative arcs of the novel—the realization the narrator’s not just the recipient of ancestral knowledge and obligation, but necessarily the conduit as well. It’s really a hinge point in the development of the novel, his coming to realize that, and the way it changes his sense of what it means to remember, and unpack the work of memory.
If I have a gripe with a way the book has been read, or a hesitation, a moment of caution, it’s been with the desire to domesticate that particular arc within a family story. Of course Anam opens itself up to that because it is the story of grandfather, grandson, and daughter—that movement. But I’d like to think it’s also more expansive. As important as the familial relation is, the book is also about a communal structure of inheritance.
And when it is domesticated to just a family story, it tends to be by critics or readers—I can’t help but notice their background. I’m always wanting to be careful about how one understands a reader’s or a critic’s or a writer’s background and how it informs their thinking, but in this case, I think there’s something to it. To make it more explicit: it’s not a reading I found Vietnamese readers or Vietnamese critics making. To them Anam was a family story that could be readily transposed to a communal story.
lmbd: Without having read them, I can easily imagine Vietnamese Australian critics having very particular concerns that have nothing to do with what you’re describing! [laughs]
I’m reminded of Viet [Thanh Nguyen]’s recent LitHub piece we’ve been discussing, about anticolonial literature, literature that exposes and challenges the workings of empire. As opposed to literature that steers toward domestic dramas, allowing the imperial surface to go on undisturbed.
The dynamic is always two-sided, though. What you’re describing are reading audiences who’re hungry to fulfill the other side of the coin, too ready to consume literary work that stirs and moves them but ultimately confirms the coherence of a shared reality—one that only coheres if its fundamental power imbalances and exploitations and dehumanizations stay hidden. These audiences don’t even need the literary work to be what Viet would call an imperial work of literature! They’re happy to do it to anticolonial writing, too, if they can! It’s just that some books, like Anam, resist it.
And the new novel you’re working on, early in progress now—once it comes out, Anam will have to be read “backwards” through it. So there’s another refusal of domestication. A reader can always do what they want, make their choices, but they’ll have to ignore the direction of this next book, and how it’s connected to Anam, in order to read Anam in that limited, depoliticized way.
AD: I really like the flip side you’re making of Viet’s point, about the responsibility of the writer, by looking at the structures of reception. It’s helpful to think back to some of those structures of reception for Anam, and consider some of the positive reception for the book in terms of, as you put it, that desire to understand it in “non-anticolonial ways,” I guess you could say. To obscure or miss that trajectory of the work.
To your second point: how does subsequent work, whether it’s the next novel or other bits of writing, shape reception as well? It goes right back to that conversation about direction of inheritance. There’s the text, and as we move into the future and produce other things, and other things happen, like the genocide in Gaza, right? These all affect how we can and should read a text. It opens up possibilities.
lmbd: If you’re comfortable, I’d love to hear about the novel in progress.
I also want to quickly say: one of the things that’s been fascinating about Viet is how people who’d presumably have no interest in anticolonial work love his work, and don’t seem to be bothered by some of his more inflammatory public positions. How do we understand that? It’s like the person who wants to domesticate Anam. They do it, but it’s incomplete. They can’t pretend away the portion of the novel about the detentions on Manus Island. I mean, how much more anticolonial can you get? Than looking at what’s happening at the Manus Island detention center, how the detainees come to be there, the nitty-gritty of detention life. The humanity of detainees. You can’t read that material and just forget it. I’m hopeful for that subversive potential. Certain readers give Anam an expected, safe response, but the other stuff is inside them, waiting to cause indigestion down the road.
AD: [grins] I’ve seen a bit of that indigestion at events. Where I’ve tried to engage with those sections of the novel, around detention. It’s been fascinating the way some readers have tried to assimilate that material into some kind of comforting, pre-existing framework. The one they tend to fall back on positions the citizen as the one who is able to welcome. They’ll say, “Oh, that was really—I was really moved by . . .” or they’re outraged, or whatever. There’s that response.
