Bitter Mouthfuls Paper

ASAL 29/6-2/7/08 at University of Wollongong

A Ton of Bitter Mouthfuls: Migrant Women’s Voices from the 1970s.
by Adrienne Sallay

Reading version…2,768 words.

ABSTRACT

This paper explores some migrant women’s voices from the 1970s, during which boundaries imposed on marginalised groups changed and shifted. With the rise of new social movements, people in categories which were previously excluded, marginalised or exploited, such as women, Aborigines, migrants and lesbians, mobilised as new political constituencies gained power. These divisions resulted in different subsets of women’s creative writing that addressed sexuality, race and class in new ways. Migrant writers used the fracture between English and their language of origin for poetic effect.

Sneja Gunew defines multicultural writers as those who write “from outside the prevailing Anglo-Celtic traditions, [and] who have a privileged relationship with languages and cultures other than those deriving from England and Ireland”. She argues that such writers use techniques of montage, fragments and disruptions to convey a non-Anglo sensibility and create new forms of writing. Writers such as Anna Couani, Antigone Kefala and Rosa Cappiello worked at gaining exposure for their writing, even, in Couani’s case, establishing their own small publishing houses. Their efforts resulted in a cascade of new writing that, by the end of the 1970s, had vastly increased the representation of migrant women writers and changed the literary culture in Australia.

SLIDE 1: TITLE
A Ton of Bitter Mouthfuls: Migrant Women’s Voices from the 1970s.

This paper explores some Central European migrant women’s voices from the 1970s, demonstrating how they pre-empted a later flowering of migrant women’s writing in Australia.

Anne Cranny-Francis argues that the values underlying the field of Australian literature were essentially masculine at the end of the 1960s, determining “what sorts of issues texts should address and …how those issues should be addressed”. It was difficult for a woman to become an independent creative producer of a work when society told her that “…her optimal role is silence and that what she has to say is implicitly inferior”. Migrant women had the added disadvantage of working in a language that was not their language of origin.

In her 1992 feminist study, Living in the Margins, Jan Pettman argues that during the 1970s, boundaries imposed on marginalised groups changed and shifted. With the rise of new social movements, people in categories which were previously excluded, marginalised or exploited, such as women, Aborigines, migrants and lesbians, mobilised as new political constituencies gained power. These divisions resulted in different subsets of women’s creative writing that addressed sexuality, race and class in new ways.

In Bourdieu After Feminism Lisa Adkins outlines how “social groups and classes are constructed through successful bids for cultural and political authorization and recognition”, and adds that women’s groups work for power from within their ranks. This was how some writers (such as Anna Couani) and publishers (such as Hilary McPhee) organised themselves in the 1970s. Successful bids for recognition also underpin philosopher Kelly Oliver’s theories on women’s writing. Her work is based on Julia Kristeva’s ideas of the maternal semiotic transforming to the symbolic through idealization and sublimation. Oliver argues that when this process is actively and successfully pursued, the results of oppression are negated, and a sense of agency and control established.

As part of the social habitus and its “chameleon-like flexibility”, values espoused by writers such as Betty Friedan from the US, Germaine Greer and Juliet Mitchell from the UK, and Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva from Europe, began to percolate into the Australian habitus. While the European writers were not translated and circulating in Australia until the late 1970s, their ideas arrived via travelling writers returning to Australia, and via migrant women reading them in their original language.

Cixous’ wish “to live in a time in which the tongue would not be bound, castrated, intimidated, constrained to obey fraudulent sages and genuine asses” encouraged young writers to experiment. Irigaray’s argument for the creation of new language strategies to deal with the concepts of difference also influenced the ways women were writing, while Kristeva’s theorisation of women’s sexuality as unique and particular also underpinned the new writing.

Factors mitigating against the success of new women writers involved reviewing, marketing practices and audience reception. Bronwen Levy suggested in 1985 that:

[g]etting a good review, particularly for texts that are likely to be read as provocative, may well involve negotiating a minefield. But there’s more to the withholding of literary value than critical condemnation. An even more reliable method is not to review at all.

