Books Roundup

Legitimate Sexpectations
Katrina Marson (Scribe, available now)

Legitimate Sexpectations is our First Book Club pick for September—Read the transcript of our in-conversation live event with the author and First Book Club host Ellen Cregan!

Sex-ed in Australian schools is inadequate. Many students leave school with few instructions and maybe how to roll a condom over a banana. In Legitimate Sexpectations, Katrina Marson shows us why what we teach young people must go beyond ‘no means no’ and how our collective attitudes towards sex and education must change if we are to protect future generations from sexual violence. 

Marson begins her book with the sobering reminder that sexual harassment is ‘a very dark and dangerous thing, and yet it is a very ordinary thing. It is not overstating it to say sexual violence is ubiquitous.’ As a former criminal lawyer, Marson has engaged with issues of sexual violence through both professional and academic avenues. Statistics about rape, assault and violence are listed to support quite a few of her arguments. But Marson takes a pragmatic approach to this complex issue, making this book an approachable read for anyone. Each chapter begins with a fictional case study that illustrates an aspect of sex-ed. At the points in the book that risk becoming slightly bogged down in terminology and statistics, she is able to call back to that narrative and recapture her readers attention, making her arguments feel less abstract.

Marson shows us why what we teach young people must go beyond ‘no means no.’

Marson identifies that sexual education is seen as a moral issue, but subject to egregious double standards. The risk of sexual violence is especially high for young women, LGBTQIA+ people and disabled people, all of whom are represented in her narrative case studies. She notes that programs designed to prevent gendered violence are supported at a state and federal governmental level and are delivered to parents, educators and kids, while rarely seen as being controversial. However sex-ed is a very different story. Throughout the book,  there are anecdotes from people working in the education space about parents pulling kids from programs designed to teach consent and encourage respectful sexual behaviour. Marson believes that reactions like these pose an important question: ‘we might all agree that violence is unacceptable, but do we all agree on common values when it comes to sex, sexuality, and relationships?’ While it would be easy to place blame on specific people—parents, teachers, legislators—Marson instead shows the ways in which our collective cultural attitudes towards sex are letting young people down. 

Legitimate Sexpectations pitches a very achievable path to a world with less sexual violence. Marson shows us again and again just how frustratingly within-reach this future is, and readers are left with the understanding that creating this world is the responsibility of the community. 

— Ellen Cregan

Against Disappearance 
Ed. by Leah Jing McIntosh and Adolfo Aranjuez (Pantera Press, available now)

In her introduction to Against Disappearance, a collection of essays from the LIMINAL & Pantera Press Nonfiction Prize 2021, co-editor Leah Jing McIntosh states: ‘The forced disappearance of cultures is so often framed as natural or unavoidable, the way of things when it is in fact the opposite: hegemonic power is as much about the stories it actively erases as those it tells.’ In the inaugural year of the prize for First Nations and writers of colour, the shortlisted essays offer a meditation on what it means to exist, live and write by those so often excluded from the Australian white-settler literary canon.

This anthology is a continuation of the work of LIMINAL, an anti-racist literary platform that challenges the historical whiteness of Australian literary landscape. Split into three sections, ‘Inheritances’, ‘Archives’ and ‘Opacities’, each shows the different ways that exclusion of First Nations and people of colour is an act of violence.

Each essay broadens the definition of what it means to be a writer in so-called Australia.

‘Inheritances’ focuses on what has come before. As Mykaela Saunders writes in her piece ‘Communing with Uncle Kev’ on the importance of storytelling as archive: ‘the information we inherit is minimal yet precious to us, and the missing pieces tell a bigger story than what’s there.’ This section offers insightful reflections on what is passed down and what is kept from us both by family and the state.

In ‘Archives’, we see how those who have been marginalised by society interact with recorded history. The archive can enact cultural erasure, as Elizabeth Flux states in reference to modern censorship in Hong Kong in her powerful essay, ‘This Is Probably Sedition’: ‘Erasing history is nothing new…There are many reasons for wanting a blank state, but most of the time it comes back to one thing: trying to control the story.’

In the final section ‘Opacities’, the essays are more internal. The pieces have a focus on the connections our bodies have to place, and to our identities. ‘Third Cowboy from the Sun’ by Hassan Abul, the overall winner of prize, explores gender and being seen. Abul shifts between an intricate film critique of the Mexican coming-of-age film Y Tu Mamá También and a highly personal examination of the self. ‘I do not keep records of my own changing form’, he tells us of his transition, highlighting the complexities of identity. ‘This whole thing has been too slippery, too experiential and dynamic, to fall into an archive.’

With originality and uncompromising individuality, each essay broadens the definition of what it means to be a writer in so-called Australia, showing what is possible for the creative non-fiction genre. Some are experimental, varying in form and prose style with internal monologues and self-discoveries, while others more factual, exploring political events and scientific concepts.

