Relations of difference: Asianness, indigeneity and whiteness in Simone Lazaroo’s fiction

Kunapipi Volume 32 Issue 1 Article 12 2010 Relations of difference: Asianness, indigeneity and whiteness in Simone Lazaroo’s fiction Robyn Morris Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Morris, Robyn, Relations of difference: Asianness, indigeneity and whiteness in Simone Lazaroo’s fiction, Kunapipi, 32(1), 2010. Available at:https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol32/iss1/12 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: Relations of difference: Asianness, indigeneity and whiteness in Simone Lazaroo’s fiction Abstract Issues of representation have been central to critical discussions regarding a contemporary politics of difference. As Monika Kin Gagnon notes, ‘at issue is visibility, visuality, and power, and what is often referred to as a politics of knowledge; it problematises who defines and who determines cultural value’ (23). Simone Lazaroo’s fiction brings to visibility issues of representation, especially the way race and gender are intertwined as artificial constructions of difference within Australian cultural and historical discourse. This article examines how Lazaroo’s novels engage in a triangulated contemporary representational politics through an articulation of ‘relations of difference’ in which characters of Asian, Aboriginal and Anglo ancestry interact and react to racialised and gendered inscriptions of otherness. This journal article is available in Kunapipi: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol32/iss1/12 116 Robyn Morris Relations of Difference: Asianness, Indigeneity and Whiteness in Simone Lazaroo’s Fiction Issues of representation have been central to critical discussions regarding a contemporary politics of difference. As Monika Kin Gagnon notes, ‘at issue is visibility, visuality, and power, and what is often referred to as a politics of knowledge; it problematises who defines and who determines cultural value’ (23). Simone Lazaroo’s fiction brings to visibility issues of representation, especially the way race and gender are intertwined as artificial constructions of difference within Australian cultural and historical discourse. This article examines how Lazaroo’s novels engage in a triangulated contemporary representational politics through an articulation of ‘relations of difference’ in which characters of Asian, Aboriginal and Anglo ancestry interact and react to racialised and gendered inscriptions of otherness. This essay therefore explores how Lazaroo criticises the hyper-visuality and sexualising of the Asian female body by the dominant white, Anglo-Australian society and the concomitant erasure of the Indigenous body and culture in stories of nation in The World Waiting to Be Made (1994), The Australian Fiancé (2000), and The Travel Writer (2006). These works signal Lazaroo’s ongoing interrogation of the politics of both relations of difference and looking relations. The World Waiting to be Made is set predominantly against a backdrop of Australianness that has not yet moved towards fully embracing official Multiculturalism. Australia is depicted instead, as a nation still intent upon protecting and perpetuating the supposed natural purity of whiteness associated with The White Australia Policy (WAP) which was one of the first legislations to be introduced by the new Australian Government of 1901. This Bill was not dismantled until the early 1970s and was predicated on preserving the purity of the imported ‘white blood’ in Australia and provided a nebulous scale for various citizens of the empire to distinguish between white and non-white, majority and minority, citizen and alien, right and wrong. It is the residue of this policy that adversely impacts upon the unnamed Eurasian narrator of The World Waiting to be Made after her family is move from Singapore to Australia in 1966. From the moment of arrival, her family is read as physically bi-racial. The narrator spends her teenage years searching for stability of place, rejecting her father and her darker-skinned twin sister, and donning various disguises in an Relations of Difference 117 attempt to assimilate into whiteness. The narrator’s skin becomes a movable and performative border as she mutilates and bleaches her skin to a socially suitable degree of whiteness. In the context of contemporary race politics, ‘skin’ is read as ‘the outermost sheath, the “corporeal” dress of human beings’ (Benthien viii). Claudia Benthien further argues that ‘skin is understood less and less as a given. Instead it is seen increasingly as a dress — something that is worn, something a person carries around’ (ix). The narrator’s recollection of her angst-ridden years at school and at work in Australia describes an overwhelming desire to achieve ‘normality’ by erasing her ‘strangeness’, or what she describes repeatedly as her abnormal ‘Asianness’ (Lazaroo 1994 107). The narrator states that ‘there were several darknesses about my appearance that I would have to alter if I wanted to obliterate my origins and be accepted […] I would have to aim for as close to iridescence as depilatories and chemical warfare on my natural colouring would allow’ (99). The narrator’s ongoing act of whitening her of-colour body emphasises that perceptions of skin difference, particularly within the realm of Australian identity politics in the 1970s, had yet to move towards a degree of acceptance of skin difference. The depiction of the narrator’s painful journey to adulthood in suburban and outback Australia allows for a critique of the way the ‘of-colour’ is policed and categorised as deviant and other to the white body in the realm of the social and the political. Just as important, is the way this novel emphasises, through satire, how this same white body, at the very centre of racist discourse in Australia, refrains from marking itself. As Nicolas Mirzoeff so succinctly puts it, ‘[t]he perfect body in Western culture was sustained and made imaginable by the imperfect body of the racialised other’ (2004 135). It is the exploration of the ongoing racism directed against the Eurasian narrator that lends the novel a degree of political edge. Whiteness is ratified in the official dialectics of governmental policies and Lazaroo analyses its appropriation and championing at the (unequal) level of Australian citizenship. The World Waiting to be Made gestures towards Lazaroo’s fictional engagement in subsequent work with triangulated discourses of subjectivity by also drawing into the narrative, not so much Indigenous characters, but issues surrounding Indigenous dispossession and containment in the Kimberley/Broome region of Western Australia. The narrator’s teaching outpost is located on, what the Headmaster tells her on her first day, ‘use to be no-man’s land. Native Welfare pulled together a couple of desert tribes and tribes from (...truncated)