Ma Lili² ( Ma for short hereafter):

What was your original motivation for writing The Garden Book, where did you get your inspiration?

Brian Castro ( Castro for short hereafter):

There is a nice story that goes with the book. I was living in the Dandenongs, and one day I went out to the countryside, there was a small museum. In this museum they had many objects, you know – the early pioneers had axes and tools for the trees and they sawed the trees for building. Finally in one corner there was a Mr. Wang, who was the local teacher, so I just thought that was strange – a Chinese school teacher, because normally Chinese came to the Dandenongs just to make market gardens and grow vegetables and things like that. So a Chinese school teacher was very different, and then I researched a bit further and found that he had a daughter who also became the school teacher after him, and everybody liked them. So I thought, here is a story, so the real inspiration was about his daughter which became Swan.

Ma:

But what drove you to combine this story with the story of He Shuangqing?

Castro:

There was a book written called Leaves of Prayer by Elsie Choy, about a woman poet from the 18th century, she wrote these poems that were very good poems but she was badly treated by her husband in her village, so I decided to make like a memorial of this woman and her poems, so I combined the two.

Crossing time and space, with a very idiosyncratic form. What is your favorite writing form?

Castro:

I have done now totally 13 books and 12 of them is fictional, so I want to actually do the next one in nonfiction, in other words, what is becoming I think more and more common now is that people are not writing big novels any more, they are writing observations, essays. So I am looking at the American writer called Elliot Weinberger, he actually writes these short stories that are also essays, so it’s again crossing two different forms and these two different forms as I’ve always done in my writing is to advance the genres, not the traditional novel, but also not fact, but something in-between essays and stories, so essayistic fictions is what I call it.

Ma:

Essayistic fictions, a new artistic form. Talking about form reminds me of Hayden White, who seems to suggest that the choice of form is just as important as the content that goes with it, what do you think of his idea?

Castro:

I believe what Susan Sontag said, “ the voice is the form ”, whatever the voice you take, I do not mean my own voice, I mean the imaginative voice in my head, that voice of form is the thing that keeps the book going. So this distinctive voice if you read Virginia Woolf, and the distinctive voice if you read William Faulkner, is not the way they talk in person if you like, these are imaginary voices; and I think that is the form that the book takes, because I don’t believe you can draft the book with just ideas; otherwise that will become too artificial, as if you are just joining the dots from one plot to another, which is not the way I work; I work through language, so a literary language is the “ voice” which I think will carry the tone of the book, if it is strong enough.

Ma:

How far can you let your imagination go, say in the story of The Garden Book?

Castro:

I think that’s the secret, you cannot limit your imagination. Imaginatively, you draw from everywhere and you are like a vacuum cleaner. You are picking all kinds of things from everywhere. And you start to use some of them, you can slot into the story, but also I believe that I read a tremendous amount, so I am also drawing on other writers’ lives, because I am very interested in biography and autobiography. So I draw on their lives, and there might be some aspects of their lives that interest me. You know writers are very strange people. So I use their lives to provide me also some insight into how a writer thinks and how they live.

Ma:

Do you edit on your own work?

Castro:

Yes, a lot of them.

Ma:

I am aware that there is a slight difference between The Garden Book in print and in PDF. Is that because of your editing?

Castro:

Yes, I always do 4 drafts, that is the basic thing. Sometimes there are 7 or 8 drafts; but to me, it’s never finished, so when my publisher reads it, he would say ok, you know, do this, do this, and then I would rewrite again, normally. And I never used to think too much about the reader, I think that used to get in the way, block me. Because I don’t want to be a best seller, it’s not my interest, so I would always rewrite just for my own sake. And if it does not sell, it is fine, you know, I am not worried.

Ma:

That actually further liberates your art of creation.

Castro:

Yes, that is right.

Ma:

Do you have any specific topics for writing in mind now?

