“Give them their stories but write them better.”
Asserting truth, asserting home, and asserting history with Shankari Chandran in conversation with Henry Farnan about Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens.
Henry Farnan
Thank you so much for being here to chat about yourself, your work, and your latest book, Shankari. I can’t wait to get started.
Shankari Chandran
Thank you for having me.
Henry Farnan
So, as a lawyer, you've worked with many First Nations communities across Australia and, as a writer, dispossession and anti-colonialism are prominent themes across your work, where do you often find the intersections lie between your experiences as a lawyer and the fiction you produce and have these intersections found their way into Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens?
Shankari Chandran
So, my work as a lawyer informs the themes that I write about, and you will see that as you've noted in my whole entire body of work, it explores colonisation and dispossession, war, forced migration, and the creation of home, as well as cultural erasure and the relationships that people form as a result of that. And my fiction always starts where my legal work always began, which was looking at particular injustices. My fiction builds on my work as a lawyer in that my fiction looks at the injustices that the law has failed to fix and the people that the laws have failed to protect.
It is deeply informed by my family's own lived experience and my ancestral heritage. Both, our place and experiences and heritage in Sri Lanka and the impact of colonisation on the Tamil people in Sri Lanka. And, there were waves of colonisation in Sri Lanka – it wasn't just the British. And, then it looks at that experience when they moved to Australia, which again is the colonised experience because we have left one former colony to come to another former colony, both are deeply impacted by Britain and British colonialism.
Australia's own sort of contemporary history is, as you know, one of colonisation, genocide, and dispossession, it is also a history and a mythology of foundation that has led to a particularly aggressive Eurocentric view of what it means to be Australian and the way that it is asserted against people that do not fit that view or description. And, in particular, the way that some Australians react to other Australians, when those other Australians do not conform to the standards of behaviour, moral codes and, you know, concepts of patriotism that are expected of them. And my fiction looks to all of that.
But I will correct what you have said in terms of my work with First Nations communities, if you don't mind.
Henry Farnan
Of course, please do!
Shankari Chandran
Only to say really that I have spent a few years, both as an Australian and as a lawyer, getting to know my country – my chosen home – and the systems and institutions of justice (which are far more systems and institutions of oppression and injustice) more intimately in the last few years than I ever knew them in the preceding forty-four years of my life. And of those preceding forty-four years, thirty years, pretty much, were spent being educated by this [Australian] education system, being exposed to this media and popular culture, and being exposed to a particular rendering of history. I'm embarrassed and ashamed to admit that as someone that has always prided themselves on having a more open world view and a probing and interrogative spirit that I did not know anywhere near enough – and I went to one of the most progressive law schools in the country. There, I was able to learn from incredible First Nations activists and professors yet I still feel that it was only when I was privileged to get to know Aboriginal communities was I able to understand the ongoing impacts of colonisation and genocide on them more deeply. And also, to understand just how extraordinary their survival and resilience is and how exceptional the solutions that they have developed to the problems that are not of their making.
So, I do not hold myself out in any way to be an expert on any of those issues, but simply someone that was fortunate enough to be able to get to know communities and become friends with people and through those friendships, for people to share with me their lived experiences, so that I can have a deeper understanding of the ongoing impact of colonisation on First Nations people.
In terms of Chai Time, I don't think I could have written Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens without having those friendships with Aboriginal people because Chai Time is a different novel for me from my previous work in that it builds on my experience as a lawyer and training as a lawyer. It builds on the issues in Sri Lanka that are very important to me. But as a novel, it is more firmly located in Australia and it explores to the extent that I am at all capable of it, the intersection between the appropriation of historical and cultural narratives by colonisers that I was aware of in Sri Lanka, but not fully aware of in Australia. And that is a shame on me. So, it was through my friendships with Aboriginal people and the generosity of them in sharing their lived experience with me, that I was able to understand better the way that historical and cultural narratives have been completely appropriated in this country to create not just the mythology of our foundation, but the ongoing mythology of what it means to be Australian and the ongoing mythology of this as a fair country – the ongoing mythology of this as an equitable country.
And it looks at certain symbols of history and certain symbols of those origin stories and the power that they have in storytelling and the power that the storytelling of history has when you claim the past, as my characters explore, you are able to assert your right to be here in the present and you are able to assert your right to the future.
