Young women's memoirs of migration, dispossession and Australian 'unbelonging' demand to be heard
- Written by Ruth Balint, Associate professor, UNSW Sydney
Akuch Kuol Anyieth was born into a world of violence. Her memoir begins at the age of five, when she fled with her mother and her three siblings from civil war in South Sudan to a refugee camp[1] in north-west Kenya.
The Kakuma refugee camp became her home for the next nine years. It was a place where everything necessary for physical and mental survival was in short supply: food, water, shelter, law and order, safety, security and hope.
Review:
Unknown: A Refugee’s Story – Akuch Kuol Anyieth (Text Publishing)
Root and Branch: Essays on Inheritance – Eda Gunyadin (NewSouth)
Akuch and her mother, Mary, in Melbourne.
Author provided
Anyieth’s body bore the marks of his violence: bruised arms, black eyes, busted lips. Sleep deprivation ate away at her ability to focus in her language classes. And yet she and her mother never gave up on Dragon.
It is the relentless violence of the state that is most shocking and confronting for Anyieth, and for the African refugee community to which she belongs. The “paradise” of affluence and clean streets masked a different kind of ugliness, no less extreme for its effects on refugee lives than the visible poverty and daily degradations of Kakuma.
Anyieth and her family arrived in Melbourne at a time when refugees from Africa were receiving significant media attention. Politicians and media personalities (I am thinking here of Andrew Bolt and Neil Mitchell) helped spark a moral panic about people of African heritage, in particular South Sudanese youth. They labelled them as criminal thugs and “animals” and linked them to gang violence.
For Anyieth and her family, this manifested in small, subtle acts of racism, such as the silence of white neighbours, or racist comments by teachers and employers, and larger institutional acts of racism, including the removal of African children from their families, racial profiling and intimidation of African youths by the police, discrimination by employers, and the welfare marginalisation of African families.
All of these acts, small and large, were enacted in the alien language of English. The first-hand experience of powerlessness drove Anyieth to master English and she was soon in demand as an interpreter for the South Sudanese community.
She became an official interpreter, working for the police, the courts, Child Protection, hospitals and prisons, mainly in domestic violence disputes. In all of these institutions, a lack of cultural and historical understanding perpetuated the problems of systemic injustice.
Violence in her community, Anyieth writes,
goes deeper and beyond the gender inequality that is so readily used to explain family violence in the West. For us, it is rooted in traumatic experiences, racism, discrimination, marginalisation and social injustices.
The mental health issues and PTSD that refugee families have dealt with from years of war, followed by their marginalisation and isolation in Australia, are still overlooked, perhaps even silenced. Anyieth’s insights are part of a groundswell of voices from the South Sudanese community speaking out about the reality of mental health issues and violence in their communities, including the shocking number of youth suicides.
Read more:
Sudanese heritage youth in Australia are frequently maligned by fear-mongering and racism[6]
Inherited trauma
Eda Gunaydin is another young woman concerned with the issue of inter-generational trauma in migrant families. Her new collection of essays, Root and Branch[7], confronts the complexities of what it means to be a young Turkish woman in Western Sydney[8] – and the trauma one inherits as a child of parents who are wounded by their histories.
Gunaydin revisits Turkey through her parents’ stories, in an attempt to make sense of her father’s resignation and her mother’s unhappiness and abuse. Her relationship with her mother is an important theme that Gunaydin returns to often. Her writing acts as partly as an attempt to diagnose and heal the gaping wounds of her neglect and her mother’s unresolvable illness.
She is equally concerned with the problem of speaking and not speaking English, often including the Turkish phrases of her parents, which she deliberately does not translate. The effect on non-Turkish speakers is one of alienation, not unlike the way English often alienates migrants and refugees. The refusal to translate is provocative and political.
My favourite essay, “Western Medicine”, describes the Blacktown of Gunyadin’s family home, officially designated an “LGA [local governent area] of concern” during the recent COVID outbreak. Gunaydin considers the area as both a material reality and as a mental fixture symbolising the danger, poverty and violence of marginalised non-White Australia.
Gunaydin belongs to a particular cohort of writers[9] emerging from Western Sydney, who position themselves outside and against Australia’s hegemonic “Anglo” culture. She writes:
I am loathe to think of it as a place with a fixed geography. It’s not as sexy to say, but it would be more appropriate to call it a constellation of meanings stitched together and imputed on an ever-warping set of geographies, with Western Sydney emerging as whatever the centre discards as its periphery.
The essay is littered with comparisons to her new life in the inner west, with its better hospitals, better roads, better schools and better food.
Eda Gunyadin.
Author provided
Gunaydin is unflinching in her depiction of her family’s dysfunction. She won the Sydney Morning Herald Young Writer of the Year Award[10] for an essay on this topic and, in the essay “Literacy”, she describes her family celebrating the prize by going out to a restaurant in Rouse Hill, the “more bourgeois” part of Western Sydney. They go there in her father’s ute, the journey descending into a ritual of humiliation and unhappiness, like most of her interactions with her mother. Her father and sister remain silent, self-protecting observers.
All of this is related with Gunaydin’s unflinching honesty. Her talent lies in her ability to weave together the personal and the political, to map her story of trauma and alienation against a broader history of marginalisation and poverty that began in Turkey and continues in Western Sydney.
Each essay, some more than others, also grapples with the work of gender, queer and literary theorists. But the real strength of these essays, to my mind, is when the writing is freed of these anchors.
Root and Branch and Unknown are ferociously intelligent books by two young writers addressing the problems of gender, race and migration in Australia today. Both represent a new generation of writers engaging with the trauma of their and their parents’ pasts.
The authors share a position of not quite belonging in a country that is still not reconciled to its history of violence and dispossession. They yearn for something better. Both books stare a certain kind of Australia in the face and demand to be heard.
Read more:
Turkey, the Armenian genocide and the politics of memory[11]
References^ refugee camp (theconversation.com)^ Unknown (www.textpublishing.com.au)^ African-Australian experience (theconversation.com)^ Friday essay: hunger, dust-storms, war – how I defied the odds as a South Sudanese child refugee (theconversation.com)^ South Sudan (theconversation.com)^ Sudanese heritage youth in Australia are frequently maligned by fear-mongering and racism (theconversation.com)^ Root and Branch (unsw.press)^ Western Sydney (theconversation.com)^ writers (theconversation.com)^ Sydney Morning Herald Young Writer of the Year Award (www.smh.com.au)^ Turkey, the Armenian genocide and the politics of memory (theconversation.com)
