Podcast Transcript
Kavita Bedford “Friends & Dark Shapes”
SPEAKERS
Nicole Abadee, Kavita Bedford
Nicole Abadee 00:05
Hello, I'm Nicole Abadee and I write about books for good weekend. Welcome to the Books, Books, Books podcast in which I interview the best writers from Australia and overseas about their latest book. Thank you for joining me. Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge the country where I live and work and from where I'm joining this conversation, the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. I pay my respects to their elders past and present to the elders of all communities and cultures across Australia, and to leaders of the future. You can listen to this podcast all of the episodes at nicoleabadee.com.au or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I am delighted to be speaking with Australian Indian writer Kavita Bedford about her debut novel "Friends and Dark Shapes" published in Australia by Text Publishing, and in the United States by Europa Editions, earlier this year. Before we begin, I'd like to say I'm working on Gadigal land. And I would like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, the traditional custodians of this land and pay my respects to their elders past and present.
Now very sadly, this session was due to be recorded at Byron Writers Festival live in August 2021. As most of you will know the festival was cancelled due to COVID-19. But Books Books Books, my podcast, is thrilled to be able to present this conversation with Kavita in collaboration with Byron Writers Festival. So welcome to all of you who are listening. Before we begin, I want to tell you a little bit about Kavita and her career to date. Kavita is a creative writer and editor with a background in anthropology, journalism and literature. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Griffith Review, the Saturday Paper, and many other publications. Kavita has won a number of literary prizes, fellowships and grants, including a 2018 Churchill fellowship in Europe. She is the 2020 to 2021 Westwords Writer in Residence at the Writing and Society Research Center at Western Sydney University. She lives and works in Sydney, teaching Media and Global Studies. This wonderful book, "Friends and Dark Shapes" has been receiving fantastic reviews not only in Australia, but also in the United States. And I particularly like this one from the New York Times which said, "Bedford is a talented writer with a wonderful eye for detail, and her crisp, measured sentences are genuinely impressive. After grief, alienation and loneliness suffused the novel. The story earns its way towards a sense of hope." Kavita welcome.
Kavita Bedford 02:50
Thank you so much for having me, Nicole, and obviously it would have been beautiful to be with you in Byron Bay and with everyone, but it's also so wonderful to have this opportunity.
Nicole Abadee 02:59
Kavita could you start by telling our listeners what your book's about?
Kavita Bedford 03:03
Yeah, so basically takes place over one year where a young unnamed narrator moves into a share house. And she's with a group of three other young people who are navigating things like online dating, living in a gentrified suburb, how to deal with politics around race and class, as well as just navigating day to day life. But behind the scenes as the undertow she's grappling with the loss of her father one year after his past. So grief suffuses the novel a lot.
Nicole Abadee 03:34
So before we start to talk about the novel itself, there's something I just wanted to ask you about. I know that you wrote this novel over a period of about five years and I believe that you started it when you were part of a writers program called Under the Volcano in Mexico. Could you tell us a little bit about that program?
Kavita Bedford 03:50
Yeah, it's such a wonderful program. I actually applied to it not knowing a lot about it, I'd received a grant and was really lucky to get that and was looking to at the time, actually, right. I'd worked in Mexico many years before. And I was looking to write something around Mexico. And so I went there, and met this incredible group of people from Latin America, but also America, and the director of the program, Magda Bogin, she works for the UN as well as working in creative writing. And it's just created the most incredible community of writers and thinkers and critics and journalists and just this 10 Day program that has such an energy to it and has given me lifelong writing friends, but also, you know, people to sort of support and work with, so I highly recommend to anyone who wants to do something like that,
Nicole Abadee 04:45
Kavita "Friends and Dark Shapes" is very much a Sydney novel. It's set in and around Sydney, from Red Fern where the share house is, to Bondi Beach, Bankstown Fairfield the CBD. It started as a letter that you wrote to Sydney, when you were feeling angry at it, could you tell us a little bit about that? And why it was you're feeling angry that Sydney?