Ignoring a publication, and/or reviewing it from within a paternalistic framework both worked against valuing a text. Cranny-Francis maintained that the gendering of reviews, or the lack of reviews, was problematic for new writing by women. She relates how, when anthologies such as Hecate’s Daughters, edited by Carole Ferrier in 1978, and Frictions, edited by Anna Gibbs and Alison Tilson in 1982, were published, it was difficult to have them reviewed. In addition, writing that was not mainstream had problems being distributed, having no access to mainstream distribution channels, so that “[v]aluable work simply does not reach the market”.

For women to resist stereotyping and gain a sense of agency and control over their lives and their creativity, Oliver suggests they need to experience a revolt of the imagination:

Revolt against patriarchal institutions and values is one of imagination not only because it is necessary to change how we imagine ourselves as men and women but also because oppression takes its toll on the imagination and on the ability to imagine and create value and meaning in one’s life.

I would argue that some migrant writers of the 1970s revolted against English language conventions. As Levy argued:

The struggle into speech and writing, for women and other oppressed groups, involves arguing against dominant representations, reading others with a critical eye for possible subversive content, producing alternative versions, which themselves will be debated, and ensuring these are read.

Oliver advocates “starting from the position of “other”, or othered subjectivity” to yield a non-contestatory relationship with the other, and hence remove oppression, in order to achieve a subject position of active agency. With the move to a more liberal social and political habitus in the 1970s, creative writing with ethnic and racialised themes, and themes of sexual difference, witnessed a shift towards “othered subjectivity”.

In Framing Marginality, Sneja Gunew defines multicultural writers as those who wrote “from outside the prevailing Anglo-Celtic traditions, [and] who have a privileged relationship with languages and cultures other than those deriving from England and Ireland”. She argues that multicultural writers used techniques of montage, fragments and disruptions to convey a non-Anglo sensibility and create new forms of writing, but that reviewing work using the tools of English-language based criticism mitigated against writing arising from different cultures and perspectives.

Critic Lyn Jacobs examines the social and cultural revolution which migrant communities were undergoing in her study of Farmer’s work, Against the Grain: “[t]here was a new accommodation of alternative voices, among them women who spoke of experiences previously neglected in the imagining and literary representation of Australian social history.” Farmer’s voice, Jacobs maintained, “…frequently foregrounded female protagonists negotiating difference”. Australian migrant writers such as Beverly Farmer, Anna Couani, Antigone Kefala and Rosa Cappiello energetically worked at gaining exposure for their work, even, in Couani’s case, establishing their own small publishing houses. Their efforts resulted in a cascade of new writing that, by the end of the 1970s, had vastly increased the representation of women writers and changed the literary culture in Australia.

Speaking about diversity, multicultural writer Anna Couani said at a conference in 1995 celebrating the twentieth anniversary of International Women’s Year:

I have made it my business to support and promote women writers, gay writers, new writers and writers from non-English speaking backgrounds (NESB) because those groups have always found it difficult to break into the literary scene and have traditionally not been well represented there.

In the Preface to their 1988 anthology, Telling Ways, Couani and Gunew argued that experimental writing was “anti-narrative”, anti realist, “dedicated to changing the ways in which texts generate meanings, to transforming the signifying process itself,” in the way that it challenged and disrupted mainstream (English language) writing. In addition it was “virtually synonymous with the small presses and … with (in varying degrees) self management, grass roots, leftism, economic disadvantage, lack of funding, migrancy, and feminism”.

2: SLIDE OF ITALY

Couani was one of the ‘new’ writers described by James Tulip as “…at ease in experimenting with form”, finding a new voice and identity from within her own world. Couani’s first book, Italy, was composed of pieces written in 1974-5, in which conventional ideas of plot and characterisation were disrupted in favour of observation, conversation and fragments.

