STORY - Q & A with Alice Nelson

1. Where were you raised and educated?

I was born in Perth and grew up by the beach there. I went to school at a Catholic girls college and then on to the University of Western Australia. My parents were great travellers, so as quite small children we were exposed to different countries and cultures.

2. Tell me something of your family.

While there are only three children in my immediate family, I have a sprawling, eccentric and fabulous extended family which has always been a huge part of my life. I grew up very closely with a large network of aunts, uncles and cousins and a kind of shared communal life has always been important in my family. As well as my mother, I have five aunts who have been important formative figures in my life, and still are. I’ve always been surrounded by strong, independent, creative women!

3. Career aspirations growing up?

I always knew that I would do something that involved words, language and communication, but that I wanted to combine this with a career that was focused towards social justice. I initially studied law, but then went on to pursue journalism and communications as well as doing graduate study in creative writing in the US. I suppose I never really conceived of being a writer as a career, and while it is certainly a large part of my career now, it is by no means all that I do.

4 Please share something of your faith story.

I was raised as a Catholic but in a family that embraced a very ecumenical and open-minded notion of faith. What was important was a spirituality of contemplation, progressive vision and prophetic action. From my mother in particular I absorbed the notion of a spiritual practice that placed each small act of kindness, each moment of presence and practice, each effort to see, cleanse and integrate our inner life as part of building a new world – of becoming what we call ‘Kingdom people’.

Throughout my schooling I was taught strongly that being a Christian means that we have a faith that is not just a mere list of beliefs or propositions, but truly a new vision of life and the cosmos – one that is suffused with love, truth and justice - and that our challenge is to try and make our lives testaments to this kind of faith.
When I was living in the US I was involved in a wonderful interfaith movement for social justice, where I came across the Jewish concept of tikkun olam – ‘to heal, mend and transform the world’. I think that this is the basic call of all religions – it means that we lift people up and affirm their dignity, that we are unashamedly utopian and willing to fight for our highest ideals, yet also unashamedly humble in knowing that we don’t know all we need to know to do the healing that needs to be done.

For me, if we are people of faith then that involves an absolute demand for justice, service and love. Our world is broken – physically, socially and spiritually – and it is our obligation to help set it to rights. I believe that the sources of external injustice, poverty, suffering and ecological destruction are to be found not just in economic and political arrangements but also in our alienation from one another – our failure to experience and recognise ourselves and others as holy.

4 Could you tell me some of your experiences in Harlem?

I arrived in Harlem straight from university and, because of the chronic shortage of social workers, was given a role as a family caseworker and advocate in a Catholic multi-service agency working mostly with undocumented migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. Harlem is a true ghetto, a neighbourhood bordering the Bronx full of slum tenements and housing projects, barbed wire and disenfranchised youth, gangs and undocumented migrants. It’s a hard, cold, rough place to an outsider but after living there I found it had its own heart and warmth.

I was working with families and individuals experiencing the kinds of poverty, despair, injustice, discrimination and despair that I could never really have dreamed of. I had seen extreme poverty in developing nations before, but never had I imagined that it existed in the heart of one of the world’s wealthiest cities. Most of my clients lived in slum tenements or condemned housing or crammed into tiny flats with up to ten other families. They had no access to healthcare, education or legal assistance and most days didn’t have enough to eat. I remember going on my first home visit to an Iraqi refugee family of 8 who were sharing a one room apartment with three other families. Their allocated living space was one bunk bed. The mother was heavily pregnant with her seventh child and she showed me the dresser drawer lined in newspaper that she had prepared as a cradle for the baby.

I worked with Mexican mothers who had lost their babies to dehydration in the long walk across the desert to cross the border illegally in search of a better life; whole African families who lived in the subway system; people who had been through unimaginable torture and trauma and yet were still struggling to give their children a better life.

I was not only witnessing individual cases of pain, struggle and challenge but was also beginning to be overwhelmed by the structural and systemic injustices of a society that had so much yet gave so little to its poor. Nothing in my life had required so much, so deeply of me. Never before had the entire world, the social order, my sense of justice and personal agency seemed so profoundly shaken and fragile. It was a time of great challenge, awakenings and moments of despair.

The agency I worked for provided a vast array of programs to help these people: soup kitchens, food pantry, free medical care, counselling, advocacy, English classes, mother’s groups, a home health service. I soon came to realise however that the work we were doing challenged us to do more than provide programs and services in meeting the needs of our community. Jesus may have attended to practical needs, but he also met the hearts of those he tended. Slowly, my work became just as much about relationships as about fixing problems; about journeying with others rather than doing; about meeting hearts rather than running programs.

One of the most important insights I gained during my years in Harlem was the understanding that it is the spirit we have, not the work we do, that makes us important to the people around us. Yes, I helped to solve some of my clients’ practical problems but it was the times I spent drinking tea with them or inviting them into my house to teach me to make tortillas, or listening to their stories, that meant the most to them.

And I also came away incredibly enriched. The people I worked with taught me incredible lessons about inner strength and faith, about trauma and recovery and about the resilience of the human spirit. I do believe that when we challenge ourselves to meet people on their ground, we are profoundly changed as well.

My work in Harlem (as well as my work here in Perth) taught me a great deal about the importance of community, of belonging, of connectedness. No matter their cultural, religious or personal backgrounds, people hunger for relationship and communities in which they can experience themselves being cared for in all their uniqueness and beauty. And this recognition needs to come not only from what they can deliver or achieve in the world but simply because they are valuable and deserving of love and caring just for who they are. I did a lot of work with our donors and benefactors – finding ways to connect private philanthropists to the community and I found this same hunger for a life that is suffused with love, generosity and compassion – for connection to something more meaningful than the capitalist merry-go-round. I think there’s a hunger for a more ethical way of living and being in the world and that our social change movements need to harness this.