Kavita Bedford 05:08
Yeah. I mean, it's sort of been interesting. I've been talking to different states around this topic, and some people can really understand why you'd feel angry. Yeah, it began as a as a letter. And I think what I was trying to understand was two things. One was I'd just grown up on a lot of literature about place. I mean, I love literature that is set in cities but I was realising that I had sort of suffused my own coming of age, if you will, with cities like London, and Dublin, and Paris and New York. And in many ways, I've kind of immerse those more into my being and more into my kind of writing practice than I had around anything that was sort of particularly Australian. And part of that was because some of the experiences didn't necessarily speak to my own experiences of coming of age. And in Sydney, like Australian literature sometimes didn't deal with the city in the same kind of manner. Often, it tends to be sort of a bit more rural in setting or grappling with different kinds of ideas around identity, and sort of coming from mixed race, family, and also migration and various things I sort of wasn't necessarily at the time, I'd started it, finding that, so echoing in a lot of the literature that I was reading from here. But then another thing was around my own personal reasons, where I was seeing a city that I love, greatly and deeply changing very much before our eyes, I think with gentrification, but also just the speediness of the process of change. I mean, cities always change, it's part of their, you know, they're an organism in so many ways they have to, but I think the kind of speediness with which things are changing, and the rapid pace of it left me feeling quite alienated from a lot of the, the kind of way it was moving into. And, you know, in so many ways, Sydney, with all its beautiful enclaves and wonderful kind of spaces, but it's also very much a business centric city. And I think sort of trying to grapple with, where do people who don't fit into those kind of more mainstream narratives, whether it's around kind of, you know, race and identity, or even it's just found economics and being and living in a city, it started to make me feel very angry. And I think I was also dealing with my own personal ideas of loss. And what became very interesting to me was this idea of how a place itself imbues or, or how much, you know, we shape a place or does a place shape us. And I found that a really interesting thing, because I was sort of interested in this narrator, tracking her process of grief and loss along the contours of a city that she's also trying to understand who we actually are in this more modern day kind of capacity, and where it's made up. And it's a city made up of so many different people who've lost in very different ways.
Nicole Abadee 08:06
You said that you never thought you would set your first novel in Sydney. But yet you have, why did you decide to do that?
Kavita Bedford 08:13
A lot of it actually came, interestingly, from the writing program I was doing in Mexico, but also talking with a lot of writers from other countries. And I initially thought I would write about anywhere but this city, or this country. And it was really interesting and I think a lot of the time you need distance, and you often need to be outside. And there's a very interesting thing that happens around that dynamic of being inside or outside.
Nicole Abadee 08:42
Just so that listeners know, much of this novel was written while you were overseas. When you're in Mexico, you were in Barcelona, you're in London, you were in Berlin, you were in India and that was my next question. What did it feel like? Writing about Sydney from afar? And then I said, did the distance enable you to see the city more clearly?
Kavita Bedford 09:00
Well, very prescient question and I Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's, you know, I was looking at a lot of writing of expat writers but that doesn't quite capture the same thing as when you're from and born into a city. So you know, I mean, the classics, the Malcolm Lowry's, the Ernest Hemingway's, and, you know, but it was an interesting thing to actually be from a city to try to look at it with a kind of more anthropological lens, if you will, being part of my training, but also trying to really capture feeling I felt it was really important to have that kind of more sensory stuff, but also knowing that you're kind of tied to a place so it did create a really interesting dynamic and part of it I think, was also having conversations around place with people not from here, and it started to help me see personal things I was grappling with around identity but also around how global so many of our experiences are. And, you know, we're living in this globalised kind of space where I can talk with people from across the globe, sort of around my age group, if you will. And in so many ways, our reference points are similar around music around films around books. And so in one way, it's this incredible kind of unifying force where, you know, I had a similar coming of age to say, someone who's living, you know, in, in Paris or in America. But then there were also these things that were so incredibly particular to Sydney. And I think it was a bit of a challenge that I wanted to set myself where, and I don't know if there's anger, but I sort of felt like, I've learned the names of streets in New York, I've internalised places that I've never been to. And I see no problem in doing that I love being transported to cities and places that I've never been and I kind of wanted to know if it was possible to write a very universal kind of story but that was set very locally. And where I could presume that if a reader doesn't know something, that's okay, I can still include it in language, I can still include it with street names, I can still have a very kind of parochial set while still being incredibly universal.
