AustLit

'In Childhood, Shannon Burns quickly turns to speculation about why he, ‘a child of the welfare class’, managed, after his tumultuous early years, to find an exit route into the educated middle class, especially where many of his family members have not. I know for a fact that this is a question that plagues many people who grew up in similar circumstances to Burns, and it’s a question that I have posed and attempted to answer myself. It is precisely this analytical bent that drives us to have written these kinds of books, often clumsily dubbed trauma memoirs, in the first place.' (Introduction)

'What characterises Dan Hogan’s poetry is the way that, each time we come close to fully apprehending the impending collapse of capitalism, we are waylaid by something more urgent and mundane: groceries, emails, calls to Centrelink, traffic jams on the way home from work. When the present is frantic, frenetic and demands our full attention, it becomes the only thing that is real. The tragedy with which we live, in Hogan’s words, is that we resultantly have ‘no time to grieve for lost futures’.'(Introduction)

'One of the key tragedies of academia—or of any other profession whose appeal rests on the idea that it in some way comprises a ‘calling’, that is, that we might be doing this kind of work (thinking, reading, writing) regardless of whether or not it was remunerated (a lucky thing, given how much of it is not)—is that the Venn diagram of the jobs we’d like to be doing and the jobs we end up doing looks like two circles, not, actually, unlike the dark ones under my eyes: 

O_O

portrait of the artist experiencing the dawning realisation that they only have one good hour of work left in them before their stimulant wears off' (Introduction)

'It’s all happening very quickly. Work passes by in a blur. I barely have time to read. When I do, it’s on a deadline. I swallow knowledge without chewing and then I spit it back up just as fast. I turn it over in my mind exactly once, flipping it onto its back, and then throw it back out into the sea. Just last week I went to a meeting of a critical theory reading group I’m in: I read the book, entitled For a Left Populism, by Chantal Mouffe, a prominent post-Marxist, in the two hours beforehand. During the meeting I mention, sheepish, that when I was younger I was a post-Marxist. That is, I found it conceivable that material determinations could not a priori be privileged over others: that the class structure did not pre-exist the social, or that domination could be formulated in terms other than class terms. I scoffed at class reductionists who failed to realise that there would continue to be misogyny, violence against women, or unequal distribution of social reproductive labour under communism or socialism. Such a post-Marxist was I that I would often anger my former partner by insisting that I wanted to name my firstborn child – whom I don’t have time to conceive, birth or raise – ‘hegemonise’, a term that crops up often in this particular niche of academia. I don’t want to name my child – who doesn’t exist because I don’t have time to make them – hegemonise. I was only trying to goad my partner, thought it was funny. With a straight face, I’d insist: ‘C’mon! You have to admit, it’s an original name. No one else will have done it before.’' (Introduction)

'There is a Turkish saying that one’s home is not where one is born, but where one grows full – doğduğun yer, doyduğun yer. Mixing the personal and political, Eda Gunaydin’s bold and innovative writing explores race, class, gender and violence, and Turkish diaspora – both in Australia and round the world – in her compelling debut.

'Equal parts piercing, tender and funny, this book takes us from an overworked and underpaid café job in Western Sydney, the mother-daughter tradition of sharing a meal in the local kebab shop, a night clubbing with Turkish students, to the legacies of family migration, and intergenerational trauma within a history of violence and political activism.

'For readers of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Durga Chew-Bose, Eda Gunaydin seeks to unsettle neat descriptions of migration and diaspora. How should we address a racist remark on the 2AM night ride bus? What does the Turkish diaspora of Auburn in Western Sydney have in common with Neukölln in Berlin? And how can we look to past suffering to imagine a new future?' (Publication summary)

'I’m letting our succulents die. I was the only one keeping them alive. So I’ve forced myself to stop. I read in a book that a vital stage of healing for those who have sustained trauma is letting go of the caretaker roles they find oppressive. I have deleted from my calendar the reminder notification that says ‘water plant’. When I see the pots I force myself to look away, and resist the compulsion to run to their aid.' (Introduction)

'I stopped writing my memoir a year ago. Not for lack of interest, but for lack of understanding, maybe. I shit you not, I have seen things you people wouldn’t believe. But why should I tell anyone about it? I stopped because I realised that forcing someone to look at me is no guarantee that I will be seen. How could I write about, say, my experience with a cult that abused and traumatised a loved one, among tens of others, culminating in a court case in which the offender was acquitted, and the complainants victim-blamed publicly, made the butt of jokes? How could I, when I am steeped in a culture which views cults as a joke: something to meme, or dedicate a season of a tween TV show to, or an episode of a podcast to, or to make into merchandise?' (Introduction)     

 (Publication abstract)

'The shoulder bumps from strangers that make me shove back during the day go down easier at night. The power dynamic shifts when you hurry against the CBD’s foot traffic as a group, newly animated with the ability to break up other clusters of bodies with your increased speed and size. On the corner of Sydney’s George and Bathurst I glance up, diverted by some Big Four firm’s logo beaming down—its sedate, civilised, civilising weight. The building’s few lit office windows cut and blaze against the ones that have gone dark. I imagine being one of those floating Friday bodies shifting on an eighth floor, fiddling with my stationery, sipping from my mug of free pod coffee, looking out the window after dusk and realising that I should climb into my car-smelling car, return to my flat-smelling flat and kiss my cat-smelling cat. Then Ahmet falls onto his side.' (Introduction)