Soraya the Storyteller

Rosanne Hawke (author)

Lothian Books, Australia: 2004; 172pp

ISBN: 0734407092

Genres: realistic fiction

Issues: ethics, family, freedom, friendship, identity, immigration, isolation, racism, relationships, values

Shortlisted for the CBCA Awards, Younger Readers: 2005.

Soraya and her family are from Afghanistan. She is a storyteller, like her father, and his father before him. Her stories are what keep her alive, despite the pain in her heart.

She has seen and experienced terrible things under the rule of the Taliban. She has lost four members of her family. Having been forced to flee her country and take appalling risks in order to escape those who persecuted them, Soraya arrived in Australia with her mother, younger brother and sister only to find that it was not a place of freedom that would welcome them, but a different form of prison.

Finally released under a Temporary Protection Visa, the family has to live with the fear of being forced to return to Afghanistan at the end of three years. How is it possible to deal with the nightmares of the past and live life positively when a black cloud of fear hovers constantly over their household? Soraya's mother's solution is to shut down, to withdraw inside herself and refuse to succumb to hope. Soraya believes there must be more to life than that. She believes that if you work hard enough, if you remember who you are and where you have come from, if you face your pain and use it to make you strong, that anything is possible.

So she writes her stories down - for herself, and perhaps, later, for her younger siblings. She finds that although there are some difficult people around, Australians who really don't understand why she and her family had to take refuge in an illegal boat to their country, that there are also better educated people who are willing to fight for them. That some things are common to all cultures - like games, stories and smiles.

This is a beautifully crafted piece of writing that will touch the heart of any reader. Told as a first-person narrative, Soraya's day-to-day experiences in her new community are interspersed with the things she writes in her diary - the things she dares not say aloud, in case she loses control of her emotions. The stark simplicity of her memories, a heart-wrenching mixture of normal family joys, bitter grief and terrible fear, are remarkably evocative. Rosanne Hawke has written a powerful and moving story that puts faces on some of the nameless ‘boat people' and ‘queue jumpers' as the media and others classify all those who are unfortunate enough to be forced to flee their own war-torn countries.

Without overt preaching but with a very strong subtext of tolerance, acceptance and compassion, Hawke's writing seeks to open the reader's eyes to the tension and uncertainty endured by those who are here on Temporary Protection Visas, as well as the circumstances endured by those locked in Detention Centres. Overall, however, it is a novel about hope - hope that Australia will learn to show greater compassion, hope for change in our laws and attitudes, and above all the hope of freedom from war and loss that drives refugees to Australia in the first place.

Quite inspirational and terribly moving, this is a novel that should stimulate much discussion, within a family or a classroom. Perhaps someone should pass copies of it onto the federal government!