According to Anne Brewster’s analysis of Couani’s work, writing such as her poem, “What a man, what a moon” challenges traditional English grammar and syntax of subject, verb, object, using repetitious sequences and word associations:

4 SLIDE OF WHAT A MAN (handout p 4)

What a man, what a moon, what a fish, what a chip, what a block, what
a mind, what a tool, what a drive, what a car, what a tent, what a…
(Hampton and Llewellyn 196)

Brewster argues that Couani’s “…experimental writing mounted a critique of the exclusions of mainstream Australian culture, particularly those of the publishing and literary industries”. Couani encapsulated her preoccupations during the 1970s in her prose-poem, “The Salty Sea”:

5 SLIDE OF SALTY SEA

I remember the inner city lifestyles of the 70’s
the kitchens, the tarot, the numerology
the herbal tea, things that are institutionalised now
my world straddling the women’s movement and the small press scene …

The stories in Italy and Were All Women Sex-Mad (1982), according to Brewster, also reflect an alternative lifestyle expounding the values of “freedom, cosmopolitanism and love”, intervening in the construction of traditional feminine identity, and questioning the values of conventional work, marriage and gender roles.

5: SLIDE PIC OF COUANI

Couani and Gunew relate in Telling Ways how “[i]n reaction to the appalling exclusion of women writers in the literary scene … women writers set up women-only or feminist enterprises in the small press arena … although they [multinational publishers] publish a few Australian writers, the plethora of books by women available in bookshops masks the still rather sexist complexion of oz writing”. Brewster describes Couani’s efforts to run small presses such as Magic Sam (1975-1982), Sea Cruise Books (a book series) and two anthologies of short, experimental Australian prose: Island in the Sun (1980), and Island in the Sun 2 (1981).

Couani also coordinated a group called the Sydney Women Writers’ Workshop (SWWW), which published their work under the banner No Regrets. They produced three anthologies with that title in 1979 (edited by the SWWW), 1981 (edited by Moya Costello) and 1985 (again edited by the SWWW). Small literary presses Couani and Gunew listed in Telling Ways included Pinchgut Press, Sea Cruise Books, Tutu Press, Tantrum Press, Redress Press, Saturday Club, Fab Press, Power Press, Pariah Press, Abalone Press, Labrys Press, Sisters, Fillia, Sybylla and Never Never Press (13).

6 PIC OF KEFALA

Antigone Kefala is another influential non Anglo-Celt writing in the 1970s. Born in Romania of Greek parents, she is also based in Sydney. With English as her fourth language, the others being Romanian, French and Greek, she arrived in Australia at the age of twenty-four. She began writing in English in the 1960s and became a prolific poet during the 1970s. Ken Gelder maintains Kefala wrote from a sense of dislocation, “…no longer linked to [her] own culture” but not enjoying a sense of “the comforts of Australianness”.

7 SLIDE: COVER: THE FIRST JOURNEY

She published two novellas, The Boarding House and The First Journey, in 1975. Gunew reviewed her work, writing in Framing Marginalities:

Kefala’s earlier reviewers speak from the stability of a common language which assumes that English is never subject to the seismic disturbances of history, class, race or gender, and that Australian English, as developed over almost two hundred years, should not be fissured by the many dialects which produced these numerous groups of voyagers.

Because of these fissures, Pam Gilbert, in her postscript to Coming Out From Under, writes that Kefala’s central characters “…are frequently engaged in the struggle to understand the nuances of their new cultures”. Representing this sense of dislocation, the narrator in the story The Island writes: “I could see from his face that he had not the faintest idea what I was saying, the meaning stopped somewhere mid-air between us…”.

8 COVER OF REFLECTIONS

Kefala’s latest offering, published by the Giramondo Publishing Company, a boutique publishing house set up in 1995, is Sydney Journals: Reflections 1970-2000. Giramondo states that it “portrays the intellectual milieu of the writer and her circle, many of them emigrés, a world sustained by conversation and friendship, and by reflection, on books and paintings, plays and films, and literary fortune.”

9 COVER OF OH LUCKY COUNTRY

Italian writer Rosa Cappiello published her effervescent novel Oh, Lucky Country in Italian in 1981 and in English in 1984. Ferrier maintained in 1985 that the novel challenged some of society’s puritanical assumptions in “the refusal of sexual reserve of the nice good middle class girl”.

