Recently, on a family outing with my 15-year-old nephew, I asked him what he was studying in English class. “We’re comparing the Westminster Bridge poem by Wordsworth to Trent Dalton’s All the Shimmering Skies,” he said.
I rolled my eyes. Not because I have anything against Trent Dalton or William Wordsworth. I rolled my eyes because for the first 18 years of my life, I too, was subject only to the male consciousness. I too, had been taught exactly who to pay attention to, who to read, who to admire, who to love.
When I was at uni, I spent all my money at book sales on texts by ‘the Classics’ — Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Blake, Yeats, Chaucer, Coleridge, Byron, Eliot, Fitzgerald, Twain, Wilde, Tolstoy, Orwell, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Joyce, Hawthorne, Proust, Vonnegut, Nabokov, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Kafka, Chekhov, Carver, Hemingway, Rushdie, Forster, Huxley, Kerouac, Mailer, Roth, Hardy, Beckett, Aims, Updike.
When you see these names printed against an orange and white margin beside the words “Penguin Classics” — you learn from a very young age that those are the names that very important people have decided hold very important ideas.
For most of my life, I thought those names constituted ‘Good writing’. ‘Good writing’ has always looked white and male.
For most of my life, I thought those names constituted ‘Good writing’. ‘Good writing’ has always looked white and male. ‘Good writing’ taught me whose perspective was valued and whose was not. ‘Good writing’ taught me what to pay attention to and how to pay attention to it. ‘Good writing’ did not only exclude me from its creation; it erased me entirely from its stories.
Whenever I lament about the overwhelming maleness of our western canon, people inevitably hit back with the usual; “What about Jane Austen? Harper Lee? Mary Shelley! The Bronte sisters!”
I’d kill the conversation by saying they’re all white, and then feel awful for days for simply wanting stories told by someone who looked like me. Was that too much to ask?
Well, seems like it still is. When you don’t read about yourself on the page, you don’t really know how to be. When you do see yourself, you begin to unconsciously perform the ways you have been represented.
I can still count on one hand the occasions where characters who look like me have been included in white people’s stories: Kim in Miss Saigon, Phuong in The Quiet American, Chiyo in Memoirs of a Geisha, Ngoc Lan from Downsizing. All these Asian women are peripheral characters (only to be desired by white men) who end up dead or neglected. And all these stories were written by white men.
All these Asian women are peripheral characters (only to be desired by white men) who end up dead or neglected. And all these stories were written by white men.
The discomfort around this asymmetrical offering of attention is something I feel when I roam art galleries around the world. The history of art is the history of men looking at naked women. Regardless of the colour of my skin, I am always inspiration for someone else’s art.
At school, when we’re young, we don’t necessarily get to choose what we pay attention to. Our high school teachers assign us what to spend our time thinking about, looking at, listening to, reading.
Our attention is so limited, so now as an adult, I am obsessively aware of whose art I give my attention to.
I give my attention to those who live in bodies that is somehow ‘othered’, whose sexuality means they don’t benefit from the heteronormative structures of our society, whose ambitions are outside of parenthood or marriage, whose ideologies don’t comply with capitalism or racism or homophobia or transphobia. I pay attention to people who, on account of their rebellion, are deemed ‘unpalatable’.
These people are infinitely more interesting and useful to learn from, because they live in those blind spots we continue to teach our children to uphold. Comparing Trent Dalton’s words to Wordsworth’s is simply perpetuating the ideas I am trying to dismantle inside my brain; the idea that only white men can write beautiful, important sentences; that only white men are the authorial figures whose take on the planet is the one worth paying attention to.
A few months ago, I sat down with my friend S.L Lim over tea and vegan scones. We talked about our books, what we were trying to solve in writing novels, how we answer the questions that seem to evade solutions.
“Who do you write for?” I asked them towards the end of our conversation.
“The future,” they said.
“Really?” I said, perplexed.
I told them I wrote mostly for myself.
“My writing is entirely self-centred,” I said. “I write so that I exist on the page. I write so that I can be a fully-formed human being, with desires that are contradictory, and ambitions that are wider than anything I’ve ever seen in a movie or book of someone who has a face like mine.”
“I think about who I’m accountable to,” Lim told me. “I write towards people who share a commitment to liberatory politics; also people whose opinions are good and funny and not whack.”
I started to think about my own commitments to art. Whose opinion do I care about? Who am I responsible to? What are my artistic obligations?
I started to think about my own commitments to art. Whose opinion do I care about? Who am I responsible to? What are my artistic obligations?
Both my parents’ mothers had very little agency over their lives. They were not allowed to choose who they paid attention to. I am. So I will be intentional where I choose to place my attention. I choose to pay attention to stories and voices whose narratives expand and challenge my way of moving through the world. Attention is too rare a resource to just give to someone who is simply white and male.
Jessie Tu will appear at ‘Your Favourite’s Favourites’ with author Christos Tsiolkas at the Sydney Writers’ Festival on Sunday, May 2. Find out more