Henry Farnan
I love that, I was going to try and sort of add something on the end there. I don't think there's anything I can add, you know, you mentioned notions like the creation of home, and how origin and heritage is often how we build identity. I found so much of that in Chai Time.
Shankari Chandran
Thank you. I mean, I actually found it a hard question to answer as I try to approach all things with humility and curiosity. But your question brings together, not just my work as a lawyer, but also, my entire body of work. Even things that I wrote about initially, which were located in Sri Lanka and the way that I've had, I feel and I hope, greater confidence with which to then bring that writing into Australia and to locate it here, more confidently, more assertively, but still respectfully.
Henry Farnan
Well, thank you so much for braving such a large opening question.
Shankari Chandran
No worries. Tell me it gets easier from here!
Henry Farnan
Trust me, it does!
Many different writers have been known to view their practice in wildly different ways. How would you describe what the writing process is like for you? Is it the satisfaction of an itch? A comfort? A duty?
Shankari Chandran
My writing often begins from a place of anger. As I was saying, it will always be located initially in an injustice. It then tends to move quite quickly to an expression of love. So, I am exploring a story and characters that I want to tell initially, actually always for my children, who I love with the sort of ferocious, heart-stopping, breathtaking anxiety and passion of all parents. It often begins with me wanting to tell them something about where they've come from and where they are right now in order to help them navigate where they will go in the future. And then, as I continue to write and grow in confidence and certainty about what I'm writing, there is a part of me that does want to reach a wider readership with my work.
Going back to the process – the writing is incredibly therapeutic and meditative for me. My father has been trying to teach me to pray, since I was little, and to meditate. And, I have been failing at both prayer and meditation quite successfully for four to five decades, now. However, writing, when I sit down to write, I am not aware of anything around me, except for the world that I have stepped into that I'm both creating as I'm writing, but that already exists in my mind in some way.
And the writing gives it grace, a clarity. But it's also responding to a call. So, there are already scenes and themes and emotions and people and visions that are in my mind that I have probably collected from, you know, from various bits of experience in life and friendships and relationships. They come together at some point and it's almost as though they begin to push me. So, when I am able to get into a deeper flow of writing, there is a really tremendous and antisocial and almost life-threatening urgency about it. And I say, life-threatening because, you know, I try not to write when the children are in the house because when I'm writing I am afraid that I'm not aware of what's happening around me. And so, if there was a fire, for example, in the house, I'm sure I would be aware of it but I'm not actually 100% sure that I would be aware of it – and helpfully we have a dog who is aware of everything – but I try to keep my writing discipline at times when the children are not here or when there is another adult in the house, because I go into that world and I really struggle to come out and all I want to do is write, and it is exhilarating. So, at the end of a writing day, I am both exhausted and energised. My writing days are just the best days and even the writing moments are the best moments because all writers know that getting a writing day is sadly not a practical and financial opportunity that is available to most of us. So, my writing snippets that are, you know, cleaved into and stolen from the rest of my daily routine of working and parenting and life are my most joyous moments.
Henry Farnan
I love hearing about writers’ daily practices and routines, so I’d love to hear more about your writing days. As someone who is busied by a family, career, and just everyday life, what does a perfect writing day look like for you?
Shankari Chandran
Ohhh, I like that question. So, I have been very fortunate in that I have received philanthropic and government funding for Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens.
Henry Farnan
Congratulations, that’s incredible.
Shankari Chandran
Thank you. I received that a couple of years ago and it is essential for writing. Because funding means time for writers. We busy ourselves with financially viable jobs and opportunities but when we do, it can create more time than we're able to steal from the rest of our lives for writing. The reason I raised this point with you is because, you know, my last words will be on my death bed – will probably actually just be a reminder to my children to do various things – but they will also be a passionate cry for better funding of the arts and better recognition of the value of literature in our society and in our community and the fact that it needs to be supported so that writers can write. And perhaps more importantly to me, so that diverse writers can write and that all the stories of Australia can be told.
Henry Farnan
Absolutely.
