Write What You Know - Interview with writer Sunil Badami
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Sunil Badami
"I know that when I was growing up in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s, I was made more aware of my difference, and worked much harder to eradicate or obscure it, so that it wasn't a barrier between the person I felt - someone who felt Aussie - and the person I appeared - foreign. Australia wasn't really plural then: the White Australia Policy had only recently been repealed, and there weren't many people like me.
"My name, and people's inability to say it, was a big part of that barrier. And shamefully, because people's attitudes were so casually, subconsciously racist, I thought it was my fault my name was hard for them to say, rather than thinking that given the effort I'd made to fit in, they might meet me half-way."
Badami says that even though writing can bleed truths and real ideas that weren't apparent to an author prior to being said on a page, "all writers - especially young ones - have to be careful of aphorisms or proverbs! I think when you're a young writer, it's easier to "tell" - especially if it comes in what appears to be a well-shaped sentence with echoes of profundity.
"I hate the idea that writers might be considered - or consider themselves - to have any better idea of "the truth" than anyone else: the messy, contradictory lives of many writers (myself included) would suggest otherwise!" he says with a laugh.
"It's the characters that determine the truth and believability of the story, and if you imagine them well enough, they'll act in unexpected ways that surprise you. So I suppose the truth - whatever that is - does and can appear, but the golden rule for me is: if I find it boring, the reader will too.
"And whatever other pretension or hope I as a writer might have for what I write, at the end of the day, it is just entertainment, a diversion - though hopefully with a little meaning in it too."
Sunil Badami will be at the Sydney Writers' Festival to launch Growing Up Asian In Australia, an anthology of Asian-Australian writing which he contributed to.
Read about Sunil in session during the Festival here.
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