10 OH LUCKY COUNTRY PAGE 88-9

In this passage, the protagonist is on her way to work, where she operates a heavy sewing machine:

I rush along with the furies snapping at my heels, soup, bread, food to go with the bread and a ton of bitter mouthfuls to keep my job at the factory because I’m human and a woman. What does it mean to be a woman? I get hysterical, hysteria, womb, weakness. Crap. Haven’t I more strength and character than thousands of maggot males put together? ////// (read more if time) There, if I were only cunning, with it, and had a degree in Anthropology or some such, I’d throw myself into an article by some famous old male writer who lets himself rave on about feminism just to get rid of the complex created by the fact that a woman can have ten orgasms to the male’s single desolate one. This morning I’m feeling rather jumpy. Thanks to Lella who has upset my solitary routine, or the book I read last night which has got me up in arms. A book written in the first person where the male writer fucks all over the place making abundant use of nymphomaniacs, and all sorts of women good and bad, just to fill his six hundred pages, which is a waste because had he condensed it all into ten pages it would have turned out a masterpiece. (88-89)

The novel’s energy and seeming lack of boundaries evoke the urgent, intense affect also evident in the work of Vicki Viidikas, a countercultural writer who explored women’s sexuality and the meaning of representation. Gunew celebrated Oh, Lucky Country with a glowing review: “Cappiello’s book teems with unruly women, from the lesbian couple at the opening (who cause a riot in the hostel) to the narrator herself and her extended female coterie. All the women are unruly; they all curse in technicolour, and none acts out a traditional sex role”.
11 SLIDE OF DOUBLE PAGE SPREAD of Oh Lucky Country

Commenting on the structure of the novel, Gunew describes the work as having “no stiff or solid boundaries anywhere in this novel”. Paragraphs are often pages long, with a flow of ideas, thoughts, conversations and scenes issuing in an uninterrupted writerly stream across each page. She argues that the novel’s excessiveness disrupts the stereotypical representation of migrant women and becomes “a force for renewal and imaginative energy”. I would argue that its excessiveness echoes the kinds of writing advocated by Cixous and Irigaray.

The novel was not well received by mainstream reviewers, because it disrupted the novel form and style so radically. It confronted “good middle-class” girls and women, challenging taboos by its very excessiveness, and it fell into relative obscurity. Gunew records how it was dismissed as “incompetent”, because, she suggests, readers in English “miss[ed] out on the word play and allusions which draw upon the Neapolitan dialect as well as on the Italo-Australian inflections”. And Australian (male) reviewers missed its “wickedly parodic” voice. Another reason could have been that, referring back to Levy’s passage on the struggle into speech and writing, it was not read “with a critical eye for possible subversive content”. Levy describes how Cappiello’s writing, “energetic” and “full of gusto”, works on a political level to subvert the status quo by being deliberately “neither respectful nor respectable”.

Brewster argues that, because feminist literary theory was in its infancy in the 1970s, not only the work of Couani, but the work of Cappiello and other non-Anglo writers, “…was often met with incomprehension. In many ways the literary and academic community during this period did not have the critical tools to evaluate [their] experimental poetics”. Levy notes that with the development of feminist literary criticism in the 1980s, the value of this writing lay not only in it being avant-garde, or an aesthetic embellishment, but the work also had “a material and political presence”.
SLIDE 12 THE END

Migrant writers used the fracture between English and their language of origin for poetic effect. The efforts of these writers resulted in a cascade of new writing that, by the end of the 1970s, had vastly increased their representation and changed the literary culture in Australia. Many more Central European migrant writers gained exposure in the 1980s, including Ania Walwicz, Gillian Bouras and publisher Helen Nickas. In the 1990s Asian Australian writing developed a readership with, for example, Vietnamese Australian writer Uyen Loewald’s short stories and her autobiography, Child of Vietnam, and most recently Chinese Australian Alice Pung’s delightful memoir, Unpolished Gem.
But that’s another story.