Shankari Chandran
Back to your question. What does a writing day look like? The ideal writing day would involve writing being fully recognised as a job so that I can get up early in the morning, roll out of bed in my trackies into my next set of trackies, and go hard from morning till the evening. The reality is that a writing day is not quite that. I will get up in the morning, help look after my children, send them off to school – thank god they're increasingly independent now – come back, write hard from 9AM to 2.45PM when I slip back into parenting mode and address their needs. My husband has been incredibly supportive of my writing and we are working hard together to create more time. On a Friday I get up early, my husband looks after the children and I go hard. I try to write for as long as possible on that Friday. And I guard and protect that Friday jealously. So, I do not take calls, I do not do appointments. It has to be an emergency situation for me to step away from my laptop because that is the only day I've got. And I have begun a new novel. And I really want and need to see that wonderful commitment and privilege through to the end.
Henry Farnan
Totally, totally. Speaking of projects and jobs, you've also worked in theatre as a dramaturge. Do you find that there's a difference between the kind of stories you can tell within each medium? And is there something particular about the stories you've told in Chai Time that compelled you to tell them in novel form?
Shankari Chandran
Okay. So, my work as a dramaturge for Bhoomi: Our Country was so developmental and instructive for me and was really challenging and exciting. I learned so much from this collective of very talented South Asian artists, across multiple forms of art. They were dances, singers, and instrumentalists all in the South Asian classical tradition. I felt like an interloper and just a little bit of an imposter stepping into their incredibly accomplished universe. And it took a while for me to get comfortable, really understanding what my contribution could be, and being able to have the competence to then step back and say, ‘all art forms are storytelling, and all storytelling has a narrative arc and I know how to do a narrative arc. This is a different platform’. And the way that you’ll craft that narrative arc is perhaps obviously adapted to and transformed by the art forms that you are working with. So, the different types of art forms, the staging, and who your audience is, because storytelling is storytelling to an audience, and it's important to be mindful of and respectful towards your audience and to ask yourself, ‘how am I developing a connection – a relationship – with my audience through the storytelling?’
So those are the parameters of the storytelling as a dramaturge and you have a limited time within which to reach them. And, we'd also set for ourselves the additional empowering framework of asking ourselves; what does it mean to be South Asian in Australia, a country that is ancient, but claims to be modern? And what are the stories, traditions, and what is the cultural heritage of this country and its First Nations people that enables us to live better and to do better on this land. That was a very empowering framework and we were very fortunate to collaborate with Bruce Pascoe on that and to be guided and informed by his own work. In Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, it could only ever have begun life, I think, as a novel. And I must say that whilst I do love television and film – both low brow and highbrow – writing and the novel will always be my first artistic love. That’s because it is a place where you can more fully and more deeply take your time to explore the full complexity of the human experience and human nature, which are complex and contradictory and need time and space to be explored. Only the novel allows you to do that, which is another reason why novels should be more greatly supported within the arts.
Henry Farnan
Yes! Absolutely!
Shankari Chandran
Who the hell doesn’t want to read a book, come on!
Henry Farnan
Exactly! I also really just wanted to talk about your work as a dramaturge because I thought that was very interesting and a bit out of left field.
Shankari Chandran
That’s correct. Thank you for seeing that I did that. I loved it because, I mean, I was working with Arjunan Puveendran who’s a talented vocalist and mridangam player. I was also working with Indu Balachandran, who's a third-generation veena player. She's a dancer and a vocalist. I mean, I have one skill, Henry. One skill, and it's questionable whether I'm accomplished or not at that one skill.
Henry Farnan
No no no. Three novels in, I don’t think there’s any question about it.
Shankari Chandran
Thank you but I mean, these guys, these guys are incredible and come from an artistic tradition that is thousands of years old, and they find ways to make it accessible both to non-South Asian audiences, to South Asian audiences, and to diasporic South Asian audiences.
Because for us, as the diaspora, whether we are located in London or Toronto or Sydney or Perth, for us as a diaspora our relationship with our culture is ever-changing. We are both seeking connection with what it used to be and constantly creating what it will be. So, for these incredibly talented South Asian artists, they perform such an important service to cross-cultural communities in making ancient cultures accessible to contemporary societies.
I think you asked me something else… there was another part of your question… What is chaos? Oh, duty! My first novel, Song of the Sun God, was very much about my duty to my community, because I have not used my skills as a lawyer in the service of my community. When the genocide happened at the end of the war, I attended protests, I signed petitions, but I didn't do anything particularly useful. I watched the news and I raged and I was broken by grief at what happens to our people but I still didn't do anything particularly useful. Song of the Sun God is very much my duty to my people. It is my attempt to record our communal history, our communal memories, the richness of our culture and traditions, the beauty of our families, the chaos of our war and the injustice of our genocide. And that was my duty to my community and my gift to my children.