Nicole Abadee 11:24
Just as a bigger picture question. It seemed to me a lot of these characters are second generation Australians, their parents are migrants, that is, of course your own experience. You were born here, your father's Australian I gather and your mother is Indian. How important was it for you to tell the stories to tell this story? From the perspective of migrants to Australia, how important was it for you that their voices should be heard?
Kavita Bedford 11:50
Yeah, it was very important. I think it was a huge launch pad for it. Again, there are a few things where, and I grappled, you know, I thought about it for a long time, before I did it, I wanted it to be mainly second generation, I think there is, you know, and obviously, that's my own experience. But I also know stories very much from my family of first generation, and they've been, they are being covered, you know, and, and importantly, and very much needed. But I wanted to write second generation, because I think a very interesting phenomenon is occurring with that. And especially because I wanted to write about class. And I use that by trying to look at this issue of gentrification a bit more closely and I think the interesting thing with second generation is, we were born here, we belong here and we feel very, very culturally tied and part of this kind of upbringing. But I was kind of intrigued by this idea that many of us have had families that have had to leave places, and many of us have had have had families or grown up with stories of knowing incredible sacrifice and loss. But they're not necessarily our lived experience. Yet, they've kind of imbued their ways into our viewpoints of the world. And now with gentrification, you know, many of us come from middle class backgrounds. And I think sometimes the migrant narrative becomes a bit of a kind of, you know, almost poverty narrative at times, but a lot of us have come from, you know, very highly educated middle class families. And we are participating in the problem.
Nicole Abadee 13:19
Let's touch on that notion of gentrification because you deal with it in the novel. There's one particular scene where the unnamed narrator goes to a little shoe shop in Redfern and speaks to a man who I think he originally came from Lebanon. And he, he started his shop in 1964. And he's still there, all these years later, and he tells her about what has happened in Redfern from 1964 when he first moved there, to what it's like now, would you like to just tell us a little bit about that?
Kavita Bedford 13:49
Yeah, I was really interested. I guess a lot of the voices that make up the novel aren't necessarily characters that that occur throughout the whole thing. A lot of them are shopkeepers, Uber drivers...
Nicole Abadee 14:00
People whose stories aren't always told, yeah, everyday people who are part of the thrumming heart of the city, but who we don't hear from all that often.
Kavita Bedford 14:10
I'm so happy that you pick that up and that's I wanted this voice really populated when I was thinking of cities, I kept thinking of, I want it to be populated by voices and voices that aren't just one generation, even though it's obviously in many ways coming from the perspective of a generation. But I wanted it to be this kind of thronging sense of different sacrifices and different stories. And yeah, I chose to set it in Redfern, which I think has a very unique history to Australia with the indigenous background as well as this kind of very much in its current present state of gentrification, but also where the first wave happened and where you had a lot of people from, you know, during the Civil War coming in, and that first wave of Italians and Lebanese and Yugoslavians former and making up a city at that time or making up a place. Setting up their businesses like this shoe shop repairs man. And then you have the second wave occuring kind of now where you have a lot of young professionals moving in. And once again, and it's such an interesting place where but also a kind of heartbreaking place where all these layers of communities, and you had, at the time of this book, they ended the forced relocation of indigenous communities, once again, happening on this soil. The pushing out of other migrant groups, and then kind of second generation hip, young people also participating in that very kind of relocation space. And I was really interested and I feel like gentrification is such a loaded and fascinating occurrence, because it's very hard sometimes, you know, you want to blame someone, or you want to look at that and I think one thing in this book was, I was trying very hard not to place blame on any one group. And I wanted it to be that there is no kind of one victim, or you know, and I think sometimes migrant stories can also go into those kinds of victim stories, naturally, in many ways needed but I wanted in this particular story, this also to be a story about, just to bring up questions of what are we all engaging and participating in as a kind of class and as a community and as a city? And whose voices are being pushed out? And whose voices do we choose to listen to? And how do we listen to each other? I suppose was a very big question in it as well. And where is that space for silence and empathy and hearing the stories of people that that shaped us?
