The Pain of Unbelonging: Alienation and Identity in Australasian Literature. (Cross-Cultures, 91)

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For Philip and Raphaël Collingwood–Whittick

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Contents

Preface GERMAINE GREER INTRODUCTION

Towards Settler Auto-Ethnography: Nicholas Jose’s Black Sheep MARC DELREZ

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1

Australia Re-Mapped and Con-Texted in Kim Scott’s Benang PABLO ARMELLINO

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“One more story to tell”: Diasporic Articulations in Sally Morgan’s My Place ELVIRA PULITANO

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Belonging and Unbelonging in Text and Research: “Snow Domes” in Australia ELEONORE WILDBURGER

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Reconciling Accounts: An Analysis of Stephen Gray’s The Artist is a Thief CHRISTINE NICHOLLS

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The Spectral Belongings of Mudrooroo LORENZO PERRONA

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The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith and the ‘Pain of Unbelonging’ S U E R Y A N –F A Z I L L E A U

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the bone people Contexts and Reception, 1984–2004 SARAH SHIEFF

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Integrating, Belonging, Unbelonging in Albert Wendt’s Sons for the Return Home FRANÇOISE KRAL

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Margaret Mahy’s Post-National Bridge-Building: Weaving the Threads of Unbelonging A N N E M A G N A N –P A R K

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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Preface

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NBELONGING HURTS RIGHT ENOUGH;

it hurts whether you’re a European woman in a southern country whose nightly dreams all happen under a paler northern sky or a descendant of forty thousand years of free-holders locked out of the land that it is your duty to cherish, watching it blow away because it’s been eaten out by an interloper’s sheep. I imagine it would be pretty grim being an earthling on Mars, or a Martian wandering the crowded surface of this mismanaged planet. There are those who will tell you that it is human destiny to unbelong, because we were designed for heaven. All human life is exile, as far as such believers are concerned. Everywhere is diaspora. If that is the case, perhaps we should just get on with it, accept unbelongingness as a humanity thing, call it freedom, even. We don’t have roots. We have feet and feet are made for walking. Nevertheless, we persist in an erroneous notion that we should have roots, that human beings need roots. We believe that children conceived as a consequence of sperm donation have a right to know who their ‘real’ father is. Roots and identity are imagined to be co-extensive. Soon we’ll know just what genetic load comes with what gamete, so we’ll be even more set on embedding people in their heredity. And yet at the same time we accept the idea of people finding themselves in the wrong body, and are prepared to indulge them in the conviction that they are not who they are, but a totally new discontinuous autochthonous creation. These are people who need to unbelong, even to the mother who bore them. Confused? You bet. I am the child of a man who had never heard the name his mother gave him at baptism, who rejected the name given him by the people who brought him up, and made himself a new one which, for no good reason, I keep; rooting myself in rootlessness. Communities are imagined; for most

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of my life I imagined myself a Jew. To escape guilt and misery for the Holocaust I needed to believe that I was a Jew. I learnt Yiddish, then the lingua franca of central Europe, but my grandmother, whom I called Rachel Weiss, was Emma Rachel Wise, and not Jewish at all. I was convinced my mother was half Italian; instead, she was a quarter Swiss. I half-believe things about her other forebears that are only half-true. Rootless may be bad, but is rooted any better? The skeletal black kids on the fringes of the desert who sniff petrol instead of going hunting are struggling to kick free of their elders’ insistence on traditional values. Such discipline they see as not only onerous and tedious but pointless. Belonging is limitation. Belonging can mean staying in the run-down house in the run-down street of a long-dead industrial town, caring for the aged parent until all hope is gone. When we put borders around Aboriginal territories and pen the people inside them, we turn belonging into a punishment. Born people need a navel but not an umbilical cord. Home is a place to leave as well as to return to. For nomadic peoples, home is the journeying. The true pain of unbelonging is felt by those who have no homeland and no diaspora, who do not belong where they are, and don’t belong anywhere else either. As an Australian of European descent, I can claim no identification with the place where I was born. Yet that is the country that made me the peculiar phenomenon that I am. I could come from nowhere else. Australians may believe that I have denied them, but Europeans offer me no such possibility. Every London cab driver asks me where I’m from, as if I arrived last week instead of forty years ago. I keep my Australian passport, refuse, have refused and will always refuse British nationality, even though the Home Office now demands that I pay a huge sum for a stamp in my Australian passport to show that I am permitted to go on paying part of my earnings into the British treasury. So far I haven’t paid it and don’t have the stamp. I’m proud to stand for hours in the longest queue at immigration control, holding six passports with the old stamp in them, because it reminds me several times a month that I don’t belong. If I had roots, which I haven’t, some would be in republican Ireland, some in Ulster, some in Lincolnshire, some in the Ticino, some in Denmark and some in Prussia. My ashes won’t be scattered in England or Europe, but they can’t be scattered in Australia either. For a gubba in Australia there can be no belonging. Ours is the trauma of never having belonged. Nothing else will explain the colonists’ con-

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tempt for and brutal treatment of the great south land. In all our interactions with country we are reminded, not that it is not ours, which could be fixed, but that it belongs to other people, which can’t. To this fact we cannot, must not be reconciled. Nor should we demand that the people we have displaced perform reconciliation on our behalf. But it seems that if country cannot be ours we will destroy it; the process is already irreversible but most Australians can ignore it. Safe in their cordon of anonymous conurbation that sucks up the continent’s scanty water and squanders it on imported vegetation, they dare to call Australia the lucky country. In the streets of the endless suburbs we could be anywhere, from the Costa Brava to Cape Town to Miami. White Australians are tourists in their own birthplace, dashing from funny-shaped rock to funny-shaped rock, with only the vaguest idea of what might lie between. Unbelonging hurts, but the pain is salutary. Belonging hurts, too, when what you belong to and what belongs to you is being withheld, exploited, undermined and destroyed. That pain is entirely destructive, toxic, relentless, maddening. I can shoulder my mongrel heritage and walk away. I can have my ashes shot off into the jet stream to be whirled around the globe, unhoused forever, or just have them put in the garbage, it makes no odds to me. There are other people for whom the disjunctions that exist in my life don’t exist, people for whom land is both self and meaning, whose lives become derelict when they can no longer fulfil their obligations to the source of all their being. To be driven out of one’s spiritual landscape, to be pushed from pillar to post at the constantly changing whim of an alien system, this pain of unbelonging is unbearable anguish. As a white Australian I am complicit in inflicting it upon Aboriginal peoples, day by cruel day. When the reckoning comes, I will not be able to expiate my guilt by merely enduring the lesser pain of unbelonging. GERMAINE GREER

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Introduction

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critics of the postcolonial have rightly attacked postcolonial theory for its homogenizing tendency or, more precisely, its failure to take adequately into account those aspects of colonialism that, contrary to the single, monolithic phenomenon which postcolonialism so often assumes as its point of departure, have in reality resulted in a range of significantly different sociocultural models.1 Just as the Raj bears scant resemblance to former European colonies like French Algeria or the Belgian Congo, so the white settler colonies of the Empire such as Australia or South Africa have little in common with the tropical exploitation colonies that Britain established in Africa or the Caribbean. Yet, in acknowledging the need for both more differentiation in the way postcolonial theory represents colonial societies and greater nuance in its analyses of contemporary postcolonial nations, we must nevertheless beware of overlooking the existence of certain common experiences that are part of what could be called the bedrock condition of colonialism, irrespective of its chronology, geography, or the national/ethnic identities of those whose lives were caught up in its formidable momentum. One such experience is that of colonial alienation. For colonialism, by its very nature, not only deracinates, physically displaces and psychically disorientates all those concerned – whether as agents in, or peoples acted on – by the colonial enterprise, it also unfailingly disconnects colonial subjects from their native culture. Dislodged from their existential moorings, emotionally destabilized by the fissure that opens up in their lives, sunder1

N THE LAST DECADE,

Which would include the historical context and geographical location in which it operated, the national identity of the colonizing power, the sociocultural organization of the indigenous peoples at the time of colonization, etc.

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ing the ‘sacred’ place to which they once belonged from the profane colonial space into which the process of colonization has propelled them, colonizers and colonized alike are afflicted by a psychological malaise that Homi Bhabha has defined as “the estranging sense of the relocation of the home and the world in an unhallowed place.”2 Referring to the experience of Australia’s colonizers in her recent polemical essay Whitefella Jump Up, Germaine Greer speaks of “the kind of unremitting and inadmissible psychic pain” that originated in the trauma of “migration […] to a land from which there [could] be no return”3 and was compounded by the stress of long-term exile in unknown territory. This “psychic pain,” which Greer has described elsewhere as “the pain of unbelonging,”4 provides the focus of the present collection of essays on the contemporary literatures of Australia and New Zealand. There are, of course, numerous important points of divergence between the colonial histories of Australia and New Zealand. Not only did the colonization of Australia begin more than half a century before that of New Zealand, but the modern Australian nation started life as a penal colony, whereas white settlement in New Zealand was, from the outset, the result of free immigration. The native populations of these two antipodean outposts of empire also reacted to the advent of the white man in significantly different ways. A tribal people who lived in large settled communities and practised both agriculture and war, Maori responded to the invasion of their land in a more organized and bellicose way than the small, nomadic, hunter-gatherer groups of Aborigines, whose resistance was necessarily restricted to the use of sporadic guerrilla tactics. In Australia, settlers ‘dispersed’ or, less euphemistically, massacred recalcitrant Aboriginal clans; in New Zealand, British and colonial forces fought battles against Maori armies. In the words of C.D. Rowley, “The Maori was Homi Bhabha, “The World and the Home,” Social Text 31–32 (1992): 141. Germaine Greer, Whitefella Jump Up: The Shortest Way to Nationhood (London: Profile, 2004): 11. 4 The expression, used by Germaine Greer in one of the many interviews she gave on the publication of Whitefella, struck me as a particularly apt description of a feeling or, rather, an emotional state that is recurrent in a great deal of colonial and postcolonial literature. Unfortunately, despite a great deal of searching on the internet, where I originally found the interview in question, I have since been unable to relocate the precise document. Fortunately, however, the reader can find the essence of Greer’s reflections in the preface she has been so kind as to write for the present collection. 2 3

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respected as a warrior; the Aboriginal was despised as a rural pest.”5 Consequently, contrary to the practice in New Zealand where Maori chiefs were individually solicited by the British to be co-signatories to the famous Treaty of Waitangi, it was never deemed necessary to enter into any form of negotiation with Australia’s first peoples over the massive transfer of their territories into white hands. And yet, despite these notable differences, striking parallels exist between the two countries at every stage of their respective post-contact histories – first, in terms of the psychological reactions of white communities to their constantly evolving condition as settlers, and, secondly, with regard to the disastrous sociocultural impact of European settlement on the indigenous societies of Australia and New Zealand. The primary and principal reaction of settlers to the geographical and cultural deracination they underwent and the difficulties they experienced in re-rooting themselves in the unrecognizable world they had entered was, then, the pain of unbelonging to which Greer refers. It was the colonizer’s absolute unfamiliarity with the alien space of the colony and his striving to overcome the feelings of existential homelessness such ignorance engendered that both prompted his initially destructive relationship with the physical environment and drove his genocidal fantasies about the indigenous population. To allay their overwhelming sense of estrangement, settler communities had first to conquer their fear of the unknown – a process that often entailed the systematic elimination of all that was ‘alien’ in their surroundings. In suppressing the unfamiliar, they not only destroyed many of the landscape’s natural features, they also, as Simon Featherstone explains, obliterated signs indicating human occupation of it – key evidence, in other words, of indigenous peoples’ belonging: In Australia, the colonial ‘re-seeing’ resulted in the erasure of an ancient human geography […]. The inability of colonists to see and understand Aboriginal methods of defining and managing their lands […] led to a landscape long mapped and maintained by indigenous peoples being redefined as ‘wilderness’[…]. The transformation of a productive indigenous geography into an unproductive ‘European’ landscape of desert

5 C.D. Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1974): 15.

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In Australia, preparing the country for an agricultural development it had never previously known necessitated the large-scale felling of trees, the elimination of indigenous vegetation and the diversion of important watercourses. Extensive clearing of the Australian bush produced the requisite expanses of pasturage for cattle, while ambitious irrigation systems transformed formerly arid plains into endless fields of wheat. If millions of sheep and cows – the first hard-hooved creatures Australia had ever known – soon began to trample and destroy the fragile native grasses, they were far from being the only non-indigenous animals imported into the colony by its human invaders. Early consignments of livestock shipped over from the homeland included foxes, rabbits and game-birds (introduced to satisfy the English gentleman’s nostalgia for the hunt); horses, donkeys, pigs, goats, cats and dogs (essential elements in the reconstitution of the traditional British farmyard); and thrushes and blackbirds (for whose familiar song the homesick immigrants yearned).7 Colonial gardens were planted with flowers and vegetables from the old country and the grander settler mansions were surrounded by the reassuringly English décor of rolling lawns and trim green hedges. In David Malouf’s novel Remembering Babylon, such radical interference in the environment is represented as a sign of the Anglo-Celt’s blind ethnocentrism. Writing in his field notebook, the botanizing Reverend Frazer confesses: We have been wrong to see this continent as hostile and infelicitous, so that only by the fiercest stoicism, a supreme resolution and force of will, and by felling, clearing, sowing with the seeds we have brought with us, and by importing sheep, cattle, rabbits, even the very birds of the air, can it be shaped and made habitable. It is habitable already. […] We must rub our eyes and look again, clear our minds of what we are looking for to see what is there.8

6 7 8

Simon Featherstone, Postcolonial Cultures (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2005): 205. Geoffrey Blainey, A Land Half Won (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 1995): 307. David Malouf, Remembering Babylon (London: Vintage, 1993): 129–30.

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Driven by a neurotic determination to make the country more like home, Australia’s settlers not only failed to “see what was there,” they went on to cause irreversible damage to the country’s unique and fragile ecosystem. In D.J. Mulvaney’s words, “Pastoral occupation upset the delicate balance of nature through over-grazing and the destruction of grasslands and forests which provided many edible seeds and roots and supported a rich fauna; erosion also followed.”9 Apart from the extensive damage caused by pastoral farming, other environmental menaces arising from colonial interaction with the landscape include the extinction of numerous species of indigenous wildlife due to the indiscriminate introduction of European fauna,10 the eruption of great salt ulcers on the land caused by grandiose irrigation projects, and the silting-up of rivers (with the prospect of water shortages for major cities like Adelaide11) that has resulted from the diversion of important water-courses. As Germaine Greer remarks apropos of the ecological destruction that has been wrought in Australia, “If we truly felt that this country was our home we could not despoil it in this manner; we are trashing it because we suspect it belongs to someone else.”12 The same observation might well be made of New Zealand, where the draining of wetlands, the clearing of forests and the introduction of sheep and cattle have led to a similar catalogue of ecological disasters : namely, extensive damage to the country’s ancient eco-systems, the extinction of numerous species of indigenous 9 D.J. Mulvaney, The Prehistory of Australia (London: Thames & Hudson, 1969): 46. The erosion that Mulvaney refers to resulted in gigantic dust-storms that even to-

day plague the lives of contemporary Australians. 10 Underlining the proliferation in the 1860s of acclimatization societies which “met in the cities and planned the introduction of all kinds of useful creatures,” Blainey makes the point that “The mania for acclimatizing was in one sense a reflection that people themselves were still unacclimatized. They longed for reminders of home”; A Land Half Won, 307. 11 A recent press article reports that “Australia’s greatest river is running dry because of a prolonged drought that has exacerbated the problems caused by farmers taking too much water to irrigate unsuitable crops. Scientists fear that years of belowaverage rainfall in south-east Australia is turning the once mighty Murray river – known as the Australian Mississippi – from a gushing torrent to a trickling stream”; Steve Connor (Science Editor) “Australia’s greatest river runs dry as drought takes hold,” The Independent (10 December 2005). 12 Greer, Whitefella, 117 (emphasis added).

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fauna, the destruction of two thirds of the original vegetation, the deterioration of water resources and severe soil erosion. In addition to their radical attempts to transform the physical appearance of the country, British settlers in Australia and New Zealand also sought to neutralize the environment’s power to alienate through a psychological re-orientation of the way they looked at it. In the early literature of the two colonies there are, for example, innumerable instances of a determined effort to find in the new topographies surveyed by the authorial gaze any element that can conceivably be likened or related to the landscapes of the old continent. This “habit of resorting to familiar European stereotypes to deal with the unfamiliar appearance of things Australian” is, Robert Hughes points out, “one of the more common […] descriptive resources of the First Fleet diarists.”13 The following journal entry of the First Fleeter Arthur Bowes Smyth, reporting on the area around what is today Sydney Harbour, provides a good example: The finest terras’s, lawns and grottos, with distinct plantations of the tallest and most stately trees I ever saw in any nobleman’s ground in England, cannot excel in beauty those wh. Nature now presented to our view.14

John Rickard identifies the same assimilatory tendency in the accounts of early explorers. “In descriptions of [the] country,” he observes, “the image of the park often recurs.”15 Thus, a valley that Thomas Mitchell comes upon in his travels is said by the explorer to have “the appearance of a well kept park,” Theodore Scott refers to the “stately trees” growing in the country around Adelaide as “rising here and there from their green foundations in the same way as they do in the noble parks of England.”16 Indeed, any open grassland – which, in reality, had almost certainly been produced by Aboriginal firing – is, Simon Ryan points out, thought to resemble “a nobleman’s park on a gigantic scale.”17 Like the Governor of Queensland in Remembering Babylon, the colonizer continually scours his new environment for points of comparison with the scenery of his native Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore (London: Harvill, 1996): 3. Hughes, The Fatal Shore, 4. 15 John Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History (London: Longman, 1988): 50. 16 Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History, 51. 17 Simon Ryan, The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1996): 60. 13 14

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continent. In the words of Malouf’s narrator, “Analogy is his drug. He finds it everywhere.”18 Although New Zealand was the most remote and, arguably for that reason, the loneliest and most other-worldly of Britain’s colonies, its snow-capped mountain ranges and verdant landscapes nevertheless ensured that it, too, was perceived in terms of the “familiar European stereotypes” mentioned by Hughes. Of the country around Christchurch, Samuel Butler informs his reader that it “reminded me much of Cambridgeshire,” before adding a few lines later that, to be more precise, it “is a sort of a cross between the plains of Lombardy and the fens of North Cambridgeshire.”19 To use Ryan’s analysis, in descriptions such as this, “The landscape itself is deferred; it exists only insofar as it reminds one of a European exemplum.”20 There were, however, cases where the new environment did not lend itself to even the most tenuous comparisons, and then remedies of a different order had to be found for relieving the pain of unbelonging. As the following depiction of a station house in New Zealand indicates, some settlers went to extraordinary lengths to reconstitute within the microcosm of their own home an exact replica of the world they had left behind: The house is of wood, two storeys high, and came out from England! It is built on a brick foundation, which is quite unusual here. Inside, it is exactly like a most charming English house, and when I first stood in the drawing-room it was difficult to believe that I was at the other end of the world. All the newest books, papers, and periodicals covered the tables, the newest music lay on the piano, whilst a profusion of English greenhouse flowers in Minton’s loveliest vases added to the illusion. The Avon winds through the grounds, which are very pretty, and are laid out in the English fashion.21

Malouf, Remembering Babylon, 169. Samuel Butler, A First Year in Canterbury Settlement with Other Early Essays (New Zealand Electronic Text Centre): ch. 3; http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/teiButFir-ButFir1-1-c3.html 20 Ryan, The Cartographic Eye, 61. 21 Lady Mary Anne Barker, Station Life in New Zealand (New Zealand Electronic Text Centre): ch. 3, “Pleasant Days at Ilam”; http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/teiBarLife-BarLife-c8.html 18 19

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The principle of eradicating the unfamiliar, or of trying to superimpose a more recognizable form on it, was, however, not just applied to the settlers’ surroundings. In each of the colonies, the desire to make the indigenous peoples disappear was both a constant motive of settler behaviour and the implicit (or sometimes explicit) reason for some of the more iniquitous policies that colonial governments pursued. In the early days of colonization, the eurocentric habit of comparing the colony with the homeland went hand in hand with the tendency to “verbally depopulate” the colonial landscape.22 Australia’s Aboriginal inhabitants were, as Simon Ryan demonstrates, invariably missing from descriptions of territory that was about to be, or was in the process of being, colonized. When, on the other hand, natives were mentioned in the literature of the period, the tendency was to minimize drastically the implications of their presence, as may be witnessed in Samuel Butler’s account of his first year in Canterbury, in which the Maori are summarily dismissed in the following sentence “There are few Maoris here; they inhabit the north island, and are only in small numbers, and degenerate in this, so may be passed over unnoticed.”23 Later, what Claire Bradford refers to as “strategies of silence and concealment”24 were employed by Anglo-Celtic authors and historians to delete the existence of indigenous peoples from textual depictions of settlement. In Australia’s juvenile literature, she argues, colonial discourse sought “to make Aboriginal people all but invisible to child readers.”25 It was not until the final decades of the twentieth century, in fact, that an Aboriginal presence began to be re-inscribed in fictional and factual accounts of Australia’s history. While enthusiastically embracing practices which were destined to eliminate the indigenous inhabitants, many of the white settlers of Australia and New Zealand found it more difficult to assume moral responsibility for such acts. The natives’ falling population was thus often ‘explained’ in terms of that colonial wish-fulfilment fantasy which social Darwinism so 22

Mary Louise Pratt, “Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen,” in “Race”, Writing and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1986): 146. 23 Butler, A First Year, ch. 10. 24 Clare Bradford, Reading Race: Aboriginality in Children’s Literature (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne U P , 2001): 15. 25 Bradford, Reading Race, 21.

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conveniently offered colonizing societies – the ‘vanishing races’ theory. As Patrick Brantlinger remarks apropos of the decline in numbers of Maori that resulted from the wars of the 1840s and 1860s, For most nineteenth century observers there was no doubt that “the race” would soon become extinct. For many, especially during and after the warfare of the 1860s, the wish was rather that it should become extinct to make room for the superior colonizing race.26

Similarly, from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, the Australian government’s policy towards the country’s indigenous peoples was predicated entirely on the conviction that ‘full-blood’ Aborigines were doomed to disappear. For the mixed-race individuals who continued to threaten the settler’s dream of establishing a white European homeland in the antipodes, assimilation policies were devised that were designed to wipe out Aboriginality by attacking indigenous culture at its roots. Accordingly, in the early decades of the twentieth century, part-Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families and placed in white institutions where they were forbidden to speak their native language, observe Aboriginal customs, or have any further contact with their Aboriginal relatives. And although, after the Second World War, the modus operandi of the policy was modified to allow mixed-race youngsters to be placed with white foster or adoptive families, the aim of the policy – that of erasing all traces of the children’s Aboriginal identity – remained unchanged. European perceptions of the Maori as having an organized, if inferior, form of society meant that, unlike the Aborigines, New Zealand’s autochthones were spared the worst excesses of assimilationism. There was thus no child-removal policy in New Zealand, nor did eugenics play any part in government attempts to construct an image of New Zealand as a white man’s country. Assimilating the natives was nonetheless always high on the agenda of the country’s colonizers. From the earliest days of white settlement, British missionaries were extremely active in converting the Maori to Christianity, and while Maori was initially the language of instruction in mission schools, English replaced it in 1867. After which, as Alan Bell points out, assimilation took a more aggressive turn: “Through 26 Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 2003): 162–63.

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the first half of the twentieth century, New Zealand schools replicated the behaviour pattern reported universally in such situations around the world: Maori children were beaten for speaking their language at school.”27 This ban on the use of the Maori language, following, as it did, hard on the heels of the defeat of the Maori in the wars of the 1860s, is part of a pattern of behaviour in which most colonial societies actively engage – the practice of imposing assimilation on native peoples with the objective, not so much of civilizing or uplifting them (the alibi that colonial discourse invents), as simply of eradicating their indigenous identity. Assimilation policies constitute, in effect, one of the main tools to which settler communities have recourse in order to establish their own legitimacy. What I mean by this can be illustrated by way of Denis Byrne’s observation on how Australia’s colonists discursively constructed Aborigines whose lifestyle and material culture had been influenced by the arrival of Europeans: “The Aborigines,” Byrne notes, “were seen to have lost or to be fast losing that quality which for so many Europeans was the only excuse for being a native, the quality of being authentically primitive.”28 If, as settler discourse posits, acculturation transforms genuine primitives into fake natives, then the acculturation policies pursued by colonial governments may be perceived as a means of denying indigenous peoples their position as the legitimate occupants of the disputed colonial space. Tim Rowse, drawing on Fanon’s theories, explains: Controlling the definition of what was essentially characteristic of the subjugated culture, the colonisers reserve the power to distinguish authentic and inauthentic aspects of the living traditions of the colonised. If the colonised argue political demands by reference to their culture, the colonisers are quick to adjudicate what is genuine in such claims.29

By eliminating the first peoples of the colony – either literally or by means of the discursive strategies discussed above – settler societies liberated for 27 Alan Bell, “The Politics of English in New Zealand,” in Dirty Silence: Aspects of Language and Literature in New Zealand, ed. Graham McGregor & Mark Williams (Auckland: Oxford U P , 1991): 67–68. 28 Denis Byrne, “Deep Nation: Australia’s acquisition of an indigenous past,” Aboriginal History 20 (1996): 83. Emphasis added. 29 Tim Rowse, “Middle Australia and the noble savage: a political romance,” in Past and Present: The Construction of Aboriginality, ed. Jeremy Beckett (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies, 1988): 174.