Henry Farnan
I’m so glad that you remembered that I’d asked about duty because I’d completely forgotten but I’m loving hearing you discuss your other works too. Speaking of your other novels, you’ve taken your characters across the globe from America to India, to England, and far beyond, would you call yourself a traveller? And what does that mean to you?
Shankari Chandran
COVID is an interesting time, right? Because we can't travel at all. And I have not felt locked in by lockdown because my previous life experience was very privileged. My pre-pandemic experience was very privileged in that I did have the ability to travel and I did travel.
I also think that there are many platforms such as the internet, public libraries and television that have democratized access to information and my imagination is closed in only by fatigue. So, my imagination is as boundless as I could have the courage and energy to push it. And I'm very grateful for the curiosity that my parents approached life with. One of the first books that my father gave me was a prize that he won at school. And so, it's this old hardback book with a woven cover the way that books used to be, you know, back in, I guess it would have been 1953 and it's called He Went With Marco Polo and it's about the young page boy who accompanied Marco Polo on his travels.
And I was as fascinated by the stories of this book and the traveling that the protagonist had experienced. But I was more fascinated by the stories of my father who had received this book as a child and the way that it opened up worlds for him and the way that he then went into the world with curiosity and humility. So, I would absolutely consider myself, whether I'm moving around the world or at home in lockdown, I would consider myself a traveller of time, space, and land and feel very fortunate to have both the physical and financial privilege to do it, but also the imagination to take me to places.
Henry Farnan
Wow, ‘Traveller time, space, and land’. I love that turn of phrase so much.
Shankari Chandran
It’s yours.
Henry Farnan
I’m honoured. Within the starting pages of Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, I found myself drawn to every detail and immersed in the history of the building itself. Without spoiling too much of the book, are there particular details about places you're writing about in Westgrove, Sydney, or the stories in these spaces that you wanted readers to take with them after closing the book?
Shankari Chandran
I love novels where place is a character. And I'm not sure that I have done that effectively enough in Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, but I certainly gave it a red hot go. And it explores two places that I love. Both of which being my homes in different ways.
I have spent much of my childhood in Western Sydney and had my parents are from Sri Lanka, in particular from the north. And although I've never lived there in Jaffna, the north of Sri Lanka is very real and very clear in my mind because not just the research that I've done to create my novels, but because of their memories and my extended family's memories and their willingness to share those memories and experiences with me. So, I hope that I have given readers a sense of time and place in both of those two times and two places. I would also love readers to take with them the experiences, the trauma, and the resilience of the characters. And it's the trauma and resilience that is affected and committed both against people in place, right? Colonisation, genocide, and war affects both people and place. And there are Aboriginal activists and people who are far more deeply equipped to speak about this from their own lived experience of the tremendous damage that colonisation has done to their country and countries, and the way that their connection to country still survives despite dispossession and ruination of the land.
In my novels, I have looked at the impact of colonisation and genocide and war on people and place. And so, I hope that readers take with them a deeper understanding of the trauma that results from that, but also the incredible resilience that we find from the relationships that we create and the communities that we create. People say this novel is about lots of different things and I think every time I answer that question, I'd perhaps give a different answer. You know, it's my love letter. It's just storytelling. It's about the power of storytelling. It's about trauma and war. It's about survival and resilience. But today, and perhaps always underneath it all, it's actually about the communities we create and the ways in which we create them. And we create them in the places we've come from. We create them in the places we're forced to move to. We create them in the homes that we build and embrace. And in the ways that we contribute to our places of origin and our places of choice and our places of home. And it's really important to me in particular that non-South Asian readers of this novel take away a sense that their own lived experience as white Australians is not the only lived experience of this country, that there is a multiplicity of lived experiences and multiplicity of histories, cultures, languages, identities, and aspirations. And whilst there are many common themes throughout all of them, there are also tremendous, beautiful, and profound differences that make this country better. And I would like readers to embrace that and to reflect on that.
Henry Farnan
Totally. I think that's so important. You mentioned that your answer to ‘what is the novel about?’ changes every time. I think that speaks to the depth and the prolificity of this novel.
