Zoya Patel is a complex young woman. Feminist, Fijian-Indian, Australian, vegetarian, partner, daughter, sister, writer, community advocate. There are many descriptors that define her yet she struggles with the whole concept of identity.
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Her book No Country Woman is the story of never knowing where you belong, a collection of essays that discuss race, feminism, religion, family. It’s an intelligent conversation, opinionated and critical, harsh at times even, yet one that is still full of love, for her family and her culture.
She’s a young woman who uses words such as zeitgeist and diaspora, she calls herself audacious. She admits she is a little angry at the moment, that her patience is tested more easily.
She’s just 28 and full of passion and fury and when I ask her if she thinks she’ll ever reach that point in her life where she’ll be happy to say “I’m Zoya” without any descriptors she pauses.
“It’s interesting you say that,” she says.
“That's how I feel about feminism now. I started on my feminist journey pretty young but I have got to the point where when people get hung up on pop culture representations of women I'm like whatever, talk to me about childcare, that's what I'm interested in right now, maternity leave, systemic problems …
“That’s been a real evolution for me. I've gone from wanting to write an article every time a celebrity did something wrong but now I don't feel the need to hold on to my feminist label anymore, even though I would proudly proclaim it, that's just who I am now.”
Patel has been described as a “feminist wunderkind”. She was in her mid-teens when she set up the website Feminartsy, an online feminist arts and literature journal, she was the former editor-in-chief of Lip Magazine, and she studied gender studies at the Australian National University in Canberra. But readers who come to No Country Woman expecting a feminist manifesto will be disappointed.
It’s race that concerns her now.
“I don't get to choose how people see me,” she says. “All it takes is one incident to get my back up.
“For a lot of people out there I'll always be that brown girl, that migrant, that where-are-you-really-from girl.
“You don't get to choose how that label is applied to you. For that reason I think I'll always have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about race.”
She says it’s the mainstream normalised discrimination and prejudice that angers her now.
“The minor things like when yoga instructors say namaste at the end of a session. It really irks me, it's hard to explain, I don't think people should stop doing things like that and I recognise that culture is always evolving and it should, that's inevitable.
“But it grates against the kind of racism that I grew up with that told me everything about me and my culture was not very cool and not very interesting and was in fact to my detriment … to then have those things appropriated by white culture is really frustrating.”
Born in Fiji, to Fijian-Indian parents, the youngest of four siblings, the family moved to Australia when she was three, first to Albury and then at 11 to Canberra. Her parents have always been her No. 1 supporters..
“They always knew I would end up writing a book one day, although they probably hoped it would be some Anne of Green Gables-esque literature,” she says.
“It might have been a surprise when I started writing about our lives. In our culture you don't talk about your personal lives very much.”
When she was a student at ANU she started a blog called The Coconut Chronicles - “a coconut is brown on the outside and white on the inside, the joke only works when I’m saying it to myself” - where she would share experiences of funny cultural experiences.
“It wasn't about the cultural conflicts with mainstream Australians it was more about negotiating tensions that came up with your family and I started getting emails from other people like me, from Australia and across the world, it was quite random.
“It made me realise there was this whole cohort of people like me who didn’t really have any media speaking directly to them or they didn't at the time.”
She hopes No Country Woman might reach the same audience, people “like” her. She uses the phrase “like me” a lot during our conversation, which is interesting considering the book is about finding your identity.
Despite all the angst, you get the sense that Patel knows exactly who she is, where she’s at. All she needs is the courage to admit that to herself.
No Country Woman: A memoir of not belonging, by Zoya Patel. Hachette, $32.99.
Zoya Patel will be appearing at the Melbourne Writers' Festival from August 26-31.
