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I thought that being in America, surrounded by wealth, the new air, the very idea of a fresh start, would obliterate all my fears. I thought I could change identities like a double agent.
Of the books by Australians that were entered for the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2004, M.J. Hyland’s How the Light Gets In (2003), featured in the Best First Book shortlist of the Eurasia region, though it did not win the award. This debut novel left a lingering impression on the mind; a commendable feat when 103 books were entered from the Eurasia region in 2003. The two other Australian books entered for the competition belonged to the South East Asia and South Pacific region of the Commonwealth and were once again by women writers. The Best Book and Best First Book regional winners of CWP 2004 went to The Hamilton Case by Michelle de Kretser and Somewhere, Home by Nada Awar Jarrar. Both writers located their novels outside Australia, specifically in Sri Lanka (or more accurately, the erstwhile Ceylon) and present day Lebanon respectively. But Hyland’s novel How the Light Goes Out focuses on Australian lower middle-class culture and the culture of alien spaces negotiated by the protagonist or persona, tracing thereby the dynamics of the local/global dichotomy. Hyland is an Australian resident, but was born to Irish parents who migrated to Australia in search of a better life. She had a difficult childhood with an abusive father and an impoverished family life, but she is now a lawyer as well as a writer. In this connection, the cosmopolitan Australian woman writer who comes to mind is Christina Stead who left Australia, lived in the UK and the USA, and returned to Australia after about forty-six years. However, the history of Christina Stead being considered as non-Australian and denied Australia’s most prestigious literary award, once again brings us to the endless debate about homes and homelands in the era of globalization and migration. The resemblances are obviously tenuous but at the same time such data vindicate the fact that negotiating multiple geographical and cultural locations has been an ongoing process for Australian writers throughout the twentieth century, resulting in many clashes of cultures, sometimes infected by pride and prejudice. But in the transnational environment, national and regional cultures are all in that immense crucible where each is represented as part of the whole, and the crucial absence of one leads to a severe sense of loss and reduction in quality and quantity. It is the harmony of heterogeneous congeniality that needs to be celebrated, not the tediousness of homogeneity that chokes many in order to establish a lustreless uniformity. For Australians too, as perhaps in many other regions in the world, the twentieth century very deeply embedded in the psyche of the urban young an irrepressible desire to chase the American Dream that had replaced the Anglo Dream of the previous centuries when Britain was no longer the hegemonic power. The cultural variable is the wider penetrating power of the stronger economy that consumes less dominant cultures, as the consumers of these locations are overpowered by the consumerist charisma of endless choice, the magnetism of capitalist economy. The impact of America’s popular culture is all pervasive - it echoes through the coconut plantations of Sri Lanka, the tea plantations of Darjeeling, the streets of Melbourne and Paris, and the towns of the United Kingdom. It is this ubiquitous presence that lures exchange students, as well as the Toefel, GRE and GMAT candidates, to crack the eligibility tests that provide the preliminary entry point to the land of dreams and opportunities. M. J. Hyland initially wrote a short story about this American allure, entitled ‘In a Prison of Wayward Exchange Students’. In an interview, she stated that she had not really planned to have a female protagonist, as such. The politics of gender was not her agenda, Hyland said.
I didn't set out to write about a teenage girl, it was mostly an accident. Lou started out as a male character and went through several incarnations. I had written a short story called 'In a Prison for Wayward Exchange Students' and the main character was a boy. Lou then grew out of that story because I wanted to tell the story of one of the exchange students and how he or she ended up in this prison. ( Bibliofemme interview).
