Narrative as Navigation Through the Self: Isobel Blackthorn’s Asylum

(‘Narrative as Navigation Through the Self: Isobel Blackthorn’s Asylum’ by Ness Mercieca was originally published in the October 2015 edition of The Tertangala)



They say the mind does not create, and that it only cuts and pastes the stimulus it receives from the outside world.
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^{PHOTO: For a country that values its commitment to human rights as does Australia, the silence in the face of Rohingya suffering is a humiliating moment. (AFP: Christophe Archambault)}

Still, it’s easier to shut my ears and eyes to Eurovision and not be affected by it. Whereas hearing the latest spin on those asylum seekers languishing in South Asian waters is something I can’t disengage from. Julie Bishop has been told by Indonesian officials that the Bangladeshis on those boats are all illegal labourers, or ‘economic migrants’ and not refugees at all. I dare say there will be much debate and speculation about the validity of the claim. Whatever the outcome, I’m deeply troubled. I awoke this morning thinking that we will no doubt also describe all environmental refugees who leave their land as a result of climate change, ‘economic.’ A sure justification for sending them back. As sea levels rise, and floods and droughts decimate the world’s poorest nations, what are pe...

I’m delighted to share another warm review of Asylum.

“Asylum by Isobel Blackthorn was a pleasure to read. Within pages of starting the book I was drawn into the story of Yvette and her relationships with the permanent women and transient men in her life. Capturing the inconsistencies in policy and disgust many feel about current politics around who is welcomed to Australia, the story travels across Australia. I have never been to Perth or Fremantle but I felt myself transported.” – Katherine Webber

Paperback edition of Asylum will be released by Odyssey Books in May 2015.

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…in which Yvette confronts the squalor of her friend Thomas’ flat…

Yvette stood in the aisle beside her back-row seat. Behind her the other passengers jostled for a place in the tightly-packed queue. After a ten-hour bus ride, another hour in transit to Tullamarine airport, and a tedious three hour wait for a smooth four-hour flight across the desert guts of Australia, her skin felt dirty and Special and she hankered for somewhere, anywhere, quiet, cool and still.


Instead, the steward opened the plane’s rear door and Perth greeted Yvette with a gust of hot, dry air. November, and it must have been a hundred degrees.


The heat was at once exotic and familiar, the heat Yvette grew up with in Perth, the sort of heat she craved all those years in London, the heat that drew her to Malta. Heading for the shelter of the concrete and glass building across the tarmac, she felt exhilarated, until memory stabbed its black through her head and,...

I'm serialising on my blog my novel Asylum. Here's a taste. If you like what you've read please follow the link below for more.
Synopsis

Seeking asylum from the wreckage of her life, art-school graduate Yvette Grimm arrives in Australia on a holiday visa, reuniting with her English-born mother, Leah. Yvette applies for permanent residency with no hope of success. She resists Leah’s advice that she marry to stay in the country, investing her hopes in a palm-reader’s prophecy that she would meet the father of her children before she’s thirty. She’s twenty-nine.
Set in the excoriating heat of an endless Perth summer, Yvette enters a Gothic world filled with actors and dilettantes. Life is surreal. A cockroach infestation in her drab flat leads to an unexpected revelation; her childhood friend Heather appears in a café and before long she’s singing in a choir; and an encounter with Gordon, a former resident of a children’s home, fosters a new artistic direction. ...