Re-storying the past, re-imagining the future in Adib Khan’s Homecoming and Spiral Road

Abstract

This article argues that Adib Khan’s fiction challenges the orthodoxies of rigid cultural boundaries and dominator systems by creatively reconfiguring histories, landscapes and identities into forms of transcultural dialogue. Both Homecoming (2003) and Spiral Road (2007) tell the story of the disquieted lives of their protagonists, Martin and Masud, who struggle to inhabit an empathetic consciousness in a world ranked and measured by labels, points of origin, skin colour and religion. Their sense of displacement and yearning to belong – a feature in all Khan’s novels – enable them to move beyond the anxieties of finding a fitting place within the culture around them and embrace new ways of overcoming disconnection, violence and other forms of cultural stereotyping common to all cultures, thus rethinking their past and recreating a more equitable future.

Keywords:

• Adib Khan
• Homecoming
• Spiral Road
• Australian literature
• partnership/dominator models
• empathetic consciousness

Notes

1. Khan’s first novel Seasonal Adjustments (1994) won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, the Book of the Year award in the 1994 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards and the 1995 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book, and was also shortlisted for the 1994 Age Book of the Year award. Solitude of Illusions (1996) was shortlisted for the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, and the Ethnic Affairs Commission Award, and won the 1997 Tilly Aston Braille Book of the Year Award.

2. Abdulla’s stories started appearing in periodicals such as the Bulletin, Quadrant and Hemisphere in 1953 and were subsequently published in book form as The Time of the Peacock, jointly authored by Abdullah and Mathew (1965).

3. For a detailed discussion of the partnership model in world literatures, languages and education, see the publications listed in official website of the Partnership Studies Group (PSG), http://all.uniud.it/?page_id=198.

4. “‘Equalitarian’ is used instead of the more conventional ‘egalitarian’ which traditionally has only described equality between men and men (as the works of Locke, Rousseau, and other ‘rights of man’ philosophers, as well as modern history, evidence). ‘Equalitarian’ denotes social relations in a partnership society where women and men (and ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’) are accorded equal value” (Eisler 1987, 216).

5. Eisler distinguishes “between domination hierarchies characterized by a predominantly authoritarian social structure ultimately backed by force or fear of pain, which inhibit the actualization of both oneself and others’ highest potentials, and actualization hierarchies in which power is used to empower rather than disempower others” (Mercanti 2014, 17; emphases in original).

6. For a detailed analysis of the novel, see Mercanti (2012).

7. Another significant expression of protest is the anthology of prose and verse edited by Shirley Cass, Ros Cheney, David Malouf and Michael Wilding (1971), We Took Their Orders and Are Dead.

8. The legitimization of violence as the only real and cosmically grounded reality, a dominator way of thinking and living within a system in which the human need for caring connection is associated with either the infliction or suffering of pain. Hence, pain, abuse and injustice are repressed in one’s unconscious mind and, as required to maintain a domination system, legitimized as the way things are supposed to be (see Eisler 1987, 1995, 2014).