Transcript of Interview published in AQ November-December 1998
Interviewer Paul Best.


Interviewer: Had Pauline Hanson come to prominence when you wrote this novel?

Eva Sallis: No she hadn't. But I do think Pauline Hanson's prominence has changed the way readers perceive the novel. Certainly I didn't mean the novel to be as political as it has been seen to be. I guess that's very much the reader's business and something no author has control over.

Do you think the story offers any constructive comment to the debate we've
had of race and multiculturalism even though that you didn't write it in
that environment?

Yes I do. I think the book resists any kind of dehumanising or generalising about another culture. It's very much about an individual human being, and readers, I hope, have to take on (Hiam's) cultural background as a given, rather than as something they use to interpret her. People's access to the main character is on the basis of empathy and fairly shared human experiences such that her culture becomes something the reader simply absorbs along with the woman.

Are you writing it from a biographical point of view?

No. It's completely fictional.

Why then have you chosen a Palestinian woman living in what is for her a
fairly brutal Australian landscape?

I don't think it's brutal. She's going through fairly brutal human experiences of loss and betrayal, and all the feelings that go along with that. The subject matter arose for me because I was experiencing quite intensely Arabic culture and literature, and I really wanted to write more than I could in my non-fiction work, which was my PhD thesis. In order to do this, I wrote it alongside my PhD as a way of expressing many of things that I was really saturated in at the time. I used the Australian landscape because I think it brought to quite prominence a lot of the identity issues I wanted to explore for this character, but also because I love (the Australian landscape) and wanted to put in the book everything that I really liked about it. So I threw it all together.

Do you see the emblem of the red centre trying to create a bridge between
two vastly different cultures?

I didn't think of it in that way. More I saw it as a source, or a starting point for any individual Australian. It worked sufficiently as a corollary to her inner despair and it had within it the germs of her regeneration which she discovers on the inside as well as the outside. So while I think it is stark, it plays a part as a source of creation in the book.

It's a little like a script for a road movie because I, as a reader, was
never sure whether I was reading about an actual physical journey or the
heroine's internal psychic journey?

It's both really. Some people have done me the great honour of comparing it with a Wim Wenders movie. I am still reeling from that as a kind of praise because I really like his movies. It has that landscape-as-character feel, where identity and landscape are very intertwined.

To me the great Australian novel about the landscape interestingly enough
is by someone born outside that landscape, D.H. Lawrence, in his novel
Kangaroo. I got hints of that coming through in your description.

I think the landscape dominates Australian artistic expression and it is likely to come up in many different personae in many different writers’ works.

Because the book concentrates on some fairly universal human emotions, are we intended to forget the cultural differences, that Hiam is at a cultural remove?

No, I think we're meant to take them on board. Sameness and difference have to beacknowledged side by side. I very much wanted to write against the way we generalise about other cultures and simply present that as a given, as something you have to flow with rather than judge and stand back from. The cultural difference can't be erased. It's very much a part of where Hiam is coming from and it's very much her inner resources she has from having a happy childhood in an Islamic country, and it's very much to that that she returns when she regains her strength. What I wanted more was for the reader to participate in that in a way that celebrates (her culture) rather than in a way that causes one to step back and criticise it through the use of inherited stereotypes.

By the end of the book has Hiam changed, particularly her strength of
feeling about her own culture?

I think she has. Although she's returned to faith, the phrase from the Koran which I use at the end of the book is very inclusive with a suggestion that God's world is everywhere, and that nationality and identity are irrelevant. In a sense, she has gone through a journey of accepting who she is in Australia or anywhere, accepting herself as belonging wherever she might be.

You use a very poetic language and a strong use of metaphor. Was that done
to try and transcend cultural boundaries or strengthen boundaries?

No, it's more compulsive. I wrote a lot of poetry before I ever wrote fiction and I was very unsuccessful as a poet in that I never managed to get any poetry published. So in writing fiction, I wanted to have my cake and eat it.

Do you think this will renew your interest in trying to write poetry now
you are published?

Now I really want to write fiction but I will keep experimenting with poetry until my readers get fed up with it.

In terms of the fiction, there are two stories within the story. The
characters start to tell stories and they're very poetic as well. Where did
those stories come from, those interpolated tales that she narrates to
herself at the climax?

Both those fairy story tales are drawn from sources I thought Hiam would've been exposed to as a child. In a sense she's retelling childhood Arab folktales. One of them is something I developed from a Yemen folktale and the other one is developed from a very brief fable from a medieval Arab story collection.

They come at a strange time and they tend to interrupt the reading of the
novel. Suddenly we're set off down a different road if you like.

Yes and no. My view - and it hasn't always worked for readers - that the stories would be ways of narrating Hiam's own story to herself and each story does revisit, in one form or another, the situation in which she finds herself. And each of them has positioned within it two female characters and a male articulating some of the possibilities and the parameters of the tragedy in which she has found herself. The third one is a way of narrating to herself that which she hasn't been facing all along: narrating what has really happened. So each of the stories is intimately connected with the symbolic systems of the novel as a whole, and also with the notion that the narration or a story is a form of psychological healing. She has always set herself up as a story-teller. At this point, narrating stories to herself is effectively enabling her to embark on the real path of healing whereas, until now, she has just been in fugue, she's been fleeing herself, her past and her pain.