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themselves a psychic space within which a new identity could develop. They could begin to construct themselves as the legitimate inhabitants of territory that had been appropriated by the most illegitimate of means. And since the corollary to de-indigenizing the indigenous is for the nonindigenous to indigenize themselves, it is hardly surprising to find that, from the end of the nineteenth century, the concept of indigeneity becomes a dominant feature of the discourse of both colonies under discussion. That Australia’s settler community has been systematically appropriating signifiers of Aboriginal identity for the last hundred years is a fact well documented by Australian cultural-studies theorists. The psychological impulse behind this appropriation is, as the following analysis by Andrew Lattas suggests, the lack of a sense of belonging that continues to haunt non-indigenous Australians eight generations down the line: Australian newspapers often represent Aborigines’ spiritual relationship to the land as being able to heal the spiritual pain of the removal of migrants from their mother countries. This discourse constructs a lack in the migrant which it simultaneously seeks to fill with a presence appropriated from Aboriginal culture. In a review of his book We Have No Dreaming, Ronald McKie was reported as arguing that after 200 years whites ‘still have no inherent attachment to the land like Aborigines’.30

Formerly a thematic concern that flourished mainly in literature,31 the plastic arts32 and the more low-brow world of advertising,33 indigenization 30 Andrew Lattas, “Primitivism, Nationalism and Individualism in Australian Popular Culture,” in Power, Knowledge and Aborigines, ed. Bain Attwood & John Arnold (Bundoora, Victoria: La Trobe U P , 1992): 55. 31 As well as being a fetish of the Bulletin writers in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the fantasy of indigenization, is also a dominant motif in more recent literature. From Mrs Roxburgh in Patrick White’s A Fringe of Leaves to Gemmy Fairly in David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon, from the ‘mystery relative’ in Nicolas Jose’s recent autobiographical work Black Sheep: Journey to Borroloola (discussed in this collection by Marc Delrez) to the “White Aborigines” in Inga Clendinnen’s 2002 memoir, Tiger’s Eye, white blackfellas positively abound in contemporary Australian literature. 32 See Denis Byrne, “Deep Nation,” and Andrew Lattas, “Primitivism, Nationalism and Individualism.” 33 See Philip Batty, “Saluting the Dot Spangled Banner: Aboriginal Culture, National Identity and the Australian Republic,” Australian Humanities Review 11 (Sept-

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has, over the last thirty years, gradually assumed the status of a national discourse in Australia. This development can be explained by the increasing influence the rhetoric of indigeneity has acquired in crucial academic fields such as archaeology and museology – disciplines that are directly involved, in other words, in the representation of the nation’s past. As Byrne explains, although “there is something quite radical and extraordinary in the prospect of a settler culture which for so long had pronounced the indigenous culture to be a savage anachronism suddenly turning to embrace the past of that culture as its own,” it is, paradoxically, not at all surprising that a settler colony like Australia, in order to bond itself better to the exotic terrain by sending roots down into the continent’s past, would at some stage want to appropriate to itself the time-depth represented by the archaeological remains of the indigenous minority.34

In addition to its recent appropriations of Aboriginal iconography for the purpose of projecting a more culturally exotic, touristically alluring image of Australia to the rest of the world – an image notably in evidence in the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics – white Australia has been committed to “grafting white culture onto an Aboriginal root”35 ever since the late 1960s when Australian archaeologists first began “to articulate their work as part of a national identity project.”36 This project has involved the co-opting of Aboriginal artefacts and, more importantly, of ancient Aboriginal sites into the master-narrative of a multi-millennial national history which settler Australia now tells itself. At the National

ember–December 1998), http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR /archive/Issue-September1998/batty.html; Jeremy Beckett, “The past in the present; the present in the past : constructing a national Aboriginality,” in Past and Present, ed. Beckett, 191–217; Philip Jones, “The Boomerang’s Erratic Flight: The Mutability of Ethnographic Objects,” in Power, Knowledge and Aborigines, ed. Bain Attwood & John Arnold (Bundoora, Victoria: La Trobe U P , 1992): 59–71; and Julie Marcus, “The Journey Out to the Centre: The Cultural Appropriation of Ayers Rock,” in Aboriginal Culture Today, ed. Anna Rutherford (Sydney & Mundelstrup: Dangaroo, 1988): 254–74. 34 Byrne, “Deep Nation,” 82. 35 Harry Allen, “History Matters: A commentary on divergent interpretations of Australian history,” Australian Aboriginal Studies 2 (1988), quoted in Byrne, “Deep Nation,” 98. 36 Byrne, “Deep Nation,” 98.

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Museum of Australia, opened in 2001, one of the galleries that deals specifically with non-indigenous history is tellingly entitled “Eternity.” As James Gore observes, however, The use of the name ‘Eternity’ in the national museum, to describe a gallery that is supposed to be exploring the nation’s identity, is […] problematic. The word ‘Eternity’ has itself increasingly become a clichéd image of the nation in Australia in recent years, illustrated by its widespread use at the Millennium celebrations in Sydney and at the 2000 Olympics.37

A similar process of indigenization can be observed in the evolution of white New Zealand identity. A few diverse literary examples that could be cited are Katherine Mansfield’s “The Story of Pearl Button” (1912), which recounts the abduction by Maori of a little white girl and the latter’s brief, ecstatic experience of being integrated into the indigenous world; or the nationalist poet Charles Brasch’s poem “Forerunners” (1939), in which Maori identity is represented, in the final stanza, as the “soil” into which the deracinated pakeha can put down new roots: Behind our quickness, our shallow occupation of the easier Landscape, their unprotesting memory Mildly hovers, surrounding us with perspective, Offering soil for our rootless behaviour.38

There are also the autobiographical writings of the popular historian and literary biographer, Michael King, Being Pakeha (1985), and its updated version, Being Pakeha Now (1999),39 both of which strongly argue that

37

James M. Gore, “Representations of Non-Indigenous History and Identity in the National Museum of Australia and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa” (The Electronic Journal of Australian and New Zealand History, October 18, 2003), http://www.jcu.edu.au/aff/history/articles/gore.htm 38 Quoted in Alex Calder, “Unsettling Settlement: Poetry and Nationalism in Aotearoa / New Zealand,” New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre, http://www.nzepc .auckland.ac.nz/misc/calder.asp (emphasis added). As Calder incisively comments, “Maori identity is the bolster of an unsettled New Zealand identity. Its unspecifiable plenitude (‘surrounding us with perspective’) grants an emergent Pakeha identity the handsome promise of a lack fulfilled, but only on condition that Maori are lost from history as an ‘unprotesting memory,’ and that the processes of settlement are misremembered as a ‘shallow occupation’.” 39 Described on the cover as the “Reflections and Recollections of a White Native.”

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New Zealand’s non-Maori population has now achieved the status of an indigenous people. More recently, Brian Turner’s Footfall, a collection of poems that follows in the same discursive tradition, was reviewed by Hugh Roberts of the New Zealand Listener in terms that are themselves deeply embedded in indigenist rhetoric: “Turner’s ‘footfall’ speaks of a relationship to the land […] whose anxieties no longer have anything to do with ‘belonging’. For Pakeha, like so many Robinson Crusoes, the desert island has become “our island” and the footprints we find are our own.”40 As in the case of Australia, museology in New Zealand has been instrumental in constructing a discourse that represents New Zealand’s white settlers as indigenous inhabitants of the country. Referring to an exhibition that took place in Christchurch as early as 1906, James Gore notes that “pakeha New Zealanders were portraying New Zealand as ‘Maoriland’, an appropriation of Maori culture to express a national identity.”41 The fact that New Zealand’s National Museum, which opened in 1998, is named “Te Papa Tongarewa,” the adoption by many settler New Zealanders of the Maori term ‘pakeha’ to describe themselves, not to mention the extraordinary plethora of Maori words and expressions that (as Sara Schieff’s essay attests) have been absorbed into common usage in New Zealand English – all these are so many signals of the white settlers’ desire to establish their indigeneity. Commenting on this phenomenon, the Maori intellectual Linda Tuhiwai Smith notes acidly that the word ‘indigenous’ has been coopted politically by the descendants of settlers who lay claim to an indigenous identity through their occupation and settlement of land over several generations or simply through being born in that place – though they tend not to show up at indigenous peoples’ meetings nor form alliances that support the self-determination of people whose forebears once occupied the land they have ‘tamed’ and upon which they have settled. Nor do they actively struggle as a society for the survival of indigenous languages, knowledges and cultures.42

Hugh Roberts, “Being Pakeha Now,” New Zealand Listener 199.3395 (2005): http://listener.co.nz/default,4101.sm (emphasis added). 41 James Gore, “Representations of Non-Indigenous History.” 42 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London & New York: Zed, 1999): 7. 40

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As Smith’s last point indicates, white claims to indigeneity by no means translate into sympathy for the efforts currently being made by indigenous peoples to reconstruct their shattered cultures. The Maori immersion-education project, aimed at saving a language on the brink of extinction, has met with a great deal of antagonism from pakeha who, Michael Hollings contends, have a subconscious fear of “the potential for a dramatic change in power relations […] of losing long-held control”43 if the Maori’s bid for linguistic revival succeeds. To quote Smith once again, “The indigenous language is often regarded as being subversive to national interests and national literacy campaigns.”44 In Australia, after the landmark Mabo judgement in 1992, the principle recognizing indigenous entitlement to ancestral territories (without which the transmission of traditional Aboriginal identity cannot easily be effected) has been systematically eroded by the Howard administration. Of greater significance, however, is the probability that the current government’s position on the land-rights issue accurately reflects that of Middle Australia, which, opinion polls reveal, is prepared to treat Aborigines “like any other Australians provided that they are prepared to accept ‘our’ values and play by ‘our’ rules.”45 The main condition of white acceptance of Aborigines is, in other words, that Aborigines renounce their identity as indigenous peoples and thus forfeit their rights to land taken by force from their ancestors. The rejection of the 1999 referendum, which proposed a preamble to the existing Australian constitution that would name Aborigines as the first peoples of Australia, can be regarded as a clear signal of persistent white refusal to acknowledge the cultural specificity of Aborigines. My contention here, then, is that contemporary settler hostility to the idea that there still exists an authentic indigenous population of Australia and that that population is not Anglo-Celtic is symptomatic of a continuing susceptibility in white Australians to the pain of unbelonging. This susceptibility has been reactivated by recent debates on reconciliation in which many prominent figures have insisted on the need to recognize the 43

Michael Hollings, “The Politics of Education in Maori,” in Dirty Silence ed. McGregor & Williams, 58–59. 44 Linda T. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 148. 45 Newspoll Inc, Saulwick & Muller Inc. & Hugh Mackay, “Public Opinion on Reconciliation: Snap Shot, Close Focus, Long Lens,” in Essays on Australian Reconciliation, ed. Michelle Grattan (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2000): 36. Emphasis added.

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more shameful aspects of settler history. A further aggravation was the publication in 1997 by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission of a report condemning the genocidal policy – carried out by successive Australian governments over a period of sixty years – of removing part-Aboriginal children from their Aboriginal families.46 White Australians’ sense of their own legitimacy has been seriously undermined by such developments. The success of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party in the late 1990s, along with the recent re-election of John Howard as head of a government which has shamelessly inflected its own policies to reflect the populist, racial vision of the world that characterized the One Nation programme, must thus be seen as representing a backlash against the ethical questions that reconciliation and the ‘Stolen Children’ report are felt to have raised about the origins of settler society. In stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that present Aboriginal suffering is a legacy of former colonial injustices,47 in calling an end to their thirty-year flirtation with multi-culturalism,48 and in returning to their old love of White Australia, settler Australians seem poised today to define their uncertain identity anew in terms of their Anglo-Celtic origins. New Zealand’s pakeha, too, appear to be going through a phase of reassessing an always unstable identity that has, Sarah Dugdale points out, been further de-stabilized by the postcolonial process of “writing the colonised back onto the page.” According to Dugdale, Uneasy questions about identity and belonging, key tropes in the discourse of post-colonial literature, have undeniably forced this, the domi46

See “Bringing Them Home: The ‘Stolen Children’ Report,” at http://www.hreoc .gov.au/social_justice/stolen_children/ 47 Newspoll Inc, Saulwick & Muller Inc. & Hugh Mackay, “Public Opinion on Reconciliation,” 33–34. 48 The race riots that took place at Cronulla in December 2005 were reported in many Australian newspapers as sounding the death knell of multiculturalism. In a neighbourhood which John Howard himself has described as “a part of Sydney which has always represented to me what middle Australia is all about” (Sharon Verghis, “What Middle Australia is all about,” The Age [13 December 2005]), drunken Anglo youths draped in the Australian flag sang “Waltzing Matilda” and brandished banners with the message (aimed at the Lebanese immigrant youths against whose presence on their beach the whites were protesting) “We grew here. You flew here.” One can imagine that the irony of such statements was not lost on Australia’s Aboriginal population.

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nant sector of New Zealand society, into a process of re-negotiating their identity.49

Like their Australian cousins, many white New Zealanders are, she argues, unhappy about the diminution of their authority that has resulted from the official biculturalist policy pursued by recent governments. “An anxiety does exist and, although it sits below the surface, it threatens to react in a manner not dissimilar to the ‘Pauline Hanson phenomenon’.”50 The pain of unbelonging which, as we have seen, has had such a potent, formative influence on the development of settler identity and, more generally, on settler history as a whole is, however, by no means exclusive to the settler community. Since, by its very nature, colonization both physically displaces the colonized and psychologically distances them from their traditional culture, indigenous peoples are also ontologically disabled by feelings of alienation. Indeed, there are strong grounds for arguing that, as in their lack of immunity to common European diseases, indigenous peoples experience a particularly devastating reaction to the condition of unbelonging. Although they sometimes felt deeply, even desperately, estranged from their new surroundings, New Zealand’s colonizers, like those of Australia, had at least (with the exception of the early convicts) chosen to displace themselves. They were also the products of a culture in which social change – particularly in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century – was commonplace, but where notions of the world’s geographical and ethnic heterogeneity were, thanks to Britain’s long tradition of exploration and colonization, well-established in the public imagination. For traditional peoples like the Aborigines, however, it was simply inconceivable that the world they knew, the world whose immutable features had been celebrated in their songs and legends for tens of thousands of years, could ever be any different. Just as unimaginable was the possibility that the sacred, fusional relationship that bound them eternally to their ancestral territory could ever be violated. When it occurred, separation from the land was inevitably a major trauma for indigenous peoples – it was from this brutal amputation that all other suffering would flow. 49

Sarah Dugdale, “Chronicles of Evasion: Negotiating Pakeha New Zealand Identity,” in Race, Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand Identity, ed. John Docker & Gerhard Fischer (Sydney: U of New South Wales P , 2000): 190. 50 Dugdale, “Chronicles of Evasion,” 191.

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For the Europeans, whose very raison d’être as settlers depended on their acquisition of territory, the significance of land for native peoples was, on the other hand, either invisible or deliberately ignored. Australia’s colonizers saw, or chose to see, the nomadic Aborigines as vagrants – as people, in other words, with neither attachment nor entitlement to the uncultivated terrain over which they merely ‘roamed’. Yet, as the following observations by the Australian anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner eloquently attest, the implications of dispossession for Aboriginal existence were nothing short of catastrophic: When we took what we call ‘land’ we took what to them meant hearth, home, the source and the locus of life, and everlastingness of spirit. At the same time it left each local band bereft of an essential constant that made their plan and code of living intelligible. Particular pieces of territory, each a homeland, formed part of a set of constants without which no affiliation of any person, no link in the whole network of relationships, no part of the complex structure of social groups any longer had all its co-ordinates. What I describe as “homelessness”, then, means that the Aborigines faced a kind of vertigo in living. They had no stable base of life; every personal affiliation was lamed; every group structure; no social network had a point of fixture left.51

As the frontier advanced and increasing numbers of Europeans laid claim to vast areas of the country for the pastoral stations they dreamed of establishing, many Aboriginal groups who had, in one fell swoop, been excluded from their traditional hunting-grounds, water-holes, and fishingspots, suddenly found themselves deprived of all material means of subsistence. When they were not actually being ordered at gun-point to get off the settler’s ‘property’, chronic starvation forced them to leave their lineage territory and move to centres of settlement where they were at least able to eke out an existence on the donations of food rations with which the white community’s uneasy conscience provided them. Their physical survival was, however, very much at the expense of the spiritual bonds that constituted the very basis of their identity. As Pat Dodson ex51 W.E.H. Stanner, White Man Got No Dreaming, quoted in Graeme Neate, “Mapping landscapes of the mind: A cadastral conundrum in the Native Title era,” paper given at the U N –F I G Conference on Land Tenure and Cadastral Infrastructures for Sustainable Development, Melbourne, October 25–27, 1999, http://www.sli.unimelb .edu.au/UNConf99/sessions/session5/neate.pdf

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plains, “When you take an Aboriginal man from his land, you take him from the spirit that is giving him life; that spirit cannot be regenerated in some other place. So you end up with shells of human beings, living in other peoples’ countries.”52 But while no longer having access to their sacred sites caused incalculable damage to the Aborigines’ sense of belonging, it was not the only force working to destabilize the foundations of indigenous culture. A further cause of Aboriginal alienation was their exposure to a way of seeing the world that was in diametric opposition to their own traditional values. Individual property, wealth, the importance of ‘things’, working for pay, the shamefulness of the naked body, saving for the future, self-interest, hierarchical relationships – all intrinsic features of everyday European life 52 Pat Dodson, former Aboriginal Director of the Central Land Council in Alice Springs, quoted in Elisabeth Strohscheidt, “Land Rights for the First Australians: A Long Way Still to Go,” in Aratjara: Aboriginal Culture and Literature in Australia, ed. Dieter Riemenschneider & Geoffrey V. Davis (Cross / Cultures 28; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1997): 9. Of comparable importance in terms of the alienation of the Aborigines was the fact that every step the immigrants took to render the ‘inhospitable’ Australian landscape more home-like, had precisely the inverse effect for its indigenous inhabitants. Country with which they had been on the most intimate terms for millennia suddenly appeared as unheimlich. The reminiscences of Kim Scott’s elderly Noongar auntie in the recently published Kayang and Me are shot through with the enduring pain of this experience. Her account of a conversation she had with a relative about a landmark familiar to them in their childhood records the Aborigines’ inconsolable grief at the desecration of their environment: He said, ‘You remember this place?’ And he looked at me, and his eyes were full of tears. I said, ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I remember this place. I remember this place.’That was a special place where we used to go and get eggs. Where Jerramungup townsite is now, where they ploughed over on this side now, there was seven ngaw nests, in just that little area. You know when we lived out there, you could go to any creek out there at all. You didn’t have to carry buckets full of water, or drums of water like you have to do now when you’re travelling. You could go to any creek and find fresh water running. And now, since they did the clearing, you can see salt, you can see trees dead everywhere. All around the creeks that used to be fresh water, they’re all salt water now. […] When they did that land development, they never stopped to think. They wanted every inch cleared, to put a piece of grain, a bit of seed or something. To grow a crop. They never thought about the trees. Taking all the trees away, that encouraged the salt to come up and claim the land’. Kim Scott, Kayang and Me (Fremantle, W.A.: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2005): 223–25.

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and all concepts alien and incomprehensible to indigenous society – were, the Aborigines were relentlessly instructed, of immeasurable superiority to their own ‘primitive’ beliefs and ‘savage’ customs. Writing in the late 1950s, the anthropologist Ruth Fink points out, apropos of one of the missions to which Aborigines were assigned from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, The managers […] did their best to imprint upon the children’s mind that the practises of the old people and their parents were primitive and barbaric, and they must not imitate them. As a result, all the people on the Mission are today ashamed of anything connected with aboriginal life.53

Unlike Australia’s settlers, the whites who colonized New Zealand were in the rather different situation of having to deal with an indigenous people whose settled villages and agriculture testified to a civilization and a relationship with the land that no European could pretend not to understand. Consequently, rather than being unceremoniously dispossessed in the way the Aborigines were, a great many Maori were duped out of their land by being persuaded to agree to the outrageously unfavourable terms that unscrupulous Anglo-Celtic immigrants proposed. Katherine Mansfield, hardly the most politically engagée of authors, alludes to this practice in her story “Old Tar” (1913), which recounts how the father of the eponymous hero ‘bought’ his land from a Maori for “a suit of clothes an’ a lookin’-glass.”54 The spiritual and cultural desolation that New Zealand’s autochthones suffered as a result of such infamous transactions becomes clear when we understand that Maori identity is, as Linda Tuhiwai Smith explains, inextricably bound up with the intimate relationship each community enjoys with a specific territory. As for Aborigines, geography and genealogy are inseparable one from the other. For Maori there are several ways of identifying one’s indigenous ‘community’. One commonly used way is to introduce yourself by naming the 53 Ruth Fink, “The Caste Barrier: An Obstacle to the Assimilation of Part-Aborigines in North-West New South Wales,” Oceania 28.2 (December 1957): 109. Malcolm J.C. Calley similarly notes that the Aborigine “has constantly been told, and has come to believe that his manner of living is inferior to that of the white man”; “Race Relations on the Coast of New South Wales,” Oceania 27.3 (March 1957): 203. 54 Katherine Mansfield, “Old Tar,” in Undiscovered Country: The New Zealand Stories of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Ian A. Gordon (London: Longman, 1974): 299.

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mountain, the river, the tribal ancestor, the tribe and the family. Through this form of introduction you locate yourself in a set of identities which have been framed geographically, politically and geneaologically.55

Yet another consequence of colonization that has entailed profound feelings of unbelonging for countless numbers of colonized people in Australia and New Zealand is the existence in both countries of the large mixed-race population mentioned earlier. Often the fruit of sexual liaisons that were forced on indigenous women by British settlers, these part-indigenous children were, for several generations encouraged or – as was the case in Australia – compelled to reject their indigenous ancestry and identify exclusively with the values of a dominant culture that was never really willing to accept them. In her study of the ‘caste barrier’ that, she argues, constitutes an impassable obstacle to the integration of part-Aborigines, Ruth Fink explains that, because most whites in small outback towns in the 1950s were unwilling to have any social intercourse with “coloured people,” the only hope that mixed-race individuals had of attaining status in such a community was by marrying lighter-coloured partners so as to “breed out the coloured element.” The next stage in their search for acceptance was to “adopt attitudes of rejection toward their own colour, and anything that is symbolic of their origins. The status conscious coloured person is forced to prove that he does not in any way belong to the coloured group.”56 Indeed, the main condition for obtaining an “exemption certificate”57 was for the mixed-race individual to demonstrate that s/he had severed all links with the Aboriginal community at large and his/her own family in particular. Given such a manichaean racial environment, it is easy to understand how many part-Aborigines developed a pathological aversion towards the Aboriginal side of their identity. One example Fink gives is 55

Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 126. Fink, “The Caste Barrier,” 101. Emphasis added. 57 This was the surrealistic document that resulted from the Aborigines Acts of 1911, 1917 and 1919 and testified to the fact that selected people of Aboriginal ancestry were ‘no longer’ Aborigines and hence, theoretically at least, entitled to be treated with respect in white society. See Deirdre F. Jordan, “Aboriginal Identity: Uses of the past, problems for the future?” in Past and Present, ed. Beckett, 112. Jordan points out that in South Australia all people of Aboriginal descent were defined as Aboriginal unless “‘in the light of their character and standard of intelligence and development’ they had been exempted” (112). 56

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that of a woman who “tried to scrub her younger sons with solvol to lighten their skins.”58 In Sally Morgan’s My Place,59 the author’s grandmother relates a similar story of a friend of hers who, as a young woman, took baths in hydrogen peroxide and dyed her hair red.60 Yet, as Fink’s study demonstrates, no effort that they were prepared to make was ever enough to guarantee integration for Australia’s part-Aborigines. Of the situation in north-west New South Wales, she writes: To the white people of Barwon the coloured people are all the same. They do not distinguish between Upper and Lower groups; they still class them all as blacks. The local policeman, for example, said: “The half-castes are all a bad lot because they get the worst white blood; none are any good”. The only white people who mix socially with the Upper group are whites who have intermarried with them, and these people have thereby lost their status in the white community.61

Kim Scott’s autobiographical novel Benang62 yields many examples of the settler community’s rejection of mixed-race people. One typical episode is that which recounts the experience of part-Aboriginal children sent to school in Gebalup, Western Australia: The name calling began on the very first day. Nigger. One of the older students (…) used to turn around when the teacher had turned her back. Sneering and smirking he would hold his nose, Pooh. Whenever he could he grabbed the skin on one of the little kid’s forearms and twisted it. “See,” He liked to say, doing it more gently on his own arm, “mine goes white and then red when I do it.”63

The experience of the colonized peoples of Australia and New Zealand, uprooted from their land and disconnected from the cultural world to which they traditionally belonged, yet, at the same time, continually excluded from the mainstream white society to which they have been en58

Fink, “The Caste Barrier,” 105. Discussed in Elvira Pulitano’s essay, below. 60 Sally Morgan, My Place (Fremantle, W.A.: Freemantle Arts Centre P, 1987): 329. 61 Fink, “The Caste Barrier,” 105–106. See also Beckett, “The Past in the Present,” 197. 62 The subject of Pablo Armellino’s essay, below. 63 Kim Scott, Benang (Fremantle, W.A.: Fremantle Arts Centre P, 1999): 287–88. 59

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couraged to aspire, has resulted in many grave social problems for the indigenous communities of these former settler colonies. Alcohol and drug abuse, delinquency, juvenile suicide, incarceration and child neglect – not to mention severe economic disadvantage and appallingly high rates both of mortality and disease linked to extreme poverty – are all prominent features of the desolate social landscape in which Australia’s Aboriginal people exist today.64 In his recent investigation into the “staggering” rise in teenage Aboriginal suicide rates, Colin Tatz establishes a direct link between the problems suffered by contemporary Aborigines and the fact that their lives since colonization have been in every respect “separate and inferior” to that of non-indigenous Australians. Describing the effects of alienation on today’s indigenous youngsters who are, he claims, “socialised from birth to an endemic and all-pervasive racism,”65 he reports that some of them articulate a sense of emptiness, a loss of culture, especially ritual and spirituality. Others know that there is a ‘hole’ in their lives but don’t know what it is. They suffer the label ‘Aborigine’, yet cannot comprehend what it is in ‘Aborigine’ that causes such antagonism or contempt.66

The ‘violence syndrome’ that exists in many Aboriginal societies is, Tatz argues, the result of a series of factors, one of which is “a sense of aliena64

Elisabeth Strohscheidt stresses the fact that “The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody placed some emphasis between land rights and self-determination (or, rather, the lack of both) of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders on the one hand, and their disproportionate incarceration and death-rates in Australia’s police cells on the other”; Strohscheidt, “Land Rights,” 27–28. Quentin Beresford and Paul Omaji underline the difficulties that the ‘Stolen Generation’ often experience on becoming parents themselves. Beresford and Omaji, Our State of Mind: Racial Planning and the Stolen Generations (Fremantle, W.A.: Fremantle Arts Centre P , 1998): 212–13. An article published in The Independent in 2004 cited a recent report by the Hollows Foundation saying that “indigenous heath and life expectancy in Australia – one of the world’s wealthiest nations – are worse than in countries such as Sudan, Bangladesh, Sierra Leone and Eritrea.” that “Malnutrition rates are similar to those in the Third World [and] infectious diseases […] virtually unknown in the developed world, plague Aboriginal communities.” Kathy Marks, “Aboriginal males unlikely to live beyond mid-40s says report,” The Independent (1 April 2004). 65 Colin Tatz, Aboriginal Suicide is Different: A Portrait of Life and Self Destruction (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies P , 2001): 97. 66 Tatz, Aboriginal Suicide, 78.