Nicole Abadee 16:45
Kavita, let's talk a little bit now about the narrator? What do we know about her when the novel begins?
Kavita Bedford 16:52
So the novel begins with her moving into a share house one year after her father died. And that's set up in the very first line, but the grief itself and the references to the father don't start to unfold and that story doesn't take shape to kind of the latter third of the novel. And the first kind of half or two thirds really set up about the sharehouse and the dynamics with the three other young people that she's moved in with, and about the place and sort of collecting as we've discussed these voices of different people that populate the city. And she works part time as a freelance journalist and sort of allows her to go around, you know, the city asking these somewhat sometimes intrusive questions of strangers, and I needed a, I needed a vehicle to allow her to be doing that, that wasn't just grief bound. But what unfolds is it very much is about grief, and trying to understand stories of people who've lost in very, very different ways. And she goes around with a photographer to kind of what I termed the, you know, the lesser kind of frequented parts of Sydney, if you will. And I thought that was really important. And I it's something I'm really passionate about, I guess, is kind of, you know, there's so many different narratives of Sydney that are that are placed. And I think it's also been really interesting having this book out at the time when we're going through COVID. I mean, I think we've already just seen the very fact of the way, the city is kind of divided into two areas, and just how it's been treated during lockdown. And the stories of Western Sydney and southwestern Sydney, are stories that get either very maligned by the press, or they don't actually get representation or real representation from kind of more everyday people who live there. And it's sort of feels like it's set up often to be this, it's got a function of fear, that allows another part of Sydney to just kind of exist and do its own thing. And I felt it was really important to bring those those stories and some of those people, which is why I wanted it to be people from the area and not necessarily sort of the narrator telling you what these stories are, because and I based it on a lot of actual interviews and, and people that I had spoken to about these issues
Nicole Abadee 19:14
We meet some fascinating characters for example, early in the piece, she she goes out to the West and interviews a Syrian woman who runs a hijab shop and her, her mission is very much what yours was, I think, which is to just show the perspectives of everyday people who live in Sydney.
Kavita Bedford 19:31
Yeah, exactly. She runs a, yeah, she runs a fashion store, and kind of keeps being coerced to tell stories about, you know, the war in Syria and trauma and grief. And I think it's really important to also show you know, in this case, this woman actually just wanted to make kind of modest fashion that was really beautiful and interesting and cool to people from Australia as well as you know, sort of Australian Muslims. Those things that get lost, those nuances that really get lost in a lot of these kind of more dramatic debates,
Nicole Abadee 20:03
I want to ask you a little bit about the narrator's position as an outsider in her own city. At one point, she jumped on a train at 11am in the morning and speaks about everyone who lives outside the city's routine hours, jumps aboard, and we have that concept of the outsider being referred to in terms of the narrator herself quite a bit. The narrator, as I've said, was, or is an outsider in her own city. Why do you think that is?
Kavita Bedford 20:32
That's a really beautiful question. I think I wanted to bring in that sense. And I think what happens a lot with people from sort of diverse backgrounds and different kinds of family experiences, is a feeling, yes of not fully belonging, but kind of trapped, because you also don't really belong to the the other country. So you're part of this fabric, and you're part of its blood and bones in so many ways, but you're also not necessarily on board with a lot of those narratives. But I think it's more than just kind of race as well. I think there is a very strong generational sense as well, of being pushed out of a city, around affordability, crisis around kind of mentalities and how to kind of grapple with being part of this. And then I think something also happens that's even greater around cities themselves. Where people feel cities have such thronging huge spaces of so many competing jostling needs and desires and wants and hurts, and how does anyone really belong to a city when they're such sort of movable changeable beasts? And I think I was interested in that thing around a city changing constantly so, so, you know, in a kind of sense of impermanence, like what do we actually even attach and belong to, and if a city is the closest thing we've got to attach into, is that a is that a true or real thing to even be attached towards.
Nicole Abadee 22:11
I also wondered if to some extent, her grief was alienating. If it, because she, she suffers this enormous grief, which you write about very beautifully. She talks about how people swerve to avoid her and they see her, she talks about waking up with an ice cold shiver of dread. Is it also partly her grief that is making her an outsider like a, if you like, an observer of her own life?
Kavita Bedford 22:36
Yeah, absolutely. And that was a huge part of the book, I kind of partly also wanted to give this space of the sharehouse and the characters, a kind of thrown in, you know, very present sort of tense feel. Because I knew that really, at the heart, I wanted to write about grief. And grief is such a fluid and constantly changing state itself. But it also does, it's sort of the thing that allows you to be very close to death itself. So it causes or creates a bit of a haze where you do naturally feel outside of the folds of life. And I wanted that, a kind of detached observer sense, that takes over when you don't feel part of something, but also very weighed down by your own sense of, of extreme loss. To then sort of really flow into that last part of the book, or to explain a lot of why she has such a detached perspective, you know, and the way she even narrates and talks about these people that are sort of her friends and her housemates, is with this constantly watching observational kind of not clinical, but like there's a tone to it that's quite removed. And I think that that's a really huge part of grief is that you do feel completely removed from it. And and, you know, there were parts where I felt frustrated I wanted her to be in amongst the life of things, but that's not what that phase allows for.
Nicole Abadee 24:12
Let's talk a little bit about the three housemates. Nikki is Australian Cambodian, Sammy is an Australian Palestinian and Bowerbird, wasn't sure what he was he,
Kavita Bedford 24:23
Never described. Yeah,
Nicole Abadee 24:24
No, but he works in a guitar shop Sammy is a lawyer. Nikki works in graphics. And they one of the things that I think you talk about a lot you say at one point, they have group dinners on a Sunday night to replicate some idea of a traditional family and we have various scenes of them sitting together talking together about what sort of toilet paper they should use, whether they should buy nice furniture for the house, whether they should hire a cleaner, which is a controversial one, whether they should paint the walls. And I wondered to what extent the share house has become the equivalent of family for unmarried millennials?I also wondered how difficult is it to navigate those sharehouse, flatmate relationships?
Kavita Bedford 25:05
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think what was so interesting about it, you know, when I was getting to write the share house was not part of it at all. So I actually wrote a first draft of this book, which was very grief based, heavily, heavily so, and the share house had nothing to do with it. But it still had these observational parts, it still had these kind of, it had a lot of the characters but it didn't have this kind of tight unit, if you will. And that also allowed for a kind of structural aspect to it. And there are a few reasons I really wanted a share house in it. And one is I think that partly, partly it's really generational in part in the sense that it allowed a conversation to occur around what is home and a conversation to occur around what are the milestones actually, of coming of age. And you know, I've kind of described this book as a coming of age book but it's so interesting, because I mean, a traditional Coming of Age book is much, much earlier stage, it's not kind of your late 20s by any means, it's the teens.
Nicole Abadee 26:11
There's a great quote, there's a couple of them that I've noted, but I think this is probably the classic one that's that's related to what you're saying, "we have achieved none of the things we should have by our age, no marriage, no property, no city income, no babies, no assets. And another point we are turning 30. And things don't look like we imagined they would" They describe themselves as aspirational and they do seem to be in this liminal state, don't they? Between the traditional coming of age, which we think of as 21 / 22, but they're not at the next stage of their lives, either where they have mortgages or families or necessarily solid careers. So yeah, talk a little bit about that state.
Kavita Bedford 26:50
Yeah, I think it's a really forced liminality and in some ways, it's it feels I was really interested in the idea with our generation of what parts feel like choice and what parts feel like constraints. And I think a lot of the time, we've kind of adopted a lot of the language of a kind of, you know, it's more a pro choice and, and as if it is this kind of emancipatory model. And sometimes that comes out of a need, and, you know, a way to kind of coerce what is actually happening in your own sense of lack of control over a situation, and to feel as if you you've got that, because I think there's a lot of deeper freedoms that are that are not actually able to be self actualised or realised. And I was really interested in the whole idea around home and property ownership. I mean, it is the Australian. I mean, it's all the papers talk about but also, it's a very Australian thing, you know, in many ways. There's a lot of other countries that don't have that real sense of one must own a house. And I was so interested in the expectation behind that the privilege behind that but also, is it incredibly unfair that one generation isn't allowed to? I don't know is the thing you know, I think it's just such a fascinating issue that that continually comes up and who's locking who out of a homing and, and the economics behind that. And especially then when you have those debates happening on unseeded land as well. And these debates happening on a much deeper level, and where you have migrants coming in, who are also part of that dynamic of whose land is whose. So I really wanted to explore some of those ideas of what is land and what is the depth of its meaning. And what is ownership over land? Is ownership about buying place? Is ownership around power? Is ownership around the experiences that you've had? Is ownership around losing love, on land, or death on land, or finding love on land? And I was just really interested in what actually binds us to a place and how we think about those models of what binds us to a place.
Nicole Abadee 29:06
Something else that was I thought, sort of a strong theme of the novel, was the concept of loneliness. At one point in the book, the narrator says that she writes about this loneliness. Another aspect of it, of course, is that it's a product in her case of her grief. At one point she says it's "she feels like loneliness is not something she should feel in the age of constant connection." And I wonder if that was another theme that you wanted really to explore that amongst the busyness of life in a big city like Sydney, there are so many people who suffer from loneliness and perhaps technology, although it's meant to remove that, in fact, actually exacerbates it?
Kavita Bedford 29:42
Yeah, I mean, I definitely wanted to talk about loneliness in the city. I was reading also Olivia Lange at the time and a lot of you know, amazing writers who talk about this and there's something so much more lonely about being around people when you feel alone than just being alone. And I was really Interested in the different forms of loneliness that that people have. And that we, it's sort of still feels like it's something taboo to really talk about in an age when we supposedly talk about everything. I felt like grief and loneliness is still the great, you know, we can talk about sex, we can talk about all kinds of aspects, but but there's some things which I really wanted the novel to explore about, like, what is allowed to be said still and what isn't?
Nicole Abadee 30:24
Why do you think that is? Why do you think we don't talk very much about loneliness?
Kavita Bedford 30:28
I think it's connected to shame. Yeah, very much so and, and I guess that's that kind of idea around, you know, it feels like we're not allowed to be lonely when everything is plugged in and operated. And I think, you know, it's seen from - I can speak to my generation - from my generation, but also, I think, seen from all sides kinds of aspects of everyone talks about how busy they are. And I'm so interested in yes, that is, that is a flaw and yes, that many people feel overwhelmed by it but there's also a kind of badge of honour to it. And there's a huge I mean, you know, we can go into capitalism, and neoliberalism and all of these aspects, and what's kind of fuelling that, but that kind of counterpoint of, you know, pride over busyness, and shame over unproductivity or loneliness, or grief, or kind of, you know, or it's seen as something that you're supposed to be able to get over yourself. And I was really interested, you know, even in smaller levels of grief, you know, when people talk about, you know, breakups or losing jobs, or all of these things, it's not a society that that wants to talk or spend much time on that loss and actually like dealing with it, it's all about moving on, quickly. Getting over that, you know, you've got Tinder, you've got dating apps, you've got online job searches, you've got so much at your fingertips of disposable, you know, sort of ability to gain stuff that, that to just say, I need to pause or I need time, just feels still. And I think it's actually becoming somewhat changing over this time during COVID, where you've had suddenly had people on a more mass scale, feeling that kind of grief and loneliness and overwhelm.
Nicole Abadee 32:13
And more prepared to talk about it openly do you think?
Kavita Bedford 32:16
Yeah, I think that's something that's, that's been quite incredible and, and having this book coming out during that time when people are actually open to those questions. But even at the time that I was writing it sort of few years ago, it still felt like those were things you shouldn't necessarily talk aloud with others.
Nicole Abadee 32:33
Let's talk now about racism. Another major concern of the book, we see many, many incidents of casual racism in the book as well as outright racist, racism. The one I wanted to ask you about is this, the narrator goes and meets up with another young woman of colour, who was also a freelance journalist like she is, and they've both been asked to write about growing up in Australia and they both say what that means actually is a euphemism for, "can you write about what it's like to grow up in Australia as a young woman of colour," they both are named. So how does the woman who's not the narrator feel about being asked to write that article?
Kavita Bedford 33:16
I think the other woman, so she's from Mogadishu, African Australian, and she's got anger and fire in her belly about it. And and that can be such a motivating important force, you know, sometimes to have as well, to actually get you to do something about it. And she's got a lot of sort of a lot more academic and clear theories around, you know, othering in this country, and why it's important to, to speak out and be a voice, but also, you know, she's sassy and she sees exactly what's happening from a media perspective around, you know, how this is going to be clickbait. How media very much kind of internalises its own racism, how you can sort of be caught into positions of being, you know, the person who's who has to speak on behalf of people of colour. And either you become this kind of token representative, or you get put as a kind of, you know, this is an opinion piece. So it's not actually factual or correct in any way. And so she's kind of she's, she's quite scathing, and able to cut down sort of what's actually the the power plays. But I think one of the things I really wanted with the narrator again with grief, is it's such an engulfing sense of apathy as well, it can create and that fire in her belly has sort of gone out. So she's passively listening to a lot of people who are who are fired up and fueled by injustice. And all she can think about really is her own loss.
Nicole Abadee 34:46
I want to go back to the young woman from Mogadishu. And one of the things she says, she says, "The thing I'm most scared to talk publicly about in this country is race. I'd rather talk about being a sex worker or casual worker, anything other than race?" Why does she say that Kavita? What happens here in Australia, if a person of colour talks about race?
Kavita Bedford 35:08
Well, I think a lot of those things, I think it can still be rather taboo. A lot of the issues comes, you know, historically around, you know, I think just not having a vocabulary to really talk about it, it feels often as if you've got to have the discussion from the beginning of do we even have a problem around racism? And that is an incredibly tedious and boring prob, hurt thing to keep discussing and it feels like you can't actually get into the nuance of any real debate. There are many levels to this that are much more interesting. And if we use that as a kind of baseline, meaning, yes, we do have a problem with racism in this country, then perhaps we can actually have a more sophisticated and interesting and encompassing conversation about where to go from there, or even unpacking some of those issues, but to be continually called upon to then just stand in front of people and have to be a kind of, you know, question and as people sort of flog you to say, we don't have a problem, you end up becoming this kind of decoy to the whole thing. And I think that's incredibly frustrating and hurtful. And it feels like a waste of a lot of people's intellect and time.
Nicole Abadee 36:22
Let's talk a little bit about Sydney itself. It seems to me you write about Sydney, with ambivalence, you write about the beauty of Sydney, Bondi Beach, the Jacaranda trees, but also the dark side. So at one point, the narrator says "it is beautiful, but it looks fake." At another point, "it's not a city where you can easily make a friend." Something else that you focus on is this idea. I think you referred to earlier of Sydney as segregated and at one point that you, the narrator says "Sydney doesn't have a centre. It's a series of enclaves Sydneysiders do not have a holistic sense of the place we inhabit it is a segregated city." Would you like to talk a little bit about that?
Kavita Bedford 37:06
Yeah, I mean, it's it's such a fascinating city in so many ways. I think there is definitely the sense of architecturally how it's been designed, where, you know, even sort of Parramatta which is now again being recruited as the centre of the city and was once considered the centre. But a lot of people with this sort of government out there, you know, hear a lot of complaints even then about going out that way. It's not a city that just by transportation, you know, it's caught up by so many waterways. I have it as well, like we all have it, you know, to actually get from one end of the city to another, take can take hours. When a friend moves you, when a friend moves to the other side of the bridge, or a friend moves to another area, you end up kind of mourning them, because you're like, okay, well, there goes seeing them. So it already is built into the city. It's not always sort of, you know, the mentality but of course, how a city is is kind of formed and its architecture also then comes into forming the being and the mindset around it. And I think those kinds of ways where it's become rather pocketed in many ways, where people don't necessarily meet up. I feel like it's so interesting. We, it's a city where you hear about the other side of the city via the news, not via conversation or going there necessarily.
Nicole Abadee 38:33
You make the point that that has been if anything accentuated by the last three months of lockdown in Sydney, the city has become more and more segregated, I guess.
Kavita Bedford 38:45
Yeah, well, I think a lot of people are feeling actually that it's just mirroring what was already there. It's just now out in the open in many ways. And I think it is a really, you know, when you do have even sort of using the kind of lock down if you will, as as an example. I mean, obviously that's not in the book, but it is a kind of, there's not a unifying necessarily sense of this city, in the way that we treat its inhabitants. And the way that we you know, as a city coming together or dealing with adversity is it's not always together. It's often done in very segregated or different ways, or there's one rule for one group of people, etc. And yeah, I was interested then if how do you then create a sense of belonging? Is it to your kind of tribe? Is it to your area? Is it to what what actually forms that holistic sense that many other cities have? And it's something you know, I've also heard it a lot from, from when I was sort of younger, even growing up a lot of people in kind of arts and, you know, literature and kind of more creative fields as well really moaning, bemoaning that as well, because it's quite hard to get involved in the centre of something that's happening. And I think it's interesting, you know, a lot of stuff that's been done in the CBD now, it's really beautiful and things are changing again. But it's often not felt like a city where you know where to go, and everyone will be there. That doesn't mean, it doesn't have that kind of central hub, there might be a central hub in your area, and then people from that area go there. And as a result, I was again, really interested in more than what perspectives are being told and being heard about this city or about this place. And when I sometimes spoke to people from overseas or from other cities, sometimes I had a completely different narrative at play about the city, than another person might have. So yeah, I was interested in how place and segregation and these kinds of things actually come into a sense of belonging.
Nicole Abadee 40:53
Kavita I just have one final question for you. When you were writing this book, you said that you thought carefully about the differences about writing on place as an outsider versus an insider, and the challenges of othering and familiarity. And I wondered how you saw yourself, you were born in Sydney, you grew up here, you've lived a lot of your life here. Do you see yourself as an outsider or as an insider?
Kavita Bedford 41:20
Hmm, you know, I think I, as a lot of people do write their way into understanding as well. And I think also it being a kind of first novel. It was a huge part of me trying to actually grapple and tackle that exact issue for myself. And I was trying to understand to what do I owe this city? Um, to what extent does it hold me when sometimes I felt like it didn't? And to what extent Yeah, like, is there kind of love and roots in this, in this place? And I think, through writing it, it really actually helped me feel like I belong to a bit more and felt like I was part of the fabric and the histories and the waterways. And I think just that sense of place being just so imbued in my own being, is, was a really beautiful thing to come out of this whole exercise as well.
Nicole Abadee 42:20
Well, that's a really wonderful note to end on. Thank you so much for speaking to me today. Thank you for participating in this collaboration between Byron Writers Festival and Books, Books, Books. I wish we'd been able to speak in person, but I look forward to the day when we can meet in person and I congratulate you on the great success your book has had already and I wish you the very best for it for the the time to come.
Kavita Bedford 42:43
Thank you very much it was an absolute pleasure. And thanks to Byron Bay as well.
Nicole Abadee 42:51
Thank you for listening to Books, Books, Books. If you liked what you heard in this episode, please go to my website, nicoleabadee.com.au. To listen to all the episodes and find out more about the podcast you can also find me Nicole Abadee on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and look for my reviews in Good Weekend. You can subscribe to Books, Books, Books at Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google and all the usual places. It would be lovely if you could go to any of these platforms and give a rating or review. Thank you. I look forward to talking books with you again soon.