5. The fellowships you have gained, especially overseas - and The Last Sky - suggest a very self contained, focused, independent personality - is that how you see yourself?

I think that to be a writer, one has to possess a degree of self-containment and independence. You have to have the kind of personality that allows you to sit for hours and hours on end in a room with the door shut, wrestling with words on a page. An enormous amount of solitude and introspection is required to complete a novel.
At the same time, I think writers need to be passionately involved in life, in the world, in the stories of others. It’s the stuff of our work. Yes, there are writers like Emily Dickinson, who led relatively secluded lives and produced incredible work, but for me, being out there engaging with the world, with all kinds of people, is what feeds my work. My involvement over many years with African refugees, both in Australia and the US, has not only been personally enriching and inspiring to me, but has become part of the novel I’m currently working on.

6. Please explain your 'take' on the relationship between art and the social conscience or imagination.

I believe that fiction has an incredible power to recognise and to restore human dignity. Literature offers us the articulated potentials, the dreams, the yearnings and the unmistakable beauty and possibility of the human reality of other people, no matter how different they are from us. As a child I read voraciously because it was a way for me to experience not only other worlds, but other souls. Then, and now, fiction provided me with that truth that we are all more than what we seem and that what each of us holds is irreplaceable.

I have spoken and written a great deal about the importance of storytelling, of literature and of imagination. I believe that when we write, we resist the forces that deny our common humanity. People ask why, in these dark and complex times, we should care about imagination and storytelling. My answer is that without imagination, we cannot believe in a time when a seemingly permanent injustice will be removed, we cannot plan its removal.

We cannot call up those elements of the past which nourish us and make us ourselves, we cannot have a future, because nothing, in reality, exists other than the endless now. This tyranny demands an eternal, unrelieved present tense, a forgetting of our own interior lives and those of all others, our co-operation in the process of our own removal, thought by thought. Why else would an oppressive regime and any government with an eye to its own survival, become at least unsettled by the widespread use of imagination amongst a population it sought to control? Because if we have imagination, we can fit actions together with consequences even if those consequences are being intentionally obscured.

Literature is in my estimation best understood as a record of our human selves: of our frailties, of our follies, of our errors, of our limitations, of our fears, of our delusions, of our evasions and of our vulnerabilities. Literature, when ‘done right’, moves us beyond our myths of mastery and invulnerability and reminds us with inescapable force that all we are and all we shall ever be is human. Literature, in other words, bears witness to what it is to be human. Bearing witness to our humanity not only punctures myths and acts as an antidote to those who would dehumanise us through war, deception, the logic of capital and the daily quotidian practice of cruelty and indifference, it also helps to make us more human. And it is in this human-making that literature, like all art, excels.

I believe it is a failure of the imagination that allows famine or terror to reign in the world. A man who throws half the contents of his fridge into the rubbish fails to imagine that there are whole villages in Africa desperate for a scrap of food. The general who orders the release of cruise missiles on villages doesn’t imagine the children playing, the women cooking below, doesn’t imagine that they experience grief and love and loss like him. Every mass atrocity I can think of has had a concomitant failure and retreat of public imagination. We can destroy people when we cease to imagine that they are like us, that they love and suffer as deeply as we do.

Governments, especially authoritarian ones, like to control people's capacity to imagine some things. This is always related to human rights - the more limited public imagination, the more docile the populace will be and the more a government can act as it pleases. In Australia this desire to control the capacity to imagine was and is most apparent in the government's handling of refugees and detention centres. We can lock up men, women and children in remote detention centres in the desert for years because we fail to imagine that they are like us, that they have the same hopes and dreams for their families. An asylum seeker locked in the Villawood Detention Centre for several years sent out postcard saying, ‘Don’t forget us. We’re humans too’. And that’s what I think the power of imagination comes down to – the ability to see that the stranger is like ourselves.

7. Tell me something about your African boys.

Dorothy Day, who has long been one of my great heroes, once spoke about having a ‘Christ room’ in every house – a place where we can welcome the homeless, the hungry, the stranger. This sounds wildly impractical to most people with their busy lives and focus on their own families, but I believe that this is exactly what our faith challenges us to do – we can’t say that we are born two thousand years too late to offer a room to Christ – we have opportunities every single day.

I first had the opportunity to put this notion of a ‘Christ room’ in action four years ago when I received a call from the refugee agency I work for, desperately trying to find accommodation for a young Ethiopian refugee mother and her baby. All the shelters were full and this young mum would have been out on the street. I have a lovely big house and live alone and I couldn’t see any reason why I wouldn’t offer a place to stay to this vulnerable little family. So mum and baby came to live with me for several months, during which time we found English classes and counselling for the mother, playgroup for the baby and gradually built up the mum’s confidence so that she was able to move into her own unit. Since then I’ve had other families stay with me in times of need and sometimes children when their parents are not able to care for them.

For the last two years I’ve been very involved with a young Rwandan mum and her two little boys. I think it’s true that you need a community to raise children and for this particular young mother with her history of persecution, torture and trauma, being a functioning parent to two very active little boys is very difficult.

As well as thinking that this kind of work is simply part of our common humanity, I also believe that the way Australia has dealt with the issues of asylum seekers and refugees is a terrible indictment on our country. I see a growing tendency to dehumanise those who come to our wealthy nations seeking a better life and I think that we have an obligation to help others think more carefully about one of the most urgent of moral questions – who do we call ‘us’?

As well as working directly with immigrants and refugees, I am interested in helping to open up new prospects for welcome, understanding and dialogue with wider society.

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