Hyland here asserts that the author’s agenda gets transformed as the words are born on the page. It is this transmutation that Roland Barthes probably had in mind when he alerted readers to the construction of the fictional text and the author’s inability to dominate the text through very subjective interventions when he observed, ‘The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture' in his famous essay on the death of the author: As used by Hyland in the title of her short story, the word ‘prison’ takes on a crucial significance on many levels. Ideally, exchange students are looked upon as cultural ambassadors negotiating the host culture and introducing the inmates of the host culture to the practices of the home culture, of which the exchange student is a representative. So, Louise Conner from Sydney, Australia, arrives in Chicago to live with her affluent American host family. Very precisely, the modest circumstances of the Australian teenager and the affluence of her temporary American ‘home’ are underscored by Hyland in two short passages:
No member of my family has ever been overseas. My mum ( Sandra), my dad (Mick), and my two teenage sisters, (Erin and Leona), live squashed together in our three-bedroom flat…and the few places I have ever been with them did not involve visas, suitcases or aeroplanes. (6)
In chapter 2 Lou describes her American abode:
My new home is a suburban mansion: two storeys, wide, tall and white, with six, big white columns on the front porch and curtains clean as milk in the windows. (13)
The most devastating reflective statement in this début novel about negotiating cultures is in the opening lines of Chapter 3, ‘I have read that a sheep raised by dogs will eventually learn to chase cars. But how long does it take to learn the tricks of another animal? How long will I need to live with the Hardings before I unlearn the tricks of my own family?’ (33). These questions open up debates about assimilation and acculturation that are becoming increasingly unavoidable in the growing global environment, despite the fact that Hyland is not writing about a migrant person but an exchange scholar. However, what troubles me is that, while Hyland came very close to a cross-cultural critiquing of the contrasts and similarities between the American and Australian culture, as a reader I felt the book was a case of missed opportunity. It is a missed opportunity for showcasing sameness and difference in American and Australian adolescents - who will obviously participate, in the next seventy years of the twenty-first century, in determining the shape of things to come. Is this absence in the text due to the fact that there are more similarities than differences between white teenagers, irrespective of their cultural location? It is apparent that there are more differences between teenagers of other colours and their white counterparts, though they may all be fitted out in Calvin Klein and DKNY creations. Hyland skims over these issues with subtlety, without letting them take on the position of centrality in the text often observable in Asian American writing, and more specifically in Asian Indian fiction. Lou’s rich American host parents, Henry and Margaret, are smart, sophisticated, upwardly mobile, middle-aged professionals, who invite an exchange student as a guest to sensitize their teenage children as well as themselves about people from other cultures. However, there are few exchanges between the teenagers or their friends in school, from which the true purpose of exchange students - to generate mutual understanding in future citizens - is achieved. So, Lou observes, ‘Margaret and Henry are more cheerful towards me now that my S.A.T. scores are out, and I am officially in the top one percent of the country. This seems to prove that I can ‘fit in’ (192). The American host parents are represented as possessing typical WASP superiority and snobbishness. Lou’s unabashed exploitative and unemotional analysis of her host-mother Margaret is repeated often in the text and this culminates in the statement - ‘What she wanted from me was the short-term experience of a quaint and foreign visitor. She does not want to be involved in changing somebody’s life for good’ (194). The Hardings hesitate when Lou asks them to support her stay in America as a permanent resident:
I’d rather die than go home. (183)
I don’t want to go home. I want to know whether you can help me stay in America? (193) So, Lou rests her hopes on her boyfriend Tom, who comes from the richest family in the neighbourhood and is also in love with Lou. Lou dreams of the possibility of moving into his house if the Hardings are unable to sponsor her stay in America even if his family supports the Ku Klux Klan: ‘I am still going to ask if I can move in. I’ll tell him what I think of bigots and racists after I have got a green card and I’ve got into a good college on a full scholarship’ (194). Earlier in the novel Lou’s plans had been: ‘When school has finished and my scholarship ends, I’ll move in with Tom’s family and become a citizen’ (167).
Lou tells James, her host-brother, about her deep sense of repulsion towards her own family, though there are occasions in the text that prove her desire to be loved by her mother and father and have a bonding with her sisters – ‘I tell him that my real family is foul; that my sisters and parents are foul and that the whole point of my coming here was to purify myself and that I never want to see them again’ (206).
