What Kept You?
by Raaza Jamshed
ISBN 9781923106413
Reviewed by ROUMINA PARSA
The monster in Frankenstein is a literate creature. He becomes fluent in three languages within his first year of existence, giving him the preternatural gift of communicating directly with his creator.
‘If I cannot inspire love,’ he tells Victor, ‘I will cause fear’ (1).
But in screen adaptations, the creature is non-speaking. He is ossified in joints and feeling. Burning cottages down not from the pain of his own unhomeliness but simple malice. Rendered without agency or reason, he is made monstrous by his non-speech, leaving the audience with only an image of his destruction.
If defying nature mythologises new monsters, then defining their essence is also a constructed practice. It depends entirely on their representation; on who is speaking when telling the story. This is an understanding that Raaza Jamshed brings to What Kept You?, a novel roaming with beasts of language and with hauntings of intergenerational trauma. The protagonist, Jahan, is an immigrant from Lahore, a city that has witnessed and survived the sufferings of the India Pakistan partition. Her ancestors come from Kashmir, a state divided and controlled by both countries as a result of post-imperial cartographies in the subcontinent. This political violence is a monster of its own. But alongside memory and the mythical, Jamshed also explores another kind of created monster: the migrant. Spoken of and for, isolated, othered and silenced. Feminist philosopher Kelly Oliver says gaining subjectivity as an “othered” individual requires becoming a speaking subject (2). Raaza Jamshed writing her novel is an act of becoming a speaking subject. My reviewing her novel is an act of becoming a speaking subject. Yet, subjectivity can only be gained when the dominant group ‘recognises something familiar in that other…when [they] can see that the other is a person too’ (3, p.9). It’s not enough to merely speak. The unmuted monster – the migrant, the other – must also be understood.
Jahan is aware of these nuances of speech. Like Raaza Jamshed, she lives in Sydney with her Middle Eastern husband, volunteering at creative writing classes for children from various backgrounds. Stories, Jahan teaches, can be one’s compass. In the midst of grieving her Nani (grandmother), processing a miscarriage and navigating an approaching bushfire, Jahan returns to the formative tales inherited from her matriarchs. Tales of girls going missing in the night. Demonic figures. Moving shadows and houses built on bones. The result is a series of letters from Jahan to her late Nani, a meditation on which stories to carry and which to abandon.
Like much anti-colonial literature written in English, the language in this novel is required to turn against itself, to do ‘a different cultural work’ (4, p.4) than that historically inherent. At times Jamshed’s execution of this is clear, focused. Jahan’s mother adopts a British accent to ‘tell someone off without raising her voice’(p101). A student mocks Jahan’s enunciation, ‘cuntinue’(p40). Simultaneously, Jahan insists, English is a toothless conduit. It’s a ‘second tongue that my country forced down my throat’ (p159). English is removed from ‘the abstract coils of fear that could only be made concrete in Urdu’ (p135) – her Nani’s warnings of ‘beasts. Ghouls. Demons. Monsters’ (p134). The historical power of English is invoked in order to undercut it. Appropriated only to highlight its own imposing inadequacy when another language is held at the centre.
When non-English words are used – as is the case with Urdu and Arabic by Jamshed – the linguistic disruption expands. The reader is called to attention. “Foreign” words made natural to the novel’s landscape cause a specific unsettling: reader turned migrant. (Or even more startling, native English speaker turned migrant.) As Jahan reflects on her youth in Pakistan, the reader is immersed within a different time, space and language, creating an almost fantastical context. Location becomes a metaphysical meeting point where it is the English speaker, and not the other, who is suspended in incomprehension.
Teamed with first-person narration directed solely towards her Nani, Jahan signals to the reader that they are a witness to rather than the intended recipient of her words. It’s a layered rejection of Kelly Oliver’s theoretical path towards subjectivity. ‘Story, perhaps, is the only English word I’ve found whole, unsullied by insufficiency,’ says Jahan, ‘it conjures the word house, one storey stacked upon another’ (p12). It feels purposeful that she doesn’t instead use the word home. A refreshing sidestep of that old question, on what it really means for a migrant and every answering variation of both/ neither/ either/or. I’m not writing to be understood, Jahan seems to be saying. In fact, I am sacrificing understanding for an attempt at a truer expression. For the building of something new, unceded, unclaimed.
Such is the ultimate migrant goal. An existence outside the parameters of performance. With a background in architecture, Jahan enacts this in the literal sense. She walks Sydney’s streets and imagines them altered. Draws parks, trees and swings in different configurations. Buildings are toppled by her pen. Elsewhere, grass and weeds overtake busy roads. Sometimes, she’s in the sketches. But most of the time, she’s omitted, ‘as if only [her] absence could make the scenes whole’ (p45). Again, the air of the fantastical is summoned. A subversion of the “invasion” of migrants, our presence so quiet it turns us invisible. And even further, an invisibility that can also be neutral, even joyous: ‘I yelled ‘whale!’ in the steamy dusk light when I saw something grey and sleek break through the water’s surface and was glad no one had heard me’ (p117).