Shankari Chandran
Thank you very much. While I was writing Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens I had almost a fear and a sadness that gave me courage. My fear and sadness was that this might actually be my last novel. I mean, don't tell my publisher that because he wants my next novel and I promised him I'll write one. But after I published my first two books. I had written a third manuscript and it didn't find a publisher. Um, and so then in an active, you know, in a staggering act of extraordinary optimism I thought I'll write another novel instead of hanging up my bootstraps – I'm going to write another novel. But this time I felt really freed by the constraints of wanting to get it published because I figured I'm highly unlikely to get it published and I've been supported by funding and my family is working with me to try to create time. I have lived in this beautiful country for so long.
I'm really ready to write about this country. Let me do that with courage and without self-consciousness. And it was a very liberating experience to write Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens.
Henry Farnan
The way you’ve described Cinnamon Gardens in the book left me with an overwhelming sense of comfort and homeliness while at the same time, a sense of quiet foreboding and tenseness, just beneath all surfaces. This is a tonal balance that I felt throughout the whole book. Can you tell us about how you went about crafting that as a writer and why?
Shankari Chandran
Wow. Thank you. I'm so honoured that that has been achieved. Cinnamon Gardens, the nursing home, is based on the nursing home in Western Sydney where my grandmother lives. So, I'm not sure if you're aware of that. Did you know that?
Henry Farnan
Wow. I wasn't aware of that, sorry.
Shankari Chandran
No, that’s good because I just didn't want to tell you something you already knew. So, it is based on a nursing home in Western Sydney where my grandmother lives, and there are many Sri Lankan Tamils who also live in that nursing home and they know each other from ‘back home’, as they say. And when I go to visit my grandmother with my four children we will often run into friends and cousins who are visiting their ammas and their appas. It is a wonderful place of community where at any one time in any one resident's room you will find four generations of a family talking and laughing and fighting and listening and telling stories and learning.
So, I thought what a wonderful place that creates community and what a wonderful place to set a story in. Creating that nursing home itself was not difficult. It was a joy particularly because during 2020, I was not able to go back to the nursing home at all, really, because of lockdown and restrictions around safety for the elderly. And so, I haven't seen my grandmother and so creating and recreating the nursing home has been a wonderful experience.
On creating the tonal undercurrent and the concurrent tones that exist within the novel, the first draft of that was very much about allowing myself to honestly critique the tonal concurrence that exists in Australia and therefore it was not constructed. The first draft was not constructed or conscious.
It was much more about allowing myself to take the constraints of my childhood and my upbringing and my indoctrination as a ‘migrant Australian’. And I say that with inverted commas, because we are all – unless your ancestors have been here for tens of thousands of years – we are all migrant Australians.
So, the first draft of this novel was very much about allowing myself to take away the constraints of my ‘migrant’s upbringing’ and allow myself to feel freely what I have always observed, but been too afraid to articulate. It was about allowing myself to then just do what every writing teacher will tell you, which is don't make it up, just write it down.
And I did that. I just said, this is what I feel, this is what I see, so this is what I'm going to write. And that first draft came out. The first 50,000 words was actually really hard because I was really fighting with myself and against these restrictions that had been placed on me for 45 years.
As for the second 50,000 words. I felt as though it was almost like I sat down one morning to write a novel and at the end of the day I stood up and there was another 50,000 words on the page. And so that second 50,000 words, I don't even feel that I wrote it. Like, I don't almost remember writing it. It happened so quickly and so furiously, and it tapped into the rage that was happening around me with the pandemic and the backlash against Asians around the world who had somehow ‘caused’ this global pandemic. It tapped into the rage around the way the pandemic revealed the systemic inequalities of our existence and made those inequalities worse.
It tapped into the rage of George Floyd's murder and the ferocity of the Black Lives Matter movement in the US, but more importantly, the grief and the rage of First Nations communities, as they desperately tried to remind us of what happens in Australia every single day. And it taps into the rage and grief that I have felt throughout my life about the way in which ‘migrants’, again, in inverted commas, and people of colour are positioned within this political, social, and cultural landscape on the margins and as the Other and how it takes so little for this racist narrative to fire up – it is then protected by freedom of speech.
Um, I'm just going to take a full stop and a breath. So, the second 50,000 words was fast and furious. Yeah.