Castro:

At the moment, of course, I am very concerned about the world situation of refugees, so refugees are a phenomenon which before, people used to be more kindly towards them, but now they are seen as enemies, I do not particularly like the way that they are being treated, but there are millions and millions of them and what can you do? But that is not my problem, my problem is that my interest is in these people who really have nowhere to go, and no resources, what is their story? So I want to have actually an interview of some, but of course under the current government you can’t even talk to them not even by mobile phones; they are in a prison-like situation, so I want to at some stage talk to people, talk to their children, talk to their parents, and yes do something like that.

Ma:

Does this have anything to do with your concern: sadness?

Castro:

Yes, my idea of melancholy, which I think is a natural condition but also a creative condition. I used to think, why do people say “ oh, I can just go to another country and be very happy”? I don’t think so, as far as I am concerned, I am unhappy everywhere.

Ma:

Is that unhappiness that drives you to writing?

Castro:

Yes, that is the territory which is the happiest, it is when I am inside writing. So it is not a paradise but it is also a suffering, but is where I belong, not in the real world perhaps, but I find, everywhere that I go for 6 or 8 months, it feels pretty good, but then little by little, you realize it is not that paradise one thinks.

Ma:

Does this unhappiness result from your personal life or elsewhere?

Castro:

My personal life and my family, they have very tragic circumstances; and they lived through so many different wars, the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong – my father was imprisoned by the Japanese and tortured also, my mother lost her first two children, otherwise I would have an older brother and an older sister; but they both died during the war, because there was not enough food to eat, from diseases and things like that. So it is these personal tragedies that are always at the back of your mind; and I felt my mother was the carrier of this sadness, because she was very important, and she told me these things in Cantonese, so it is not just I lost my mother, but I lost the language, which is a loss that one tries to bring back in writing in a different language.

Ma:

Your personal family tragedy reminds me of Mark Twain who suffered from so many personal tragic experiences in his early time that they severely affected his writing style.

Castro:

So he invented these stories.

Ma:

In a sarcastic, bitter and pessimistic way.

Castro:

Yes. Yes.

Ma:

Let’ s go on with questions on The Garden Book. Some questions from the other translator of The Garden Book. Her first question is, “ you use a lot of ink to describe the sky in The Garden Book, does it have any particular meaning? ”

Castro:

Yes, I think once someone asked, do you get an idea to write a novel and do you do a lot of research? I say No, sometimes it is just the weather, when it starts to rain I am inspired; when it is very cold I am inspired; so I cannot write in the hot summer, I cannot write; maybe it is just my personal disposition, but the sky, the weather, these things change all the time according to my moods; it is not the other way around, not because it is raining that I am sad, I am sad so I write about weather.

Ma:

So no matter what the outside environment is, you will always have sadness inside yourself.

Castro:

So you portray that, one way I portray that [sadness] is the writing about weather.

Ma:

Sure, I notice more weather descriptions in the book, Swan’ s father who nearly died in the storm; and when little

Darcy was running away from home, the sky was dark; when Swan and Darcy met for the first time, “ The heavens opened. Drops of rain hard as nails upon his head”...

Castro:

In the Dandenongs the weather is full of microclimates, it changes very quickly from the bright day to stormy dark, the trees are very tall, so it becomes very dark. It is very threatening.

Ma:

Ok, that explains many scenes in the book. The second question from Miss Bai: you use the word “ disappear” many times, what is that really disappeared or disappearing?

Castro:

I suppose because Swan writes on leaves, so it is not meant to be forever, so these leaves will disappear, they will die away, the ink will die away; so she is not interested in this idea of posterity, that I will write something famous and the whole world will know about it; she is writing for the sense that poetry is very ephemeral, very transient, and may not last, that one wants it to last. So in one way I am questioning the idea of a writer, especially writers who think they will become famous and lasting, so the idea is, what is writing anyway? Is it for yourself , is it to make yourself very grand and set in stone, so that you will be remembered forever? That is not my way of thinking, I think writing is very brief, life is very brief, so in one sense, disappearing is probably a good way to put for me, the idea of life, life is always disappearing, especially one dies obviously, but so many things are disappearing, it is best not to be too heavy on the earth, in other words; don’t destroy the earth to make big memorials, or remembrances or build buildings, in people’ s names. It is more important to pass through very lightly. That is what Swan does.

