Our voice? Can you hear it?

How do I approach voice, compared to the first post in this blog? Looking back now, my more essayistic styled approaches to the subject of voice and culture, seem naive.  However, looking through the creative posts, you can begin to identify a journey of understanding and growth.

Through an article titled Writing Other, I made clear my opinion on the rules and regulations associated with writing someone from a different disposition. I highlight the importance of listening to the voice of minority writers, something that has always been pressed upon me as important, especially in the recent few months attending Emerging Writers Festival, in which their opening presentation was based on great aboriginal storytelling and encouraging aboriginal writers and youths to have their voice be heard. This cry for minority writers is an important one to open up to, being a queer writer myself, I understand the need for my voice to be heard above others with an experience unlike mine, but it’s also an important observation on the notion of censorship. To listen is as equally important as speaking, but we must do both to fully appreciate the gift that is writing culture in Melbourne, and through the internet. I sternly question if using another person’s voice makes it your property, and how you must do extensive research to avoid humiliating and possibly harmful association.  “If you aren’t prepared to do that work, then don’t even touch ‘other’’ I forcefully state. Looking back on it now, that statement, while still holding a lot of gravity, may not be as binding as I once believed. People, no matter where and who they are, are still people. Specificity remains at the heart of good writing, but emotion can be relative no matter distance or difference. I end the sentiment on this statement. “There is never an end to learning”. This thought encapsulates my blog. I consider it a chronological display of my awareness growing, and there is never going to be an end to that.

https://culturevvulture.blogspot.com/2018/08/writing-other.html

One of the most interesting displays of learning is the comparison of my first attempt at writing a voice unlike my own, with a piece I wrote inspired by a poster I saw hanging in the women’s bathroom of RMIT. The story is a split point of view piece. One character, an Australian, is fed up with seeing so much Chinese culture displayed in her city. She graffiti’s “speak English” on a Chinese advertisement. The second character is a Chinese exchange student, who responds to the writing with her own graffiti, condemning the first girl’s ignorance.  The piece ends with a final character who was intended to be the perspective of an uninvolved outsider. The piece was to be an observation on the culture of the university, rather than any racial statement.  The first and last perspectives were easy voices for me to write because they were native to me, however, the exchange students voice was difficult for me. I don’t have too many friends from outside of Australia, how was I to write their accent? How could I portray through voice who this person was? My answer back then was to limit the English vocabulary, which now I think is more negative than positive.  I tried to use simple language to emulate that of a second language speaker, but enough to not appear like a stereotype of eastern characters.  This assumption was based on my own learning experiences with a second language, and how little I am able to express myself in that dialect. That notion now feels uninformed.  Many exchange students I have worked with have an amazing grasp on the colorful way to use the English language, and many of them are not beginners.  Since then I have discovered a new way to attempt that voice, with my submission piece to cha. Rather than limiting vocabulary, I know look more towards sentence structure. In English, the sentence order is not strict, but we follow a pattern of Subject>Action>Object>Place>Extra Subject (I ate dinner at the pub with my friends) whereas, in many Asian languages, they follow the structure of Subject>Extra Subject> Place>Object>Action (me and my friends went to the pub, dinner we ate.) Sounds like Yoda in English, but it’s a structure, that I can employ in my writing, even just for the more experimental experience.

