Authors: Melissa Katsoulis
Morgan never reaffirmed her apology to the race she had disrespected, and continues to be vague about which bits of her book were imagined, which were distorted to protect the identities of the people she went walkabout with and which were true. Her final word on the matter, printed in the
Seattle Times
in September 1994, seems to be this:
The Australian government says these people don’t exist; they couldn’t still be there after the last roundup to send Aborigines to the reservation. In the eyes of the government, they would be criminals, walking on government land without a permit, not on any census or tax rolls, not registering births. But the government doesn’t pursue fictional people or places . . . I did go on walkabout. Everything that I say happened did happen. Nothing in the book is embellished. It’s fiction because of what I left out, not what I put in.
But anthropologists, Aboriginal commentators and historians all agree: if Morgan really did find a lost tribe of nomads in the bush who bear little or no resemblance to any other indigenous Australian group known to man, her achievement is far greater than even she is giving herself credit for.
T
HE STORY OF
the Australian hoaxer Helen Darville aka Demidenko has attracted indignant interest from all corners of the globe thanks to the subject-matter of the book that made her famous.
The Hand that Signed the Paper
won the Australian/Vogel literary award in 1993, the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal in 1995 and the prestigious Miles Franklin award in the same year. The book claims to be written by the daughter of a Ukrainian peasant and his brother, now living in Australia, who in the 1940s decided to join the Nazi death squads after being mistreated by Russian Jewish ‘commissars’ in their homeland. These hated communists, Demidenko wrote, inflicted terrible institutionalized suffering on the native population, causing them to rise up in anti-Semitic hatred and join Hitler in his fatal cause. In the book, Demidenko says that as an Australian-Ukrainian she often found herself having to explain why her forebears acted as they did, and from these discussions grew the idea for a book in which she could retell a particular chapter of twentieth-century history from the less well-known side. The side of the perpetrators. Of course there is nothing wrong with this, as sensitive and gifted German writers like Sebastian Hafner have shown. But coupled with a sideline in anti-Israeli journalism and a prose style that is at best hysterical, at worst sensationalist, Demidenko immediately attracted the attention of Jewish groups in Australia and beyond.
After accusing her of writing a book that hardly sought to disguise its pro-fascist sympathies, commentators from the Jewish and non-Jewish intellectual communities alike began to ask just who this Helen Demidenko was. She replied that she was a young woman in her twenties who had an uncle and other relatives who were keen for her to tell – perhaps to justify – their side of a very dark story. Her family had allegedly been blighted by events in Eastern Europe before fleeing to Australia: events which included witnessing loved ones being killed by Stalin’s invading Jews, then being liberated by the Nazis. Ultimately, one member of the Demidenko clan had become a concentration camp guard and another took part in the 1941 massacre of Jews at Babi Yar, a ravine outside Kiev. ‘An apology for genocide’ is what one highly respected Australian academic called it.
If the testament of the Demidenko uncle had been proven to be true,
The Hand that Signed the Paper
could be relegated to an unpleasant but necessary footnote in the annals of Europe’s lowest decade. But the fact that after only a little nudging by resourceful readers and critics Helen Demidenko admitted that she made it all up, casts it in a far stranger and more unsavoury light.
For Helen Demidenko was actually Helen Darville and her Australian family, far from fleeing the horrors of 1940s Ukraine, had come over from Great Britain and lived in the suburbs of Brisbane. They were neither educated nor rich, but Helen was studying English at the University of Queensland when the book was published. In 1993 she was an unworldly twenty-year-old, as evidenced by the fact that she made public appearances wearing Ukrainian folk costumes and regaling fans with tales of her vodka-soaked heritage.
There was no very dramatic debunking of Helen Demidenko, because everyone who knew her at university and at home was well aware that she was 100 per cent English-Australian. As she said herself, in her trademark plain dealing style on Australia’s Radio National, she just got tired of putting on the Demidenko act: ‘I felt trapped by constantly having to go out and perform it . . . I can pull the wog accent, and sound like Effie and do the Ukrainian-Australian accent really well . . . I grew up around these sorts of people.’