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tion from society, of not belonging, of foreignness.”67 Interestingly, from the point of view of the present study, Tatz draws a parallel between his own findings and those emerging from recent studies carried out in New Zealand. According to Tatz, “Dr. Erahana Ryan, New Zealand’s only female Maori psychiatrist, talks of Maori youth who suffer ‘stress of loss of who they are’. She talks about the ‘emptiness of blighted, warped, eviscerated urban Maori life’.”68 Like Tatz, Linda Tuhiwai Smith undercores the “complete disorder” that colonialism brought to indigenous people, “disconnecting them from their histories, their landscapes, their languages, their social relations and their own ways of thinking, feeling and interacting with the world.”69 She also points out that “Maori suicide rates, both male and female have risen sharply over the last decade, with New Zealand rates amongst the highest in O E C D countries.”70 Over the last two or three decades, however, in contrast to the bleak portrait of indigenous life that such figures reveal, there has been evidence of a growing determination on the part of Aborigines and Maori to halt the process of physical and psychic alienation that has been ravaging their societies since the arrival of British settlers in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Significantly, rather than demanding improvements in the material conditions of indigenous existence, activists seem more interested in solutions that involve the recovery of some key aspect or other of the culture from which colonization disconnected native populations. Barry Morris’s account of his experience with the Dhan-gadi people of New South Wales in the 1980s attests, for example, to a strong desire in certain sections of Australia’s Aboriginal population “to gain control over their own cultural and social identity”71 through the revival of traditional cultural practices. “The politics of identity is,” Morris argues, “an expression of resistance to attempts to make Aborigines experience themselves in the terms defined by the dominant society.”72 67

Aboriginal Suicide, 20. Emphasis added. Aboriginal Suicide, 78. 69 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 28. 70 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 154. (O E C D = Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) 71 Barry Morris, “The Politics of Identity: from Aborigines to the first Australian,” in Past and Present, ed. Beckett, 76. 72 Morris, “The Politics of Identity,” 77. 68

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One expression of this resistance may be observed in the increase in the number of people officially acknowledging their indigenous identity today. Referring to the rise in the number of Australians identifying as indigenous in the 1990s, Elisabeth Strohscheidt comments that it is partly the result of “revived self-esteem” among Aborigines or Torres Strait Islanders.73 Alex Calder, who points out that in 1985 “the number of people identifying as Maori had doubled to around 12% of the total population,”74 similarly explains this phenomenon in terms of the “gathering momentum” of a cultural renaissance among the Maori. The other side of indigenous people’s refusal “to experience themselves in the terms defined by the dominant society” has been the rejection by many Aborigines and Maori of the multiculturalist policies espoused in recent decades by their respective governments. Typical of Maori hostility to multiculturalism in New Zealand is the argument advanced by the historian Ranganui Walker that it reduces the Maori “to a position of one of many minorities, negates their status as the people of the land and enables governments to neutralise their claims for justice.”75 Like New Zealand’s indigenes, Aborigines who reject multiculturalism do so on the grounds of their own “separate heritage” as a people that “preexisted European occupation” and in opposition to a way of seeing that “reduces the particularity of Aboriginal culture to one among a multiplicity of cultures recognised by the state.”76 Central to the politics of indigenous identity in both former colonies is the struggle for land rights. As Jeremy Beckett reminds us, land for Australia’s indigenous peoples is “not just an economic or a spiritual resource, but the means by which the Aboriginal past is substantialised in the Australian present, and the locus in which Aboriginality can be realised through self-determination.”77 Similarly, among the many projects she lists as being part of the overall Maori objective of seeking to restore “well-being” to their damaged culture, Linda Tuhiwai Smith underlines that of ‘claiming’, by which she means “the returning of lands, rivers, and 73

Strohscheidt, “Land Rights,” 10, fn7. Calder, “Unsettling Settlement.” 75 Ranganui Walker, quoted in Nina Nola, “Exploring Disallowed Territory: Introducing the Multicultural Subject in New Zealand Literature,” in Race, Colour and Identity, ed Docker & Fischer, 206–207. 76 Morris, “The Politics of Identity,” 72–73. 77 Beckett, “The past in the present,” 208. 74

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mountains to their indigenous owners” and “the return of traditional foodgathering sites”78 to tribes. But ‘claiming’, Smith points out, is not exclusively concerned with land: “It involves the repatriation of artefacts, remains and other cultural materials stolen or removed and taken overseas”79 – a goal which, much to the dismay of Western scientists, Aboriginal groups have also been pursuing with increasing vigour and a certain degree of success over the past several years.80 Other essential tools in the struggle to regain the sense of belonging that colonial assimilation policies were designed to erase are language and education. Recent research in the Northern Territory of Australia has shown, for example, that, when it comes to the education of their children, most Aboriginal families give as their first priority “retaining and consolidating their Aboriginal identity and culture.”81 Consequently, the provision of mother-tongue instruction is seen as an essential condition of any programme aimed at educating indigenous children. Commenting on the fact that “more and more Aboriginal people are going back to the old way of identifying themselves by stating who their tribal group is,” the Aboriginal linguist and educator Jeanie Bell underlines the inextricable nature of the links that exist between language and identity, identity and land: for us that is really important. It tells you that we haven’t been wiped out. It tells you that we belong to this land, that we have a connection with it that goes right back to the beginning of this country – and in our eyes, life did begin here. It’s a statement that we want people to know who we are, and that we do have that knowledge, and that connection to the land that we identify with is as strong as ever it was.82

78

Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 155. Decolonizing Methodologies, 155. 80 See Paul Harris, “Aborigines Clash with Scientists over Bones,” The Observer (1 June 2003), and Robert McKie, “Scientists fight to save ancestral bone bank,” The Observer (28 September 2003). 81 Merridy Malin & Debra Maidment, “Education, Indigenous Survival and WellBeing: Emerging Ideas and Programs,” Australian Journal of Indigenous Education 32 (2003): 90. 82 Jeanie Bell, “Australia’s Indigenous Languages,” in Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians, ed. Michelle Grossman (Melbourne: Melbourne U P , 2003): 169. Emphasis added. 79

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Both the cultural significance and the unmistakable political dimension of the revival of indigenous languages are evident in Bell’s statement that “Our languages are the voice of the land and we are the carriers of the languages.”83 The political dimension of Maori-medium instruction in schools is equally strong. In the past, Michael Hollings points out, New Zealand’s schools, educated Maori to occupy their assigned place in the labour force as unskilled workers […] legitimized what kinds of knowledge, language use, values and modes of learning [were] valid [and] […] reinforced the racial hegemony that underlies government power.84

It is that hegemony that Maori-medium education sets out to challenge, by empowering Maori teachers, parents and pupils, strengthening the Maori community’s sense of identity, and healing the psychic injuries inflicted by the deculturation process that colonialism imposed upon them. Finally, resistance to the pain of unbelonging may be observed in the fact that the cinema, the theatre, music and the plastic arts have all, over the past couple of decades, served as important loci for powerful assertions of indigenous identity. In the field of literature, assertions of this kind play a particularly important role, and it is striking to note that for authors of mixed origins such as Keri Hulme, Sally Morgan and Kim Scott (authors, incidentally, whose genealogy is dominated by white-settler ancestry) the redemptive sense of belonging expressed in their writing is dis/re-covered exclusively through identification with their indigenous antecedents. The white-settler communities of Australia and New Zealand have a more difficult time achieving closure on the eternally debatable question of their identity. It seems, namely, that as long as an indigenous population exists, the legitimacy of the non-indigenous community’s status in these former colonies will remain challenged. Reflected in the eyes of the ‘real’ autochthone, the individual of Anglo-Celtic descent sees an image of him/herself as an outsider, a mere excrescence on the surface of a land which reserves its imprimatur, its intimacies and its secrets for a more ancient human presence. 83 84

Bell, “Australia’s Indigenous Languages,” 170. Hollings, “The Politics of Education,” 59.

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The ontological insecurity generated by such an image (“the anxieties of not belonging,”85 to use Nicholas Jose’s expression) deeply impregnates the fabric of texts written by the white authors studied in this collection – authors who are all (albeit via different routes and to varying extents) struggling to lay the ghost of the colonial past, to find “a way of moving the story on.”86 Interestingly, when compared with the writing of indigenous authors, there is less confidence, greater ambiguity and, overall, a more tortuous and sometimes more tortured quality in these white authorial imaginings of what belonging might actually signify. Among the heterogeneous collection of texts examined in the following pages, we find examples of autobiographical writing (Sally Morgan), children’s fiction (Margaret Mahy), the short story (Janice Slater) the philosophical essay (Mudrooroo), the travel narrative (Nicholas Jose), and – within the multiple configurations of the novel – magical realism (Keri Hulme), the detective story (Stephen Gray), the family chronicle (Albert Wendt), the historical novel (Kim Scott), and the futurist fantasy (Peter Carey). Yet whatever medium these Australian and New Zealand authors have chosen to represent their vision of life ‘down under’, there is one common if polyvalent motif that threads its way through all of their works – that of alienation, of searching for, but rarely finding, a rooted identity, a place in the world to call one’s home. What this collection of essays demonstrates, in effect, is that more than two hundred years after the process of colonization began in Australasia, the pain of unbelonging remains an endemic existential pathology in the contemporary (post)colonial nations of Australia and New Zealand. Notwithstanding the asymmetrical, not to say antagonistic positions they occupy in the still-dichotomous space of the ex-colony, both the indigenous and the non-indigenous peoples continue to suffer today from the psychic repercussions of geographical and cultural deracination to which colonialism inexorably exposes all those whose lives it touches.

85 86

Nicholas Jose, Black Sheep: Journey to Borroloola (London: Profile, 2002): 38. Jose, Black Sheep, 38.

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WORKS CITED Barker, Lady Mary Anne. Station Life in New Zealand (New Zealand Electronic Text Centre). http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-BarLife-BarLife-c8.html Batty, Philip. “Saluting the Dot Spangled Banner: Aboriginal Culture, National Identity and the Australian Republic,” Australian Humanities Review 11 (September– December 1998): http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR /archive/Issue-September1998/batty.html Beckett, Jeremy. “The past in the present; the present in the past: Constructing a national Aboriginality,” in Past and Present: The Construction of Aboriginality, ed. Jeremy Beckett (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies P , 1988): 191–217. Bell, Alan. “The Politics of English in New Zealand,” in Dirty Silence: Aspects of Language and Literature in New Zealand, ed. Graham McGregor & Mark Williams (Auckland: Oxford U P , 1991): 65–75. Bell, Jeanie. “Australia’s Indigenous Languages,” in Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians, ed. Michelle Grossman (Melbourne: Melbourne U P 2003): 159–70. Beresford, Quentin, & Paul Omaji. Our State of Mind: Racial Planning and the Stolen Generations (Fremantle, W.A.: Fremantle Arts Centre P , 1998). Bhabha, Homi K. “The World and the Home,” Social Text 31–32 (1992): 14–53. Bradford, Clare. Reading Race: Aboriginality in Children’s Literature (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne U P , 2001) Brantlinger, Patrick. Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 2003). Butler, Samuel. A First Year in Canterbury Settlement with Other Early Essays (New Zealand Electronic Text Centre). http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-ButFirButFir1-1-c3.html Byrne, Denis. “Deep Nation: Australia’s acquisition of an indigenous past,” Aboriginal History 20 (1996): 82–107. Calder, Alex. “Unsettling Settlement: Poetry and Nationalism in Aotearoa / New Zealand” (New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre). http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz /misc/calder.asp Calley, Malcom J.C. “Race Relations on the Coast of New South Wales,” Oceania 27.3 (March 1957): 190–209. Dugdale, Sarah. “Chronicles of Evasion: Negotiating Pakeha New Zealand Identity,” in Race, Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand Identity, ed. John Docker & Gerhard Fischer (Sydney: U of New South Wales P , 2000): 190–202. Fink, Ruth. “The Caste Barrier: An Obstacle to the Assimilation of Part-Aborigines in North-West New South Wales,” Oceania 28.2 (December 1957): 100–10. Gore, James M. “Representations of Non-Indigenous History and Identity in the National Museum of Australia and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa,” Electronic Journal of Australian and New Zealand History (18 October 2003). http://www.jcu.edu.au/aff/history/articles/gore.htm Greer, Germaine. Whitefella Jump Up: The Shortest Way to Nationhood (London: Profile, 2004).

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Harris, Paul. “Aborigines Clash with Scientists over Bones,” The Observer (London; 1 June 2003). Hollings, Michael. “The Politics of Education in Maori,” in Dirty Silence: Aspects of Language and Literature in New Zealand, ed. Graham McGregor & Mark Williams (Auckland: Oxford U P , 1991): 53–64. Hughes, Robert. The Fatal Shore (London: Harvill, 1996). Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission. “Bringing Them Home: The ‘Stolen Children’ Report.” http://www.hreoc.gov.au/social_justice/stolen_children/ Jones, Philip. “The Boomerang’s Erratic Flight: The Mutability of Ethnographic Objects,” in Power, Knowledge and Aborigines, ed. Bain Attwood & John Arnold (Bundoora, Victoria: La Trobe U P , 1992): 59–71. Jordan, Deirdre F. “Aboriginal Identity: Uses of the past, problems for the future?” in Past and Present: The Construction of Aboriginality, ed. Jeremy Beckett (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies P , 1988): 109–30. Jose, Nicholas. Black Sheep: Journey to Borroloola (London: Profile, 2002) Lattas, Andrew. “Primitivism, Nationalism and Individualism in Australian Popular Culture,” in Power, Knowledge and Aborigines, ed. Bain Attwood & John Arnold (Bundoora, Victoria: La Trobe U P , 1992): 45–58. McKie, Robert. “Scientists fight to save ancestral bone bank,” The Observer (London; 28 September 2003). Malin, Merridy, & Debra Maidment. “Education, Indigenous Survival and Well-Being: Emerging Ideas and Programs,” Australian Journal of Indigenous Education 32 (2003): 85–100. Malouf, David. Remembering Babylon (London: Vintage, 1993). Mansfield, Katherine. “Old Tar,” in Undiscovered Country: The New Zealand Stories of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Ian A. Gordon (London: Longman, 1974): 299–303. Marcus, Julie. “The Journey Out to the Centre: The Cultural Appropriation of Ayers Rock,” in Aboriginal Culture Today, ed. Anna Rutherford (Sydney & Mundelstrup: Dangaroo, 1988): 254–74. Marks, Kathy. “Aboriginal males unlikely to live beyond mid-40s says report,” The Independent (London; 1 April 2004). Morgan, Sally. My Place (Fremantle, W.A.: Freemantle Arts Centre P , 1987). Morris, Barry. “The Politics of Identity: from Aborigines to the first Australian,” in Past and Present: The Construction of Aboriginality, ed. Jeremy Beckett (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies P , 1988): 63–85. Mulvaney, D.J. The Prehistory of Australia (London: Thames & Hudson, 1969). Neate, Graeme. “Mapping landscapes of the mind: a cadastral conundrum in the Native Title era,” paper given at the U N -F I G Conference on Land Tenure and Cadastral Infrastructures for Sustainable Development, Melbourne (October 25–27, 1999). http://www.sli.unimelb.edu.au/UNConf99/sessions/session5/neate.pdf Newspoll Inc, Saulwick & Muller Inc. & Hugh Mackay. “Public Opinion on Reconciliation: Snap Shot, Close Focus, Long Lens,” in Essays on Australian Reconciliation, ed. Michelle Grattan (Melbourne: Black, 2000). Nola, Nina. “Exploring Disallowed Territory: Introducing the Multicultural Subject in New Zealand Literature,” in Race, Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand

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Identity, ed. John Docker & Gerhard Fischer (Sydney: U of New South Wales P , 2000): 203–17. Pratt, Mary-Louise. “Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen,” in “Race”, Writing and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1986): 138–62. Rickard, John Australia: A Cultural History (London: Longman, 1988) Roberts, Hugh. “Being Pakeha Now,” New Zealand Listener 199.3395 (2005). http: //listener.co.nz/default,4101.sm Rowley, C.D. The Destruction of Aboriginal Society (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1974). Rowse, Tim. “Middle Australia and the noble savage: A political romance,” in Past and Present: The Construction of Aboriginality, ed. Jeremy Beckett (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies, 1988): 161–77. Ryan, Simon. The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1996). Scott, Kim. Benang (Fremantle, W.A.: Fremantle Arts Centre P , 1999). ——. Kayang and Me (Fremantle, W.A.: Fremantle Arts Centre P , 2005). Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London & New York: Zed, 1999). Strohscheidt, Elisabeth. “Land Rights for the First Australians: A Long Way Still to Go,” in Aratjara: Aboriginal Culture and Literature in Australia, ed. Geoffrey V. Davis & Dieter Riemenscheider (Cross / Cultures 28; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1997): 9–37. Tatz, Colin. Aboriginal Suicide is Different: A Portrait of Life and Self Destruction (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies P , 2001). Verghis, Sharon. “What Middle Australia is all about,” The Age (13 December 2005).

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Towards Settler Auto-Ethnography Nicholas Jose’s Black Sheep

Marc Delrez

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F A S C I N A T I N G C O N S E Q U E N C E of the Reconciliation years in Australia is that even the most progressive among settler writers now seem compelled to restructure their sense of national subjectivity, in a way that will resonate with new sensitivities about the issue of coexistence in this country. One would expect the current difficulties of belonging in Australia to be best circumscribed in the work of those writers who always acknowledged the dark side of the dream, as these are more finely attuned to the complexities of living on land that was legally stolen from its traditional owners. However, it seems that no amount of moral speculation or historical investigation will ever suffice to provide an exemption from the trauma of collective bad conscience which is today afflicting all of the nation. In other words, even the most liberal thinkers on issues of race and ownership find themselves cornered in “a painful intellectual and emotional impasse”1 – an impasse that is interestingly explored in contemporary literature, but one that is also sometimes bypassed at the price of a political lapse. Some restructuring of the political spectrum thus seems to be taking place, in confirmation of Haydie Gooder’s and Jane Jacobs’s insight that “the reconciliation process, precisely because it is trying to move beyond colonialism, consolidates a particular colonially constituted social configuration, with the Anglo-Celtic settler as the assumed normative subject and indigenous 1 Peter Read, Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2000): 3.

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Australians as its necessary other.”2 By this token, some writers who used to occupy a marginal position by virtue of their enlightened stance in the land-rights debate now appear to be brought back into an all-encompassing norm, where they have to rub shoulders with the most obstreperous rednecks. Also, as an aspect of this blunt dichotomy between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, certain thematic symmetries are beginning to emerge, including new definitions of the native or, indeed, of the community, which appropriate elements from Aboriginal models. It would be tempting to dub this state of affairs the ‘disgrace’ syndrome, in recognition of the way in which similar parameters were examined by somebody else in a different context. In Australia, an interesting manifestation of this sort of political disgrace can be observed in the trope of the white native as it occurs in Nicholas Jose’s interesting travel narrative Black Sheep: Journey to Borroloola (2002). This is a curious little book of non-fiction – rather in the tradition of Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines – in which Jose sets out to find out the truth about a mystery relative called Roger Jose, who used to live “blackfella” in the Far North until the moment of his death in 1963. The reasons for the author’s interest in this putative ancestor are quite tangled. The first is a very personal desire to relate to a character whom he first heard about as a child, for Roger played a part in the Jose folklore in his capacity as “an embarrassment to the family.”3 Any connection with him had always been vehemently denied, notably on the strength of genealogy, as “there was nowhere on the family tree he could have fallen off” (3). Nevertheless Jose seems keen to contemplate the possibility that some link may have existed, which is perhaps in keeping with today’s tendency to fill in the gaps in an historical record considered as no more than a discursive legitimatization of the dominant outlook. Seen in this light, the earlier dismissal of the family’s black sheep is somehow made to reinforce the adverse claim that another narrative could be written, one that would give more centrality to alternative patterns of experience, by virtue of which new connections can be sensed and affirmed.

2

Haydie Gooder & Jane M. Jacobs, “‘On the Border of the Unsayable’: The Apology in Postcolonizing Australia,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 2.2 (2000): 232. 3 Nicholas Jose, Black Sheep: Journey to Borroloola (London: Profile, 2002): 1. Further page references are in the main text.

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Jose, then, seems prepared to go out of his way – indeed, quite literally so in this travel narrative – to make the point that “many whites had family histories that were closely entwined with Aborigines” (45). Clearly, the fascination exerted by Roger has to do in part with the fact that he consorted with Aboriginal women – two of whom he considered as his regular wives, in overt defiance of colonial conventions – and that he lived in this company in a water-tank house in Borroloola, in the state of relative destitution that was then the lot of Aboriginal communities in the north of Australia. The significance of this odd character is therefore more than just personal, as Jose duly points out: Roger Jose, my putative kin, a labourer who lived “blackfella,” in the policeman’s disapproving words, might turn out to be the most exemplary of forebears, a neglected visionary. I wanted the connection because I wanted to join myself to someone who had earned his belonging in this country. (38)

Not only is Jose perfectly outspoken about the importance of the stakes, since the right to belong is here identified as the objective in sight, but his rhetoric is remarkably like that deployed by David Malouf in his novel Remembering Babylon (1993), where the character of Gemmy Fairley, also a white man who lived with the blacks, is similarly hailed as an “exemplum” and a “forerunner.”4 Thus, no less than Malouf, Jose turns to the past with an eye peeled for alternative ontologies that might back up his blueprint for a post-Reconciliation future. The analogy with David Malouf should, of course, alert us to the difficulties potentially contained in Jose’s position. We should not forget that, at the time of its publication in 1993, Remembering Babylon had been the focus of a bitter controversy, as some critics deplored the writer’s knack for subordinating the whole cross-cultural issue to his own aesthetic of change, through the privileging of Ovidian animal metaphors that allowed him to avoid “the anxieties of miscegenation at any level more threatening than the apiarian.”5 Such solipsism on Malouf’s part only confirmed the

4

David Malouf, Remembering Babylon (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993): 132; Malouf’s italics. 5 Suvendrini Perera, “Unspeakable Bodies: Representing the Aboriginal in Australian Critical Discourse,” Meridian 13.1 (1994): 19.

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impression already made6 by a novel like Fly Away Peter (1982), the first section of which presents an idyllic picture of prelapsarian Australia before the outbreak of World War I. The character of Jim Saddler is here endowed with a capacity for bonding with the land which ostensibly borrows from identifiable stereotypes of Aboriginal spirituality. Indeed, the authenticity of Jim’s link to the place is apparently vindicated by his gift for nomenclature, by his having “names for things, and in that way possessing them,” in full enjoyment of a familiarity with the land said to be “ancient and deep.”7 Because no rival claim is acknowledged in Fly Away Peter, this presumption of belonging is never at any stage seriously contested. This makes Malouf’s work colonial rather than postcolonial in expression, as tends to be recognized by those among his critics who object to a discourse found to be “complicitous with the invisible exercise of imperial power.”8 Jose, then, emulates David Malouf in that he, too, invokes the trope of the white native as a strategy of empowerment in the embattled context of Australian cultural politics. By contrast, the younger writer resists the temptation to trump the cards by erasing the Aborigines from the picture. Rather, Jose consistently acknowledges the Aboriginality of the models of identity at which he gestures. Thus, it is significant that his investigation into the life of Roger Jose relies not only on the settler archive, such as the “leather-bound worm-eaten journals from the Borroloola police station” (34) filed in the Northern Territory Library in Darwin, but also on the oral tradition kept alive by Aboriginal witnesses such as the Gangalidda elder Roy Hammer. His reconstruction of the Roger Jose narrative thus aims at a sort of referential equilibrium, informed as it is by both white and black sources. Such ‘bothness’ is in keeping with Jose’s sympathetic stance towards the Aborigines in The Custodians (1997), a novel where he thematizes the Stolen Generations as well as the issue of Aboriginal deaths in custody – all of which is perceived as the flip-side of white settler equanimity. In Black Sheep, not only are the Aborigines again represented, but the view offered is one that is at some remove from the static picture 6

See Marc Delrez, “David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter: A European View,” in Missions of Interdependence: A Literary Directory, ed. Gerhard Stilz (Cross / Cultures 58; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2002): 275–84. 7 David Malouf, Fly Away Peter (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1983): 7. 8 Amanda Nettelbeck, “Languages of War, Class and National History: David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter,” Kunapipi 18.2–3 (1996): 255.

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usually on show in the settler archive. This liberation from stereotype provides an indication of the ground that must be covered, apparently, if one is to ‘earn’ the right to belong in Australia. More particularly, Jose sets out to “challenge the view that Aboriginal Australia was primordially isolated from the outside world until advanced Europeans broke into its static, frozen culture” (54). This is something he achieves at the price of some acrobatics worth describing in detail. Borroloola, the object of the quest, is first presented as an extreme of geographical isolation, which owes its symbolic value and appeal to its being, “on [the] national remoteness index,” a kind of record-breaker – “as far as you can go in Australia without a passport” (6). The many physical obstacles on the way to Borroloola are therefore dwelt upon, but only as a prelude to the discovery that this backwater, instead of being the country’s last frontier, actually opens out on new horizons. Thus Borroloola, despite its reputation as “a gathering place for scum” (93) and by all accounts “the end of the line” (77), is unexpectedly revealed as a spot where the line can be crossed in all kinds of creative ways. In this context, the Aborigines’ cross-cultural connections with Asia are documented – with a particular emphasis on their trading transactions with the Macassans who used to sail to the northern coasts of Australia from what is now Ujung Pandang (in Sulawesi, Indonesia) in search of the sea-cucumber, a delicacy reputed to be aphrodisiac and greatly valued on the Chinese market. Jose is, then, in a position to present Aboriginal culture as dynamic and open to foreign influences, perceptible, for example, in the dugout canoes which they adopted from the Asian visitors, “as an improvement on the local model” (50), in exchange for their permission to exploit the coastal waters. There is little doubt that an ethical surplus characterizes this approach to the narrative of cultural negotiation in Australia, if only because it presents a picture that falls “outside dominant theorizations of Australian history,” traditionally modelled as “a drama of binary black/white relations.”9 By contrast, the recognition of ancient cultural links between China, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and the peoples of Arnhem Land represents at least an implicit challenge to the principle of terra nullius 9

Suvendrini Perera, “Futures Imperfect,” in Alter/Asians: Asian–Australian Identities in Art, Media and Popular Culture, ed. Ien Ang, Sharon Chalmers, Lisa Law & Mandy Thomas (Sydney: Pluto, 2000): 11.

