Words by Olivia De Zilva
Since I was four years old and diagnosed with selective mutism, I have used writing as a conduit for my feelings. Despite enrolling in a political science degree, writing had always been my end goal, and I was ecstatic that after ten years of uncertainty, fear and self-doubt, last month I finally achieved my dream of publishing a book. A deeply personal book, too. Plastic Budgie deals with universal themes of childhood and coming of age, but also explores issues that are not always a priority when marketing stories from people of colour.
My birth was smack-bang in the middle of John Howard’s Australia. In 1996, Pauline Hanson said Australia was ‘in danger of being swamped by Asians’ in her maiden speech to parliament. She said Asians did not do well enough to ‘assimilate’ and therefore their voices didn’t matter. When Plastic Budgie was published nearly thirty years later, there were marches around Australia rallying against immigration and multiculturalism. Assimilation was something I never cared about – but with the background of hatred and anger against people like me, I knew that publishing a book, like my birth, wasn’t a totally welcome concept.
When I think about my peers and the coverage they have received for their books, I can’t help but compare myself. I was lucky enough to find a community and kinship in important and vital POC spaces. It was a total privilege to find readers who understood and most importantly felt what I was writing about. However, when I zoomed out, away from the safe corner of publishing that many Asian-diasporic writers find solace in, I realised that no mainstream publications or male critics engaged with the work. My publisher creates a marketing plan for all their books targeting the same places, but Plastic Budgie was often left in the coop. I did my Masters thesis on the perception of Asian-diasporic writers in a predominately white publishing industry, and I found it uncannily come to life.
Writing as a woman of colour is exhausting, and harkens back to childhood trauma when I lost my voice on the playground. I found that to thrive, I had to perform to white expectations, and assimilate to a palatable version of a voice and world that didn’t belong to me. I realised that to be seen, or heard, I had to work harder than contemporaries who received opportunities and platforms that I could never dream of. It felt that to be successful, I had to sell my work in ways that felt inauthentic and adhered to the capitalistic hustle culture and humble bragging that flooded my Instagram page. I found that the more I felt silenced, and assimilated, the more the themes of my book began to ring true.
I always got the sense that diasporic writers should feel grateful to be given a spot at the table, allowed to rub shoulders with the hegemony. When I finally got my place, this gratitude turned into sadness. It was expected of me not to speak out about my experience, because I was lucky to be there. However, talking to other people of colour, especially female-diasporic writers, I realised that it was important to be as loud as possible when I was at risk of losing my voice again. Starting a conversation about racism and misogyny in publishing is never easy, but it has to be done. It was baffling to see how many people shared the same experience, but I was assured that I wasn’t alone, and that our voices could cause a strong echo into the void.
Assimilation is something that I will always reject – perhaps to the detriment of my success – but losing my voice again was just not an option. Releasing Plastic Budgie into the world was always going to be fraught with pushback and ignorance, but no matter the obstacles or hardship, it was important to me that it could fly free.
Plastic Budgie is out now at all good bookshops and libraries, and directly from Pink Shorts Press.