One of the striking things about Helen Darville, as we can now call her, although recently she has been going by the name Helen Dale, is that far from slinking away with her tail between her legs, she has swept off accusations of being a racist fantasist with élan. Some might say that is easier to do in Australia than it might be in the UK, say, because of the comparatively mainstream nature of far-right politics there, but it is also credit to her self-confidence that she has reinvented herself as a right-wing lawyer and commentator for ultra-conservative magazines like
Quadrant
(the right-wing publication founded by the Ern Malley hoaxer) and blogs like Catallaxy. She is now happy to give interviews and write articles in which she discusses her youthful escapades as a literary trickster. And although she never admits to being a hoaxer
per se
, claiming her book was always supposed to be a work of fiction but that she felt a Ukrainian name would give it more credibility, she agrees that she was keen to prick the ‘pretentiousness’ of the literary scene – just like McAuley, the Jew-baiting
Quadrant
founder did before her – and decided to start blogging against the left-wing critics in order to ‘humiliate a group I considered spineless’.
But deeper clues to the motivation behind her hoax came in a surprisingly revealing interview she gave to the ABC programme
All in the Mind
in April 2006. In it she reveals that far from being the ordinary child of quiet suburbanites, she faced challenges from the outset. Badly dyslexic, she recalled ‘not being any good at anything – well certainly not anything academic – when I was young. I can still remember the sensation of being the class idiot.’ But a keen intelligence meant she found strategies to overcome her literacy problems, as many clever dyslexics do, and so went ‘from the bottom to the top of the class inside six months, and that was very freaky. I’ve never forgotten that.’
If this sudden success and respect at school was thrilling, there was little such upward mobility at home, where her loving but uneducated mother was battling to keep the family together in the face of that recurring figure in the annals of literary hoaxers – the absent father. And Darville’s was absent in a quite spectacular way. Always what she called ‘a serial philanderer and petty criminal’, her dad, she says, ‘wasn’t worth too much’. After years of humiliating the family with his infidelities and run-ins with the law, he finally died while
in flagrante delicto
with a prostitute at a local brothel.
What did young Helen have to lose? Merely a past filled with ignominy which was leavened only by her discovery that she was smart enough to outwit the powers that be. And so she did, for a while. But doubtless she considers herself to have got the last laugh, as she is on the way to becoming a high-earning lawyer. Literature, she has said, was never going to earn her a decent crust, and ‘If I’m going to cop that much aggro, I want to be paid better for it’. Fair dinkum? You decide.
F
ORBIDDEN LOVE
IS
the story of Dalia, an ambitious, compassionate, beautiful young Jordanian woman who, after falling in love with a Christian man, was murdered by her father in a so-called honour killing. Throughout her short life she had had but one confidante, her best friend Norma – they not only shared their romantic dreams and secrets, but even set up as hairdressers together in a ground-breaking unisex salon in Amman. But when Dalia was stabbed to death with the full knowledge of her family, her friend was determined to tell the world about her unjust end – and to publicize the shameful institutionalized killings that went on behind closed doors in the Middle East. Moreover she wanted to tell the story of her and Dalia’s lives in repressive Amman. To do this, however, she would have to get out of the strict, secretive world of 1990s Jordan. It was only with the help of Dalia’s boyfriend, Michael, that she was able to be smuggled out of the country, initially to Greece and then to Australia, where she made a new life for herself as an author and campaigner for women’s rights.
Writing Dalia’s story was, Norma told journalists on the book’s publication, a very hard thing to do because it brought back so many painful memories of her dear friend, the beguiling young woman whose affair with the wrong man had, anyway, been totally chaste. But ultimately she
found the experience cathartic and was motivated by the desire to tell the world of the injustices perpetrated in the name of Jordanian patriarchy and the chance that by raising awareness – and money, with the proceeds of her book – she might be able to save just one girl’s life.