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and attendant assumptions concerning the ‘historylessness’ of pre-contact Australia. Jose simultaneously achieves a reconfiguration of cultural space, in view of his sensitivity to the porosity of boundaries; and a new conceptualization of the pre-European past, seen not as an empty stretch of time but as a significantly archived realm of experience. Arguably, this bid to redeem an eclipsed past is encoded in Black Sheep in the reference to the continuing relevance of fossils as part of a “landscape of concertinaed time” (224). Thus the writer includes a passage on the fossil site at Riversleigh which forms an important aspect of “the zone of exchange in which the Gulf Country sits” (227). The beckoning fascination of fossils has to do with their ability to bridge temporal chasms and connect the beholder to the more accommodating dimensions intuited beyond the “fanatically exclusive” (225) arguments of contemporary history. A sense of connection, then, becomes available, freakily embodied in the Gulf snapping turtle recently found swimming “in the gorge at Indarri Falls” yet identical “to the 50,000-year-old fossil found at Riversleigh and thought to be extinct” (228). Above all, and beyond this sort of literal anachronism, the contemplation of fossils allows one to embrace a temporal scale in which it is necessary to acknowledge “that someone else was here before me”; but also that “this is the case everywhere on earth” (224–25). The main effect, then, is perhaps one of relativizing the most strident of territorial claims, in keeping with the feeling that “in responding to these sought-after things we elaborate systems in which we have a place too, a connection with the archaeology of our own psyche, as individuals and as kinds” (221). This should perhaps alert us to the paradoxical possibility that Jose is indeed attempting, through the rehearsal of this progressive rhetoric, to elaborate precisely such a “system,” one that will serve as existential justification for the fact of his own presence in Australia. On the one hand, the awareness of the diversity of the continent’s history represents progress over the tendency, again revealed in somebody like Malouf, to recognize only the settlers’ monuments, from a magnified perspective in which these will be seen as “going back centuries rather than a mere score of years.”10 On the other hand, an enlargement of perspective to place cultural studies within a cosmic scale somehow amounts to a nimble side-stepping of the whole political debate. A similar move can be observed in Alex Miller’s 10

Malouf, Fly Away Peter, 12.

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novel Journey to the Stone Country (2002), which gives prominence to the theme of artefact-hunting in the high ranges of the Bowen Basin, in northern Queensland. The perception that the bush is neither pristine nor dormant but, rather, alive with the glowing remains of a complex past interestingly displaces received histories sedimented around any kind of eurocentric foundational principle. However, the objects uncovered turn out to exert a magical hold on Aborigines and settlers alike; moreover, the search for Aboriginal artefacts is conducted in parallel with an examination of pastoralist vestiges in the same area. In consequence, the novel appears to renege on its own postcolonial agenda, which is ‘disgraced’ as the book gestures towards a nativist position which fails to discriminate between the beneficiaries and the victims of colonial history. In like manner, Jose in Black Sheep negotiates a complex discursive terrain fraught with potential ambiguities that need to be unpicked very carefully. By pointing to an Aboriginal–Asian pre-contact history, he appears to challenge, very usefully, what cultural historians would call “the monothematic narrative of settlement history”11 in Australia. On the face of it, he is redressing a European misconception about the Aborigines having been non-existent on the map of international relations, commercial or otherwise. However, in case this looks like an instance of disinterested historical revisionism, it should be pointed out that the qualities of adaptability and diplomatic expertise now ascribed to the Aborigines are further declared to be particularly welcome “in the no less difficult negotiations of today’s world” (55). The suspicion therefore arises that revision of history is here primarily strategic, aiming as it does to create the discursive conditions in which the Aborigines will be recognized as seasoned mediators ready for yet another bargain – one that is called for in the present-day context of Reconciliation. A similar tension can be perceived in the chapter devoted to Matthew Flinders’ survey of the coastline of the Gulf of Carpentaria, on board his Investigator at the very beginning of the nineteenth century. By presenting the Aborigines of the Borroloola area as a sea-going people, who “had been navigating that complex shore for centuries after all” (78), Jose contributes to dispelling the myth of Flinders’ firstness. This, again, looks like a useful deconstruction of an official record which enshrines European 11 Lars Jensen, Unsettling Australia: Readings in Australian Cultural History (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2005): 61.

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experience at the expense of native claims to history. Even so, Flinders remains eulogized in Black Sheep as a “secular visionary” – indeed, exactly like Roger Jose, because he similarly “crossed over into a world that belonged to others” (77). The colonial narrative is, then, not so much dismissed as transformed into a self-serving search for cross-cultural correspondences which are found to validate it. By this token, what makes Flinders’ life heroic is perhaps not his pioneering attitude so much as the fact that he was willing and able to cross imaginative boundaries in his quest for knowledge that would match the findings of Aboriginal cartography. This, in turn, leads one to interrogate Jose’s cross-culturalism as it is manifest in some of his previous books. Jose, of course, has a long-standing connection with China, since he taught English literature and Australian studies in Beijing and Shanghai, and then worked as cultural counsellor at the Australian Embassy in Beijing from 1987 to 1990. His interest in Australia’s relations with China informs his Chinese Whispers (1995), a collection of essays, as well as novels like Avenue of Eternal Peace (1989), The Rose Crossing (1994), and, more recently, The Red Thread (2000). It has been pointed out that Jose’s formidable familiarity with Chinese culture allowed him to “sidestep the pitfalls of navel-gazing identity politics”12 in favour of a more egalitarian cultural negotiation, one that gestures towards the utopian ideal of Sino-Australian symbiosis. In other words, Jose’s engagement with China can be seen as an attempt to curb the tendency to view Asia as a distant playground or “territory of the Australian psyche,”13 or to consider Asians as just one more minority on Australian soil. This is, after all, the usual drift of cross-cultural studies: towards redressing the balance when it tips onto the side of eurocentric narcissism or imperialist hubris. In this framework, White-Australia policies are seen to discriminate equally against all coloured races, quite in keeping with “the habitual mindset of imperialism,”14 so that the Chinese

12

Marc Delrez, “Cross-Cultural Connections in the Work of Nicholas Jose,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 36.1 (2001): 47. 13 Helen Tiffin, “Asia and the Contemporary Australian Novel,” Australian Literary Studies 11.4 (1984): 468. 14 Alison Broinowski, “Chinese Remonstrances,” in Bastard Moon: Essays on Chinese-Australian Writing, ed. Wenche Ommundsen (Kingsbury: Otherland, 2001; special issue of Otherland Literary Journal): 7.

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and the Aborigines are almost interchangeable in their roles as the settlers’ repressed Other. It can be argued, however, that a different sort of rationale may also lie behind the construction of the link to China, to the effect that Chinese migrants to Australia will appear not as another wronged minority but, rather, as the settlers’ eclipsed predecessor and alter ego. Thus Jose refers in Black Sheep to “porcelain shards and other archaeological finds,” suggesting that trade had been “carried out between prosperous China and Aboriginal Australia for some centuries” (53). Furthermore, the writer invokes rumours about the existence of “remains of a stone Ming-dynasty house […] hidden deep in an off-limits part of Arnhem Land” (53) that would provide evidence that Chinese colonizers managed to gain a foothold on the Australian continent as early as the fifteenth century, presumably with the assent of native populations. Ironically, then, the point is once again that the historical gap-filling which is encouraged by Reconciliation turns out to yield, among various insights gained into indigenous lore, the proposition that Aboriginal cultures were always amenable to foreign influence anyway. Since the narrative of the past is now open to revision, in ways that might integrate so far neglected dimensions of experience, it would seem that no harm can be done in taking advantage of this process to construct Aboriginal traditions as essentially non-exclusionary. Cultural or collective self-invention, namely, is definitely the order of the day. It is only fair that this should be so for the Aborigines, whose identities have to be created anew in view of the destructive impact of European invasion. In this context, it is significant that, as Sheila Collingwood–Whittick has shown, contemporary Aboriginal autobiographies amount to a form of autoethnography, in that they recount “the generic life history of the author’s ethnic group”15 rather than his or her individual existence. As defined by Mary Louise Pratt, “autoethnographic expression is a very widespread phenomenon of the contact zone,”16 which constitutes a discursive response to the misrepresentations of European ethno-

15

Sheila Collingwood–Whittick, “Re-Presenting the Australian Aborigine: Challenging Colonialist Discourse through Autoethnography,” World Literature Written in English 38.2 (2000): 112. 16 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992): 9.

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graphy as an oppressed group seeks to gain a “point of entry into metropolitan literate culture”17 by appropriating the forms of that culture. It is therefore a paradox, or at least something in the nature of a counterdiscursive move, that the settlers themselves should resort to autoethnographic strategies of their own. Of course, Black Sheep could be read traditionally as just another instance of ethnographic expression, since the author here ostensibly chooses to represent Aborigines in the way that best fits his own political agenda; but my point is that Jose also inscribes himself within a variety of autoethnographic settler writing, for he clearly speaks on behalf of a community of settlers defined at variance with accepted patterns of European identity. Perhaps Jose’s autoethnographic impulse is nowhere more apparent than in his longing for a mode of writing that would qualify as “an authentically Australian magic realism” (206). Interestingly, such writing would be characterized by ‘bothness’, too, thus providing an apt aesthetic medium in an age of Reconciliation, as exemplified in Alexis Wright’s historical novel Plains of Promise (1997), which is found to exist in two domains: “One temporal, epic and European, the other magical, poetic and linked to Aboriginal lore” (203). By this token, magical realism is outlined as a shared fictional terrain, the meeting-ground of originally discrete sensibilities ostensibly fated to coalesce in some new mode of perception and representation. That Jose himself feels drawn to this aesthetic model is evident from his repeated references to The Lost Steps (1953), the “great jungle odyssey by the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier” (5), which supplies a title for the “Prologue” of Black Sheep as well as a pattern for Jose’s own “wandering life, [his] lost steps to come” (207). Carpentier, the man who is customarily credited with the invention of magical realism, or at least with giving the phrase its critical currency, is then hailed as a companion and a guide, a privileged predecessor, who daringly innovated with narrative forms, preferring “not a straight line or a circle but an elliptical curve.” Jose resolutely places himself in the Cuban’s footsteps when he declares: Here in the Gulf country his book whispers in my ear. I am no longer on a fixed journey around one centre, my end in my beginning. I am pulled

17

Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 9.

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by another centre, away from Roger Jose and into the present, my trajectory an ellipse. (208)

Amusingly, Jose goes so far in Black Sheep as to speculate whether the name of Carpentier bears any connection to Carpentaria, the topographical designation for the Gulf area which is his field of investigation and his destination in this travel narrative. While it would be absurd for the literary critic to become too prescriptive about the endeavours of creative writers, or indeed to condemn their aesthetic choices, it may still be useful to remember that magical realism was recently problematized, as a critical category, for the “hermeneutics of vagueness” that it fosters when it is defined primarily in formalist terms. Indeed, any approach identifying the formal requirements of magical realism as a conjunction of contraries, like the homely and the uncanny, would run the risk of glossing over the “disjunctions just below the continuous surface presumed by the category.”18 In particular, it seems imperative to circumscribe the “cultural and historical specificities”19 which constitute an outlying referent for the ‘magical’ element found to disrupt the fabric of ordinariness within the texts. In an Australian context, two related difficulties of method are bound to present themselves. The first has to do with the temptation – not to say cliché – of considering all magical occurrences as codified translations, into some universally readable script, of spiritual apprehensions infused with a sense of ‘authentic’ Aboriginality; while the second revolves around the danger that these emergences of the sacred – albeit a manufactured brand thereof – may then be recuperated by the settler writer in what would amount to yet another colonialist confiscation of culture. Hence the need for a differentiated typology of Australian magical realism that will be orientated “towards the culturally constructed boundary between what is considered real and what is not,”20 if one is to avoid the sort of assimilationist rhetorical strategies sometimes perceptible in Jose’s Black Sheep. In the last analysis, then, it is not only that Roger Jose chose to go “combo” in the North – to use the local slang for those settlers who adopted an indigenous life-style in Australia. The further significance of 18 Christopher Warnes, “The Hermeneutics of Vagueness: Magical Realism in Current Literary Critical Discourse,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 41.1 (2005): 8. 19 Warnes, “The Hermeneutics of Vagueness,” 10. 20 “The Hermeneutics of Vagueness,” 8.

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this cranky character lies in his setting-up of a role model, derived from Aboriginal customs, for other settlers wishing to identify with him. In this respect, it is revealing that Jose fails to establish the exact nature of his family ties to this mystery relative. What matters more is that a deeper kinship is felt to unite them, evident in their common taste for pushing against borders. We have seen that a similar quality of ‘borderlessness’ is also recognized in Matthew Flinders, who is admitted into the family. In a sense, it is a whole system of extended kinship, again inspired by Aboriginal structures, that is delineated in Black Sheep as the book pays homage to all those independent-minded individuals at the Top End who, “conscious that their community was an experiment” (136), managed to achieve “a degree of harmonious […] co-existence that was impossible elsewhere” (137). Quite amusingly, Jose goes so far as to suggest that this settler community actually relied on some sort of oral tradition. This is the consequence of a quirk of history – one of those moments when colonial history flirts with surrealism: a lending library boasting a collection of more than 3,000 volumes was actually set up in Borroloola in the late nineteenth century, for the benefit of Roger Jose and his kind. Nicholas Jose records in detail the tribulations to which these books were subjected in the outback; but, more importantly for our present purposes, he underlines the way in which the books gradually vanished through a succession of wet seasons – and through the determination of termites. However, before this happened, the hermits of Borroloola had time to absorb the content of the works, so that the “decomposing library [was] turned into oral form and conveyed to passers-by.” Indeed, one could “hear them arguing out “‘Thuky-dides’ and ‘Themis-tockles’ by the Billabong” (146). Interestingly, Jose pits this against the fate reserved for the oral traditions of the Aborigines: The preoccupation with preserving relics of book culture stands in fetishistic contrast to the destruction of the oral, non-book culture of Aboriginal people that was running on apace. Artefacts inscribed with knowledge were freely pillaged, elders were dying without passing on stories, languages themselves were becoming extinct. (111–12)

In this context, the Borroloola experiment acquires compensating redemptive virtues, as Jose claims that “the disintegrating library stands for the resilience of the oral, or its revenge” (114).

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This passage epitomizes the tension that lies at the heart of Black Sheep. On the one hand, Jose here endorses a version of Australian history which recognizes the discrimination and inhumanity that characterized the settlers’ treatment of Aborigines ever since the moment of European arrival in 1770. In this connection, he strikes an elegiac note which is no doubt sincere. On the other hand, he takes this opportunity to reveal and explore alternatives to standard settler behaviour, with a view to staking out a mutual ground of shared experiences. It is not easy, at the close of this essay, to come up with any definitive judgement about Jose’s discursive stance in this book. There is certainly something self-defeating to a reading that would castigate the well-meaning efforts of such a progressive and engaging writer as Nicholas Jose; and we have no reason to decide that the “no-hopers” of Borroloola may not indeed represent some sort of potential hope for a reconciled Australia, as they symbolize the possibility that “things [may] work out somewhat differently” (25). However, it must be said in conclusion that the search for redemptive affinities between the settlers and the Aborigines tends to mask the ongoing inequalities and injustices that continue to be an aspect of cultural relations in contemporary Australia. Therefore, despite our sympathy with Nicholas Jose and with the plight of the settlers more generally, it is difficult not to feel “suspicious of the missionary motives” that non-Aboriginal people bring to Aboriginal communities, whom they study out of a genuine interest but also because they are “looking for something for themselves” (37).

WORKS CITED Broinowski, Alison. “Chinese Remonstrances,” in Bastard Moon: Essays on Chinese– Australian Writing, ed. Wenche Ommundsen (Kingsbury: Otherland, 2001; special issue of Otherland Literary Journal): 7–22. Collingwood–Whittick, Sheila. “Re-Presenting the Australian Aborigine: Challenging Colonialist Discourse through Autoethnography,” World Literature Written in English 38.2 (2000): 110–31. Delrez, Marc. “Ambivalent Oppositionality: David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter: A European View,” in Missions of Interdependence: A Literary Directory, ed. Gerhard Stilz (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2002): 275–84. ——. “Cross-Cultural Connections in the Work of Nicholas Jose,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 36.1 (2001): 45–57. Gooder, Haydie, & Jane M. Jacobs. “’On the Border of the Unsayable’: The Apology in Postcolonizing Australia,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 2.2 (2000): 229–47.

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Jensen, Lars. Unsettling Australia: Readings in Australian Cultural History (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2005). Jose, Nicholas. Avenue of Eternal Peace (1989; New York: Penguin, 1991). ——. Black Sheep: Journey to Borroloola (London: Profile, 2002). ——. Chinese Whispers: Cultural Essays (Kent Town, S.A.: Wakefield, 1995). ——. The Custodians (London: Picador, 1997). ——. The Red Thread (London: Faber & Faber, 2000). ——. The Rose Crossing (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994). Malouf, David. Fly Away Peter (1982; Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1983). ——. Remembering Babylon (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993). Miller, Alex. Journey to the Stone Country (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2002). Nettelbeck, Amanda. “Languages of War, Class and National History: David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter,” Kunapipi 18.2–3 (1996): 249–60. Perera, Suvendrini. “Futures Imperfect,” in Alter / Asians: Asian–Australian Identities in Art, Media and Popular Culture, ed. Ien Ang, Sharon Chalmers, Lisa Law & Mandy Thomas (Sydney: Pluto, 2000): 7–15. ——. “Unspeakable Bodies: Representing the Aboriginal in Australian Critical Discourse,” Meridian 13.1 (1994): 15–26. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). Read, Peter. Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2000). Tiffin, Helen. “Asia and the Contemporary Australian Novel,” Australian Literary Studies 11.4 (1984): 468–79. Warnes, Christopher. “The Hermeneutics of Vagueness: Magical Realism in Current Critical Literary Discourse,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 41.1 (2005): 1–13. Wright, Alexis. Plains of Promise (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1997).

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Australia Re-Mapped and Con-Texted in Kim Scott’s Benang Pablo Armellino

B

F R O M T H E H E A R T is the second novel by Kim Scott – born in Perth, Western Australia, in 1957 – a young author who defines himself as a descendant of the people who have always lived along the coast of south-western Australia, the Nyoongar. Scott’s first novel, True Country, published in 1993, marked an impressive debut that foreshadowed the astonishing accomplishment and success obtained in 1999 with Benang. As the novel has been appropriately defined, Benang is a “sweeping historical novel” that will surprise its readers “for the originality of the voice that speaks >there@”;1 this consideration rightly draws attention to two very important aspects of this amazing novel: the author, on the basis of his own family history, has managed to create an imposing metahistoriographic fictional work that recounts Australian history without ever becoming an historical narrative in the traditional sense. The voice – or, better, the voices – emerging from history are what Gayatri Spivak would call the subalterns of Australia;2 ordinary Aboriginal people narrate their life stories in all their simplicity and crudeness, giving the non-Aboriginal reader a chance to witness what has been silenced for so long. 1

ENANG,

Gerry Turcotte, “Review of Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart,” Sydney Morning Herald (19 June 1999), http://www.facp.iinet.net.au/benangreviews .html#smh 2 Cf. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: U of Illinois P , 1988).

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However, Kim Scott’s aim was not only to dig up a past that white Australia has so consistently tried to obliterate; his major objective was to reply to and challenge the white Australian discourse which still discriminates against Australian natives. Benang manages to do so by highlighting all the moments of injustice and failed comprehension that have occurred from the first encounter to the present. These events, the backbone of which is constituted by happenings concerning the protagonist’s family line, are reconstituted in a network of significant locations and moments that centre the Aboriginal experience and identity and provide the basis for the development of an independent Aboriginal discourse. The aim of this essay is to demonstrate the way in which Kim Scott’s narrative, by going beyond realist Aboriginal literature and ‘life stories’, manages successfully to re-map Australian history and geography, hence to ‘con-text’ white Australian discourse and to create the basis for the emergence of a new Aboriginal one. The novel’s plot is driven by the protagonist Harley’s growing awareness of his aboriginal ancestry and his resulting quest for personal identity. Raised by his white grandfather, he has been plucked from the native side of the family in accordance with an unforgiving project of human breeding. Adopting Auber Octavius Neville’s ideas and methods for the dilution of the native race into the white one,3 Ern Salomon Scat – a fictional character whom Scott created around his own grandfather – devotes himself to the procreation of white offspring out of successive interbreedings between Aborigines and white Australians. Black May Become White: Work of Elevating the Natives The black will go white. It is exemplified in the quarter-castes, and by gradual absorption of the native Australian black race by the white.

3

Serving from 1915 to 1940, Chief Protector of Aborigines A.O. Neville was convinced of the possibility of breeding out the natives in as few as three generations. This could be effected by keeping the ‘half-castes’ from having children with ‘full-blood’ blacks. The necessity of eliminating blacks as soon as possible was induced by the fear that half-castes could increase in number and eventually become a threat for the white community – full-bloods, by contrast, were considered doomed to extinction. For this reason, the forcible removal of children became an accepted policy that lasted until the end of World War I I and beyond (after signing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, Australia had to refashion this policy so that it could last until 1970).

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The position is analogous to that of a small stream of dirty water entering a larger clear stream. Eventually the colour of the smaller is lost.4

Harley’s narrative starts from an extremely marginal standpoint: as his grandfather’s eugenic and cultural project was meant to do, almost every trace of aboriginality has been wiped out of him. While still convalescing from the car accident in which his father died, the protagonist becomes aware of his situation and strives to be something more than a “mere full stop”; at that moment, what becomes a most distinct sensation is the void that the ‘purging’ process has left in him. It is a mixture of rage, self-pity and frustration that triggers off the desire to find a way back to his roots; in the absence of any other link, it is ‘deracination’ that offers itself as a link with his hidden origins: As the first-born-successfully-white-man-in-the-family-line I awoke to a terrible pressure, particularly upon my nose and forehead, and thought I was blind. In fact the truth was that there was nothing to see, except – right in front of my eyes – a whiteness which was surface only, with no depth, and very little variation. Eventually, I realised my face was pressed hard against a ceiling.5

The pressure on the nose, forehead and the white surface obstructing Harley’s vision graphically represents the way in which deprivation becomes a real presence in his life: the absence of certain physiognomic features and the blinding effect of white education literally make him float above the ground. Neville’s words cast further light on the situation: “As I see it, what we have to do is to uplift and elevate these people to our own plane.”6 Harley has been ‘uprooted’ and ‘elevated’ and, as a consequence, now completely rootless, he cannot keep himself earth-bound and, against all physical principles, flies in real life. This abrupt evasion of the domain of reality illustrates the protagonist’s initial position and state of mind: from this insecure position – itself the negation of a standpoint – it is a matter of necessity to work his way back to the ground: 4

Auber Octavius Neville, “Black May Become White: Work of Elevating the Natives,” Daily News (3 October 1933), quoted in Kim Scott, Benang: From the Heart (South Fremantle, W.A.: Fremantle Arts Centre P , 2000): 7. 5 Scott, Benang: From the Heart, 13. Further page references are in the main text. 6 A.O. Neville, “Australia’s Coloured Minority: Their Place in Our Community,” in Kim Scott, Benang, 11.

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PABLO ARMELLINO \ Raised to carry on one heritage, and ignore another, I found myself wishing to reverse that upbringing, not only for the sake of my own children, but also for my ancestors, and for their children in turn. And therefore, inevitably, most especially, for myself. (21)

Trying to escape the pauperization produced by his grandfather’s social and racial engineering, Harley starts studying Ern’s documents and discovers an astounding universe of racism and under-privilege. The files describing his family in terms of hues of skin colour, somatic features and fractions of native blood betray an attitude towards the Aborigines that was not only his grandfather’s but also that of an entire nation. The pseudo-scientific arguments that fomented the racist discourse prove too much for Harley to bear and he reacts with anger and violence. I turned away from the old man and in a sort of tantrum – oh, no doubt it was childish – I plucked papers from drawers, threw them, let them fall. I made books fly, index cards panic and flee. Occasionally, rising and falling in that flurry, I paused to read from a book which had passages underlined on almost every page. There were a couple of family trees inscribed in the flyleaf. Trees? Rather, they where sharply ruled diagrams. My name finished each one. On another page there was a third, a fourth. All leading to me. (29)

What was intended to be the outcome of his grandfather’s eugenic project as well as the final step in the process of cultural erasure – Harley is the ‘first-born-successfully-white-man-in-the-family-line’ – hence becomes the starting point of a reciprocal process in which all the branches of the sharply ruled diagrams are followed back to the discovery of each of his relatives’ life stories. Harley’s investigation, through his grandfather’s files and later through the accounts of two uncles, allows over a century of family history to be traced right back to the present and to assume its rightful place as part of that section of Australian history that has for so long been wilfully silenced. The main plot, which could be described as a type of healing process in the course of which Harley is guided through the reconstruction of his own heritage, continuously gives rise to different narratives that independently bring to life the reality of each character’s existence. The documents, along with Uncle Will’s reticence and Uncle Jack’s less restrained accounts, are all merged in Harley’s narration; these give way to the disclosure of each storyline as a separate entity, as if these were being

[ Australia Re-Mapped and Con-Texted

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enacted in their own time. As a result, the individual life stories are bound together into an imposing saga which might seem reminiscent of certain modes of South American narrative, but which should actually be recognized as being directly in line with the ‘life stories’ of contemporary Aboriginal authors such as Sally Morgan. This genre celebrates the transmutation of individual experience into universal knowledge and thus the evolution of autobiography into a type of narrative that, without renouncing its uniqueness, stands for an entire people. Taking a cue from this genre, Kim Scott’s semi-autobiographical novel simultaneously side-steps the rules of realist narrative and carefully puts together an intricate family history. This combination of distinctive approaches produces a metahistoriographic narrative7 that openly challenges white Australian history: “first inhabitants,” “first explorations” and “first dwellings” are all pinned down as counterfeit “locations of culture”8 whose agenda is to invalidate Aboriginal antecedents. Kim Scott became aware of this discourse while researching his family history, and resolved to prove it wrong: in lots of local histories that I read in the region that my family had been moving for thousands of years, lots of local histories tried to talk about who was the “first white person born” in such and such an area. It seemed to me that in doing that they were trying to impose a story on a landscape and jettison the pre-existing stories.9

In accordance with Hayden White’s idea that “history is the collection of narratives we tell ourselves in order to create a past from which we would like to be descended,”10 Benang demonstrates how the colonizers’ recording of the past is nothing but a deplorable attempt at gaining a foothold in the territory while at the same time trying to efface the antecedent Abori7

Cf. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988). 8 Playing on the title of Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture, I here try to stress the fact that culture is actively ‘located’ in space and time through the creation of timelines and maps. 9 Joseph Buck, “Trees that Belong Here: An Interview with Award Winning Author Kim Scott,” Boomtown Magazine (http://www.boomtownmag.com/articles/200101 /benang.htm). 10 Robert Markley, “History, Literature, and Criticism,” in Literary Criticism and Theory: The Greeks to the Present, ed. Robert Con Davis & Laurie Finke (New York: Longman, 1989): 878.