Ma:

Your idea about writing reminds me of a sentence from After China that is how I got to know your name and got interested in your novels, “ it is through writing that we find ourselves”. Can you explain it a bit further?

Castro:

I think that is the journey that one takes, not the other way, not looking for something in the world but to find yourself inside yourself.

Ma:

You mention “ chaotic” in The Garden Book many times in describing Swan and her feelings, is there any significance in it?

Castro:

I think she was living through a period of the history in 1930s-1940s, that was a chaotic period--- the Second World War. Because of the Japanese invasion of the Pacific, a lot of racism against Asians was happening in Australia. Earlier they tried to breed out the Chinese, and also to actually make a law whereby if you went back to your village in China, you could not come back even if you’d lived in Australia, so it was a kind of ethnic cleansing. I am also interested in this because I am more interested in refugees and the way racism works to not just keep out the foreigners, but to actually prevent them forever from diluting the white population in this racial way. I think there is a scientific term----eugenics. Eugenics is very strong still in Australia, it’s about breeding only your race, there are a whole lot of theories about it, there are certain people that don’t like to see a Chinese person with an Australian person, mixed marriages, things like that. So one thing is that these racial theories have been passed down from the 19th century. These kind of things disturb me, because the eugenics is a myth, since genetics have already proven that people are not of one particular descendant or race, it is all a mixture of everybody. If we think we all came from a certain place it is probably Africa. So maybe there has been a stream of my work that I’ve always spoken out against this kind of racism (Ma Lili &Li Jingfei, 2019). So that is why it interests me about Swan and about Darcy, because it is a mixed race partnership, he is of course expressing a lot of this kind of eugenic racism to his own wife, so how tragic was her life to have to live under this kind of persecution!

Ma:

True. Racism seems to come back now in Australia.

Castro:

It is becoming more common, and unfortunately, certain politicians are fueling this fire and they want it because they get votes from the public; but I don’t think the Australian public is all like that, of course; but when people don’t have much education, they hear these things and they act without reason, and it is unfortunate. So I think the fight against racism has never gone away, you know, ever since I started writing, I have been writing with this in mind and in my sub-consciousness even, that somehow these are the kind of things that disturb me as I try to use my writing and my fiction to show the tragedy of certain people’s lives, also not to help anybody [but] to actually make people understand that unless you are in someone else’ s shoes, you really can not appreciate the situation---

Ma:

Empathy. This is something we really need, to deal with racism and to deal with any hatred between persons, cultures as well nations especially in such a cosmopolitan world.

Now let's talk about the word “ghost” in The Garden Book, at the very beginning, you quote Kafka who writes “ Writing letters, however, means to denude oneself before the ghosts...The ghosts won’t starve, but we will perish”, so “ ghost”, “ haunting” and “ the uncanny”, are these terms all related to each other?

Castro:

Yes, they all related, I suppose, in a Freudian kind of way, because Freud wrote about “ the uncanny”, he also wrote about melancholia, so I think that these things come out of a sense of displacement that “ the uncanny” is when you are in a place you think you’ve been before, but you’ve not actually been, so you are haunted by a feeling and that feeling can have all kinds of reverberations, in terms of your own history perhaps, but also in terms of your psychology, so these things are all connected, yes for sure. What I call “ the ghost effect” is actually beneath everything that we think of as sociological or historical, there are ghosts haunting, things that we do not actually pick up unless we are very sensitive, you know, we detect it by our unconscious.

Ma:

Indeed so. Such understanding reminds us of Paul Ricoeur who wanted to show how the past bore upon the present, how the past could responsibly be remembered in the present. Certainly Kafka’s idea of ghost and Auden’s concept of time and banishment of human beings carry a strong significance of meaning, what about the minor figures such as Marquis de Sade in The Garden Book?

