Glitter and guts 

Interrogating the truth of the past

Featured in

  • Published 20240206
  • ISBN: 978-1-922212-92-4
  • Extent: 204pp
  • Paperback, ePub, PDF, Kindle compatible

RIGHT NOW, I am obsessed with the past. My debut novel is finished and ready for publication, and I am wrestling with the fear and insecurity that comes with writing a second. To alleviate the anxiety of unknown plot points, unfamiliar characters and structure problems, I’ve sought refuge in the past, in the familiar. I watch and rewatch beloved time-travel movies. I read and re-read dearly loved books that transport me to a previous version of myself. Sometimes I roll my eyes at the person I was. Sometimes I weep. But always I return to the past to understand my present.

A few years ago I read Kindred by Octavia Butler for the first time. Written in 1979, when I was six years old, it tells the story of a Black American woman who travels through time against her will. Its voice is seamless, its form, style and prose the perfect template for any novel writer, but it is the revelation of the plot that stays with me. The truth that there is no time in all of history when it is safe to be a Black woman. 

Already a subscriber? Sign in here

If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au

Share article

More from author

On undoing

Non-fictionI am forty before I visit Europe, still ignorant that a century before me my great-grandfather had walked those same cobblestones. That he had fought in a war that did not reward him with any meaningful welcome on his return home. Now that I know, I yearn to go back and breathe that air, knowing that William was there.

More from this edition

Threshold

PoetryWhat is the voice of one who has died if no one listened to what remained unspoken? It no longer matters.

Time plays tricks

IntroductionTen years ago, the late, great cultural theorist Mark Fisher posited that our ‘montaging of earlier eras’ had reached such fever pitch that we no longer even noticed our submersion in a sea of bygones. And sitting alongside this purported cultural inertia are our increasingly divergent attitudes towards history – the far-right impulse to romanticise the past, the far-left desire to remedy its wrongs – and how they inflect our politics. 

Always was, always will be

In ConversationIf Aboriginal people are all dead, you don’t have to negotiate a treaty with us and you certainly don’t have to go around feeling guilty about stolen land and stolen wages and stolen children; the subjects of that injustice don’t exist anymore if you choose to believe that we’re dead or all assimilated, which isn’t the case. It’s a very practical kind of assimilation strategy.

Stay up to date with the latest, news, articles and special offers from Griffith Review.