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ginal history. For each first white man born, the novel provides an alternative story, the wilfully discarded one that reminds us that Aboriginal people were there first, that they had always been there, and that they never ceased to be inhabitants of that territory. Australian history is therefore literally ‘re-mapped’ as the coordinates of its authentication are displaced and cancelled, reverting to long-forgotten ones. It is thus that official accounts are re-told and a gruesome past finally emerges from the depths of the land into which the blood has inexorably seeped: They crept to the natives camp deep in the night, gently raised their weapons and fired an earth-shattering volley over the heads of the sleeping natives. The natives rose as one man, and as one demented man they screamed and fled through the bush with more frightful roars behind them. Their bewildered pet dingoes yelped and ran in a wide circle – one of them was shot dead to show what those noisome weapons could do. (185)11

The official account of this episode – which ends in the near-extermination of the tribe to whom Harley’s great-great-grandmother belonged – reveals a racism that inherently disfigures the reconstruction of the events. The image of the natives rising and moving like a pack of wild animals is only too obviously a concession to the need to dehumanize the victims of the massacre. This loathing was nonetheless genuine and, as Henry Reynolds shows in his study of genocide in Australia, it has been quite common to consider the natives as less than animals and thus to shoot them as though they were nothing more than dingoes. If it is wrong to hold the country – give it up; if it is right – hold it as of old, peaceably if possible but when such terrible proof is given of the impossibility of peace, treat them as they deserve; [if] it is useless to tame them, then destroy them, as you would any other savage beast, men they don’t deserve to be called.12

11

This passage has been paraphrased by the author from an entry in West Australian Royal Society: Journal and Proceedings (1954). 12 Reported from the Sydney Morning Herald (19 May 1858) in Henry Reynolds, An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia’s History (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 2001): 122.

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What happens here is a typical case of ‘pseudospeciation’: in his study of human aggression and war, Irenäus Eibl–Eibesfeldt explains how the biological norm “Thou shalt not kill thy own kind,” which is characteristic of all vertebrates, can be easily overcome by human beings through the use of a ‘cultural norm filter’: The vital role is played here by cultural pseudospeciation. The fact that the other party is often denied a share in our common humanity shifts the conflict to the interspecific level, and interspecific aggression is generally destructive in the animal kingdom too. Over the biological norm filter that inhibits destructive aggression in man as in other creatures, a cultural norm filter is superimposed that commands us to kill. […] The important point to bear in mind is that destructive war is a result of cultural evolution.13

It was thanks to a ‘frame of mind’ telling them they were not about to confront fellow human beings but only non-humans that punitive parties could set out to kill. Thus the “culturally imprinted” can not only inhibit the inborn aggression controls and “perfectly suppress the constitutional” but also “dispose of the relic of bad conscience.”14 It is therefore with perfect candour that Australian discourse writes an unlikely story of weapons gently raised to fire a demonstrative volley above the camp, and it is because of such light-heartedness that history now betrays itself and proves to be a collection of absurd stories. The subaltern version of this story comes back to life through the reconstruction of Harley’s great-great-grandfather’s experience. Sandy One, who on account of his whiteness has to join the retaliation party, lives with horror and terror the moments of the massacre. “There was never any trouble. No blood spilt, or a gun raised in anger” (185), claims white Australian discourse. The same account sounds completely different when recounted in Harley’s words: Shots roared in the vast canyon of night the little hollow had suddenly become. Perhaps the stars had brightened; he could see the figures leaping to their feet, helping one another up, running. And there were voices calling, calling. 13

Irenäus Eibl–Eibesfeldt, The Biology of Peace and War: Men, Animals and Aggression, tr. Eric Mosbacher (Krieg und Frieden; Munich: Piper, 1975; tr. New York: Viking, 1979): 123. 14 Eibl–Eibesfeldt, The Biology of Peace and War, 169.

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PABLO ARMELLINO \ People fell, were shot. Were shot. A woman running at Sandy jerked, and was flung to the ground. In the little space between gunshots was the sound of running feet, other bodies hitting the ground, screams and shouting. Small voices, too. (188)

The reconstruction of individual experiences accurately underscores and retells the crudeness of history, and the resurgence of these blind spots stresses the importance of the clashes/encounters between the two cultures as crucial moments of alteration. Every blow struck by white Australians only partially demolished its target, because the Aborigines responded by stubbornly adapting to every new situation. This relentless hacking away at Aboriginal culture spawned an infinite number of what Édouard Glissant, borrowing from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, calls rhizomic roots: “The single root is the one that kills everything around itself whereas the rhizome is the root that stretches towards other roots.”15 Clearly, according to this picture, the colonizer is acknowledged as the single root which, by clearing the ground around itself, tries to establish itself as the sole proprietor of a territory, while the colonized are forced to take the role of the rhizomic root which has the option of moving horizontally, hence of side-stepping obstacles, circumventing hindrances, and finally resisting eradication. The passage previously quoted from Kim Scott’s novel might not seem to leave space for survival. However, considering that Sandy One is a quadroon disguised as a white man, that his half-caste mother was conceived as a result of rape on an island where native women were taken by the whalers, and that his wife Fanny, in order not to suffer a similar or even worse fate, saves herself by clinging to a man she recognizes as being, at least partially, a tribesman, it is possible to see that Sandy One and Fanny are crucial figures in this continuous enforced adaptation. Sandy One, by silently watching Fanny’s people die, saves the lives of his family and, in a sense, guarantees the survival of the tribe itself. Thus, the island where Sandy One’s mother was conceived, the shore on which Sandy One steps off a whaler’s boat to join Fanny while his companions take the rest of the women of the tribe onboard, and finally the place where the tribe is slaughtered, are all crucial places where at different 15

Édouard Glissant, Introduction à une Poétique du Divers (Paris: Gallimard,

1996): 59. My translation from the French: “La racine unique est celle qui tue autour

d’elle alors que le rhizome est la racine qui s’étend à la rencontre d’autres racines.”

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times hybridization is required; at that moment a metaphorical root is sunk into the ground (often in association with the spilling of blood) and a shifting of genealogy and culture takes place as identities interpose in order to cope with the stress provoked by the pressure exerted by the colonizers’ presence and actions. The novel thus proposes an image of history in which the survivors of the white Australian policies of annihilation and absorption can be considered ‘affiliative offspring’ of both former cultures. In The World, the Text and the Critic, Edward Said argues that when “biological reproduction is either too difficult or too unpleasant, there [is] some other way by which men and women can create social bonds.”16 In this situation, the process of affiliation intervenes to replace the process of direct filiation, “thereby creating a new institution based not on a direct genealogical descent but on what we may call, barbarously, horizontal affiliation.”17 What I am describing is the transition from a failed idea or possibility of filiation to a kind of compensatory order that, whether it is a party, an institution, a culture, a set of beliefs, or even a world-vision, provides men and women with a new form of relationship, which I have been calling affiliation but which is also a new system.18

Fanny, Sandy One and their family are a case of horizontal/rhizomic affiliation. As the filiative relation to their culture was constantly impeded, Aborigines affiliated themselves to the culture of the colonizer and tried, as far as they could, to fit into it by disguising themselves. The new affiliative culture in which the Aborigines had to look for shelter is therefore already something new: the clash/encounter/merging of the two cultures gave birth to a line quite separate from both of its antecedents but also one with a double heritage to look back to. This ambivalent position, otherwise described as the position of the barbarian in Mario Vargas Llosa’s García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio, enables its holders “to have the best of both worlds” (292) and to be predatory in the face of the culture that has subjugated them.

16

Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge M A : Harvard

U P , 1983): 17. 17 18

Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic,18. The World, the Text, and the Critic, 19.

24

PABLO ARMELLINO \ The absence of a cultural tradition implies an emptiness that also involves an extreme liberty; due not only to the fact that the barbarian, that orphan, can loot with equal ease all the cultural reserves of the earth (something that the ‘civilised’ person cannot do, limited as he is by the mental picture that his own civilisation imposes on other cultures), but, most especially, because his adamic condition, that of a pioneer in the domain of creation, constitutes an incentive for his ambition: it permits all sorts of excesses and enhances the impetus and audacity of innocence.19

The result is that immense cultural richness and freedom of movement are granted to those who have been plucked from their culture. As we have seen, the Aboriginal characters, who alternately play a role in the novel and become protagonists of their stories, use this ‘freedom’ in order to cope with the highly regimented system through which whites ruled their lives; this, however, was never an easy task, because, as in the case of the massacre of Fanny’s tribe, it required a high level of endurance, if only to guarantee mere survival. With the slackening of governmental pressure, this twofold affiliation has finally revealed its full potential. As Vargas Llosa suggests, the emptiness that the author faces when looking backwards – emptiness left by centuries of annihilation, dispersion, eugenic absorption, cultural integration and guilt-ridden reconciliation – becomes an advantage when the non-European author, not having to confront the imposing monuments of a great literary tradition, can only find comfort in the emptiness behind him and thus find the courage to undertake the most amazing enterprises: All of a sudden, however, in certain circumstances, due to his passion, to his vigour, one of those barbarians aims so high – because free of the mind-numbing straitjacket of a cultural tradition – that he manages to tackle and build a linguistic world where his achievement reaches the level of that irresponsible ambition which initially inspired him.

19

Mario Vargas Llosa, García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1971): 208. My translation of the original: “La falta de una tradición cultural significa un vacío que es también suprema libertad. No solo porque el bárbaro, ese huérfano, puede saquear con igual comodidad todas las reservas culturales de la tierra (lo que el ‘civilizado’ no puede hacer, limitado como está frente a las otras culturas por la visión que de ellas le impone la suya propia), sino, sobre todo, porque su condición adánica, de pionero en el dominio de la creación, constituye un aliciente para su ambición: autoriza a ésta todos los excesos, el ímpetu y la audacia de la inocencia.”

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In this way, a Borges or a Neruda appears: for them, barbarity was as fruitful as civilisation was for Eliot, Proust or Thomas Mann.20

It could be further said that it is thus that an author such as Kim Scott can make his appearance and that it is by trying to describe this condition that a protagonist/narrator such as Harley can come into being. I know I make people uncomfortable, and embarrass even those who come to hear me sing. I regret that, but not how the talk and nervous laughter fades as I rise from the ground and, hovering in the campfire smoke, slowly turn to consider this small circle of which I am the centre. (9)

Harley’s propensity to fly, his hovering in the trailing smoke of the campfires, and the subsequent rejection of an entire realist literary tradition – these are all details that substantiate the validity of the connection with Vargas Llosa’s arguments and his study of García Márquez’s works. The term magical realism can for once be used – if with some reservations – to define the work of an Aboriginal author. The events narrated in Benang steer a course around ‘reality’ not simply to represent the cultural gap that prevents the Western reader from understanding native society, but in order for the evasion of the order of reality to become a tool with which the author frees himself from the constraints imposed by Western culture. Kim Scott, in an online interview, explains how it was the reading of The Wave by the Mexican author Octavio Paz that first inspired this approach: Well that story was mind-blowing in many ways! Here’s a different way of telling stories. What I got from the education system here in Australia at that stage was social realism and that’s about all. That sort of drab social realist story. So that story helped make me think about things a bit different and connect to other ways of storying that weren’t yet on the page.21

20

Vargas Llosa, García Márquez, 209. My translation of the original: “Pero, de pronto, en ciertos casos, por su pasión, por su energía, uno de esos bárbaros que apuntó tan alto porqué no tenia esa camisa de fuerza adormecedora de una tradición, acierta y construye un mundo verbal en el que la realización está a la altura de esa irresponsable ambición que le inspiró. Entonces aparecen un Borges, un Neruda: la barbarie fue para ellos tan fecunda como lo fue la civilización para un Eliot, un Proust o un Thomas Mann.” 21 Joseph Buck, “Trees that Belong Here; an Interview with Award Winning Author Kim Scott,” Boomtown Magazine (http://www.boomtownmag.com/articles/200101 /benang.htm).

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This subtle Latin American influence does not, however, make Kim Scott a magical-realist author; rather, the South American example is used to create a new and peculiar style of storytelling in which the Aboriginal tradition and Western canonical ways of writing are blended. Harley seems, therefore, to perfectly represent the embarrassing deracinated barbarian who, with his careless audacity, dares to express himself in a truly revolutionary way. Harley takes full advantage of the ambivalence and freedom afforded to him by being a ‘barbarous affiliative offspring’ of two cultures and, in typical postmodern fashion, constructs his narrative by jumping back and forward in time, shifting from the present of the narrator to that of the focalizer’s time, and dealing freely with the remote stories of family members. This systematic disrespect for chronology stands at last as a symbolic re-framing of the idea of time and evolution; a subversion that echoes Adam Shoemaker’s accusation of the role that ‘chronological time’ had in imprisoning the Aborigines in a subaltern position by stigmatizing them as a fossilized Neolithic culture: The historical dates which constitute what is known as ‘chronological time’ have often been used to imprison Australia’s indigenous people. Terms such as ‘prehistory’ and ‘preliteracy’ carry with them the strongest possible sense of a time before and a time after. Of course, these dividing lines have been imposed retrospectively upon Black Australians by those who are not members of that culture. Such arbitrary demarcations also imply that the past begins when it is recorded in legible script and not when human beings began to commit stories to memory.22

None of this is true, and Kim Scott’s jumpy narration specifically addresses this cultural trope. By organizing the development of the story according to Harley’s spatial movement around his traditional land, Scott challenges white chronology and proves it to be just another fiction. Harley’s trips with his uncles are all planned around visits to the most significant places in the history of the family and thus allow the stories related to each site to flow back into the present. The native life-experiences that, in their own order, literally surface on the page serve to counter the victor’s

22

Adam Shoemaker, “White on Black / Black on Black,” in The Oxford Literary History of Australia, ed. Bruce Bennett & Jennifer Strauss (Melbourne: Oxford U P , 1998): 9.

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view of history and draw a pattern defying the very concept of chronology. Kim Scott’s narrative is therefore configured as a nomadic one. It follows the routes traced by Harley’s journey to the discovery of his family history and it tracks down a series of ‘relevant locations’ – which we could now call rhizomic roots – where the present sense of Aboriginality was forged. Places where people lived, were born or were killed, are visited by the narrator, who, with his quasi-magical relation to the land, re-enacts episodes of his ancestors’ lives. Harley’s performances are quite shocking: he hovers over campfires and ‘sings’ things he has never known, things that are probably told to him by the land itself. This controversially privileged relationship with the land seems to challenge the idea that being airborne means to be disconnected from the land. On the contrary, in Harley’s case it is the deep connection to his tribal country that provides him with a far-reaching aerial vision which has nothing to do with those Western people acquire when flying over the ground or when looking at maps. Maps, for Simon Ryan, are imperial technologies intrinsically crippled by the perspective distortion and politicization that are employed in the construction of a ‘universal space’ that is intended to supplant all other world-views:23 Space has usually been categorized in one of two ways. There is the absolute space of geometry, cartography and physics, and there is the relative space of individual cognitive mapping and landscape appreciation. […] The imperial endeavor encourages the construction of space as a universal, measurable and divisible entity, for this is a self-legitimizing view of the world.24

If maps encouraged the use of Cartesian space, settlers wholeheartedly believed, and applied, this unilateral perspective, which had the convenience of voiding the land of its inhabitants by inscribing its interior with the blankness of the unsettled and of the unknown. The discourse proposed in Kim Scott’s novel challenges this still-accepted point of view: Harley’s vantage is proposed as a resurrected ‘individual’ model of space that can oppose itself to the ‘geometric’ one that was used to conquer and topographically create Australia. It is for this reason that Harley’s elevated 23 Simon Ryan, The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia (Cambridge & Melbourne: Cambridge U P , 1996): 4. 24 Ryan, The Cartographic Eye, 4.

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position has nothing to do with the perspective distancing of the ideal viewer postulated in maps; it is the profound connection to the territory and the consequent knowledge of all its elements that gives Harley the capacity to range freely across it. In this case, elevation is perspective-free and genuinely descriptive, while the point of view of the explorer mapmaker is assertive and egocentric: His elevation transforms him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was ‘possessed’ into a text that lies before one’s eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a God. The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive; the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more.25

In the novel there is a specific scene in which this type of gaze is revealed; Harley’s grandfather, from a similarly elevated position, looks across the territory and considers the prospects of the area: Ernest Salomon Scat was up in the air, back then, and looking around. He had touched jetty, railway, electrical and telegraphic wires, sealed road. He had rarely touched the land. Ernest Salomon Scat floated all his life, in a different way to myself, and never even realised it. (55)

Ern’s gaze is that of a pioneer: from the height of the roof that he is repairing he ‘explores’ the territory, searching for signs of economic progress. By looking at the land for signs of human intervention, Ern can almost possess the land before he has bought it. Looking is laying a claim and, as he foresees the railway reaching Gebalup, he can also picture the profit he will make by selling the land at inflated prices. This rapacious, God-like way of looking is diametrically opposed to the way in which Harley looks at the land. Harley’s grandfather never trod on the soil, because he never descended from the elevated position in which he thought he could control the land. Ironically, this implies that, in this case, his ‘floating’, even though it is only metaphorical, is in fact a real sign of disconnection. Ern becomes an instrument of the imperial ideology that claims that “the Aborigines do not have a different space to that of the explorers;

25 Michel de Certeau, “On the Practice of Everyday Life,” quoted by Simon Ryan in The Cartographic Eye, 4.

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rather they under-utilize the space.”26 Caught in the mechanism of colonial space-creation, Ern is ‘elevated’ to a position that is merely a fictitious self-made stance used to master the recently fabricated sets of sociotopographic referents that rationalize the land. What Harley sees from a very similar point of view is a set of completely different signs: I studied the pathways and tracks which ran across the coastal dunes, and saw the white beach as the sandy, solidified froth of small waves touching the coast. I noted how rocks and reef and weed lurked beneath the water’s surface, and saw the tiny town of Wirlup Haven and how Grandad’s historic homestead – as if shunned – clung to a road which was sealed and heading inland. (165)

This set of landmarks is chosen from symbolic locations that illustrate Harley’s personal heritage as it is inscribed in the land. Again, it is a profound knowledge and sense of belonging that places the protagonist/ narrator not above the place but, in a sense, within its story. The encounter between the sea and the land-mass, the way the grandfather’s house seems to hold on tight to a road heading inland, and the way the tiny town is even further inland – all seems to suggest that there is some sort of orientation in the disposition of these elements, that there is a path that has been followed. It is, in fact, from the sea that the white men first arrived and it is on the coast that they immediately settled, only to expand their dominion later over every inch of the interior. The ocean and the Australian land-mass seem to become the symbols of the two relevant cultures: that of the conquerors, and that of the natives. The aerial perspective that Harley consciously wants to acquire when flying over the coastline is the one that allows him to embrace this encounter: In the mornings I would attach strong fishing line to a reel on my belt, anchor one end of it to the house and, stepping out the door, simply let the breeze take me. I rose and fell like a wind-borne seed. The horizon moved away so that the islands no longer rested on its line, but stood within the sea, and it seemed that the pulsing white at the island’s tip was not mere transformation induced by collision, but was blossoming and wilting at some fissure where sea met land. (165)

Those islands, like outposts of the mainland, are the first places where the sea meets the land; isolated in the midst of the water, they are not only 26

Ryan, The Cartographic Eye, 4.

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detached from the ‘motherland’ but also independent. The pulse at the tip of the islands or, rather, the “blossoming,” as the narrator suggests, seems to represent iconically the site of colonial encounter; this, in a very encouraging vision, produces a continuous flourishing. Those islands are key locations in Harley’s family history: it is here that his ancestors were taken to be ‘imprisoned’ and it is also here that a whaler took Sandy One’s grandmother and kept her captive as his slave-wife. It is therefore on one of those islands that the first ‘fruits’ of the colonial encounter flourished. The daughter of William the whaler and his captive Aboriginal woman will be handed over to an ex-convict to whom she will give a son; Sandy One Mason. Flying for Harley is thus neither a simple symptom of uprootedness nor a position of control; it is too detached and peaceful to be either of those. Rather, it represents the spiritual bond granting him an elevated point of observation from which to gaze down over the land; to know it, recognize it, narrate it, and sing it. Again, it is the freedom of those that live between cultures that enables the narrator to hold together the strings of such an intricate and untidy narrative. As was the case with the chronology of the novel, the spatial movement also reforms white Australian discourse. All the individual lives, with their sets of relevant locations, end up creating nets of stories that sway across the land charting it as they meet, intersect, and part again. It is not by chance that this alternative cartographic structure is highly reminiscent of the system of songlines that once mapped the entirety of Australia. Aboriginal mythology codified the territory according to oral narratives recounting the travels of the dreaming ancestors who traversed the land and shaped it in the course of their adventures. Ceremonies were celebrated in the most important locations and the territory became a homely environment without ever being altered by human intervention. Kim Scott’s attempt at re-mapping the territory is not very different from this native antecedent: during their trips, Harley, Jack and Will retrace the steps of their ancestors and revive the stories connected to each place they visit. Of course, their stories are not at all mythical, nor their ancestors at all legendary. Even in darkness, and after, and even when it no longer stains the crusty skin, blood continues to seep down and down to water below. The paths we took have disappeared and been sealed, and yet at the very least we still skim, humming, along the scar tissue. (189)

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Harley’s growing sense of belonging finds its roots in the locations where blood has encrusted the land, where amniotic liquid has seeped into it, or where tears of desperation have been spilled. Each member of the family contributes to the construction of this spatial imaginary that ultimately links the protagonist to the land. The process of socio-spatialization through which the spatial imaginary of the territory is re-constructed is a combination of the Western mode – founded on the construction of landmarks symbolizing the sense of belonging – and the uniquely Aboriginal imaginary one. Thus, Kim Scott proposes to adopt the ancient Aboriginal attitude, to replace the fabricated white Australian system of territorial signification with one based on the locations that have become evocatively relevant during the daily struggle for survival of ordinary Aboriginal people. These constellations of places where new rhizomic roots have been sunk into the ground are therefore modern ceremonial sites interconnected through a network of lives expanding freely into time and space. Having established that Benang simultaneously re-frames history and geography, we could also come to look on this novel as a modern epic. According to Glissant, epics are instrumental in the sociocultural formation of the conscience of a people. The Old Testament, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Song of Roland, the Song of the Nibelungs, the Finnish Kalevala and numerous other Western texts from ancient times are all examples of the crystallization of the conscience of a people in a text that frames it and guarantees its rightness and solidity by making it holy and exclusive to their culture.27 Scott’s novel seems to participate in a very similar process, inasmuch as its narratives attempt to re-root the Aboriginal people in their ancestral land by providing them with a deep sense of identity and with a collective history functioning as a generative discourse. However, ancient epics were also the instruments by which singlerooted atavic cultures claimed their uniqueness and superiority, hence becoming instruments of distinction and exclusion: This poetic cry of the new-born conscience is also the cry of an excluding one. That is to say that traditional epics resemble all the things that constitute the community while they exclude all that is not part of it.28 27

Glissant, Introduction à une Poétique du Divers, 35. Glissant, Introduction à une Poétique du Divers, 35. My translation from the French: “Ce cri poétique de la conscience commençante est aussi le cri d’une con28

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By contrast – and as is to be expected of a rhizomic culture – Benang presents itself as an all-embracing text. This is made possible by the many intersecting stories which, in the novel, create a hybridized textual space that enfolds white culture in the infinite junctures of the rhizomic roots that constitute present-day Aboriginal culture. The result is that at last the proposed socio-topographic reconfiguration of both territory and history generates a ‘context’ in which Aborigines can start looking at themselves within and at the world around them without feeling alien to it. At the same time, the novel, by reducing white people to the subsidiary role of ‘constituents’ of a much more imposing story that encompasses them, also re-frames the basis of the hatred that the colonized might develop toward the colonizer. Ern is the key figure in this process, and his ‘re-dimensioning’ in Harley’s story is a reflection of the lesson Scott learned from his own family: Ernest Scat is based upon my real grandfather. He was a bastard of a man, really. And I can remember my dad, who’s Nyoongar, saying to me when I moved to the city to go to uni: “Go and see your grandfather if you don’t mind too much. He’s a bastard, I know he’s an old bastard, he’s a lonely old man, he’s a mongrel, but he’s still your grandfather.”29

Harley manages, in fact, to overcome his rage against his grandfather by understanding that Ern is only an incidental instrument of a wider technology of rule. Reduced to this subordinate condition, his role in the family history can be subverted and in a way re-appropriated by fitting it into the even broader and more fleeting strategy of stubborn survival. Even if Ern is the one who most often triggered the ‘reshaping’ of his family – and, on a grander scale, that of all the native people – Aboriginal culture fooled him by surviving him and including him in the native history of survival. Benang, however, does not only offer itself as the foundation of a new Australian native cultural ‘context’, it also actively responds to White Australian discourse by proposing itself as a ‘con-text’. The use that John

science excluante. C’est-à-dire que l’épique traditionnelle ressemble tout ce qui constitue la communauté et en exclut tout ce qui n’est pas la communauté.” 29 Interview with Kim Scott, “What does it mean to be Aboriginal,” A T S I C News (February 2000), http://www.atsic.gov.au/News_Room/ATSIC_News/February_2000 /what_Does_It_Mean_To_Be.asp

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Thieme makes of the terms ‘con-text’ and ‘pre-text’ is “to indicate, [in the first case,] postcolonial texts that engage in direct, if ambivalent, dialogue with the canon by virtue of responding to a classic English text, and [in the second case], to refer to the canonical texts to which they respond.”30 As a counter-text, Benang does not rewrite any specific novel – as is the case with Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea or J.M. Coetzee’s Foe – more generally, Benang responds to the official histories dispersed throughout Australian archives and to the policy of assimilation conceived and promoted by A.O. Neville in his treatise Australia’s Coloured Minority: Its Place in the Community. In his own words, Scott’s intention was “to show that Neville’s genocidal idea of breeding [the Aboriginal people] out was a weak, silly, whiteman’s way of thinking.”31 It is this kind of approach that makes of Benang a con-text – as Thieme himself suggests, the term con-text can be used “to refer also to the full range of discursive situations (contexts), many of which have little or nothing to do with the canon, from which the counter-discursive work emerges.”32 Hence, at times the subversive action of the novel takes place as a result of direct quotations from A.O. Neville’s book and archival materials from the official community histories – pretexts which “are only invoked as a launching pad (pretext) for a consideration of broader concerns.”33 At other times, the contestation of the ‘pre-text’ – but in this case we could say ‘pre-discourse’ – is implicit in the genre of historiographic meta-fiction. It is the whole novel that rewrites the story which white Australians have proclaimed to be Australian ‘H’istory. This new, more inclusive version of history is capable of embracing both cultures: “I have written this story wanting to embrace all of you, and it is the best I can do in this language we share. Of course, there is an older tongue which also tells it” (497). And Kim Scott has, in a daring fashion, managed to accomplish just that; with a narrative that defies the rules of rationality, he has built a text that strikes a balance between the two cultures and, as Harley had wanted, that brings people together. 30 John Thieme, Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon (New York: Continuum, 2001): 4. 31 Interview with Kim Scott, “What does it mean to be Aboriginal.” 32 Thieme, Postcolonial Con-Texts, 5. 33 Thieme, Postcolonial Con-Texts, 5.