Castro:

That is where we get the word sadist. So you know Darcy is [a sadist]…… Marquis de Sade was a French writer, who was imprisoned actually for his obscenity as well as his cruelty, I think that is where it comes from.

Ma:

Does it also mean Professor Henry is being pornographic when he asks Swan to read Marquis de Sade?

Castro:

Yes, and also a power struggle, how can I say---he (Professor Henry) abuses the power as the professor, you know, to a Chinese girl; so you can imagine in those days how persuasive he could be, he is in a positional power. It happens in all these universities, we should be very careful, so that these things don’t happen.

Ma:

Could you explain a sentence from the book---“ Your aggression, came from your own hatred”? How and where did you get this amazing idea?

Castro:

Well, just reading basic theory on racism, you learn that actually racists have a hatred of themselves because they cannot empathize with someone else that looks different to them. It’s because they cannot actually assimilate the different parts of themselves and also others, so they cannot put others inside their own heart, so it is a really unconscious hatred of oneself to turn that aggression outwards.

Ma:

Have you ever thought of dissolving or solving this kind of hatred, if so, by what?

Castro:

It is very hard, because I think one thing is family education, some people do not have any, and so basically if their fathers were racists they become racists unless they go to universities maybe think through, but some don’t, hard to say. I think family environment is probably the most important, for if a family raises its children as caring as also being in the shoes of others, and listening to others, they of course become very well-rounded people; but unfortunately, I think with the social economic circumstances, quite a few people don’t reach that level; so it’s usually family violence, so if the father is violent towards the son, he will normally be violent to other people, later.

Ma:

Even of his own race.

Castro:

Even of his own race, of course it is easy to pick on someone who is different.

Ma:

It is easy to bully, and the different raced people become targets of bullying.

Castro:

So that to me has always been the situation I come back to. Philip Larkin, the English poet, wrote a very famous poem that began with the line: “ your family they fuck you up”, which means much more than just violence, it means sexual abuse and it means everything, so I thought that was a very nice line to begin a poem.

Ma:

Family is very important, it talks to you, shapes you and affects you through all your life, but then you can always be a little bit different, leaving behind your family paint or trace or negative influences, right?

Castro:

But I think it depends, of course children will always rebel to a certain degree, and they also rebel because of too much lecturing by the father or the mother.

Ma:

Especially by the father, according to psychological findings.

Castro:

Exactly, if your father was a good, honest man, and he just did honest things you saw as a child, then he didn’t need to lecture you about them, so again I think that kind of education is quite invaluable. And you can tell that some children without much encouragement are naturally kind, naturally honest, because their fathers act that way, he doesn’t have to speak.

Ma:

You can only look at their eyes to find tenderness, and the moment you see such care or tenderness, you know this gentleness and love must come from somewhere, mommy or daddy, or somewhere from schooling.

Now could we talk about your novel The Bath Fugues? Did you organize its form because you get inspiration from A Dictionary of Maqiao?

Castro:

I don’t think it inspired The Bath Fugues. In The Bath Fugues, there was simply a Portuguese poet living in Macao, his name is Camilo Pessanha, he married a Chinese woman, he had a lot of children and then he had concubines, this is in the early 1900s. And he also acquired a lot of Chinese paintings. In those days nobody cared that they were valuable or anything like that, but some of them were; and then I realize, I did some research, I actually got a Portuguese woman to search out for me, to research what happened to these paintings of his; I know he is an opium addict, he might have spent them on opium or anything, but she could not find anything except the fact that a shipment of them went back to Portugal to Lisbon, and I just thought this is interesting to me, because then somebody had obviously realized that some of these are very old paintings. But I transposed it to Australia, I had an Australian woman who inspects these paintings, how did it get there; at the end of this book, the third part of the book is about this museum in Queensland that has those famous paintings. Originally the first story was inspired by Pessanha’s life.

Ma:

Is Pessanha a true person?