At the Melbourne Writers' Festival, you talked about the 'outsider', and
this question of being an 'insider' and 'outsider' comes at an interesting
time, when many of usare questioning where we fit in - as insider or
outsider? Perhaps you could amplify on that theme and how it fits in with
the book.

I wanted to respond to the topic, as set by the festival, pretty much with the suggestion that although we are polarised between insider and outsider status, it is something much more constructed and real. It's something that we erect by definitions and stereotypes and basically lazily ways of thinking in terms of "them" and "us". And that imagined construct becomes real because it creeps into policy and practice and it creeps into the way people parent and all the rest of it. What I wanted to suggest there is a way of reverting, that is through imagination and through imaginatively deconstructing what has been originally imaginatively constructed. And perhaps fiction has a major role to play in that. Or at least I believe it could have, if writers are very courageous about the ground they feel free to cover.

You've been reasonably courageous in choosing the subject matter of your novel.

It didn’t feel like courage at the time. It was what I was saturated in. But in general terms I do think imaginative fiction has a very important role to play in dealing with the boundaries between races and cultures.

Does the political question of what's happening in the Middle East come
into play in this particular novel.

No I kept it very understated. I didn't want to get into what is very painful and fraught material. The human subject matter I was dealing with was already very fraught. I did give Masoud, the husband, a Palestinian background partly to suggest that his lack of inner resources stem from having a very disturbed and grief-struck childhood such that he doesn't have the kind of resources that Hiam does when each of them is in trouble. But I really left aside the whole political situation and dealt much more with migrant situations and migrant emotions within Australia.

Did you have a particular audience in mind when you were writing the book,
and perhaps then, were then any particular lessons you would like readers
or an audience to take away with them?

Not lessons as such, but I very much had in mind a dual audience. I wanted to write a book that would communicate across the cultural divide so it wasn't just a book in which I was writing for fellow Australians who had fairly typical mainstream Australian backgrounds, but also for migrant Australians and also Arab readers and speakers. I really had very little confirmation until recently that the Arab side of the book was visible. But now I have had sufficient responses to realise that the side of the book that I intended to speak to Arab readers is alive and well.

The greatest success of the book would be for Arab readers to identify with
the characters. Also perhaps for non-Arab readers to identify with the
human emotions.

Yes. It's quite a different book from each perspective. I wanted it to work as a book which has warmth and meaning for both readerships and I am really hopeful that it has done that.

I was amazed at the amount of blood that spills across the page. We have
this woman driving through a fairly deserty part of South Australia and
we're seeing the eco carnage that happens on roads, in terms of kangaroos
being hit by cars.

And in her imagination as well because blood is something that she can't forget, but doesn't want to face because blood is an essential part of what it is that she's running from. Blood is a very powerful motif in her emotional state. So the bloodied nature of the road - and believe me if you drive north along the Stuart highway you see plenty of it - it is this that stands out particularly for Hiam as a character.

You talk about using your fiction to be able to cross a cultural divide.
Have you or can you do this in a similar way to what you can achieve in a
novel?

In person? Yes, but with great effort. I think that learning the language is the first start to really learning to do away with the stereotypes and the lazy ways of thinking. As you learn a language between polarised cultures you change. And also your access to knowledge and information and your respect for people changes. Your awareness of people and individuals on their own terms develops.

Where do you take it after language?

Wherever it takes you. In my case, I've been travelling back and forth between the Middle East and Australia for the last few years. And as of next year, I'll be a tour guide for Foreign Passport’s ‘Journey behind the Veil’, which are tours for women to Yemen, possibly twice a year. So it ends up being an integral part of who I am and who I want to be.

Do you think the themes of Hiam will be re-explored in your next work or do
you want to move away from that all together?

One of the books I'm working on is going to be seen to be related because the subject matter is, in part, Arab, but I think the issues I'm exploring are different, and it is set in Yemen with a lot of flashback to Australia. But I'm not sure (long term). I am also writing a black, gothic tragi-comedy about a dysfunctional family which is completely unrelated to the material I've dealt with in Hiam. I've been writing some more light-hearted and farcical short stories. At the moment, I'm really experimenting with what I'm capable of as a writer now that I've had this sort of encouragement to take myself seriously.

Given you've had a positive response from people from an Arab background,
do you think that there's a part of you that is now enmeshed with the Arab
culture?

Yes and no, and in any case such a feeling has little to do with momentary acceptances or rejections. I think I have become an outsider everywhere. In an imaginative sense and in terms of a dimension of myself having been modified by study and experience, yes, Arab culture and language has become a part of who I am. So I'm hybridised somehow between cultures, perhaps even perceived by my culture of origin as a bit strange. On the other hand I'm not Arab and nothing would make me Arab in terms of blood or family or origin. But in terms of being able to participate and speak to people as people rather than being dominated by pre-conceived notions of their culture. Certainly I've made that journey.

Hopefully, it provided a better understanding too through the book.

I hope so.