Then there’s: “I think refugees should be welcomed here.” And when people read the parts where the narrator talks about his non-belonging in Australia, they speak directly to me, and say, “I want you to know, you’re welcome here.” [both laugh] The strength of conviction that they have the authority to welcome people to stolen land—it’s incredible.
In fact right now—we have an election tomorrow. Really unfortunately, one of the hot topics of the moment is welcome to countries, which has been fomented by the far right, now taken up by the ostensibly centrist, though actually far right.
lmbd: They keep moving the middle here, too.
AD: The line is, “You don’t need to be welcomed to your own country.” The outrage and offense taken by the almost-always white citizen at some kind of official event at which the Indigenous community makes the incredibly generous and not at all to-be-expected gesture of welcoming people to country, welcoming the very people who are benefiting from ongoing settler colonialism—
lmbd: —And even saying to you, “I want you to feel welcome” is such a clear . . . They have no realization that what they’re presuming to say to you is something you couldn’t say to them, ever.
AD: Yes.
lmbd: Well, as bad as that sounds, it’s a scenario that’s almost impossible in the U.S. In order for white folks here to be put off by an Indigenous welcome, there would have to be an opportunity for an Indigenous person to welcome them! Which isn’t impossible, it does happen, but it’s not common or standardized in the U.S. It’s so uneven. Land acknowledgments are not a thing, they don’t exist as a concept in certain portions of this country. There isn’t recognition we’re on stolen land as something other than a distant historical fact.
AD: It goes back to the indigestion metaphor. Land acknowledgments and welcome to countries are having this effect, lodging something deeply uncomfortable for the settler mindset. There’s the more radical—I won’t say critique, but radical caution about land acknowledgments. A land acknowledgment without concrete steps to decolonize is its own kind of problematic. But then looking at the way welcome to countries have suddenly bubbled up as an election issue shows some of the work it does to have these public events where you either begin by acknowledging that sovereignty wasn’t ceded or by actually having an elder from the traditional owners of the land welcoming people to the space.
lmbd: Not enough, but you recognize it as something, especially in its absence. Here, with the new regime, we’re seeing rollbacks of programs we’ve been critiquing for years. We don’t want them gone! We want them better. The U.S. language of “DEI”—I don’t know what the equivalent would be for you in Australia—but here Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion has been heavily critiqued for years, and not even on the far left. It’s not dissimilar to “multiculturalism” of prior generations. It makes all these flawed assumptions and has really limited horizons, but when you scrap it altogether . . . Right now, our National Endowment for the Arts, our main federal body doing arts granting, has to remove all reference to race or any marginalized communities from its grants. It can no longer consider these and other measures of difference as criteria for how it supports arts work. These criteria were never enough, but they were hard-won, and without them . . .
AD: It’s such a key question of the current moment: how to think about the loss of these things that were never enough?
To bring it back to—you referred to my next book. One of the things that book is going to try to do is take us back to a moment before the current crisis. I’ve been really interested in other novels that do that for other crises. Novels set on the eve of the first World War, for instance. Writers trying to give us some sense of what was happening. Really the motivating question there is: how could we not have seen what is so visible now?
For this next novel, I’m not quite sure of the pinpoint moment, but for instance it could be 2014, a moment, in the States, that is maybe the zenith of DEI. But also so many of the things we’re talking about today are already there. In particular the 2014 war in Gaza. For me, it becomes quite personal. How did I not know then what I know now? How was it that I personally, and then the structures around me . . . ? I had some sense of what was happening in Gaza, some sense of the politics of the Israeli occupation. Not nearly enough of a sense, right? It’s that not-knowing, or not-saying, that made it possible for the current genocide to come as a shock and a surprise. I want to explore that.
lmbd: I remember really virulent anti-Muslim racism in 2014 in the U.S. Which has never gone away, but has maybe been crested by other energies, anti-trans energies, for instance—not that the two can’t overlap. But somehow, strangely, in 2014, 2015, it was safer to do trans, nonbinary, and gender expansive–centric and –serving arts programming than it is now. I remember doing an event and offering gender-free bathrooms without pushback. Whereas the simple fact of having headliner Muslim artists then engendered intense scrutiny and panic. These artists were largely engaging the long-tail effects of the various post-9/11, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim policies and programs and energies: Special Registration, detainment and deportation, black sites, people being disappeared. How did all that stuff point us away from what was happening in Palestine? But somehow it did. Or we weren’t able to see through it to Palestine, and see all of it through the lens of Palestine.
