Parramatta: A Dictionary of Place and Memory (Yumna Kassab, Giramondo)

Written during her time as the inaugural Parramatta Laureate in Literature, Yumna Kassab (Politica, The Lovers) turns her eye to nonfiction with Parramatta: A Dictionary of Place and Memory, though in keeping with her signature disregard for form, it is anything but a conventional work.

Arranged A to Z like a dictionary, the book catalogues the artefacts of Kassab’s daily life – cafes, park benches and walking paths feature aplenty – alongside her favourite sayings and teachings, writing advice and the principles underpinning the architecture of her life. Parramatta itself, along with Kassab’s favourite soccer club, Western Sydney Wanderers, remains central throughout. Kassab’s digressions are inextricably shaped by the stultifying heat of global warming, the changing face of Sydney’s inner west under gentrification, and the looming spectre of Israel’s genocide in Palestine.

At once expansive and discursive, the dictionary is richest when Kassab turns her thoughts to moral accountability, connection and solidarity within the work of other thinkers. She frequently evokes writers from Western Sydney – Peter Polites, Amani Haydar, Jumaana Abdu, Omar Sakr, Vivian Pham and Max Easton – alongside a broader constellation including Joan Didion, Isabel Allende, Natalie Goldberg, Kurt Vonnegut and Jorge Luis Borges. In this way, the book retains the polyphonic quality of Kassab’s previous works, even if the form differs.

Parramatta: A Dictionary of Place and Memory is underpinned by a perennial desire to learn, an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and the constant need to deconstruct, translate and decipher.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Sonia Nair is a Melbourne-based writer and critic. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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