It is deeply disturbing to sense the total alienation of a young teenager from her family, and home, and her obsessive desire to relocate in a strange location. But the sense of frustration, desperation, longing for affection, desire for surrogate parents and siblings have such a destructive impact on the intelligent, imaginative and obviously sensitive Australian teenager, that she gives into easy addictives such as gin and cigarettes, apart from becoming a petty pilferer of money and a borrower too. The cover of the novel shows the lower half of a freckled young female face, heavily lipsticked, with a lighted cigarette, between slightly parted lips, the lower section of the nose all that we see of the face. A face without eyes. A fine whiff of smoke rises from the burning cigarette. Debra Billson’s cover design is remarkably postmodern, as it disturbs the reader and also allows the reader to construct the rest of Lou’s face, by giving it deliberate anonymity, typical and yet exceptional. But Lou’s American dream is to be an achiever, a talented student with a full scholarship - this is the elusive light that lures her, this is the light that had tantalized her into pursuing academics that resulted in her distinction of being an exchange student in the USA. When the sordid mail from home arrives, reminding her of what she has escaped from, she tries to erase the links in her mind by mapping a new journey for herself - ‘I will fulfil my enormous potential, learn a new word every day, read a novel every week and become the world’s most impressive autodidact and polymath. I will go to university and live in student digs’ (54). Chapter Four concludes with the possibility of a ray of hope in the form of a streak of light under the door. ‘I lie down and look at the light coming in under the door and I am convinced that everything will be better from now on’ (54). Despite the fact that Lou is compelled by circumstances mostly of her own creation to experience the humiliation of being sent to a detention centre for wayward exchange students, she also becomes a victim of petty jealousy, and ultimately finds that she has to return to Sydney after all. Interestingly, the novel informs the reader of the existence of juvenile detention centres for wayward exchange students, who can either be taken up by another set of temporary host parents or have to return home before the completion of their grant term. In the centre, Lou meets exchange students from other parts of the world, such as Lishney from Russia whom she comes to love and Kris, a girl from Norway whom she likes enough to confide in. Such rapport with teenagers from other parts of the world who have different cultures and languages challenges the notion that cultural distance is synonymous with emotional distancing. Ironically, she fails to establish similar rapport with her American host brother and sister, James and Bridget. So, although a situation verging on fantasy and wish fulfillment is constructed through a brilliant sequence of letter reading from home, Lou’s life just moves on to another plane of experience as in the last page of the novel she once again notices a shaft of light under the door - ‘There’s a light on outside, in the hall, and it’s coming in under the door’ (317). The concluding line of the novel makes the much-hyped postmodern maxim of moving on seem scathingly ironic. The simple words very poignantly highlight the searing loneliness of the intelligent and sensitive affection-starved, troubled teenager’s need for love and understanding - ‘I’ll watch people walking in the street below and wonder which of them I might like to follow home’ (317). Hyland’s debut novel tracking Lou’s journey towards a shaft of light, a glimmer of hope, maintains the stereotypes of the lure of stronger economies, of opportunities and dreams, as well as the sense of displacement and cultural shock that the exchange student experiences as an alien, who can exist in the periphery of the host-home but never gain the status of the insider. The trauma of living in her own home in Sydney is replaced by the constant demand to adjust to the alien, sanitized ways of life of the Hardings (who, nonetheless, do not flinch while watching gang rape as family entertainment on television). Lou’s need for a surrogate mother is repeatedly emphasized, as she tries to reach out to Margaret Harding and later Gertie, a staff member at the “prison’ for wayward exchange students. However, though Homi Bhabha’s words in Nation and Narration resonate with the dream of a transnational dissemination of culture, on a macro level of the abstract and the concrete, 'America leads to Africa, the nations of Europe and Asia meet in Australia; the margins of the nation displace the center; the peoples of the periphery return to rewrite the history and fiction of the metropolis' (6), the journey seems to be longer and more complex in the context of the micropolitics of daily living, experienced by each sensitive individual in negotiating the mystery of life. This desire or disenchantment cuts across geography, race, colour, class and gender The pathetic disillusionment of the young who crave for nurturing in dysfunctional families, is both a local and global phenomenon. Many young people make a desperate bid to survive by navigating to lands of opportunities only to learn the crucial lesson that searching for the way home is a relentless process of demystification, as one discovers and deconstructs one’s dream of self by negotiating the Other and reconstructing the self. Metro Toronto www.metronews.com/books review asp?ib=1695 www.guardian.co.uk/review/story 0, 12084, 1221342 html www.bibliofemme.interviews/hyland Sanjukta Dasgupta is a Professor in the Department of English at Calcutta University. |