34

PABLO ARMELLINO \ Speaking from the heart, I tell you that I am part of a much older story, one of perpetual billowing from the sea, with its rhythm of return, return, and remain. […] We are still here, Benang. (497)

The originality of the solution proposed in this novel is also confirmed by the fact that the network of stories re-mapping history and geography does not coagulate into some solid-state discourse; on the contrary, the wishedfor Aboriginal discourse lays down its foundations on the dispersal of identity and on the common but differently endured experience of resistance to systematic annihilation. This, as Deleuze and Guattari argue in A Thousand Plateaus, is the distinctive condition of the rhizome, a condition that, against all odds, enhances the plasticity of Aboriginal culture, because “the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to trails of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states.”34 The uniqueness of this system is that, by being a “non-hierarchical” and “acentred” structure – but essentially a non-structure – which “has multiple entryways and exits, and its own lines of flight,”35 it can be approached by anybody at any given point. Through this system, the Aboriginal people – be they full-bloods or part-Aboriginals, fringe-dwellers or integrated, stolen or underprivileged, traditional people or urbanized citizens – can always follow a trail leading back to a common origin. Through the reclaiming of this complex and often incoherent past of endurance and forced alteration they can all think of themselves as Aboriginals with no distinctions. As an ultimate consequence, every nodal point dispersed throughout the net of interrelations between people, places and time, also becomes a ‘de-centered site of in-betweenness’ from which each individual can profitably look at the world from the perspective of an ever-deferred point of view. This condition, which is nothing more than a heightened representation of Bhabha’s figure of the migrant as described in The Location of Culture,36 again offers itself as a vantage-point from which to look at the world with an intrinsically critical perspective. 34

Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. & foreword Brian Massuni (Mille plateaux, Paris: Minuit, 1980; tr. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1987): 21. 35 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 21. 36 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994): 4–5.

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Kim Scott’s re-mapping and con-texting of Australia therefore creates a dynamic discourse that, as theorized by Deleuze and Guattari, is embodied in a ‘nomadology’ which opposes itself to the “history [that] is always written from the sedentary point of view and in the name of a unitary State apparatus.”37 This nomadology is conveyed through the rhizomic nature of the novel, which results from its affiliative relation to the oral Aboriginal tradition. As Adam Shoemaker pointed out in an essay published just one year before Benang, a distinguishing feature of Aboriginal storytelling is that its narratives “are stories in which journeys take place, in which journeys themselves are the story.”38 In Benang, life stories, with their life-long journeys, intertwine with each other and disarm the authority of rigid, linear subdivision imposed by chapters by putting them all in relation to each other. In addition to this, each life story is placed in relation to historical events that, through the reader’s perceptions, spin off from the domain of fiction and become active constituents of our collective imaginary. Finally, the rhizomic nature of the novel is further borne out by its continuous internal movement, which once again is a distinctive characteristic of indigenous storytelling: “Indigenous Australian storytellers lay down tracks which are typically circular; which journey forward and backwards; which involve transformations, metamorphoses, changes.”39 Benang’s main characteristic is, therefore, that it neither begins nor ends; as the narrator himself says, it is a story of perpetual “billowing, one of return, return, and remain” (497). Kim Scott’s accomplishment is particularly significant because, through the blending of traditional culture and Western culture, he has succeeded in creating a rhizomic narrative capable of upholding an inclusive discourse that embraces both Aborigines and their sometimes still intolerant white neighbours.

37

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 23. Adam Shoemaker, “White on Black / Black on Black,” 9. 39 Shoemaker, “White on Black,” 9. 38

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WORKS CITED Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Buck, Joseph. “Trees that Belong Here; an interview with Award Winning Author Kim Scott,” Boomtown Magazine. http://www.boomtownmag.com/articles/200101 /benang.htm Elkin, A.P. The Australian Aborigines: How to Understand Them (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1964). Deleuze, Gilles, & Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. & foreword by Brian Massuni (Mille plateaux; Paris: Minuit, 1980; tr. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1987). Eibl–Eibesfeldt, Irenäus. The Biology of Peace and War: Men, Animals and Aggression, tr. Eric Mosbacher (Krieg und Frieden; Munich: Piper, 1975; tr. New York: Viking, 1979). Glissant, Édouard. Introduction à une Poétique du Divers (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988). Markley, Robert. “History, Literature, and Criticism,” in Literary Criticism and Theory: The Greeks to the Present, ed. Robert Con Davis & Laurie Finke (New York: Longman, 1989): 877–94. Neville, A.O. Australia’s Coloured Minority: Its Place in the Community (Sydney: Currawong, 1947). Ryan, Simon. The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1996). Said, Edward Wadie. The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1983). Scott, Kim. Benang: From the Heart (South Fremantle, W.A.: Fremantle Arts Center, 1999). ——. “What does it mean to be Aboriginal,” A T S I C News (February 2000). http: //www.atsic.gov.au/News_Room/ATSIC_News/February_2000/what_Does_It_Mean _To_Be.asp Shoemaker, Adam. “White on Black / Black on White,” in The Oxford Literary History of Australia, ed. Bruce Bennett & Jennifer Strauss (Singapore: Oxford U P , 1998): 9–20. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: U of Illinois P , 1988): 271–313. Thieme, John. Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon (London: Continuum, 2001). Turcotte, Gerry. “Review of Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart,” Sydney Morning Herald (19 June 1999). http://www.facp.iinet.net.au/benangreviews.html #smh Vargas Llosa, Mario. García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1971).

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“One more story to tell” Diasporic Articulations in Sally Morgan’s My Place

Elvira Pulitano

“When you take an Aboriginal man from his land, you take him from the spirit that is giving him life; that spirit cannot be regenerated in some other place. So you end up with shells of human beings, living in other peoples’ countries.”1

I

T O N I M O R R I S O N ’ S B E L O V E D , the characters recur to vernacular language to illustrate the dialogic characteristics of memory and its imaginative capacity to construct and reconstruct the past. “Rememory” and “disremember,” both as nouns and verbs, are frequently used to suggest the intricacies of the mnemonic process and to foreground the tension between remembering and forgetting upon which the novel is built. Prompted by her daughter Denver, Sethe attempts the following explanation of the “rememory process”: N

“I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place – the picture of it – stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world.

1

Pat Dodson, former director of the Central Land Council in Alice Springs, quoted as epigraph in Elisabeth Strohscheidt, “Land Rights for the First Australians: A Long Way Still to Go,” in Aratjara: Aboriginal Culture and Literature in Australia, ed. Dieter Riemenschneider & Geoffrey V. Davis (Cross / Cultures 28; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1997): 9.

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ELVIRA PULITANO \ What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.”2

As the narrative moves through a series of stops and starts, clearly reflecting the characters’ intention “to keep the past at bay,” the novel becomes a celebration of the process of remembering. Such a process empowers the protagonists to tell difficult stories, stories that, because of the horrors they contain, are not supposed to be “passed on.” In telling the story of Sethe’s unspeakable infanticide, Morrison has put together a powerful healing narrative for the descendants of the African diaspora, “the sixty million and more” lost in the Middle Passage, to whom, significantly, the novel is dedicated. Since the late 1960s, the notion of diaspora, a concept that was once mostly associated with the dispersion of the Jewish people – although we also find extensive historiographies of the Armenian, Greek, and African diasporas – has been consistently appropriated by various groups (exiles, refugees, overseas communities, ethnic and racial minorities), to such an extent that a reassessment of its meaning has become the focus of recent critical debate. Following Walter Connor’s rather broad and disputable definition of diaspora as “that segment of a people living outside their traditional homeland,”3 scholars such as William Safran, Robin Cohen, and Khachig Tölölyan have attempted in the past few years to re(de)fine diaspora discourse by retaining some of the traditional pre-1960s meanings. Articulations of diaspora frequently and consistently maintain that, in order for a specific group to be considered diasporic, there should be a physical dispersal from an original centre to two or more peripheral foreign regions as well as the retention of a “collective memory,” or myth about the original homeland, which in most cases should result in a physical return.4 However, as the meaning of diaspora has increasingly expan2

Tony Morrison, Beloved (New York: Penguin, 1987): 35–36. Walter Connor, “The Impact of Homelands Upon Diasporas,” in Modern Diasporas in International Politics, ed. Gabriel Sheffer (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986): 16. 4 William Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,” Diaspora 1 (Spring 1991): 83–84. Safran’s list of defining characteristics of diaspora is significantly revised by Robin Cohen in Global Diasporas: An Introduction (Seattle: U of Washington P , 1997). Cohen challenges the commonly accepted view of the catastrophic diaspora tradition by exploring the creative, enriching life of the diasporic group in its country of exile. Moreover, Cohen contributes to the changing 3

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ded beyond the stricter definition shaped by the Jewish paradigm, these same scholars have drawn attention to the dynamic nature of diasporism in general, at the same time as they have traced the development of specific diasporas in particular. According to Tölölyan, the issue of “return” to the original homeland has become more questionable. Instead of a “physical return,” he posits, “today […] it makes more sense to think of diasporan or diasporic existence […] as a re-turn, a repeated turning to the concept and/or the reality of the homeland and other diasporic kin through memory, written, and visual texts […]et cetera.”5 Similarly, Kim Butler has pointed out the fact that “much of diaspora experience is unwritten,” inscribed as it is in the creative arts and oral traditions of cultures, a reality that makes it imperative for diaspora scholars to transcend the boundaries of disciplinary literatures as well as the traditionally defined geographic borders of diaspora communities.6 But it is James Clifford, more than any other diaspora theorist, who has taken the discussion further by considering the tribal predicaments and the kinds of transnational alliance currently being forged by Fourth-World people whom he identifies as diasporic.7 He writes:

meaning of diaspora by exploring the socio-economic and cultural forces that originated the dispersion of various communities throughout history and by extending his analysis to include diasporas in the age of globalization. 5 Khachig Tölölyan, “Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment,” Diaspora 5.1 (1996): 14–15. Despite a scholarly tendency to homogenize the Jewish diaspora, critics such as Cohen, Tölölyan, and Safran have pointed out the ethnic and cultural diversity of the Jewish tradition. If it is inaccurate to envisage a single Jewish people bound by a distinctive volkish essence, it is even more unthinkable to insist on a continuous claim for an ancient homeland that applies to all Jews. 6 Kim Butler, “Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse,” Diaspora 10.2 (2001): 212. 7 Originating in the 1970 in a book by George Manuel, founding president of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples in Canada, the term ‘Fourth World’ was intended to distinguish indigenous peoples around the planet from those of the ‘Third World’, the latter being considered as merely an imitation of Western industrial civilization. The concept was institutionalized in 1981, at a U N session of the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, held in Geneva, Switzerland. Due to its rigid ethnic component, however, the concept of the Fourth World has not been unanimously embraced over the years by all indigenous peoples, often being replaced with ‘pan-indianism’. For a discussion, see Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, “The Fourth World and Indigenism: Politics of Isolation and Alternatives,” International Migration Review 17.3 (Fall 1983): 79–105.

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ELVIRA PULITANO \ Dispersed tribal peoples, those who have been dispossessed of their lands or who must leave reduced reserves to find work, may claim diasporic identities. Inasmuch as their distinctive sense of themselves is oriented toward a lost or alienated home defined as aboriginal (and thus “outside” the surrounding nation-state), we can speak of a diasporic dimension of contemporary tribal life.8

In what follows, I intend to challenge some of the claims inherent in diaspora theorizing by exploring the significance of the term ‘diaspora’ for the indigenous populations of Australia, who, through many generations of physical and cultural displacement, might today constitute a diaspora within their homelands.9 From the brutal massacres of the earliest phases of colonization to the various policies of segregation and assimilation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the abominable legislation legitimizing the removal of mixed-blood children from their families, it is undeniable that Australian Aboriginal populations share with other diasporic groups a traumatic history of physical uprooting and cultural dispossession. Such a history transpires in various degrees in the works of contemporary Aboriginal Australian writers as we have seen them emerging in the past few decades. And it is to these works that I would like to turn in an attempt to substantiate the ongoing debate on diaspora with some literary representations of diasporic experiences, for, as Monika Fludernik convincingly argues, literature is “both the creator and the critical analyst of diasporic consciousness.”10 Focusing on Sally Morgan’s My Place, I will explore representations of diaspora as reflections of a consciousness of ethnic belonging and collective identity. Specifically, I will look at the diasporic articulations created by the skilful interaction between the oral and the written in Morgan’s 8

James Clifford, “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology 9.3 (1994): 309. Ironically, the notions of nation and nationhood as derived primarily from the European heritage bear little resemblance to what Chéri Ragaz has termed “the topography of the earth and the sacred sites within” as envisaged by Aborigines. See Geography and the Conceptual World: The Significance of Place to Aboriginal Australians with Reference to the Historical Lakes Tribes of Southern Australia (Zurich: Zentralstelle der Studentenschaft, 1988): 297. I will return to such concepts later on in my discussion. 10 Monika Fludernik, “The Diasporic Imaginary: Postcolonial Reconfigurations in the Context of Multiculturalism,” in Diaspora and Multiculturalism, ed. Fludernik (Cross / Cultures 66; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi. 2003): xxiv. 9

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polyphonic text, a strategy that ultimately transforms the imagery of trauma, separation, and dislocation often embedded in diaspora discourse into potentially creative sites of resistance and survival. As a narrative that articulates the tension between speech and silence, oral and written, memory and forgetting, Morgan’s My Place offers us a powerful example of the role of memory in the collective identity of Aboriginal people, ultimately becoming, like Morrison’s Beloved, a narrative of healing for the survivors of the Australian Aboriginal diaspora. According to Mudrooroo, “the Indigenous writers who arose in the sixties were the products of assimilation revolting against assimilation,”11 individuals completely estranged from their families and inhabiting what has been termed an “urban landscape of unbelonging,” in which the Dreaming patterns were dictated from third-rate slum houses and jails rather than from the sacred signposts of their lands. Indigenous writers of the first generation such as Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Kevin Gilbert, Jack Davis, Lionel Fogarty, and Mudrooroo himself belong, in their own right, to the Australian Aboriginal diaspora, representatives of a generation scarred by assimilation, and for whom writing, while at first polemical and confrontational, ultimately becomes the only vehicle for re-creating an Aboriginal identity and culture.12 Sally Morgan, as a representative of a new generation of Aboriginal authors, constitutes a slightly different but equally significant case. A descendant of the Palku and Nyamal peoples from the Pilbara in the northwest of Western Australia, Morgan was born in Perth, where she 11 Mudrooroo, Milli Milli Wangka: The Indigenous Literature of Australia (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1997): 14. 12 Despite the controversial debate surrounding Mudrooroo’s identity since 1996, a debate focusing increasingly on issues of authenticity and Aboriginality, I do consider Mudrooroo an ‘Aboriginal’ writer in the sense that his ‘case’ should make us reconsider and relocate the politics of Aboriginal identity as rigidly constructed and defined by European parameters. With all the risks that an outsider’s position such a mine entails, I would like to reiterate, along the lines suggested by Annalisa Oboe and Eva Rask Knudsen, the dangers involved in pursuing essentialist views of identity and some ultimate search for authenticity in Indigenous Australian discourse. For discussion of this complex, see especially Eva Rask Knudsen, The Circle and the Spiral: A Study of Australian Aboriginal and New Zealand Maori Literature (Cross / Cultures 68; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2004): xi–xiv. See also the introduction to Mongrel Signatures: Reflections on the Work of Mudrooroo, ed. Annalisa Oboe (Cross/Cultures 64; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2003): x–xii.

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currently works as a Professorial Fellow in the Centre of Indigenous History and the Arts within the School of Indigenous Studies at the University of Western Australia. While not directly a product of Australian assimilation policies, Morgan was inevitably affected by them, growing up, as she did, thinking that she was Indian. Her mother and grandmother, fearing the government’s policy of forced removal of mixed-blood children (a policy still effective in the late 1960s and early 1970s), deliberately suppressed their Aboriginal heritage. My Place began as a personal quest into an Aboriginal identity, a literary exercise that prompted Mudrooroo to label the book as belonging to the “battler genre,” “an individualised story” in which “the concerns of the Aboriginal community are of secondary importance.”13 However, as various critics have pointed out, Morgan’s “life story”14 is a powerful indictment of colonial history and race relations in Australia. According to Kathryn Trees, it is “’a counter-memory’ of the violence and deculturation to which Aboriginal people have been subjected, but which has been omitted from official white histories.”15 Surveying some of the key concepts of diasporism and diasporic consciousness, Tölölyan refers to a “collective memory” as one of the distinguishing features of diasporic communities.16 Embedded in the collective memory of diasporic groups is the complex, inextricable relation that such communities have with their homeland as well as the question of how effective or even desirable a physical return ultimately can be. Despite the fact that the homeland as the point of departure for the diasporic group no longer exists or, if it does, has changed dramatically, the construct of a homeland myth is foundational to a collective diasporic identity. Morgan’s My Place provides us with interesting discursive tools with which to re-think the notions of a “collective memory” and resist the “reinterpretation of the homeland culture” as these are often articulated within diaspora discourse. Variously classified as Western autobiography, Aboriginal life story, auto-ethnography, and a modern form of oral trans-

13

Mudrooroo, Writing from the Fringe. A Study of Modern Aboriginal Literature (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1990): 149. 14 Mudrooroo, The Indigenous Literature, 16. 15 Kathryn Trees, “Counter-Memories: History and Identity in Aboriginal Literature,” in Whose Place? A Study of Sally Morgan’s “My Place”, ed. Delys Bird & Dennis Haskell (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1992): 55. 16 Tölölyan, “Rethinking,” 12.

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mission or “as told-to autobiography,”17 Morgan’s polyphonic narrative becomes at once both an experiment in the author’s self-styling of an Aboriginal identity and a reconstruction of a significant chapter in the history of Aboriginal people. As suggested by Fran de Groen, Morgan, in My Place, embarks upon a “healing process” in which the recovery of suppressed aspects of her Aboriginal past explosively releases traumatic family secrets of the kind harboured by Nan and her brother Arthur, while hinting at a long history of silence, both self-imposed and externally imposed on Aboriginal people by official Australian history.18 Morgan’s journey takes on a dialogic dimension, conflating, as it does, the historical and the personal, the written and the oral. Originating in the author’s interest in gathering information about her family, My Place ultimately turns into an attempt to re-imagine and re-member the tribal, familial, and personal memories while reaffirming an indigenous identity in the process. In the first part of the narrative, Sally’s untitled story, Morgan introduces the character of Nan and Nan’s world as a telling counter-discourse to the hospital setting with which the story begins. Whereas the hospital signifies, as Fran De Groen convincingly suggests, the most “unhealthy environment in the narrative,”19 certainly not a place of healing, and, as such, seems a proper place for the most alienated character in the story (Sally’s father), Nan’s world, symbolized by the garden and by the myriad creatures inhabiting it, reminds us of the crucial role that she occupies as a direct link to Morgan’s Aboriginal heritage. From the very first appearnce in the narrative, in the form of a “voice,” ‘Sally … wake up …’ […] ‘Don’t you remember, I said I’d wake you early so you could hear the bullfrog again, and the bird?’,”20 Nan enacts a form of ‘racial memory’ in 17 In the ‘as-told-to’ variety, the Indigenous subject has his or her story transcribed by a white author. A well-known example of such a genre is the autobiography of Black Elk, Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux/ Black Elk; as Told Through John G. Neihardt (Flaming Rainbow), intro. Vine Deloria (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P , 1985). 18 Fran De Groen, “Healing, Wholeness, and Holiness in My Place,” in Whose Place?, 33. De Groen’s perceptive reading of My Place extends the approach taken by John Colmer, for whom the underlying structural principle of Morgan’s narrative is “the contrast between silence and speech.” See his Australian Autobiography: The Personal Quest (Melbourne: Oxford U P , 1989): 109. 19 De Groen, “Healing, Wholeness, and Holiness,” 35. 20 Sally Morgan, My Place (London: Virago, 1988): 13. Further page references are in the main text.

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Sally’s yet unidentified process of ‘re-membering’ or putting together the broken pieces of her Aboriginal heritage.21 At the end of the narrative the bird-call of the opening passage surges back, described by Daisy as “the Aboriginal bird” God sent her to tell her that she “is going home soon,” to her “own land,” to “her own people” (357). Embodied in the image of the Aboriginal bird are the collective memories of a people passed down the generations through the oral tradition. By entrusting parts of these memories to the young Sally, Nan initiates the author’s process of healing while, at the same time, becoming an additional link in the on-going tradition of Aboriginal storytelling. In Morgan’s process of re-membering, the journey motif assumes a crucial role. “How deprived we would have been if we had been willing to let things stay as they were. We would have survived, but not as whole people. We would never have known our place” (233), she writes of the trip up North, to Corunna Downs Station (the place where Daisy and her people had lived), almost to suggest the intricate relation between landscape and travelling. In 1982, Morgan travelled back to her grandmother’s birthplace. As she later explains in My Place, “what had begun as a tentative search for knowledge had grown into a spiritual and emotional pilgrimage” (233), a recovery or rediscovery of an Aboriginal consciousness. Travelling and migration have always been at the core of the Aboriginal Australian experience and of the Nyamal and Palku people in particular. “Before Europeans called Australia home, the state was part of a much larger whole, a land traversed and nurtured by hundreds of Indigenous nations, each caring for their own boundaries of country,” Morgan writes in “Seeking the Spectacular.”22 Through boundaries incompatible with those demarcated by the cartography of Western nations, and through mental maps designed for an eternity in the Dreamtime, Aboriginal Australians have always walked the land in balance and respect, telling and retelling the stories associated with the various sites they would travel. According to Sheila Collingwood–Whittick, far from being a mere 21 The Native American writer and artist N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa–Cherokee) has used the concept of “racial memory” or “memory in the blood” to refer to the collective memories of his ancestors transmitted orally through the generations. See his mixed-genre, autobiographical narrative The Way to Rainy Mountain (Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P , 1969). 22 Sally Morgan, “Seeking the Spectacular” (1 June 2004), http://heritageforum .truenorth.net.au/inspirationallandscapes/pdf/perspective_essays/Sally_Morgan_Final.pdf

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process of aimless wandering, as the European mis-reading of Aboriginal nomadism too often implies, Aboriginal nomadism was based “on a systematic and environmentally intelligent use of the earth’s natural produce” as well as on “mythological and spiritual principles.”23 In Aboriginal cartography, the land contains the stories that tell the people who they are and where they come from; as such, the land is like a book whose linguistic codes Aboriginal people have learned to read and interpret extremely well.24 The “mythological and spiritual principles” linking Aboriginal people to the land might help us problematize notions of diaspora and Aboriginal discourse even further. Scholars who oppose the idea of tribal peoples as belonging to a diasporic experience usually hold on to assertions of sovereignty and firstnationhood strongly advanced by indigenous populations world-wide. According to Clifford, the specific cosmopolitanisms articulated by diaspora discourse are in “constitutive tension” with indigenous, autochthonous claims. He argues that “Tribal cultures are not diasporas; their sense of rootedness to the land is precisely what diasporic peoples have lost.”25 Nevertheless, in the light of his ongoing research on “travelling cultures,” on the dwelling and travelling of indigenous populations, Clifford provocatively invites diaspora theorists to consider the figure of the travelling native, arguing that tribal groups have never been simply “local”; on the contrary, “they have always been rooted and routed in particular landscapes, regional and interregional networks.”26 In “Indigenous Articulations,” he cites the example of Black Elk, the Sioux Shaman and Catholic catechist who, travelling with Buffalo Bill in Paris, still considered 23

Sheila Collingwood–Whittick, “The Construction of Nomadism as Vagrancy: One of the Main Discursive Strategies Used in the Dispossession of Australia’s Aborigines,” Confluences 25 (2005): 32–33. 24 One of the most controversial departure from the Jewish diasporic tradition is the scattering of a group for voluntarist reasons. Cohen reminds us that, for the Greeks, who after all coined the term diaspora, Diaspora meant expansion and settler colonization (as opposed to traumatic uprooting). Moreover, by citing the “voluntarist component in the history of Jewish migration,” he further endorses scholars’ appeal to transcend the Jewish diaspora tradition. See his discussion in Global Diasporas: An Introduction (Seattle: U of Washington P , 1997): 20–27. Even more significantly, as it directly applies to the Aboriginal experience, is the fact that elements of nomadism and nomadic discourse often transpire in recent articulations of diaspora. 25 Clifford, “Diasporas,” 310. 26 Clifford, “Diasporas,” 309–10.

