This week’s Reading Trail – to spark or complement your thinking and list-making for votes in ABC-RN’s Top 100 Australian Books poll, or simply to whet your reading appetite – begins with “When We Talk About Time”, a lyrical and powerful exchange between Wiradjuri author Tara June Winch and Kurdish author Behrouz Boochani, from the strange out-of-time/out-of-place times and places of their particular worlds in the particular year of 2020:
Tara June Winch: Every now and then, perhaps every few weeks, I end up asking how you feel about time. It baffles you, this strange question—it baffles me too. Perhaps that’s why I keep asking you—maybe it’s not that I’m searching for an answer that I cannot find, it’s that I don’t want to be alone in my confusion. It feels as if the past decade, but particularly this year, time has receded in a tide, never to break back on land. I don’t know where I’ve been.
Behrouz Boochani: I understand the confusion. I think my understanding of time has changed, I don’t know why that happened or how. Does that relate to my experience as a man who was imprisoned for six years or does that relate to my experience as a man who migrated to another part of the world? Sometimes I think when you move from a place to another place that it impacts on your understanding of time, it seems time goes faster when you’ve moved elsewhere …
Follow their exchange – a Wiradjuri writer based in France passing messages from northern to southern hemisphere and a Kurdish writer based in New Zealand – through to Mireille Juchau’s beautiful reflection on Winch’s award-winning novel The Yield (among many other things) as part of the 2020 Adelaide Festival’s international 150 Psalms Project, and Fatima Measham’s stunning piece on Boochani’s award-winning No Friend But the Mountains (https://meanjin.com.au/essays/love-in-a-time-of-apocalypse/).
Voting is now open for this year’s ABC Radio National Top 100 Australian Books.
When We Talk About Time – Tara June Winch and Behrouz Boochani (2020)
Two Bloods – Mireille Juchau (2020)
Love in a Time of Apocalypse – Fatima Measham
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