Joyful Strains

Joyful Strains is a collection of essays about the experience of immigration. It gathers together 27 different stories from 27 different places, and this variation is its great strength. One of the lasting impressions that this collection creates is that Australia is a nation made up of a diverse mix of people, and none of them have the same tale to tell.

Yet there are still common themes that draw the collection together. In Ghassan Hage’s ‘On Other Belongings’, he talks about the roots he found in Australia being ‘not roots that keep you grounded, [but] roots that stay with you as you move’. Similarly, Ouyang Yu talks about the Chinese notion of ‘drift-anchor’ – of being allowed freedom and belonging simultaneously. In Joyful Strains, expatriation does not denote turning your back on your country of origin, but rather finding home elsewhere and still retaining connections with the places you’ve come from.

This is not to say that Joyful Strains is full of stories about the happiness of the Promised Land – far from it, and this is one of the elements that makes it so refreshing. While a sense of belonging can be found, many of these writers confess to feeling unable to return. Adib Khan talks of wanting to ‘recapture what there was and keep what I now have’, going on to describe his sense of alienation at mosque with his family back in Bangladesh. This discord features in many of the essays, along with other feelings of dislocation and tension.

Neither a resounding celebration of the joys of Australia nor a collection of great sadness, Joyful Strains is an eye-opening, truthful collection of personal essays by writers we should be proud to call our own, and a realistic, well-rounded view of the great many components of our multicultural population.

Samantha van Zweden is a freelance reviewer