Castro:

Yes, but my character was invented and the paintings belonging to Pessanha are true, but I just transposed it to Australia. In a sense, you know, sometimes when things were happening in a foreign country, let us say during the Cultural Revolution in China, a lot of arts were destroyed but some were actually shipped by foreigners to different places. So this interested me, that is why The Bath Fugues is now being published in the US and the UK, because the publisher from London( she’s actually a publisher of art work) was very interested, she said, “ oh, this is one of the first books we are going to publish, because it is about the story of art, stolen art.”

Ma:

Stolen art, an interesting topic. Now lets move on. Could you say something about your new book Blindness and

Rage？

Castro:

Yes, Blindness and Rage is actually a verse novel or what they call a verse novel, because it is written sometimes with rhyme, sometimes with different rhythms, I mean the story is very simple, an architect who is living in Adelaide is dying of cancer, so he decides that he will go to Paris and die in Paris.

Ma:

Is it based on true story?

Castro:

No, because he is so influenced by French writers, theories and fictions, he thinks that’s the best place, going back to my idea: where is paradise? It’s never a paradise. So he goes to Paris and of course finds that it is not the place he has thought, oh, yes he will enjoy so much literature and he will be inspired by everything else. In fact, he starts hallucinating about the past, and meeting with the ghosts, here comes the idea of ghosts again, here the ghosts of past are the famous French writers who are dead, and in his hallucinations these writers see Australia as a barbaric place full of kangaroos, so he was made to understand through these imaginary conversations that Paris was the center of the world, and these famous writers wouldn’t understand anyone from Australia. So basically that is the story. What he does is he falls in love with the woman next door, and through this act of love his cancer goes into remission. Obviously there is no medical support for this theory, but, you know love is so positive, it is something that I think can cure people if only through metaphor – the metaphor of love as cure –not love-sickness, but love-cure – this is the positive side of my idea of melancholy. And yes, he is not fully cured, but he is able to come home, to Adelaide, where he has a new way of looking at life. Because life is actually time, so now he has time to re-assess writing, so it doesn’t matter if he’s going to die next year, or whatever, but he has the idea of time outside of writing; he has actually resuscitated the idea of living time, because before then it's all about lack of time: I am going to die, I have no time left and I have to write. So yeah, the experience of death is a kind of regeneration of the idea of time without anxiety, that's basically the plot. It is really about language and about rhythms, and it’s about what people call prosody, prosody is when you read it, you can hear the rhythm whether you understand English or not, you can still hear the rhythms of life. You were talking about there is so much music in my work, this is very much that, you see, this is about musical qualities of language.

Ma:

Ok, that is why you said it’s impossible to translate it.

Castro:

It’s impossible, because I do not see how another language can handle both the meaning and the rhythms. Even in After China there are a lot of musical elements, and when they translated it into Chinese, it wasn’t there, so it is very difficult, I think.

Ma:

I always translate the title of After China into (zhongguozhihou---《中国之后》), because I am reminded of Adorno’s “ to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”, and I am aware that you are very much influenced by Adorno.

Castro:

That is more close to the meaning.

Ma:

How closely connected are your works with Chinese elements?

Castro:

Obviously through the racism in Australia, so that it to me has always been the subject behind my mind, but it also depends on the book, and usually I alternate. So one book is set somewhere else without any mention of China, another one comes back to China and keeps going away and coming back, because like you say about distances, when you go away somewhere, you start writing about where you came from. So for example, I wrote this story inspired by Lu Xun – it’s published in Melbourne, and Mabel Lee was the editor, she compiled an anthology, and she just asked the different writers to respond to the anniversary of the death of Lu Xun. What I wrote is not a story, it is not a fiction, so it’s both things; so if people want to research that, they will see what’s the path I am taking now. It is what I should do next. The extraordinary thing was how impressed I was with Lu Xun, I read in English his WildGrass– it is very melancholic, and it is about the weather, a lot of the weather, snowing or raining whatever. So I was inspired by that, it all ties in with what we were talking about. Everything has a link.

