Published in Tertangala ‘Birthday’ edition 2007
Linda Jaivin loves a challenge. In the decade since her first novel, Eat Me, became an instant cult classic and international bestseller, the Sydney author, film subtitler, China specialist and accidental sexpert has published erotica, science fiction, grunge lit, thriller, biography and a collection of essays. Erotic fiction involving fruit and the Big Merino? Sure. Sexy sci-fi rock’n’roll adventure? No problem. Comedy novel set in a refugee detention centre? Why not?
Her latest novel, The Infernal Optimist, is set in Villawood during Phillip Ruddock’s reign. The optimist of the book’s title is Turkish-born, Australian-raised Muslim Zeki Togan, a happy-go-lucky ‘Aussie Mossie’ who steals watches, loves his long-suffering Christian girlfriend and tends to gloss over the finer points of the laws of both his faith and his country.
After spending a month too long in prison, Zeki finds himself locked up in Villawood, where he learns that 501 is not just a pair of jeans – it’s the section of the Migration Act under which visas can be cancelled or refused on grounds of bad character. Since he never got his citizenship – the queue was too long, and he didn’t think to try and jump it – Zeki faces imminent deportation to the Old Country, a place he left at six months old. Not one to read the newspaper or watch the news, life behind the razor wire gives Zeki an education in international politics and tests his love for the country he calls home.
Jaivin regularly spent time behind the cyclone fence for three and a half years, penning two plays on the subject of refugees – Halal El Mashakel and Seeking Djira – and eventually taking on the task of helping several detainees write letters of appeal to the Minister for Immigration in a final bid for asylum.
‘Often they had either exhausted or nearly exhausted the formal processes of applying for asylum,’ Jaivin says of the long-term detainees she met. Applications are often hampered by the refugee’s inability to present their case coherently, due to factors such as language difficulties, stress or lack of research resources. Jaivin would take home boxes of paperwork, examining what had gone wrong in the appeal process and gathering support material from organisations like Amnesty International. ‘I’ve always been politically engaged and get very passionate about things. I couldn’t just go and visit and bring them tea and take away their stories.’
After visiting for a few months, Jaivin felt compelled to write a novel about detention. ‘I thought, there’s so much importance in what’s happening and so much need to tell these stories. And yet, so much of it is tragic and so terribly sad, I wasn’t sure how to go about finding the story that I could tell.’
The struggle to find a central character took months. ‘I tried to tell it with a refugee at the very centre, but it just veered into such earnestness I couldn’t make it work. Somehow it seemed if I was going to put the whole thing in the voice of a refugee, I was assuming so much responsibility that I couldn’t give myself permission to play.’ She tried writing from the perspective of a visitor, but found she ‘couldn’t get inside detention in a real sense: I couldn’t get past the visiting yard.’
Finally, after experimenting with a range of voices, Jaivin discovered Zeki. ‘This one voice kept jumping out at me saying, “I’m the one that’s working, I’m the character you need at the centre of your story”.’ Zeki is like an Australian Ali G – all wise cracks, tracky daks and the kind of broken English only a state school education can produce. Zeki’s voice allowed Jaivin to tell the story ‘from the perspective of someone who was much closer to what you’d call the ordinary Australian than any of my other choices’.
Jaivin’s nose for mischievous humour and talent for writing well-rounded, witty characters has earned her a cult following. Her characters come to life – so much so that occasionally one will get up and walk out of one book into the pages of another. Some participate in a kind of fictional exchange program. Jake, the dreadlocked love interest in Eat Me, went on to star in Rock ‘n’ Roll Babes from Outer Space, followed by an appearance in the final scene of John Birmingham’s Tasmanian Babes Fiasco. ‘He called me up and said, “I want to borrow Jake and the babes.” I said sure, that’s great,’ says Jaivin. To make it an even deal, she borrowed one of Birmingham’s characters, a ‘young girl who is hilarious and eats bowls of raw sugar and raw meat’, for Miles Walker, You’re Dead.
Judging by some of the feedback Jaivin has received for Optimist, there are a lot of readers who would like to see more of Zeki. ‘People seem to fall in love with my narrator, and one of my friends said, “I’ve got to have sex with Zeki!” I don’t know how you arrange that exactly,’ she laughs. ‘A number of people who have not been involved with refugees have been really startled and moved. It was a hard book to write, and it’s good to see it’s being read with relish.’
Finding the lighter side of life in detention was hard, but Jaivin says ‘you develop a sort of gallows humour’. The book was launched by Iranian refugee Morteza Poorvadi, who spent four years in Woomera, Port Hedland and Villawood and is now a permanent resident. In his speech Poorvadi told the story of how emus and kangaroos would come and stare at detainees through the fence. ‘I was looking at the crowd, and all of the refugees and activists were laughing their heads off,’ says Jaivin. ‘And all the people who hadn’t been involved and were in a way were confronting this stuff for the first time had tears streaming down their faces. In some ways that’s the effect I’m hoping to have as well.
‘I suppose my big hope with The Infernal Optimist is to interest readers who might not read a book which is very serious – I want to tempt people to consider this incredibly important issue in Australia. But I want to make it fun for them, I want to relax people before I slap them around.’