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Harney Peak (in the North Dakota Badlands) “the center of the world.” Clifford asks: “How is indigeneity both rooted in and routed through particular places? […] Should we think of a continuum of indigenous and diasporic situations? Or is there a specifically indigenous kind of diasporism?”27 Morgan’s detribalized ancestors in My Place would seem to respond to Clifford’s ideas of “roots” and “routes” as they apply to indigenous cultures in Australia. Even though deprived of their original homeland, Aboriginal populations have always managed to adapt and change in the light of traumatic environmental circumstances, their history of travelling and migration inevitably facilitating their response to forced removal. Due to hard work and endless tenacity against inhuman exploitation on the part of white settlers, Morgan’s great-uncle, Arthur Corunna, finally manages to buy his own farm in Mucka (Muckinbudin), which he calls “my own home, my land” (166). Similarly, in Daisy’s story, we have a glimpse at the kind of community life that her Aboriginal people had re-created at Corunna Downs Station when, after she has been taken away, down to Perth, she states: “I needed my people, they made me feel important. I belonged to them. I thought ’bout the animals, too. The Kangaroos and birds” (334). Despite the fact that it is Arthur who reveals a deeper sense of place, it is highly significant that Daisy’s final thoughts before she dies allude to land rights, as she wonders “if they’ll give the blackfellas land” and if blackfellas “will get some respect” (349–50). Even though lands can be stolen and people are forced to move or relocate, crucial within an Aboriginal world view is, as Bruce Chatwin puts it, a notion of territory “not as a block of land hemmed in by frontiers: but rather as an interlocking network of ‘lines’ of ‘ways through’.”28 The notions of home and belonging take an extremely complex turn for people who have been brutally dispersed from their original homelands. “Where is my place?” and “where do I belong?” are questions that the descendants of diaspora communities have to face constantly in order to find a sense of direction in their contemporary experience. Even though Aboriginal people did not suffer the trauma of the Middle Passage or the 27

Clifford, “Indigenous Articulations,” Contemporary Pacific 13.2 (2001): 468– http://humwww.ucsc.edu:16080/~james_clifford/pages/Indigenous_articulations .html (27 April 2004) 28 Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (London: Jonathan Cape, 1988): 56.

90,

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forceful dispersion of the Armenian population as a result of Turkish genocide, to cite two well-known and commonly acknowledged experiences of diaspora, it is undeniable that their sense of belonging to their ancestors’ place has been brutally ruptured by the genocide perpetrated by the white Australian government on their own homelands. As a survivor of the stolen generation puts it, When you look at a family tree, every person that is within that family tree is born into a spiritual inheritance. And when that person isn’t there there is a void. There is something missing on that tree. And that person has to be slotted back into his rightful position within the extended family. While that person is missing from the extended family, then the family will continue to grieve and continue to have dysfunctions within it. Until the rightful person comes and takes their spiritual inheritance within that family.29

Within this context, how is it possible for the descendants of the Australian Aboriginal diaspora to recover a sense of place in, and of belonging to, their original communities? Can the “pain of unbelonging” ultimately turn into a rediscovered notion of physical and spiritual belonging? In Cartographies of Diaspora, Avtar Brah distinguishes between home as “a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination” and, as such, a place of no return (even though visits to the geographical territory considered as the place of ‘origin’ frequently occur) and home as “the lived experience of a locality” often far from such originary location.30 By foregrounding the tension that the notion of diaspora inscribes between “a homing desire” and a critique of “discourses of fixed origins,”31 Brah concludes that the identity of the diasporic community is “far from fixed or pre-given.”32 Given these assumptions, is it still possible to cling to an original, monolithic home to which diasporic people can return? Or should we, rather, think of home as a construct in the diaspora imaginary in which processes of multi-locationality are inevitably inscribed? And aren’t such processes ultimately performed, as Brah suggests, “across geo29

“Bringing Them Home: The ‘Stolen Children’ Report,” in “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice,” H R E O C Website (16 April 2004): 215, http://wwww .hreoc.gov.au/social_justice/stolen_children/ 30 Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London & New York: Routledge, 1998): 192. 31 Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, 193. 32 Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, 183.

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graphical, cultural, and psychic boundaries?”33 In the case of Aboriginal Australian populations, whose indigenous epistemologies essentially displace Western notions of home and fixed origins, how and when does a location become home? Upon returning to Corunna Downs Station, Morgan, seeking information about her grandmother’s people, re-discovers a sense of place and belonging. Even though her ancestors did not originate in the immediate area of the station, they consider the area to be their sacred homeland, though not the only “home.” As Arthur puts it, “The land of my people was all around here, from the Condin River to Nullagine, right through the Kimberley” (175). As I indicated above, the nomadic spirit of Aboriginal tribal groups as well as the forced removal to reserves and mission stations inevitably transformed their sense of identity and place, making them acquire some of the distinguishing features typical of diasporic communities. In the Palku and Nyamal imaginary, the notion of home has been displaced to many homes, many sacred centres, the origin of many sacred stories.34 And in Morgan’s own imaginary, the notion of ‘home’ is displaced one step further to the extent that ‘her place’ includes not only a link with the geographical territory of her grandmother’s country but also a deeper, spiritual connection with her Aboriginal heritage. And such a connection is ultimately expressed in/through language. As I briefly mentioned at the start of my discussion, current debates on diaspora have paid scant attention to the literary component of the phenomenon, to the written experience of diasporic subjects that ultimately legitimates the very existence of what Vijay Mishra has called a “diasporic imaginary.”35 While looking at diaspora as essentially a socio-economic and historical fact, critics have inevitably contributed to silencing the voices of countless people living in/through everyday situations of dia33

Cartographies of Diaspora, 194. The Australian anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner has observed that the English word ‘home’ is an inadequate translation of “the Aboriginal word that may mean ‘camp’, ‘hearth’, ‘country’, ‘everlasting home’, ‘totem place’, ‘life source’, ‘spirit centre’ and much else all in one”; After the Dreaming, quoted in Adam Shoemaker, Black Words, White Page: Aboriginal Literature 1929–1988 (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1989): 180. See also Collingwood–Whittick, “The Construction of Nomadism as Vagrancy,” 41. 35 Vijay Mishra, “The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorizing the Indian Diaspora,” Textual Practice 10.3 (1996): 421–47. 34

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spora, therefore contributing to widening the gap between theory and practice, discourse and daily experience. Yet even the most fervent diaspora theoretician would hardly deny the crucial role that narrative and narrated lives play in creating a consciousness of ethnic belonging and collective identity for diasporic subjects. It has been argued that any discourse of identity operates through narrative and that only by starting the story in the past can such narrative fill in the gaps between the past and the present while paving the way to the future. One of the primary tasks now facing diasporic communities, who have supposedly lost their sense of ‘home’, is the articulation of a cultural identity in which ‘home’ is imaginatively re-created in language (rather than fixed within the geospatial coordinates of the nation). Despite significant differences in the history and predicaments of the diasporic experiences, in most cases we are confronted with individuals striving to mould English into a language that can provide a kind of ‘home’ within diaspora.36 Such a task is also a primary concern for contemporary Aboriginal Australian individuals, more specifically for those writers such as Morgan for whom language and creativity represent the fullest manifestation of human existence. Discussing the relationship between her art and her writing, Morgan states: There is a connection in that in both of them I use dreams a lot as part of the creative process. There’s a spiritual side to my writing […] and that’s true of my art. I’m also interested in not just writing oral histories, but painting oral 37 histories, doing the same thing in a different form.

Language has helped Morgan fill in the gaps while searching for her roots, imagining a story when facts and historical records were missing and when her mother’s and her grandmother’s self-imposed silence prevented historical truths from being released. Despite the temptation to put her own words in Nan’s story, Morgan gradually learned, in writing My Place, “that you don’t have to be explicit to say something,”38 as her 36

I am indebted to Sophia Lehmann for the idea of “making English a home” within diaspora. See her essay “In Search of a Mother Tongue: Locating Home in Diaspora,” M E L U S 23.4 (1998): 101–18. 37 “A Fundamental Question of Identity: An Interview with Sally Morgan,” in Aboriginal Culture Today, ed. Anna Rutherford (Sydney & Mundelstrup: Dangaroo, 1988): 103. 38 “A Fundamental Question,” 107.

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grandmother would often tell her things without necessarily having spoken. One of the most powerful achievements of Morgan’s ‘life story’ is the skillful blending of oral and written narratives as a way to reclaim the legitimacy of oral history and memory vs. the Australian official (written) version of history. The moment that Sally decides to write a book about her family history, she realizes that she will have to draw on sources other than libraries and public archives: “Well, there is nothing written from a personal point of view about Aboriginal people. All our history is about the white man. No one knows what it was like for us. A lot of our history has been lost, people have been too frightened to say anything. There is a lot of our history we can’t even get at, Arthur. There are all sorts of files about Aboriginals that go way back, and the government won’t release them. […] I mean our own government had terrible policies for Aboriginal people. Thousands of families in Australia were destroyed by the government policy of taking children away. […] I just want to try to tell a little bit of the other side of the story.” (163–64)

And it is indeed Arthur who will convince Sally of the truth and legitimacy of Aboriginal narratives over white official discourse. At one point in the story, when he tries to convince Sally that Alfred Howden Drake– Brockman, the white station owner, fathered both Daisy and himself, he states: “By jove he did! Are you gunna take the word of white people against your own flesh and blood? I got no papers to prove what I’m sayin’. Nobody cared how many blackfellas were born in those days, nor how many died. I know because my mother, Annie, told me. She said Daisy and I belonged to one another. Don’t you go takin’ the word of white people against mine.” (157; my emphasis)

For Aboriginal people, stories are truth and oral discourse does not need scientific validation. Since the Dreaming, Aboriginal people have inscribed songs and stories onto the land, strongly believing in the extraordinary power of words to change the world. Memory has been crucial to such an epistemological construct, as they depended on memory to transmit their history and culture. Speaking of Arthur, Sally writes, “he had a fantastic memory. Sometimes, when he spoke, it was like he was actually reliving what had happened” (164). Whereas in Western written tradi-

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tions, memory is often considered unreliable and therefore cannot function as a valid source of knowledge, the opposite is true in oral cultures. Critical responses to My Place have not sufficiently acknowledged Morgan’s attempt to “write down oral history,” as the text does not visibly transcribe songs and myths from the Dreaming, from that “maban reality” that, according to Mudrooroo, “comes from the land and from one of the oldest, continuous cultures in the world.”39 While generally acknowledging the text’s sophisticated structure in combining oral history and European autobiography, critics are often reluctant to see the Indigenous qualities of Morgan’s life story. Even more problematic for some critics is Morgan’s text as an expression of Aboriginality, since the author lacks first-hand experience of the events narrated, hence cannot claim an authentic Aboriginal identity. Restrictions of space do not allow me to address in detail the debates over such rather controversial issues in contemporary Aboriginal Australian writing. Nevertheless, in the light of my reading of My Place, I believe that a few remarks are necessary. With all the criticism that Mudrooroo has brought to My Place, he has nonetheless acknowledged in Morgan’s Indigenous life story a significant shift towards a maban reality. As he puts it, “In her search for her Indigenality, Sally Morgan in effect enters a different reality as she triumphantly cries at the end of the book, ‘Oh Nan’ […] I heard it, too. In my heart, I heard it’.”40 The stories of Morgan’s relatives are deeply rooted in a spirit world in which distinctions between different realms of beings are blurred, and we are presented with a holistic world view subtly woven as ‘subtext’ within the primary plot. It is a view of wholeness and unity clearly mapped out in stories, hence articulated in language since the Dreaming. As Nan points out, “Blackfellas know all ’bout spirits. We brought up with them. That’s where the white man’s stupid. He only believes what he can see. He needs to get educated. He’s only living half a life” (344). Moreover, Nan’s passing down some Aboriginal language to her great-grandchildren (a language she never forgot how to speak despite consistent governmental policies aimed at extinguishing Aboriginal languages in Australia) before she dies is a telling example of the inextricable link between language and identity for Aboriginal people. The bird-call of the final chapter, which both Sally and Jill hear, and which we are meant 39 40

Mudrooroo, Milli Milli Wangka, 105. Milli Milli Wangka, 93.

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to interpret as symbolic of Nan’s spirit in their heart, is also a powerful symbol of the Aboriginal heritage passed down through stories/narratives and perpetuated through the power and miracle of language and imagination. We see, then, how the narrative operates on multiple levels and that a careful reading is required in order to uncover the Indigenous Aboriginal text.41 More significantly, within the context of a tradition of Indigenous storytelling, Morgan’s text significantly challenges the notion of authorship. Even though Morgan acts as the principal narrator and as transcriber of Arthur’s, Gladys’s and Daisy’s stories, the story she has been telling us, which covers approximately a hundred years of Aboriginal history in the northwest of Western Australia, is not truly hers but belongs instead to her community. As in traditional indigenous storytelling, the narrator cannot claim ownership over the story s/he has been telling. In the words of the Maori writer Patricia Grace (which I quote in the title of this essay), “there is one more story to tell but it is a retelling.”42 Writing with a consciousness of the oral tradition, Morgan, in My Place, has set out to retell the unspeakable stories of the stolen generation in Australia because it is only by passing down these stories that healing can finally begin. In indigenous oral traditions, stories are a powerful form of medicine, used to fight off illness and death and restore order and balance to the universe. It could be argued that, in My Place, Morgan performs a kind of diasporic writing, in which the discourses of trauma, separation and dislocation often embedded in diaspora (and, in her case, exemplified by the stories told by Arthur, Gladys, and Daisy) are creatively re-imagined and recombined into new contexts away from the original homeland. In the contested space of Morgan’s diasporic text, the many homelands of her Aboriginal past are imaginatively re-created to contain the new place: i.e. Morgan’s re-articulation of the homeland culture. By entrusting her family’s stories to us (readers), Morgan becomes, like Nan before her, an additional link in the ongoing tradition of Aboriginal storytelling and in the continuation of her heritage. 41

According to Joan Newman, the picture on the cover of My Place, a painting Morgan herself did and which combines European folk-art style and traditional Aboriginal cave painting and sand drawings, is a telling example of the book’s hybrid qualities and of the multiple realities it represents. See “Race, Gender, and Identity,” in Whose Place?, 66–67. 42 Patricia Grace, Potiki (Honolulu: U of Hawaii P , 1986): 181.

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As my discussion has, hopefully, illustrated, in current rewriting and re-mapping of diaspora borders the literary production of Australian Aboriginal authors might provide an original contribution to diaspora theories. By exploring My Place from within a diaspora critical context, I hope I have suggested new avenues in which diaspora debates can and should be addressed. Crucial in Morgan, but in virtually any contemporary indigenous writer in Australia as well, is the recovery of a tribal heritage and of the oral tradition as a verbal repository of that heritage. Unlike Western anthropological views that keep serving us up with static images of indigenous Australian cultures, lamenting the inevitable loss inherent in writing down the oral traditions, writers such as Morgan (but also Mudrooroo, Kim Scott, Alexis Wright, and many others) powerfully suggest that the oral tradition can be re-imagined and re-expressed in written form with the result of a new critical language in which to articulate the everchanging, dynamic experience of Australian Aborigines today. Contemporary Australian Aboriginal writers such as Morgan, travelling between urban centres and Aboriginal communities while briefly returning ‘home’ in the summer to find out more information about the past, testify to the fact that the victims of what Kevin Gilbert has rightly termed “a rape of the soul so profound that the blight continues in the minds of most blacks today”43 have begun to tell stories of survival while reversing the diaspora following European invasions. And such a phenomenon simply cannot continue to be ignored by diaspora theorists deeply involved in “rethinking diasporas” today.

43 Kevin Gilbert, Living Black: Blacks Talk to Kevin Gilbert (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1984): 3.

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WORKS CITED Black Elk. Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux/ Black Elk; as Told Through John G. Neihardt (Flaming Rainbow), intr. Vine Deloria (1932; Lincoln: U of Nebraska P , 1985). Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London & New York: Routledge, 1998). “Bringing Them Home: The ‘Stolen Children’ Report,” in “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice,” H R E O C Website (16 April 2004). http://wwww .hreoc.gov.au/social_justice/stolen_children/ Butler, Kim. “Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse,” Diaspora 10.2 (2001): 189–219. Chatwin, Bruce. The Songlines (London: Jonathan Cape, 1988). Clifford, James. “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology 9.3 (1994): 302–38. ——. “Indigenous Articulations,” The Contemporary Pacific 13.2 (2001): 468–90. 27 April 2004. http://humwww.ucsc.edu:16080/~james_clifford/pages/Indigenous _articulations.html ——. “Valuing the Pacific: A Personal Perspective,” in Remembrance of Pacific Pasts: An Invitation to Remake History, ed. Rob Borofsky (Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 2000): 92–100. http://humwww.uscs.edu:16080/~james_clifford/pages/valuing _the_pacific.html (27 April 2004) Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction (Seattle: U of Washington P , 1997). Collingwood–Whittick, Sheila. “The Construction of Nomadism as Vagrancy: One of the Main Discursive Strategies Used in the Dispossession of Australia’s Aborigines,” Confluences 25 (2005): 25–43. Colmer, John. Australian Autobiography: The Personal Quest (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1989). Connor, Walter. “The Impact of Homelands Upon Diasporas,” in Modern Diasporas in International Politics, ed. Gabriel Sheffer (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986): 16–46. De Groen, Fran. “Healing, Wholeness, and Holiness in My Place,” in Whose Place? A Study of Sally Morgan’s “My Place”, ed. Delys Bird & Dennis Haskell (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1992): 32–46. Fludernik, Monica, “The Diasporic Imaginary: Postcolonial Reconfigurations in the Context of Multiculturalism,” in. Diaspora and Multiculturalism, ed. Fludernik (Cross / Cultures 66; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2003): xi–xxxviii. Gilbert, Kevin. Living Black: Blacks Talk to Kevin Gilbert (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1984). Grace, Patricia. Potiki (Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P , 1986). Knudsen, Eva Rask. The Circle and the Spiral: A Study of Australian Aboriginal and New Zealand Maori Literature (Cross / Cultures 68; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2004). Lehman, Sophia. “In Search of a Mother Tongue: Locating Home in Diaspora,” M E L U S 23.4 (1998): 101–18. Mishra, Vijay. “The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorizing the Indian Diaspora,” Textual Practice 10.3 (1996): 421–47.

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Momaday, N. Scott. The Way to Rainy Mountain (Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P , 1969). Morgan, Sally. My Place (London: Virago, 1988). ——. “Seeking the Spectacular” (1 June 2004). http://heritageforum.truenorth.net.au /inspirationallandscapes/pdf/perspective_essays/Sally_Morgan_Final.pdf Morrison, Tony. Beloved (New York: Penguin, 1987). Mudrooroo. Milli Milli Wangka: The Indigenous Literature of Australia (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1997). ——. Writing from the Fringe: A Study of Modern Aboriginal Literature (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1990). Newman, Joan. “Race, Gender, and Identity: My Place as Autobiography,” in Whose Place? A Study of Sally Morgan’s “My Place”, ed. Delys Bird & Dennis Haskell (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1992). 66–74. Oboe, Annalisa, ed. Mongrel Signatures: Reflections on the Work of Mudrooroo (Cross / Cultures 64; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2003). Ortiz, Roxanne Dunbar. “The Fourth World and Indigenism: Politics of Isolation and Alternatives,” International Migration Review 17.3 (Fall 1983): 79–105. Ragaz, Chéri. Geography and the Conceptual World: The Significance of Place to Aboriginal Australians with Reference to the Historical Lakes Tribes of Southern Australia (Zürich: Zentralstelle der Studentenschaft, 1988). Safran, William. “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,” Diaspora 1 (1991): 83–99. Shoemaker, Adam. Black Words, White Page: Aboriginal Literature 1929–1988 (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1989). Strohscheidt, Elisabeth. “Land Rights for the First Australians: A Long Way Still to Go,” in Aratjara: Aboriginal Culture and Literature in Australia, ed. Dieter Riemenschneider & Geoffrey V. Davis (Cross / Cultures 28; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1997): 9–37. Tölölyan, Khachig. “Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment,” Diaspora 5.1 (1996): 3–36. Trees, Kathryn. “Counter-Memories: History and Identity in Aboriginal Literature,” in Whose Place? A Study of Sally Morgan’s “My Place”, ed. Delys Bird & Dennis Haskell (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1992). 55–65. Wright, Mary. “A Fundamental Question of Identity: An Interview with Sally Morgan,” in Aboriginal Culture Today, ed. Anna Rutherford (Sydney & Mundelstrup: Dangaroo, 1988). 92–107.

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Belonging and Unbelonging in Text and Research “Snow Domes” in Australia

Eleonore Wildburger

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and postcolonial text analysis have been increasingly questioned in recent years, as to the adequacy of their intercultural agenda. I propose in this essay to argue, with Arun Mukherjee, that a theory of postcolonial literature needs to step beyond the “‘common experience’ of colonialism”1 and take into account the significance of difference when “analysing socially shared narratives which make the text local and specific.”2 I will thus be indicating interculturally appropriate research guidelines. “Snow Domes,”3 a short story by the Indigenous Australian author Janice Slater, of the Yamatji people from Badimaya country, is the model text I will draw on to investigate various layers of interculturally relevant key messages in the context of both the production and the reception of the text. My research proposition suggests that postcolonial, intercultural analyses of Indigenous Australian texts call for interdisciplinary research methods that consider the complex interrelations of text production, text reception and text authority. Accordingly, my research questions in relation to text analysis are: How does the intercultural context affect the process of research and reception? How is meaning created in and beyond the 1

OSTCOLONIAL STUDIES CURRICULA

Arun Mukherjee, Postcolonialism: My Living (Toronto: T S A R , 1998): 5. Mukherjee, Postcolonialism: My Living, 13. 3 Across Country: Stories from Aboriginal Australia, ed. Australian Broadcasting Corporation (Sydney: A B C , 2001): 171–80. 2

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text? How does creation of meaning relate to suggested authority of text, author, reader? In what ways do postcolonial context and Indigenous guidelines effect intercultural research methods?

Interculturally Adequate Research There has been substantial criticism of the fact that the acquisition of Indigenous knowledges by non-Indigenous researchers has perpetuated established postcolonial power-structures at the expense of Indigenous people, insofar as non-Indigenous researchers “have been responsible for the extraction, storage and control over Indigenous knowledges [which have become] the foundations upon which many academic qualifications and careers have been achieved.”4 On a similar note, Andrew Lattas argues that it is time to recognize that “the artist, the writer, the historian, the priest and the explorer [...] are authorising certain images of ourselves [the Indigenous people].”5 Indigenous people argue that there are limitations in cross-cultural experiences and that there are areas where nonIndigenous researchers are not welcome. This is particularly the case when customary law and culturally determined values are investigated. Instead, ‘outsiders’ are welcome to analyze intercultural interaction.6 Academic discourse about ‘authenticity’ becomes increasingly complex (and complicated) when it is related to literary text analysis.7 My concern is thus the quest for an interculturally adequate research strategy in accordance with Indigenous research guidelines that transcend disciplinary boundaries and take account of the fact that “Indigenous com4 Veronica Brady, in Lester Irabinna Rigney, “Internationalisation of an Indigenous anti-colonial cultural critique of research methodologies” (unpublished paper presented to the H E R D S A Conference, Adelaide, 1997). 5 Andrew Lattas, “Aborigines and contemporary Australian nationalism: primordiality and the cultural politics of otherness,” Race Matters, ed. Gillian Cowlishaw & Barry Morris (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies P , 1997): 255. 6 Willa McDonald, “Tricky Business: Whites on Black Territory,” Australian Author 29.1 (1997): 12. 7 See, for example, Greg Lehmann’s comment on authenticity and essentialism in his review of Anita Heiss’s recent publication, in Greg Lehmann, “Authentic and Essential: A review of Anita M. Heiss’a Dhuuluu-Yala (To Talk Straight): Publishing Indigenous Literature,” Australian Humanities Review (August 2004), http://www .lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-August-2004/lehman.html

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munities are apprehensive and cautious towards research ontologies, epistemologies and axiologies.”8 Over the centuries, European research theories have suggested a substantial ‘scientific’ framework to justify colonialism and its implications for colonized peoples. Elleke Boehmer points out that many Western theorists accept “without question the permeability of other cultures to Western understanding, [thereby taking for granted] an ahistorical hybridity as a universal category or structural principle, bracketing together writing from different countries.”9 Accordingly, I argue that cultural values draw upon universal principles which, in their turn, are transformed into a variety of specific factors, some of which may not translate into universal categories. With due cognizance of Foucault´s historicizing concept of knowledge, I view discourse as generated and ‘authentic’ in connection with the site of production, but I argue that within intercultural, intersubjective dialogue, specific findings can have relevance for ‘new’ discourses in regard to different sites, yet without adopting relevance as universal ‘truth’. I am suggesting here that cultural concepts derive from universal principles that translate into a plurality of ‘truths’ in their own right. Consequently, I argue that intercultural textual analysis needs to draw attention to differences in conceptual frameworks. In this context, Boehmer points to the inherent danger that a eurocentric researcher might disregard in a totalizing mode what does not translate into her/his analysis. A key preoccupation in anticolonial theory is certainly the disintegration of Western cultural authority, alongside the construction of new anticolonial identities. It is crucial to develop an “awareness of discrepant attachments, to locate texts in their own specific worlds of meaning.”10 A crucial issue of anticolonial criticism is the ‘otherness’ of the anticolonial text. Nevertheless, many Western critics take it for granted that due to a putative comparability of cultures, anticolonial texts may be discussed within universal, ahistorical categories or structural principles. This approach re-sets the trap of neocolonization in the form of a mind-set that resembles the European colonizers’ view of the world, based as it is on the firm belief that Western knowledge in science, politics, and religion is 8

Rigney, “Internationalisation.” Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford & New York: Oxford U P , 1995): 247. 10 Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, 248. 9

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universally translatable, as are Western forms of rationality. In order to avoid this trap, texts must remain within their cultural boundaries, and critics are called upon to take into account the “partial opacity to one another of different conceptual worlds.”11 Boehmer argues: To do justice to a text’s grounding either in the now, or in the past, it may be necessary to draw on specialized knowledge: to find out about local politics, for example, to read up on ritual practices, or to learn to decipher unfamiliar linguistic codes.12

Boehmer suggests two possible ways of avoiding neocolonization. First, analysis must recognize difference as “utterances which remain out of reach of postcolonial interpretation [insofar as] a certain incommensurability of historical worlds has to be conceded”; secondly, the theorist must accept cultures as being “not always mutually intelligible.” Therefore it is crucial to develop a sensitivity towards the location of a text and its “own specific worlds of meaning,”13 as texts form part of politics and must thus be read syncretically. There are, therefore, two unifying categories of anticolonial text analysis: acknowledgement of the cultural ‘location’ of the text, which includes the possibility of its partial cultural untranslatability; and the interculturally sensitive, discursive interaction between text production and text reception, as the integrating ‘creativity’ across putative divides. On a similar note, Arun Mukherjee argues that postcolonial text analysis needs to focus on the significance of difference rather than on putative common postcolonial experiences. She adds that there is no unmediated access to a text, because meaning is created by drawing on socially shared narratives.14 I argue, with the Maori theorist Linda T. Smith, that research in Indigenous studies takes place in a socially and politically contested area, knowledge being socially constructed. According to Smith, research was an important part of the colonizing process, and culturally sensitive, anticolonial research strategies need to involve partnership: “research as a partnership involves working through a process which is

11

Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, 245. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, 246. 13 Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, 247–48. 14 Mukherjee, Postcolonialism: My Living, 9–13. 12

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inevitably political,”15 and “research methodology is based on the skill of matching the problem with an ‘appropriate’ set of investigative strategies.”16 She suggests a list of research questions that need to be taken into account in a cross-cultural context: Who defined the research problem? For whom is this study relevant? What knowledge will the Indigenous community gain from this study? What knowledge will the researcher gain from this study? What are some likely positive outcomes from this study? What are some possible negative outcomes from this study? How can the negative outcomes be eliminated? To whom is the researcher accountable? What processes are in place to support the research, the researched and the researcher?17

Even though, at first sight, these issues seem to be of greatest relevance when researchers interact directly with people in the research ‘field’, I would suggest that these issues are also relevant to research in a much broader sense, and, for that matter, to intercultural text analyses based on representations of Indigenous identity. The base line of this argument is the fact that “it is also important to question that most fundamental belief of all, that individual researchers have an inherent right to knowledge and truth.”18 Smith adds: “What makes ideas ‘real’ is the system of knowledge, the formations of culture, and the relations of power in which these concepts are located”;19 the responsibility of researchers and academics is not simply to share surface information (pamphlet knowledge) but to share the theories and analyses which inform the way knowledge and information are constructed and represented.20

15 Linda T. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London & New York: Zed, 1999): 178. 16 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 173. 17 Decolonizing Methodologies, 173. 18 Decolonizing Methodologies, 173. 19 Decolonizing Methodologies, 48. 20 Decolonizing Methodologies, 16.