AD: That’s going to be part of the process of writing the book. Finding out, in a way. I don’t yet know what I didn’t know. [laughs]
lmbd: You said it was a circle of friends and compatriots and colleagues, in Australia, where some of this reckoning was happening? Friends you were in conversation with about Palestine, or about geopolitical conflict in the area, and how you all were thinking about it.
AD: In the months and year after October 2023, we, a bunch of colleagues, set out to educate ourselves on the history of Palestine, of Palestinian resistance, of Israeli occupation and oppression. That was a process of gestation, each week, realizing, learning so many new things . . . that had always been there, available for us to learn.
I do wonder how that would compare to the mass mobilization around the Vietnam War. My sense is, there was a very quick attempt at the time, by lots of people, to learn about Vietnam, this place, this people who had . . . never really come across most folks’ radar in the West. And suddenly they were organizing a whole anti-war movement. Compared to 2023, when all of this material about Palestine that we’re going through and being shocked and surprised by has been available for the last ten or more years. For whatever reason, as you say, we’ve been pulled away from it by other struggles. That might be a point of difference with the anti–Vietnam War movement, though what we can learn from the difference, I’m not sure.
lmbd: You know, my mom got to the U.S. in the ’60s. She had more encounters with the anti-war movement than most viets because she was here earlier. And her impression was that it was very, in some ways, unconcerned with actual Vietnamese people. [both laugh] Maybe not in a way that’s quite as bad as it sounds. How could the movement really engage with Vietnamese people where they were, in terms of what they actually wanted?
But it seems to me like a real point of differentiation. Even as today we’re so distant from Gaza, we’re not. We connect via social media, via reportage. And organizing has direct lines of all kinds of support and engagement and human connection with Palestinians and specifically Gazans that weren’t possible during the Vietnam War.
AD: We really get to the shape of solidarity. Say with BDS. This is something that Palestinians, Palestinian organizations have asked for, and that’s the starting point of the campaign. That became really clear working at a university. Talking about BDS, saying, this is something our colleagues in Gaza have been asking for. These specific forms of solidarity between colleagues. That’s a different shape than what was available in a lot of the anti-[Vietnam] War movement.
lmbd: It has been painful watching U.S. art organizations, literary arts organizations, many of them, really struggle with the arts equivalent of BDS, PACBI. You see some orgs doing the kind of process you talked about, embracing education, forming reading groups, working up to a public declaration of signing onto PACBI as an ethical act of sustained commitment. But then you see the issue completely cracking apart other organizations, including in the Asian American arts community. There’s real resistance to signing on, for many reasons. Funding reasons, claims to the apolitical. Art being supposedly distinct from politics.
AD: It’s a useful place to take Viet’s intervention, where he’s saying we need an anti-imperial literature. Well then, what kind of literary institutions do we have? What’s a literary arts institution for? In Australia, we recently had a scandalous episode with Creative Australia, our national arts funding body, which had an independent process to choose the artist that would be Australia’s representative at the Venice Biennale. The panel of peers and experts chose Lebanese Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi—and then, the right-wing media went into full attack mode, discovered an old work of his in which he cut up footage of the former leader of Hezbollah. They used the sheer fact that he was using that footage. It’s really telling that the lead attack came from a journalist who’s not an arts critic. How could the Australian funding body give money to this artist who glorifies terrorists? And then the funding body immediately caved. The board met overnight and rescinded his place at the Biennale.
