Who Gets To Be Smart by Bri Lee
Bri Lee’s first book, Eggshell Skull, interrogated the failure of the Australian legal system to protect and advocate for victims of sexual assault. Lee’s ability to blend her own deeply personal story with a complex critique of systemic failure resulted in an engaging and exhilarating book which rightly won a whole host of literary awards.
In this second book, Lee turns her attention to education. It begins with a trip to Oxford University where she is visiting a friend who has been granted a Rhodes Scholarship. She is surprised by her own feelings of awe and reverence but also of inadequacy and exclusion. In asking the question ‘who gets to be smart?’ Lee engages with ‘kyriarchy’, a concept withroots in feminist theory that is eloquently used by Behrouz Boochani in No Friend but the Mountains to describe Manus prison. Lee came to know Boochani’s translator Omid Tofighian on the writers’ festival circuit and he says to her that ‘academia is second only to Manus prison in terms of being the most violent and cruel institution I have ever encountered’. Kyriarchy is a way of conceptualising the accumulation and preservation of power through intersecting hierarchal institutions and their systems of oppression (such as racism, classism, and sexism), and Lee uses its lens here to investigate the education system as a whole. Lee looks at how educational inequality becomes entrenched early in Australia within the two-tiered private and public school system. She explores the works of non-Western thinkers who point to the domination of the Western scientific method of measuring ‘intelligence’, and its profound effect in the silencing and ‘othering’ of non-Western knowledge.
Helen Garner has praised Lee for her ‘scorching, self-scouring’ style and it is easy to draw favourable comparisons between the two writers. Both are keen and insightful observers of themselves and others and both are deeply interested in questions of justice and power.