Yet, like using English to critique English, the fantastical can too easily sit in contradiction with the material. Maintaining subversions requires holding a constant mode of destabilisation; in adhering to a set of rules that are not only unreal, but in defiance of those that are. It is, somehow, Frankenstein’s made-up heart beating, and also feeling love. Writing about migration in English in a way that rejects the dominant mode of thinking is by nature oxymoronic. This is not to say it is impossible. It requires building a new world, or at least, imagining one. To turn invisible in this world is to placate. The alternative world of What Kept You? is largely just as oppressive.
The fictive power of What Kept You? struggles to carry out its general political ideas through to the specific. What Ursula Robin-Shaw has observed in antipodean literature as a reliance on the ‘mere suggestion of the thing’ that just ‘adequately satisfies consumer expectations of politicised representation’ (5). As such, it ends up reverting back to traditional “racialised” writing that is over-interested in the textures of diversity rather than its dimensions. Its tastes and smells, its touchstones, its traumas. Such writing appears as a consequence of Jahan’s personal distance from the cultural elements she means to make commentary on. She describes eating a dolma as transporting her to ‘balconies draped in rustling gauze; the book, Orientalism, from my third-year syllabus suddenly alive on my tongue’ (p60). It’s an ironic reference that undoes itself not only in the context of the book, but within the very sentence it’s written in. Middle East equals dolma equals Edward Saiid. Yellow tinged filter and chaotic bazaar implied.
Jahan’s core driving force, that people are more than the stories assigned to them, continues to be undermined almost any time she departs from self-representation. She describes her exes as a series of nationalities: ‘A freckled South African boy… The Indian boy… A Chinese boy…’ (p63). Our introduction to her husband, Ali, is through his implied possessiveness: his ‘dark eyes’ imploring her to discard a small bag of seeds a gardener with ‘bright blue eyes’ gifted to her (p.7). His callous response to her miscarriage, ‘it is just a bunch of cells’, is attributed to the fact that ‘in his first tongue a foetus remained a ghost until it crossed the threshold of time and shape’ (p163). In direct opposition to Jahan’s racialised conservatism, Jahan’s one white friend, Ingrid, dresses in men’s clothes and binds her chest; a ‘beautiful woman bent on looking like a man’. Unable to wholly create the fantastical reality, Jamshed must borrow from our existing one. Unfortunately, this also includes our shaky stereotypes that are built on simplified binaries.
If what’s initially at stake is, as the blurb states, ‘the radical freedom of choosing one’s own ending’, by novel’s end it’s unclear what Jahan has “chosen” that is so radical. The letter structure acts as a trap. The post-humous dialogue with her grandmother binds her inextricably to the demands of political exile, the leaver expected to always look back on those left. She is directed constantly to the past, to things that already exist, even after they no longer do. The reader’s takeaway is absolutes, like, language is an uncrossable divide. Middle Eastern men are cruel and backwards. All white people have blue eyes and blonde hair and Australia is bushfires and jarrah and Brown women are always escaping and existing for their female ancestors.
It’s not that these elements, in isolation, can’t be true. Rather, it’s that with each repetition this particular combination of opposing elements forms a familiar narrative. Diversity again comes to mean a feeling. Foreignness, pining, suffering, existing within the same story which we must try to write out of. We remain as Jahan says of her lost great-grandparents ‘suspended in a state of transit, endlessly en route, [our] footsteps carving a path through time and space, never arriving’ (p22). Certainly, this book approaches an alternative. Stories can be one’s compass and English is a toothless conduit. Frankenstein speaks and so do I: the migrant as a new kind of anti-hero. But when Jahan concludes her journey by joining her husband in the thick of the bushfire, I’m not sure where that version of her goes. Back into the same void of the missing girls she dreams of maybe; loyal to their own demise, but at least once, defiant in a way that could be fantastical.
NOTES
- Shelley, M. (2012) Frankenstein. London: Penguin
- Oliver, K. (2001) Witnessing: beyond recognition. London: University of Minnesota Press
- ibid.
- Ashcroft, B. (2001) Post-colonial transformation. London: Routledge
- Robinson-Shaw, Ursula. (2022) Dissociating the Novel. Sydney Review of Books.
ROUMINA PARSA is an Iranian-Australian writer based in Melbourne/ Naarm. She appeared in the 2024 Emerging Writers’ Festival, was shortlisted for the 2022 Catalyse Nonfiction Prize, and her work has previously featured in Kill Your Darlings, Liminal, Meanjin and more.