Henry Farnan
Yes, that’s so important. I often find myself thinking that if my writing isn’t being fuelled by what’s inside me and what’s going on around me then it’s not anything. I always find that that is just the best feeling when you look down at the page and you think, ‘oh, where did all these words come from?’
Shankari Chandran
Yeah, it's so good, right? It's such a good feeling. I love it, and it's the best writing, because you're just not at all aware of anything. You're not aware of yourself. You're not aware of publisher expectations. You are just watching the story unfold in your mind and you're simply writing down what you see. What a tremendous joy and privilege.
Henry Farnan
While we’re on tremendous joy, everything in the novel from your writing style and the characterization to the lovely map in the front of the book is positioned to foster a deep familiarity between the reader and the characters. Among the patrons of Cinnamon Gardens, who do you feel most connected to and why?
Shankari Chandran
I feel most connected to Maya. She was certainly the most fun to write and I feel the most connected to her because I think for myself as an author, I do always – and I won't speak for all authors, I'll just speak for myself – as an author, I do. Into my novels, a little bit of myself and a little bit of the people I love the most and Maya is a representation of all of that and more. I hope I'm not limited by my own creativity and my fiction; I hope it’s not limited by my own life experience. But her experiences, for example, of being published and struggling to get published in Australia very much draw on my own lived experience.
And, in Maya, I found a lot of my experiences from when I first tried to get Song of the Sun God published. This was my first novel that was about three generations of an Australian Tamil family and the choices that they make to navigate Sri Lanka and civil war, and they're forced into migration and their creation of home, and it was a story of colonisation, dispossession, genocide, forced migration, and the creation of home – which to me is the ultimate Australian story.
It is certainly not the ultimate Australian story, but it is an Australian story. And one that is told by many of us in many different and beautiful ways, and it is a valid Australian story. And yet publishers and agents said to me, the story isn't Australian enough. We simply won't be able to sell it into the Australian market and I thought, you are wrong. The Australian story is a story written by Australians and I'm Australian. Therefore, this is an Australian story.
I think that Australians – as a readership and as a community – we are far smarter, far more generous and expansive in our own notion of what it means to be Australian and many of us yearn for those diverse stories. And our lives, and our imaginations are improved by being able to access them through the storytelling of a range of writers. And so, Maya's reaction to that was very much my own but I was then able to crank it up a notch and take her into fiction, and the Portside Review readers will have to read Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens to find out what Maya chooses to do with that experience.
She also is a woman who has been created by her time, but also is constantly rebelling against her time. You know, she'll study the literature she feels like studying, she'll write the books she feels like writing, she'll marry the man she feels like marrying and she’ll live the life she wants to live. And then she comes to Australia and says, ‘No. I will not be defeated by this. We’re not going to shut down this nursing home and strip it for parts. We are going to build a community here. We're going to build a life here. We're going to restore the building and it was going to restore my husband.’
And off she goes. So, I admire her.
Henry Farnan
I absolutely loved Maya. I thought she was just so great. Also, it's surprising to me that, well, perhaps unsurprising because the Australian publishing industry is the way it is, but surprising to me that they said that Song of the Sun God was not an Australian story. Correct me if I'm wrong, but white Australians have no trouble with selling generational sagas, so much so that if you look into any bookstore, it almost is the ultimate Australian story.
Shankari Chandran
Yeah, totally. 100% Henry. I remember making jokes that were like, oh, well maybe I should have set it in a cane field in Queensland, in colonial times, or, you know, frontier times and so on. But also, the Australian publishing market has rapidly changed and for the better, and that is through the tireless advocacy of writers such as Maxine Beneba Clarke and Michael Mohammed Ahmed, Alice Pung, Melanie Cheng, Suneeta Peres da Costa, Roanna Gonsalves, the plays of Shakthidaran.
These are exquisite powerful pieces of work. And their work and their advocacy has pried open that space for the rest of us to follow through. And I'm deeply grateful to them for everything they've done for the rest of us. The smaller publishing houses were onto this first, very much to their credit, that they could see the value in stories across a range of Australians and they were willing to champion them. Which proved of course, that these stories would be a commercial success. Who the hell didn't think these stories were A) going to be of high quality, B) incredibly interesting and C) going to sell really well. So, the smaller publishing houses provided proof of concept and the bigger publishing houses are now jumping on the bandwagon.