Ma:

You open up my mind --- in the context of Australia, when tackling China-Australian relationship, not only should we pay attention to the cultural conflicts and commingling between two nations, but also we should be aware of the prevalence of racism.

Castro:

The tension, you see, is that it seems like to me not many people want to write about that; because either if they are Chinese they want to become Australian, they don’t want to be controversial; or if they are Australians, they cannot see it, they do not see the things like you saw yesterday(some white teenagers beating a Chinese girl at Frankston Street, shouting her to “ fuck off ” ); and these are very traumatic experiences. So I feel that someone has got to speak these things, so that is my mission in a way. Because you can see racism coming back into the mainstream. It never really went away.

Ma:

Exactly, and I partly share this mission, by translating your work, by researching them and reading things from different perspectives. Just a few small questions before we finish the interview. What are you writing now?

Castro:

I am in the thinking zone at the moment, sometimes it takes 12 months before I even put pen to paper, and that thinking zone, reading zone, meditating zone. Yeah, I don’t have a specific thing in mind. But as you were saying earlier, what is the form, I am starting to get the form and I am starting to get the idea of the voice, and hopefully if that stays with me for the next 10 months or so, something will start³.

Ma:

Thank you very much, for your mission, for your writing many works that have to do with China, thanks for caring those disadvantaged Chinese in Australia, and for your humanistic concern for all the disadvantaged people in the world.

Castro:

Thank you.

Acknowledgment

Thanks first should go to Brian Castro who kindly gives me the Translation Right of his two novels: The Garden Book ( published) and Street to Street (forthcoming). He also generously agreed to allow me to do this 50 minutes Interview in his office. I never regret that I have researched and translated his work, and met him and interviewed him in person. Bai Wenge who contributes some questions (as pointed out in the Interview) in regard to The Garden Book deserves my thanks. Han Song and Liang Dongfang, editors of the Chinese translation of The Garden Book, have given me some valuable advice on how to do an interview before I met Brian Castro in person. Besides, my gratitude goes to Chen Qingsong for inviting me and urging me to subscribe this Interview to Asian-Pacific Humanities. Last but not least, my friend Kathy Anderson suggests me to replace some commas by semicolons, her like of this Interview is encouraging to me.

References

[1] Brennan, Bernadette. (2007). “ Unpacking Castro’ s Library, or Detours and Return in The Garden Book” , JASAL SPECIAL ISSUE : SPECTRES, SCREENS, SHADOWS, MIRRORS, 25-36.

[2] Brun, Marilyne. (2011). “ Grammars of Creation: An interview with Brian Castro 24 November 2008” . Journal of the European Association of Studies on Australia , l.2(1). 24-46. ISSN 2013-6897.

[3] Castro, Brian. (1992). After China. Sydney: Allen &Unwin Pty Ltd.

[4] Castro, Brian. (2005). The Garden Book. Artarmon NSW: Giramondo Publishing Company.

[5] Castro, Brian. (2009). The Bath Fugues. Artarmon NSW: Giramondo Publishing Company.

[6] Castro, Brian. (2017). Blindness and Rage: A Phantasmagoria . Artarmon NSW: Giramondo Publishing Company.

[7] Han Shaogong. (2003). A Dictionary of Maqiao. New York: Columbia University Press.

[8] Ma, Lili.& Li Jingfei. (2019). “ Anti-Racism as Theme in The Garden Book”, Journal of Hebei Normal University (Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition), 42(6).

[9] Wang Guanglin. (2004). Being and Becoming: On Cultural Identity of Diasporic Chinese Writers. Tianjin：Nankai University Press.

[10] Wang Guanglin. (2019). Translation in Diasporic Literatures. Singapore, Palgrave Macmillan.

[11] Wang Labao. “ The Treatment of Other Cultures in Transcultural Writing---A Cognitive Semiotic Reflection” , Language and Semiotic Studies, 3(1).

[12] White, Hayden. (2010). The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory 1957-2007. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.