https://culturevvulture.blogspot.com/2018/09/talk-english-to-me.html

It’s clear to see that I’m more comfortable in my native voice, but it’s one I try and avoid when I’m writing, especially in fiction. I try to write in a hybrid American- Australian tone. This subject not only drew me out of my knowledge of writing other culture, but also submerged me in awareness of my own locality, and prompted me to raise questions as to why I wasn’t using this voice as an asset? Was it perhaps because most of my literary digestion involved American voices? Perhaps it was to do with my fear that if I wrote a book with an Australian voice, that people might not understand or like it. I know realize that not every piece of literature needs to be worldwide reachable. It’s okay to write for my local industry, and it was more than okay to write for myself.  I titled a piece ‘The Aussie Handbook’ which was intended to be an amusing reflection on Australian culture, whilst also commenting on the social climate, all in an easy three chaptered manual for foreigners to blend into Australian life.  It was freeing to be able to over exaggerate the accent, and use local jargon to my heart's content, to bring to life a piece of writing that was as sarcastic as it was serious. I felt that because I was Australian, it made sense to play into a stereotype because I was naive enough to get it right. Still, my attempt at writing Australian voice raised questions. Why was it the voice I used when I wanted to inflict humor into a situation? Do I not take my native voice seriously, or am I still under the impression that no one else will?

https://culturevvulture.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-aussie-handbook.html

I am left at the end of this road, with a hundred new paths to follow. My voyage into exploring and experimenting with voice, both global and local, has only just begun. 

Habitus ll

At the start of the semester, I defined habitus as “the economized guide to narrowing down everything into a box.”

While I don’t find that description entirely wrong, I am amused by my grim point of view.

I describe myself as disliking writing that is “heteronormative and conforming, but my style is very cookie cutter.” I describe myself as loving vivid characters, but falling back on old troupes, and that perhaps is where my habitus as mutated the most.

My habitus has stretched and quivered, and still, there’s more room to grow.  I have traveled, but it must be blindingly obvious to some people that my roots are firmly planted in rural country, a place which I disliked writing about for those two exact reasons, the place is a land of heteronormativity and conformity. But like other writers before me, like Tim Winton, the Australian outback can be more than that, it can be whatever I want it to be. It was only limited by my imagination and self-restraint.

The most surprising thing I discovered was not shocking differences, strange practices, and alien views that clash with my own. The most shocking discovery was that the people I interviewed over this semester, who where designed to be ‘foreign’ to me, where extremely normal. These people were almost ordinary even, in a sense that, they didn’t stray far from the people I had already met in my life. They were ‘normal’. They blended in with my idea of what is consistent in a person’s nature. Even their views, which I assumed would be on the other scale to my own more liberal-leaning views due to their more conservative countries, where not dissimilar to views from Australia.

I realized that maybe through media, maybe through easier access to each other, maybe by sheer humanity or DNA, we are more familiar than we are distanced by differences.

We all fell emotions, we all have a grasp on the world around us, and what role we play in it. I feel foolish now to face what my expectations of these people and what their respective home countries would be like. I didn’t expect my HKBU partner to swear. I didn’t expect my partner from the Netherlands to have such strong opinions on social media. Afterward, it made sense to me to view them as their own person first and foremost, and their nationality as secondary. We may have used different words but in the end, we meant the same thing.

From a writing perspective, I felt pressure ease. The characters I’m writing might be from Hong Kong, or Russia, or America, but its still Hong Kong, Russia, and America in 2018, or the future. I’m still writing about people.  Naturally, I’d still need to do research to understand the nuances of particular people, but they can be and should be, painted by their personality first, not by their nationality.

HKBU Interview

In my interview, I focused a lot on the personal aspects of her life. I discussed mostly her relationships and her family life in Macau.  My work is inspired by her personal history with her ex-boyfriend and her grandfather’s pets. Her grandfather kept ten snakes, three of them pythons. The image stuck in my head, of a black python slithering across the wooden floor of a kitchen, and my story blossomed around that strange energy.  I was surprised by how laid back she was, and how much she swore. I was under the impression that she would be more conservative with her language, so when she told me “Melbourne is a bit shit” I was pretty shocked, but kind of delighted. I am disappointed that we didn’t end up being wonderful friends. I had hoped, like some of the other students, that we would become close, but for whatever reason, technology incompatibility, or personal disinterest, it just didn’t happen. I was expecting her to be a writer, but as it turns out, she’s not so big into writing. I changed all of my questions, that was in relation to writing as more general questions about her life.