On the one hand, we could say, Creative Australia, as an arts institution, could and should be anti-colonial. That would be one position, and, I think, we could have an interesting conversation about that. But even on the point of being an institution that simply defends art, explains what art is to a public, it’s completely failed. It’s completely failed to talk about what this artwork was, what the artist was doing, to hold the most basic conversation about ambivalence in art, the ways an image can be read. What are these institutions for? Are they just to dole out money? Or are they there to do the really necessary work of educating—creating—a public that is conversant with art? When they are so managerialized they have no capacity to do even that basic function, what are they doing?
lmbd: Censorship happens with so little justification. But this is almost precisely how it operates everywhere. It’s standard-issue colonial practice. I can think of dozens of instances like this with museums in the U.S. It boils down to: who are our major funders, and how do we keep them happy? And liability. That’s institutional thinking in a nutshell.
To shift gears: the Anam excerpt this interview accompanies—there’s a portion invoking the rubber trade, the rubber trees in VN. Did you know? One of the reasons for the invention of napalm was the lack of rubber? During WWII. There was a rubber shortage, and existing U.S. explosives couldn’t be made without it. So American scientists were tasked with creating new explosives using other synthetic compounds that could mimic the elasticity of rubber. Which apparently you want for achieving ideal incendiary properties, and so your explosives are shelf stable—so they can be transported in very hot or very cold weather and still be counted on to properly annihilate people.
AD: There’s a really horrible closing of a circuit there. The colonial world was a site of extraction, and that’s what that scene in the novel is about. The land, and the brown bodies that are on the land—just raw resources to be wrung . . . But then the rapacious appetite of the colonial power is never satisfied. It’s where the history of colonialism meets the history of capitalism. The need for endless growth. That story about napalm—you have this war machine that just cannot be satisfied with the raw materials available in its various imperial holdings. So what you get is this weird, horrific innovation, and the engine is the insatiable war machine.
lmbd: And the rubber plantation scene in Anam, it comes to us through the filter of a ghost. It’s not “humanized.” We only know it by way of a ghost that is less than human, more than human, other than human.
AD: Right. Knowledge about the depredations of the colonial regime runs in reverse. You have this woman, and then the butcher who becomes the ghost, who then tells the grandfather, who is precisely the future ghost—he will one day be the ghost from whom the narrator will learn everything. This is how we try to bring ourselves in relation to our colonial past, through these kinds of ghostly chains.
lmbd: It reminds me of a whisper network. When standard forms of discourse—or even consciousness—are prevented, then it’s only through other, unofficial, ad hoc channels that reckoning can happen.
AD: To go back to that idea of domestication. If you try to put to rest the ghost in the chain . . . One possibility the scene offers up is the love story. A reader can say, Oh this is a very tragic love story between this woman and a man . . .
But that’s just one reading, and obviously the way we’ve been reading it just now is to say, No, this is a colonial story.
lmbd: Inescapably a colonial story. Not the story of a family that just happens to have a colonial backdrop. The colonialism is inextricable. As much as Anam is a story of a family, it’s a story of colonialism as told through the prism of a family. And in the sense that the novel is actively working against colonialism’s elisions and co-optations and violences, it’s an anti-colonial story.
A request for you. Could you read aloud the passage I referred to before, the “complicity compendium”? To emphasize the, ah, anti-colonial character of the novel, and hopefully up the indigestion for would-be domesticating readers.
AD: Yes, I’d be happy to. [recites]
Forgetting is complicity. Remembering is complicity. Making art is complicity. Living in the world, pursuing material gain, buying a house you can’t afford: complicity. Starting a family, putting down roots is complicity; migration, travel, too. Hope is complicity, but so is despair. Asking, What is to be done? is complicity. Not asking is complicity. Being a human rights lawyer is complicity. Loving my daughter.”
lmbd: Thank you.
It’s such a searching, excoriating passage. You think you’re a principled person. Liberal? Humanitarian? Artist? Radical? Refugee? Whichever one, you still have blood on your hands. There’s no virtuous higher ground, and there can’t be. It’s a much-needed reminder, for anyone, that no, you can’t exempt yourself from responsibility or culpability so easily.
As a way to close, the two of us, can we recite together, honor together, some of Evelyn’s gift of a poem?
AD & lmbd: [recite an excerpt of “TO THE PARENTS.”]
