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and meta‐textuality most arise. It is not, as it happens, the first time I have used a male character as
narrator or focaliser, but this is the first of my male characters who narrates a whole novel. This
raises the issue of writing and identity politics: who can write about whom?
Identity politics and gender
Do these arguments still go on? Can a woman write as a man, can a man write as a woman? Is a
writer allowed to give voice to characters of ethnicities and cultures not her own? Can a heterosexual
writer create a gay character? As for the other way around, we have untold examples to show how
it’s done. All these things have been done: are there female characters in Western fiction more
famous, well‐known and convincing than Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina? Remember Flaubert’s
famous dictum: Mme Bovary, c’est moi?
Aren’t we all over those arguments? Can’t we all tell the difference between misjudged
appropriation and acts of imaginative empathy so great they transcend the borders, limits,
restrictions and prohibitions of assigned identity? What, anyway, is the difference between an
assigned identity and a claimed identity and how important is that for the question of a narrated
identity?
And what about an assumed identity?
I have always been attracted to, even convinced by, in varying proportions, the idea that either
the soul is androgynous or that an artist’s soul is androgynous: that we are without gender in that
realm of the ideal.
This idea is unsettled by many of today’s investigations into gender but from a fiction writer’s
point of view the one thing that matters is that gender is increasingly seen as a fluid category. I’ll
return to that soon.
Identity politics and the other: Reception
Are we over the arguments about appropriated subject matter and identity politics? Well,
apparently not. The questions in my own career (if career is the word for the odd shape of my body
of work and personal journeys) rose in a way I could not have predicted.
Responses to my memoir of a year in Papua New Guinea (Rascal Rain,1994) included vitriolic
attacks for writing about people who had not given “permission”: arguments that would never have
been raised if my memoir had been set in my own country. Once I recovered, I began to discern that
a particular moment in identity politics, and national trauma over the spotlight on the country’s
racialist past, were principal factors in this reception.
At the time, the only depictions of non‐white people and cultures that were embraced were those
posited on their innate superiority or victimhood. In 1990 a laughably spurious account of time spent
with an Australian Aboriginal tribe, called Mutant Message From Down Under by Marlo Morgan was
embraced by the New Age movement including many academics even though eventually its author
had to admit she had invented her trip among the wise folk who called themselves “The Real People”
(who do not exist in Australia) and eventually the outcry from Australian Indigenous people and
those who actually knew a thing or two about them could not be ignored and her book was
republished as fiction.
It was in a moment of great anxiety in the liberal, arts‐loving, text‐consuming culture in which I
was published and read and argued about when I wrote my account of being sent into an Indigenous
culture that had been recently, suddenly and immensely disrupted by Western intrusion led by a
mining industry and where I found much to disturb, most particularly the patriarchal and misogynist
aspects of both the traditional culture and the dominant mode of the invading culture.
My previous book was a novel (The Edge of Bali, 1992) in which a focalised main character is male,
American, and black, three things I am not. No‐one objected.
Identity politics: Mosaic or melting pot