Henry Farnan
Lastly, the novel is already receiving glowing testimonials from other authors. Are there any people or writers in particular who have been an inspiration for you as storyteller?
Shankari Chandran
Emily Maguire has mentored me for many years now. I think that role of the more established authors supporting and mentoring the aspiring and emerging authors is so important because many of us know very little about the industry and are only learning through mistakes and those mistakes can destroy your self-esteem and make you doubt your abilities. So, for me to have a mentor such as Emily Maguire has been really critical to my ongoing journey as a writer. She also writes about gender and class, and rage around gender and class so well. She's able to take the ordinary and give it the priority that it deserves and there's a real artistry in doing that.
For me, the best kind of masterclass in writing is reading high quality literature. So, if I'm about to write something, I will often go back to something else. Which is not to suggest that my work is derivative, but simply to suggest that I'm learning from people that are much better storytellers than me who've been doing it longer and doing it better than me and I am still learning. So, Emily Maguire is one. I love the work of Rohinton Mistry. So, if I was to pick amongst South Asian authors, my absolute go-to author would be Rohinton Mistry, and the incredible way that he identifies the tiny, almost trivial details of everyday life. And he weaves them into this incredibly complex tapestry that is still so simple and accessible and easy to understand. You know, he lifts you with humour and then he destroys you with grief. So, Rohinton Mistry and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire. Have you read that?
Henry Farnan
No, I haven't, but I have heard of that.
Shankari Chandran
Okay. So, the book that I would recommend to any writer, if I was to recommend one book, it would probably be Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire because the language is exquisite. The structure is elegant and intelligent and it makes you see issues and themes – such as the radicalisation of Muslims – that you thought you knew but it makes you see it completely differently. For that alone, it is brilliant, but there are many other reasons why it is brilliant. What was your question again? Cause I do want to give you a couple more and I will stop talking eventually.
Henry Farnan
No, no. Please don’t feel the need to stop talking at all. I was asking about writers who have been an inspiration to you.
Shankari Chandran
Oh yes! James Baldwin and Toni Morrison for Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, of course. Cause you remember how I was talking about how I struggled to criticize Australia, right? So, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison have really shaped how I see myself in the world because they really centre their own experience. They don't write with reference to the white gaze. In fact, they deliberately, deconstruct it for the reader and they deliberately centre and appropriate where they are right now and who they are and what their history is and what their value is through their storytelling. And we are so often used to accepting our position of marginalization. We are so often used to being pushed to the margins and saying, ‘well, okay, you know, it's really cold out here’. And what they do is they say, ‘no, actually you don't push me anywhere. I am where I am and where I am right now is extraordinary’. Let me tell you about it. And so, a James Baldwins quote, which really gives me such courage, talks about loving America so much that he insists on the right to criticize her perpetually.
So, James Baldwin talks about loving America so much. He says, “I love America so much that I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” And I come back to this quote time and time again, when I doubt my right to interrogate the community I've come from, and the one I've chosen to call home.
The other writer is Toni Morrison. When I really need to get my fight on, I listen to this quote or I read this quote and she says, “I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central. I claimed it as central and let the rest of the world move over to where I was.” And that just says it all.
I've learnt how to do it and why to do it from them. But then within my own country of choice, my home of choice, I learned from people like Nardi Simpson, right? Melissa Lukashenko, these are fierce, beautiful, poetic, devastating voices that really centred their own stories. They own it. They assert it and they demand that you listen and that you feel with them. That’s what I’m wanting for my prose and what I wrote towards for Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens.
Shankari Chandra was raised in Canberra, Australia. She spent a decade in London, working as a lawyer in the social justice field. She eventually returned home to Australia, where she now lives with her husband, four children and their dog, Benji. She uses storytelling to interrogate injustice. As a lawyer, she specialises in law reform, program management and community development. As a writer, her work explores dispossession, cultural erasure and connection.
Henry Farnan is a Perth local studying creative writing at Curtin University, he almost exclusively listens to queer artists, and he always looks for the silver lining (even when he’s falling off cliffs – and he probably does this with a big smile and a can-do attitude too!). Henry isn’t sure where he’s going yet but he’s looking forward to the journey, and we’re looking forward to seeing where it leads him.