Against Disappearance is a fierce and determined anthology full of courageous, complex and truly unique stories.

— Rosie Ofori Ward

Hopeless Kingdom
Kgshak Akec (UWA Publishing, available now)

The winner of the 2020 Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, Kgshak Akec’s poignant novel, Hopeless Kingdom, is as evocative as its title. The deeply moving coming-of-age story explores the curses of intergenerational trauma that follow a Sudanese family as they move countries to survive.

The narrative is seen through the interchanging perspectives of Akita, a reticent young girl, and her mother Taresai, a woman whose tenacity and sense of hope ‘builds nothing short of a kingdom.’ Akec writes with tenderness and emotional depth as she illustrates the family’s journey from Khartoum to Cairo, then to Sydney and Geelong, in hopes that ‘Australia will be a fortunate home’ for them. But at every place they call home, the Deng family face a distinct set of challenges.

A shining debut novel. Akec’s prose is captivating and draws you in.

Racism and cultural dislocation lie at the heart of their struggles to find a sense of safety and belonging. The story opens in Cairo, where a young Akita is daunted by school bullies: ‘almost every day it’s a new taunt…of the blackness of my skin, or the coils of my hair.’ She is soon protected by Santo, her older brother, the ‘only other sunflower among this sea of roses.’ This opening scene sets the tone for the rest of the novel, hinting toward the forthcoming waves of ‘othering’ and alienation Akita and her family will soon grapple with.

However, the battles are not only external. Akec skillfully instils a sense of yearning within the reader as they read from the viewpoints of two characters who care deeply for one another, but do not understand each other. Even in the most intimate of moments, as her daughter sits in-between her legs as she braids her hair, Taresai finds Akita ‘harder to read than a book.’ The struggle is reflective of her fractured relationship with her own mother, ‘a warrior of a woman, a monster of a mother.’ As we watch Taresai mirror the actions of her mother, even ‘though the void [her] mother created is still gaping inside of [her]’, Akec highlights the ways in which intergenerational trauma can be pervasive, despite best efforts to break cycles.

Hopeless Kingdom is a shining debut novel. Akec’s prose is captivating and draws you in for a journey that belongs to the Deng family, but also to the thousands of African migrants who have made the same trip. The importance of emotional healing is exemplified in the end, as Taresai comes to terms with the challenges of her life: ‘At the start of each day and at the end of each night, I realise that there is hope in my kingdom, because I have seen all my wounds turn to scars.’ The book introduces a powerful new voice in Australian literature through its lens of compassion and hope.

— Nasteho Said

This Devastating Fever
Sophie Cunningham (Ultimo Press, available now)

In This Devastating Fever, novelist Alice Fox attempts to capture the life of 20th-century writer, publisher and colonial explorer Leonard Woolf. She struggles to wrestle her complicated subject succinctly onto the page: ‘[H]er novel was a shapeshifter, a series of mirages. Drafts took shape. Shimmered. Disappeared.’ As her novel evolves, at first over years, and then decades, her preoccupation and fascination with first Woolf, and then his famous wife and literary companion, Virginia, grows.

Cunningham expertly blends fact and fiction, space and time, and renders the writer’s struggle, no matter the century, adeptly.

The book is at once biography, novel and also a kind of memoir. Sophie Cunningham expertly blends fact and fiction, space and time, and renders the writer’s struggle, no matter the century, adeptly. By exploring Alice’s creative difficulties as the world around her grows more dissonant with every passing year, and alongside the turbulent and tragic lives of these two literary figures, elements of Cunningham’s own battle in writing this novel over many years are recreated on the page. The fires of 2020 and the beginnings of the Covid-19 pandemic are fictionalised in devastating tones, while Leonard Woolf’s increasingly desperate attempts to prevent his wife from her eventual suicide unfold in a tender and devastating reflection on the fierceness of love. Alice may set out to write the story of Leonard, but Virginia is just as hard to ignore, so significant was she both within her time period and now, especially to non-male writers: ‘Her manifestation was far more dramatic than Leonard’s ever were.’  As a novelist, Alice is caught between two figures who are as enigmatic and compelling as each other, both of whom she finds impossible to encapsulate and recreate satisfactorily on the page (and both of whom Cunningham has rendered vivid and complex, as they undoubtedly were in their lives).

An immensely textured and rich novel, Cunningham experiments with form in a way that is reminiscent of George Saunders’ impressive Lincoln in the Bardo. Fever’s intertwined narratives and deviations in style or tone run the risk of reading convoluted, or at least complicated in the hands of a lesser writer, but they are handled with grace and elegance. The result is a book that is really more of a tapestry of mirrors, so well does Cunningham weave together connected threads in ways that illustrate their dissonances and similarities. This Devastating Fever is an extraordinary achievement.

— Georgia Brough