‘Homecoming’ by Elfie Shiosaki
Kaya everyone, welcome to #DeadlyWABookClub! Over the next three months I’ll be analysing and celebrate the writing of Aboriginal authors from Western Australia. I’ll also be sharing some essays published in the journal JASAL, to raise awareness of the big thinkers of today who are discussing and critiquing Australian literature. This is all thanks to my writer’s fellowship from ASAL/Copyright Agency - thank you! Find out more at ASAL.
We return once again to the wonderful Mabagala Books, the leading Indigenous publishing house in Australia, who published Noongar and Yawuru author Elfie Shiosaki’s moving debut novella Homecoming.
Homecoming may need no introduction, since it won the 2022 Western Australian Premier’s Prize For An Emerging Writer and was shortlisted for many other prestigious prizes, including the 2022 Stella Prize. But introduce it I will!
Homecoming is a collection of memories, stories and relationships spanning four generations of Noongar women and their experiences with colonisations, protectionism and assimilation. And how, through it all, they fought to keep their children and families together. Shiosaki defies the trappings of genre and literary labels to include poetry, prose, and historical colonial archives to slap you in the face with the profound truths about our shared colonial history, the deep love and respect within Aboriginal families, and the power of intergenerational passing down of oral stories.
Aboriginal women, particularly women from our past, didn’t often get a voice in the colonial records of Australia. They are instead controlled, diminished, discussed, dismissed, ignored, and lied about when it came to not only their horrific treatment, but also their strength and pivotal role in raising and protecting their families. This is why I loved Shiosaki’s novella so much – she refuses to let her mother’s and grandmother’s voices and the men who loved them go unheard. What we end up with is a testament to the beauty of feminine power, grief and rage – their agency to ‘resist, survive and renew’, as Magabala Books describes it.
Writing about family history in this kind of living memoir-style prose, as Shiosaki does, is what legendary Aboriginal author Anita Heiss believes is an act of challenging race and identity politics in Australia. For Aboriginal writers, she believes the goal of memoir is to clarify that their Indigenous identity is not about race at all. Rather, identity is shaped by their family history, the collective national history, and our personal subjective views on those histories. She writes: ‘Pride in our identity forces Aboriginal writers to challenge the imposed, historical, government-designed definitions and caste systems given to Aboriginal Australia since first contact. Self-identification and diversity of lived experiences are some of the elements discussed by Aboriginal writers trying to define their own and communal identities (‘BLACKWORDS: Writers on Identity’, Heiss, 2014).’
Shiosaki’s stunning prose and use of language is so clearly rooted in a deep level of understanding this communal identity: through thorough, layered historical research, and knowledge of kin, place and Country. Every poem, every verse, every letter from her ancestors is something to submerge yourself into, to breath in slowly, and feel in every atom of your being – so visceral is her writing, so gutting is its effect. If you haven’t read Homecoming, you’re simply missing out.
I want to finish this review with a recommendation to read maar bidi: next generation black writing, co-edited by Shiosaki and Linda Martin. This beautiful anthology is a collection of mostly West Australian Indigenous students who participated in creative writing workshops under Shiosaki’s tutelage at the University of Western Australia.
What does it mean to be young, black and passionate in a conflicting world? maar bidi seeks to provide some answers by featuring the poetry and prose of emerging writers, such as Yawuru, Karajarri and Nimanburr woman Savannah Cox, who writes about her home, her body, Broome, that place that is totally herself: ‘My body is the land. It is solid and curved. Imperfect by man’s doing but still beautiful and radiant. The sky is my skin… The creeks are my hair…’; or saltwater man Danny Howard, who cuts through the mess of detail with a simple refrain: ‘you don’t pick your spear / your spear picks you’… and many more wonderful young writers who, like Shiosaki, are picking up the pen to express themselves with authenticity and sovereignty.
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Question for your next book club: How did reading the historical records, colonial archives and letters in Homecoming make you feel; and what are the key messages from them that Shiosaki might want to impart on the reader?
Note: If you’re interested in reading more regular book reviews for books by Aboriginal writers, I highly recommend you follow @blackfulla_bookclub on Instagram, they are fantastic!