She called her memoir
Forbidden Love
and as soon as it was published in her new homeland in 2003 it became a runaway success. Hundreds of thousands of copies were sold, and Norma Khouri – highly marketable, with her ravishing good looks, sympathetic tone of voice and propensity to public tears of anger over the cause of women’s rights – became an overnight star. She trawled bookshops, festivals and rallies speaking about the experiences in her book, and Australia felt blessed that she had chosen that country as a refuge from the irate Jordanians now apparently hell-bent on dispatching her as they had Dalia.
The critical response to the book was muted in terms of its style, but the consensus was that this was one of those books that worked despite, and in a way because of, its unpolished prose. This was the grief-stricken lament of an angry young woman, determined to make her voice heard. And the story it told spoke volumes about the different lives led by women in the modern world. In an online interview with a website for reading groups, amongst which
Forbidden Love
was becoming hugely popular, Khouri was asked how living in a Western country had changed her. She confessed to coming round to the idea that intimacy before marriage might not be the terrible sin she had been brought up to believe it was, although she was of course still a virgin. The same interviewer asked what kinds of responses she had had from readers of Dalia’s story, and she replied, ‘shock, outrage and disgust’.
These words would taken on a prophetic edge when, only a year after publication, her story would be exposed as a fabrication. Norma Majid Khouri Michael al-Bagain Toliopoulos left her native Jordan before her fourth birthday and, until fleeing to Australia lived the life of a suburban housewife in Chicago, married to a Greek-American with whom she had two young children.
She had never been back to Jordan as an adult, apart from for a brief visit to secure identity papers. She barely spoke Arabic, and her mother and siblings, with whom she had grown up in Chicago, had no idea she was interested in women’s rights. In fact her mother, who was tracked down by the Sydney-based journalist Malcolm Knox after he became suspicious of Khouri, said her daughter had suddenly fled America in 2000, leaving her family distraught and missing her. Knox set out his scrupulous debunking in a
Sydney Morning Herald
article that had literary Australia reeling, and asking itself why it should be such a Mecca for audacious literary hoaxers.
But even before Knox’s careful investigation, eyebrows were being raised in Jordan even before the book itself had been seen. The leader of a women’s rights organization there, Amal al-Sabbagh, had received an anonymous email from someone asking for a bank account in which to deposit a charitable donation to the anti-honour-killing cause. Apparently this person was writing a book on the subject and proposed to give away the royalties. Al-Sabbagh was not in the habit of replying to nameless correspondents asking for bank details, but when, some time later, she saw the book for herself, she knew instantly that its author was not who she said she was. Aside from topographical inconsistencies which cast doubt on Khouri ever having lived in Amman, there were cultural misunderstandings which no Jordanian would make. For one thing, the notion of a unisex hair salon such as she claimed she and Dalia ran together, was absurd – such a venture would have been entirely illegal, and would have been shut down immediately. Besides, none of the hairdressers or barbers in the city had ever heard of these two women. Then came the more serious revelation that if Dalia had indeed been killed in the way Khouri described, al-Sabbagh or one of her colleagues would likely know about it. Amman is a small city of interconnected family and social groups, and scandalous Muslim-Christian relationships resulting in death by stabbing are the sorts of things people talk about. In total, al-Sabbagh found more than seventy inaccuracies in
Forbidden Love
.
Once Knox went public with all this information, it became clear that Khouri had in fact published this story before. In America, the book was called
Honor Lost
. She had sent the manuscript to a New York agent who had secured her a deal, but it hadn’t sold particularly well, getting lost in a slew of not-very-well-written misery memoirs and post-9/11 exposés of the ‘real’ Middle East.
When invited by Knox and others to account for herself, she was living in very nice enclave of Bribie Island off the coast of Queensland, where she, John and the kids had a smart house with a pool. She said she was utterly appalled that anyone would question her authenticity, and flatly denied that she had ever set foot in America until the book tour for
Honor Lost
. She maintained that she had no family in Chicago, no husband and no children and suggested that the enraged Jordanian establishment trying to discredit her.