Michelle Cahill

Through intergenerational displacements mixed ancestry people become impoverished and homeless.(Just think of the sad life of Jean Rhys.) I don’t claim to be a victim of these dynamics, but writing can be an act of reparation. About 4% of Australian Indians identify as Anglo-Indian. On migrating to Australia, I found that I could be judged by different communities to whom I bear a resemblance: not being white, not being a Hindu nor a Moslem Indian; and not quite Australian. (Of course, there are other Indian minorities: Parsees, Jews, Jains. They, like Christian are outside the official and dominant caste system.)

In the Calcutta chapters of Daisy and Woolf, I dramatise these different social, cultural tensions as they were during the early 1920’s when anti-British riots and race riots take place, and the city is divided by zones.

3. You mention Woolf's racism several times in the novel, could you expand on this for our audience who have yet to read the book but are interested in this?

Well, there are repeated undertones of the racist ideology that Woolf inherited in most of her references to India in the novel, Mrs Dalloway. Specifically, Daisy is described as ‘vain’ and ‘very dark’ but also as she is sexually objectified as ‘adorable’ and ‘charming’. Through Peter Walsh’s eyes we are provided with a depiction of India that is backward, tedious and disorderly; the women are far less attractive than British women, which appears to excuse Peter from stalking a young woman near Regent’s Park. Through the eyes of Clarissa’s circle, India is chaotic, and on the verge of uprising. It is a place where the coolies beat their wives. This kind of reduction was fairly stereotypical of the Raj era.

Woolf’s Orientalism manifests more generally in many of her novels. The painter, Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse is described as having “Chinese eyes” yet this racial sign doesn’t shape her personality or her development as a character or an artist. The Chinese reference instead is unknowable, creating a cool distance rather than cultural warmth or connection. And even in Mrs Dalloway there is a certain aesthetic passiveness associated with Chinese objects while Elizabeth Dalloway, Clarissa’s daughter, who is quite unlike her elitist mother, is described elusively as having ’Chinese eyes’:

‘She had no preferences. Of course, she would not push her way. She inclined to be passive, it was an expression she needed, but her eyes were fine, Chinese, oriental, and as her mother said, with such nice shoulders and holding herself so straight, she was always charming to look at.’ (149)

Woolf did blackface. She took part in the infamous Dreadnought Hoax of 1911, dressing up as an African prince with friends, other disguised Bloomsburians. They boarded a battleship, the HMS Dreadnought wearing turbans, robes and blackface, pretending to be Abyssinian royalty. Although Woolf didn’t mimic Swahili one of the instigators had the caucasity to do so. Nonetheless, Virginia Woolf seemed not to be aware that to parody brown people is a form of control over them. She extolled the prank in a lecture written for the Memoir club some years later. To this day, I find it alarming that some Instagrammers have posted these photographs without referencing how inappropriate that behaviour was to people of colour.

Virginia Woolf sits on the left hand side of the photograph.

Having read some of the letters and diaries, it is apparent that racist assumptions are evident in many of the Bloomsbury correspondences. In Daisy and Woolf, I reference some of these incidents, for instance, on how Julian Bell wrote letters to his friend, Eddie Playford, about his affair with Shuhua Ling revealing racist stereotypes about the Chinese and even worse ones about Indians also.

4. This novel also touches on the racism faced by Authors of Colour in the publishing industry, an issue that is very close to us. Could you give us an insight into your experience getting published as a Person of Colour? Did you face any backlash or questions on why you picked Daisy when there are many other (read: white) characters from Woolf's?

It can be retraumatising to discuss these issues; so, I will make my remarks brief. I am always speaking through trauma, something that white people don’t readily appreciate. Although I’ve been an author and poet, an independent literary editor, and know something about publishing and the dynamics that privilege white writers in this country as well as in the canon, during the writing of the novel I came to realise that I had only glimpsed a small part of the obstacles facing minority writers. The playing field remains very uneven, the opportunities available to POC writers are undoubtedly restricted. What needs to happen is a more open discussion with white mainstream culture about the structural issues and more sensitive readings of minority storytelling.

My publisher, Hachette, recognised that Daisy and Woolf is a story that needs to be published and reach readers because it’s a transformational novel. It revives and restores the ghost of a shadow character and gives her centre stage.

It’s true there is little encouragement to research minority characters in academia, and there is a veritable tsunami of microaggressions that you have to survive just to get a novel like this one ready for publishing. The risk is that you are seen to be mirroring a text located in the canon, rather than creating a precedent. But it is actually hard work because you are excavating on the one hand, but also contributing by adding something entirely original.

Metafictional and experimental fiction are less mainstream genres for BIPOC writers. Our material existence places pressure on us to reform and resist history and there are many ways to do this. Perhaps it is literary criticism that should be held to account as much as the industry or the canon. After all criticism constructs the canon; threatening to overwrite fiction. At times in my novel, Mina performs as a critic, being critical of the industry and of Woolf’s Bloomsbury and the white establishment. But in that role of criticism, we always see through her eyes, her subjective position. She does not perform as an independent authority on Virginia Woolf or Leonard Woolf or Vanessa Bell. In her critical act she makes herself vulnerable by exposing her own contingency.

During my research it alarmed me that the only substantial criticism that I’d read on the roles of India and Woolf in Mrs Dalloway, after a century of scholarly industry, was an essay that described Daisy as a British woman. How could this be? It points to the selective filters in critical research and the strategic and investment directions of literature, whereby certain topics and subjects are effectively white-washed.

The tide of all this structural racism as well as microaggressions kept surging and washing over me, yet I somehow survived and wrote the book,

5. And finally, is there a book (or books) that made you feel represented?

As a writer, I feel represented by the books I’ve written: Letter to Pessoa, Vishvarupa, The Herring Lass. I’ve mentioned the influence of Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea and in terms of my gender as a reader, Coetzee’s Foe has been an important text. Other books where I felt represented are Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Tsitsi Dangaremba’s Nervous Conditions, Melanie Cheng’s Australia Day, Maxine Beneba Clarke’s The Hate Race, S.L Lim’s Revenge and Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji.