Roanna Gonzalves: The Permanent Resident. UWA Publishing, November 2016. ISBN: 9781742589022
In June 2009 Eureka Street published a short story entitled 'Curry Muncher'. Its author, Sydney writer Roanna Gonsalves, had come to Australia from India as an international student, and her story stood in part as a response to a much publicised spate of violence against Indian students in Australian capital cities.
But the story, a revised version of which appears in Gonsalves' NSW Premier's Literary Award winning collection The Permanent Resident, is not didactic or sensationalistic. It is told from the perspective of a young woman who witnesses a violent act against a man with whom she works, and navigates her responses to it.
She feels she is acutely marked as an outsider not just by her skin but by the smell of her clothes (she is on her way home from her job at an Indian restaurant), and is both mortified and relieved when the would be assailants, young white men, pass her by in order to menace her friend in another part of the train carriage.
The emotional nuance of this story is evident throughout those collected in The Permanent Resident. Gonzales' use of language is sublime and carries insights that allow the very particular experiences of very particular characters to resonate beyond the moment, with the experiences of all who have felt themselves outsiders.
Consider this passage from 'Easter 2016'. The story finds a woman belatedly, and increasingly disinterestedly, scouring the stores of Sydney's south-west for Sichuan peppercorns. The elusive ingredient is required for a meal that she is cooking for Easter lunch, which her rather belligerent husband insists must be done right.
'After I kissed [my son] Noah,' says the narrator, 'and left him eating his chips in his red T-shirt, I put on my most comfortable shoes. They are wet now, from the puddle. But they are cleansed and ready to walk on the path paved by Canterbury Council. On Beamish St, there is no trace of the forest it used to be for millennia.'
"While carrying a weight of tradition, the stories are thoroughly modern, even topical. Still, like 'Curry Muncher', they avoid easy labels and pat answers."
In these elegant few lines we have a glimpse of the character's domestic life and her way of operating within it; a religious hue in the accidental anointing of her shoes; and an almost comical account of the clash of the ancient with