The Abyssinian Contortionist

BACKGROUND This research sits within the field of nonfiction literary practice, specifically intervening in debates around new forms and approaches to autobiography, memoir and biography within a post-human, post-Cartesian and post-colonial understanding of embodied voice. It forms part of a body of work including my previous memoir Our father who wasn't there and numerous shorter essay/memoir works that investigate questions of voice, narrativity and subject/object relationships. Key practitioners and theorists in this field include Solnit, Kapuscinsky, Gornick, Klaus, Maggie Nelson and many others. CONTRIBUTION This work asks how one can approach writing the story of another person's life, across differences of gender, culture and geography. It places the 'story' of Sosina Wogayehu, an Ethiopian-Australian asylum-seeker, within a broader context of the history of Western cultural perceptions of Africa. It does so using techniques of personal reflection and narration, combined with ethnographic observation and historical research. It breaks new ground by dramatizing, within its narrative structure, the question of how stories are told and by whom, within a 'negotiated memoir' (Carlin 2011). SIGNIFICANCE The subject of the book is an internationally renowned circus performer. The book intervenes in vital international issues including zenophobia, race relations and asylum seekers. Subsequent to the book's publication, Sosina Wogayehu has been granted $20,000 by DFAT towards establishing a new circus school in Addis Ababa. The book received funding of $11,000 from Harold Mitchell Foundation and was published by innovative trade publisher UWA Publishing. It has been nationally reviewed in Australia and spotlighted at multiple festivals and conferences in the US, The Philippines and Australia. Two leading Australian arts festivals are now commissioning an adaptation of the book into a stageplay.