Title: Christos Tsiolkas and the Ghosts of our Past
Abstract: With the arrival of his first novel in 1995, Loaded, Christos Tsiolkas became a voice for a new generation of Australians. The book’s main character, Ari – later made into the flesh by actor Alex Dimitriades in the film adaptation Head On – represented a young, gay Greek Australian man, angered by classism and racism to the point of self-destruction, and confused with his place in the world that surrounds him. This character would be reborn in many other men in Tsiolkas’ books, as would these themes become the crux of his work. His other novels include The Jesus Man (1999), Dead Europe (2005; winner of The Age Book of the Year), The Slap (2008; winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and adapted into an award winning mini-series) and his latest book Barracuda (2013). He is a multi-talented writer with an autobiography and book of essays to add to his collection, as well as ‘playwright’ and ‘screenwriter’ to add to his list of titles. Often referred to by literary critics as our most controversial writer, Christos Tsiolkas lays bare what it means to be Australian, and in this interview I revisit what for me is his most controversial book, Dead Europe. HTJ: The characters in so many of your novels are racist. No one is safe: Jews, Muslims, Asians, Wogs – in fact ‘wog’ might be the most commonly used word in your repertoire, stressing an acceptance of derogatory titles and thus a regularisation of racist thought. Misogyny, too, is painfully prevalent. Is this a commentary on Australian society or on humanity? CT: I am going to apologise for pretending I can speak outside of my sphere of knowledge and my experience as an Australian. I can’t speak for the rest of the world. My belief is that racism is a global experience but I don’t think that all racism is the same. The racism of colonial societies such as South Africa and Australia is very different to that of Europe, to that of the north Americas, and again different to the experience of it in Africa, in the Middle East, in the south Americas. And of course there are different histories and expression of it in Asia. More and more I am interested in separating racism from xenophobia, investigating notions of the stranger. Australia had no experience of the Atlantic slave trade so any analogies made between our historic and contemporary racism and that of the USA, for example, can only be simplistic and not very useful. So what is the fear of the stranger? Is it equivalent to racism or is it something else? I am not pretending any answers but it is a question that increasingly concerns me. Undoubtedly it arises from the disgust I feel at the treatment of the refugee
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-07-24
Language: en
Type: article
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