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This means that research is about ‘sharing knowledge’, rather than ‘finding information’. Mine is not an argument in favour of an ‘insider-vs.-outsider’ research model; on the contrary, I am in favour of participatory research models which take into account the Indigenous research agenda: Indigenous research focuses and situates the broader indigenous agenda in the research domain. This domain is dominated by a history, by institutional practices and by particular paradigms and approaches to research held by communities of like-minded scholars. The spaces within the research domain through which indigenous research can operate are small spaces on a shifting ground. Negotiating and transforming institutional practices and research frameworks is as significant as the carrying out of actual research programmes. This makes indigenous research a highly political activity.21

Smith adds that “research needs to be carefully negotiated, and [...] the outcomes of research need to be thought through before [emphasis added] the research is undertaken.”22 Indigenous research guidelines need to obey “the principle of reciprocity and feedback,”23 which entails, for Smith, four possible models of interculturally appropriate research: mentoring model: authoritative Indigenous people guide and sponsor research; adoption model: non-Indigenous researchers are incorporated into daily Indigenous life; ‘power sharing model’: researchers seek assistance of the community; ‘empowering outcomes model’: aims at beneficial outcomes for Indigenous people.24

Marcia Langton, too, urges intercultural cooperation: “Aboriginality has only meaning when understood in terms of intersubjectivity, when both the Aboriginal and the non-Aboriginal are subjects, not objects.”25 Langton adds:

21

Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 140. Decolonizing Methodologies, 178. 23 Decolonizing Methodologies, 15. 24 Decolonizing Methodologies, 177. 25 Marcia Langton, “Aboriginal art and film: The politics of representation,” in Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians, ed. Michele Grossmann (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne U P , 2003): 118. 22

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the central problem is the need to develop a body of knowledge and critical perspective to do with aesthetics and politics, whether written by Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal people, on representations of Aboriginal people and concerns in art, film, television or other media.26

She defines ‘Aboriginality’ as “a field of intersubjectivity in that it is remade over and over again in a process of dialogue, of imagination, of representation and interpretation.”27 According to Langton, there are “three categories of cultural and textual construction of ‘Aboriginality’”: Indigenous people interact with other Indigenous people in social situations located largely within Indigenous culture. There is never a totally closed Indigenous experience. Stereotypes of Indigenous people are constructed by white people without any substantial first-hand contact. Indigenous and non-Indigenous people engage in actual dialogues, where “working models of ‘Aboriginality’ are constructed as ways of seeing Aboriginal people, but both the Aboriginal subject and the non-Aboriginal subject are participating.28

Langton concludes that it is necessary “to test imagined models [in dialogue] against each other.”29 Drawing on Langton’s concept, I have argued elsewhere in favour of “intersubjective, interculturally adequate contact zones.”30 Researchers, cooperating in these contact zones, adjust their views and their research approach through ongoing feedback. They acknowledge diversity as an intrinsic feature of Indigenous research, which also leaves some space for incompatible issues as such. Participants are challenged to find as much common ground as possible, and at the same time acknowledge that there may be something ‘left over’, some incompatible points of contention. In these contact zones, research ‘subjects’ (as opposed to ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’) so that each constantly questions her/his role in the team, alongside the research issues. This re26

Langton, “Aboriginal art,” 115. “Aboriginal art,” 119. 28 “Aboriginal art,” 119–20. 29 “Aboriginal art,” 120. 30 Eleonore Wildburger, Politics, Power and Poetry: An Intercultural Perspective on Aboriginal Identity in Black Australian Poetry (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2003): 171. 27

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positioning is a way of neutralizing (research) power, at least to some extent, and of achieving a balanced, interculturally appropriate, participatory research method. Genuine intercultural collaboration needs clear positioning on the part of all participants. In the anti-colonial context it is important to be constantly aware that, in the end, the research product needs to empower the Indigenous people in their anticolonial concerns. The non-Indigenous researcher is called upon to avoid the trappings of Western thought, which make the researcher “paraphrase the truths of non-Western participants within a context meaningful to the researcher and his or her intended audience and theoretical framework.”31 I find my research aims confirmed by the American film theorist E. Ann Kaplan (1989), who explains why she engages in intercultural activity: Why do I want to [enter and approach the cultures of the Aborigines]? Wouldn’t it be better to leave them ‘over there’, and attend to my own cultures?...Yes and No...we must address other cultures, since we increasingly live in a world where we will rely on one another, where not to know will be dangerous. We need to contribute to the decentering of Western culture, and it helps for us to focus on other cultures. Our own paradigms are further opened up, changed in beneficial ways, through the challenges that other cultures offer. Yet we can only enter from where we stand, unless we want simply to mimic those we aim to know about. Mimicry...is not knowledge. Knowledge can only happen as we enter into a dialogue with the other culture, as we dare to look at it within frameworks we bring with us rather than trying to get inside ‘their’ frameworks, and losing ourselves in the process.32

Therefore, when entering into intercultural dialogue to allow knowledge to ‘happen’, it is necessary to clarify and assess the speaking positions and their respective transformations within the cultural frameworks, while at the same time focusing on knowledge as generated and transformed in this process. In this sense, intercultural dialogue also deals with identity transformations and their structures and strategies. The analysis of textual representations needs to be based on a holistic model of research in 31

Anne–Marie Tupuola, “Is There Room For Non-Exploitative Methodology in the Academic World?” (unpublished paper presented at the World Indigenous Peoples’ Education Conference, Wollongong, 1993). 32 E. Ann Kaplan, “Aborigines, Film and Moffat’s ‘Night Cries’: A Rural Tragedy’: An Outsider’s Perspectives,” Olive Pink Society Bulletin 2.1 (1989): 13.

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which cultural integrity and human relationships also matter, insofar as literary representations may also constitute a site of anticolonial practices. Hodge and Mishra advocate a “non-literary theory of literature which will theorize its object as a set of social rather than formal realities and processes.”33 On a similar note, they argue that a more comprehensive definition of literature includes the social functions of texts, which must be interpreted by reference to their social reality (the construction of ‘reality’ itself, however, being always problematic). In this respect the meaning of a text is located in its production and reception, in the way form and style, as well as ‘content’, are produced and read. Meaning is always constructed in specific social contexts by specific participants, transforming both the text and the world they are engaged with.34 Textual analysis in an anticolonial context is a political act of reading which calls upon action on the part of the reader to generate change in an unjust situation: Interpretation therefore means becoming involved in the political world of the poem, in just as active a way as would be required in a street march or rally of opposition. [...] Emphasising literary effects and preoccupations [of the poem] would...reduce the reading from a politically radical and dynamic process to a passive, less politically potent reading.35

This means that the reader admits her/his political commitment which determines her/his analytical approach. In this sense, text analysis is an “analysis of ideologically loaded structures and meanings, not of innocent, arbitrary, random structures”36 or, to put it differently, it is discourse analysis which pays little attention to language as an idealized product. As the form and content of the text are determined from outside through discursive formations, text analysis is more than just recovering meanings. In this respect, texts have no fixed meanings, on the contrary: interpretation becomes a process of construing possible meanings in a variety of pos-

33

Tony Bennett, Outside Literature (London: Routledge, 1990): 139. Bob Hodge & Vijay Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991): xvii–xviii. 35 David Birch, Language, Literature and Critical Practice: Ways of Analysing Text (London: Routledge, 1989): 164. 36 Birch, Language, Literature and Critical Practice, 167. 34

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sible readings, all of which remain unfixed and open to change and negotiation: Understanding has nothing to do with an immediate grasping of a foreign psychic life or with an emotional identification with a meaningful intention. Understanding is entirely mediated by the whole of explanatory procedures which precede it and accompany it. The counterpart of this personal appropriation is not something which can be felt, it is the dynamic meaning released by the explanation ... its power of disclosing a world.37

In the anticolonial, intercultural context it is necessary to examine the various formations of possible readings and meanings in intersubjective dialogue. The ideological meaning of a text lies in the transformation of subjective identities as it is generated within a sociopolitical setting. The reader’s position is relevant for deconstructing discursive practices of colonial domination and suppression. This attempt “to read texts and history together”38 allows for different kinds of reading and analyzing a text. My reading position determines both the discursive reading process of the texts and my anticolonial concern with deconstructing representations of the ‘Other’. I have elsewhere39 advocated the necessity of contact zones which will provide space for interculturally sensitive, intersubjective dialogue as the appropriate site for interculturally adequate research, in line with Marcia Langton’s above-mentioned model of intersubjectivity. Such dialogue provides opportunities to evaluate the ‘otherness’ of a text with respect to its relevance for interculturally appropriate assessments, as the following case study is meant to demonstrate.

Janice Slater’s short story “Snow Domes” – A case study “Snow Domes” is the story of two elderly women, Doris and Sophie, who have been neighbours for many years. Doris is Indigenous, Sophie is not. Both ladies are widows, living alone, both have grown-up children who live somewhere else. Doris is proud of her children and they visit their mother regularly. Sophie’s kids never do so, and Sophie is hurt and angry. Sophie is lonely; in addition, she is in the initial stages of Alzheimer’s 37

Language, Literature and Critical Practice, 168. Anthony Easthope, Literary into Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1991): 138. 39 Wildburger, Politics, Power and Poetry, 171. 38

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disease. By contrast, the Indigenous woman Doris is still very capable, and so Sophie calls her neighbour over every day, in order to have some company but, above all, to have her do the housework. As the story develops, we find out that Sophie is a very self-centred person who feels superior to Doris and treats her like a domestic servant. Yet Doris is represented as a firm, strong personality who deals with Sophie in a complex way. At the end of the story Sophie is confronted with the unexpected, sudden death of Doris, who collapses in Sophie’s house during one of her domestic-duty visits. Sophie, absorbed in her own world but also affected by her illness, forgets about the deceased woman in her lounge and starts tidying up her house by herself, as she has obviously realized that “now she would have to manage this dusting business alone.”40 As mentioned above, the text transforms a variety of meanings that may develop in different reception contexts. One option is my anticolonial research position, calling for ongoing re-assessment of research findings within a context of intercultural cooperation. My text analysis at the interface of literary studies and cultural studies thus draws upon intersubjective dialogue which is, by definition, ongoing and open-ended, occurring as it does in an intercultural contact zone. My text analysis of “Snow Domes” focuses on the interrelationship of the two protagonists within the sociopolitical setting of the narrative. Doris, the Indigenous woman, is introduced as kind and warm-hearted: A kindness radiated form her, the sort of unconditional kindness that comes from someone who has, after experiencing life’s adversities, become calm and wise and strong. (171)

She is described as “large, taciturn and kind” (171). By contrast, Sophie is “small, hysterical and self-absorbed” (171). The reader’s attention is drawn explicitly to this contrast: “A more dissimilar pair you could not find” (171). The text offers further clues with regard to the two ladies’ dissimilarities: there is taciturn, kind Doris, who is well-settled in her way of doing things, and there is whingeing, self-centred, dissatisfied Sophie, who feels superior to Doris and treats her accordingly (171). Of course, we need to dig deeper to reveal the codes that govern the interrelationships 40

Janice Slater, “Snow Domes,” in Across Country: Stories from Aboriginal Australia, ed. Australian Broadcasting Corporation (Sydney: A B C , 2001): 180. Further page references are in the main text.

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between the different cultural concepts forming the worlds of the two protagonists. The text develops in accordance with different concepts of the imaginary past, interrelated with different concepts of belonging or unbelonging. Doris, the Indigenous woman, grew up in a mission and was forced by the colonial authorities to work as a domestic servant, but she sees “her early days as something that was past and best forgotten” (177). She is proud of her children and the fact that they are “so good with words” (177), and she is aware that “they would have bucked if it were like it was in her day” (176–77). But Doris makes a conscious decision to help Sophie, who clearly needs a helping hand. Doris pretends to play Sophie’s game but, in reality, the Indigenous woman draws her strength from her own independence and her determination to do what needs to be done. Doris’ reconciliation with her past and, in consequence, with her present is challenged by her daughter Bunny, who has a university degree and disapproves of her mother’s readiness to forgive and forget. Bunny says, “Don’t you see you were at the mercy of the government? It makes me so wild, you had no choice!” Yet Doris replies: “Bun, it’s no good being wild now, they were different times, those days. Anyway, old Sophie needs a helping hand, I don’t think of it as work. You think I don’t know the old girl cons me into things? I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t want to.” (177)

Doris is firmly settled in her life and has established her own way of belonging: she belongs to herself and so she is ready to put up with her neighbour’s demands and requests. Sophie is different: stubbornly set in her behaviour, she relies on her daily routines and hates any kind of change. Her communication with Doris is basically limited to a set of phrases in relation to the respective set of orders and requests. The windows in her house are never opened and the curtains are never drawn, because she doesn’t want anyone to come in, except for Doris. She is lonely, self-centred and unstable a tidy house was the only way to keep some sort of order in her lonely life. Her possession, her life, were to remain just as she wanted, with no changes, no intrusion. (173)

In addition, her house is overloaded with what Doris calls “frippery” – artificial flowers, china ornaments of every kind, and a collection of snow

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domes. Whenever Doris does the daily dusting she tells Sophie that she has too many things that require unnecessary dusting and are therefore a waste of time. Instead, she wonders why Sophie doesn’t have any photos of her children on display. But Sophie’s family has broken up and her sense of belonging has become as artificial as the place she is living in. The pain of unbelonging disrupts Sophie’s life and human identity – a lack of human bonding that is intensified by the fact that she is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. So the links with place, people and her own past will be cut as time goes on. Within the Australian setting of the text, some sociopolitical codes are called into question. The common understanding of ‘the colonial experience’ may suggest that Indigenous people have lost their sense of belonging and their identification with the land, whereas non-Indigenous Australians have taken possession of the land. In Janice Slater’s story, the situation is different: the pain of unbelonging stays with Sophie, whereas Doris, the Indigenous woman, is firmly rooted in herself and in her own world. Doris thus confirms the Indigenous concept of land and belonging, albeit in an urban context. By contrast, Sophie’s world is as artificial and secluded as if she were living within a snow dome rather than among a collection of these items which, one may argue, are as displaced in Australia as the colonizers in whose former home countries the snow domes were part of shared cultural codes and images.41 It is Doris who clearly understands the difference, and she finds herself “pitying her neighbour in a deep, sad way” (172). Thus, another set of common codes is disrupted: Sophie’s claim to be superior to Doris translates as the colonialist dichotomy of domination and oppression, together with the racist implication of master vs. slave. In “Snow Domes,” the Indigenous woman shows willpower, is capable and in command, while Sophie’s claim to superiority falls to pieces within herself through her disease, which will leave her completely dependent, in need, and will-less at the end. The unexpected ending of the story questions the viability of another set of codes: after Doris has finished all the dusting, washing-up and cleaning in Sophie’s house, the two women sit down in the lounge to have 41

Snow domes were a popular, decorative item in European homes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Shaped like domes, the size of paperweights, these kitsch items contain miniature landmarks, covered in snow. By shaking the domes, make-believe snowflakes inside the dome turn the whole scene into a winter wonderland, in heavy snowfall.

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a chat. There, unexpectedly, Doris’ attitude towards her neighbour changes slightly. In an interior monologue, she admits some sort of frustration and anger, and seems to be struggling with herself as she thinks of ways to put an end to Sophie’s life. Doris says to herself that this “would be a supreme act of kindness. It would give them both peace” (178). So Doris seems to have run out of conciliatory motives and energies. Yet mission education has firmly imprinted the Christian codes in her mind. In her interior monologue she considers “all the questions she would be certain to get on the Day of Reckoning” (178) and she reassures herself that her plan to put an end to Sophie’s life would certainly be nothing but kindness towards Sophie: “How could anyone not see that it would be for the best [of Sophie]?” (178). In the Australian setting of the text, this question implies the government justification of protection policies which gave power to the state authorities to remove Indigenous children forcibly from their communities in order to assimilate them into mainstream Australia. The official removal of Indigenous children was “for their own good.” “Snow Domes” thus questions the conceptual codes of Australian colonialist policies, when the reader’s attention is drawn to the key motif in question, ‘doing something for someone’s own good’, which in this case overturns the codes of protection policy: here the Indigenous woman plans to kill the non-Indigenous woman ‘for her own good’. Yet the story takes a surprising turn at the end. Both ladies have a cup of tea and nod off. Doris quietly dies, obviously from a sudden heart attack. Sophie wakes up after a short time, prepares supper, goes to bed, comes back downstairs in the morning, and wonders why Doris is still there, looking cold and grey. Affected by Alzheimer’s, Sophie is unable to do anything about the dead person in her house. The reader may find the established features of the two protagonists reconfirmed, as Sophie cares only about herself, while Doris passes away unnoticed. Sophie remains detached and self-centred in her own world, where Doris does not matter at all. Yet the reader may ponder upon the question of the degree to which Sophie’s mind is distracted when she forgets about her neighbour, who has virtually died in her presence. My concern with this text has been the interrelation between text production and text reception. How can we decode both the ‘Indigeneity’ and the ‘non-Indigeneity’ of the text? We find different layers of meaning

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when we decode the key markers in a text,42 which, in Slater’s story, are intercultural key markers of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relationships. An interculturally adequate reading practice will focus on the interface of text production and text reception, where common sociopolitical codes are deconstructed. In the case of “Snow Domes,” I have pointed to codes that relate to representations of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian identities, hence to sociopolitical issues of both Australian and universal relevance. What I have sought to show is that the intercultural relevance of the text creates a variety of meanings, some of which may be assessed, decoded and reconstructed in interculturally satisfactory, intersubjective contact zones. Literary texts, along with the whole range of cultural texts, open an avenue to intercultural, anticolonial dialogue. As the Indigenous writer Alexis Wright confirms, Literature, the work of fiction, was the best way of presenting a truth – not the real truth, but more of a truth than non-fiction. Which is not really the truth either. [...] I use literature to try and create a truer replica of reality. [...] To me, fiction penetrates more than the surface layers, and probes deep into the inner workings of reality. [...] fiction would allow me to create some kind of testament, not the actual truth, but a good portrayal of truth [...] there are many truths and ways of writing the truth. This is what I believe humanity is all about.43

Postcolonial text analysis is inevitably political – research power is involved. I am well aware that intercultural research cooperation also implies eventual points of contention which may be in conflict with day-today ‘Western’ research practices. Yet I contend that the bottom line is partnership research, albeit practised in a variety of options that are determined by the particularities of the respective research projects themselves.

Conclusion My concern in this article has been to decolonize ‘postcolonial’ text analyses along Indigenous research guidelines, as suggested by Linda T. Smith and Marcia Langton. In my case study, Janice Slater’s short story 42 Stuart Hall, “The Work of Representation,” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (London: Sage, 1997): 13–64. 43 Alexis Wright, “Politics of Writing,” Southerly 62.2 (2002): 10–20.

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“Snow Domes,” I have investigated the intercultural relevance of the story with regard to its production and reception, both in the Australian setting and beyond. The story challenges the mental maps drawn by the non-Indigenous researcher, whose familiar cultural codes do not necessarily relate to the key markers in the story. In consequence, the researcher is not only called upon to locate existing cultural codes and assess their validity, but also to deconstruct conceptual maps that govern her/his systems of representation and may translate into fixed stereotypes. In accordance with Indigenous research guidelines, interculturally appropriate research is developed as partnership research. Based on Marcia Langton’s concept of intersubjectivity, I have termed the imaginary and actual meeting places of partnership research “interculturally appropriate, intersubjective contact zones,”44 where research findings are assessed and re-assessed in ongoing collaborative research processes. I have argued in this article that this partnership research model also applies to anticolonial text analysis. If we relate the text to our own conceptual maps, we can assess and re-assess our mental constructs. In so doing, we are responding to the call to open up our minds for our own good.

WORKS CITED Australian Broadcasting Corporation, ed. Across Country: Stories from Aboriginal Australia (Sydney: A B C , 2001). Australian Humanities Review (August 2004). http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR /archive/Issue-August-2004/lehman.html Bennett, Tony. Outside Literature (London: Routledge, 1990). Birch, David. Language, Literature and Critical Practice: Ways of Analysing Text (London: Routledge, 1989). Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford & New York: Oxford U P , 1995). Easthope, Anthony. Literary into Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1991). Hall, Stuart, ed. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage, 1997). Hodge, Bob, & Vijay Mishra. Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991). Kaplan, E. Ann. “Aborigines, Film and Moffat’s ‘Night Cries – A Rural Tragedy’: An Outsider’s Perspectives,” Olive Pink Society Bulletin 2.1 (1989): 13–17. 44

Wildburger, Politics, Power and Poetry, 171.

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Langton, Marcia. “Aboriginal art and film: The politics of representation,” in Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians, ed. Michele Grossmann (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne U P , 2003): 109–24. Lattas, Andrew. “Aborigines and contemporary Australian nationalism: Primordiality and the cultural politics of otherness,” in Race Matters, ed. Gillian Cowlishaw & Barry Morris (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies, 1997): 223–55. McDonald, Willa. “Tricky Business: Whites on Black Territory,” Australian Author 29.1 (1997): 11–14. Mukherjee, Arun. Postcolonialism: My Living (Toronto: T S A R , 1998). Rigney, Lester Irabinna. “Internationalisation of an Indigenous anti-colonial cultural critique of research methodologies” (unpublished paper presented to the H E R D S A Conference, Adelaide, 1997). Slater, Janice. “Snow Domes,” in Across Country: Stories from Aboriginal Australia, ed. Australian Broadcasting Corporation (Sydney: A B C , 2001). Smith, Linda T. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London & New York: Zed, 1999). Tupuola, Anne–Marie. “Is There Room For Non-Exploitative Methodology in the Academic World?” (unpublished paper presented at the World Indigenous Peoples’ Education Conference, Wollongong, 1993). Wildburger, Eleonore. Politics, Power and Poetry: An Intercultural Perspective on Aboriginal Identity in Black Australian Poetry (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2003). Wright, Alexis. “Politics of Writing,” Southerly 62.2 (2002): 10–20.

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Reconciling Accounts An Analysis of Stephen Gray’s The Artist is a Thief

Christine Nicholls

Reconciliation is a policy which intends to bring the nation into contact with the ghosts of its past, restructuring the nation’s sense of itself by returning the grim truth of colonisation to the story of Australia’s being-in-the-world. But it is not surprising that, rather than laying things to rest, these ghosts (and the past is always ghostly here) in fact set a whole range of things into motion: arguments over land, debates over the ‘proper’ history for Australia, the bother about compensation and saying ‘sorry’ (and whether these things would settle the past down, or whether they would unleash it to the extent that the sayer – think of Prime Minister John Howard here – feels he would be subjected to a multitude of claims from which the country may never recover).1

Introduction: Speaking Position

I

N T H E A R T I S T I S A T H I E F , Stephen Gray reflects on life in an imagined Aboriginal community named ‘Mission Hole’, situated in an indeterminate part of Australia’s ‘Top End’. Initially, this book captured my interest because of Gray’s portrayal of the contemporary Indigenous art scene at Mission Hole as a web of intrigue and deceitful, often dishonourable, behaviour on the part of most players, Indigenous and non-Indigenous. I have been closely involved with the Indigenous art movement in remote Aboriginal settlements for twenty-five years now. 1 Ken D. Gelder & Jane M. Jacobs, Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation (Melbourne: Melbourne U P , 1998): 30.

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Therefore it seems important to contextualize my forthcoming analysis of The Artist is a Thief by providing some information about my own speaking position in relation to living in Aboriginal communities, with particular reference to Indigenous visual art production. In 1982, at the age of thirty, I went to live and work at Lajamanu, a Warlpiri Aboriginal settlement in the Tanami Desert of the Northern Territory. Before that, I had taught in a number of mostly Sydney-based high schools. For three years prior to quitting my earlier life to go and live at Lajamanu, I held a fully tenured position in the education faculty of the University of Western Sydney, Milperra Campus. My reasons for making such a choice were complex, but a decisive factor was my youthful spirit of adventure. Initially, I worked at Lajamanu as a linguist, but in 1986 I became the school principal when it transpired that I was more experienced than other teachers in the school. My plan had been to live at Lajamanu for two years, but I ended up staying for just over a decade. Lajamanu is situated approximately 1,000 km south of Darwin and 1,000 km north of Alice Springs, and is home to about 700 Warlpiri people. Desert conditions prevail: the temperature can soar to 54 degrees centigrade in the shade in mid-summer, and plummet below zero on winter nights. For most of the year it is dry and dusty, with the exception of the period that people call ‘The Wet’, during which torrential, sometimes cyclonic, rain and storms can isolate Lajamanu from the outside world. Not long after my arrival at Lajamanu in early 1982, the single dirt track leading into the settlement became impassable because of flooding. During that time, several old people passed away and a baby died of diarrhoea. The latter was a very avoidable death: elsewhere in Australia it would have been easily treated. Very few Warlpiri people lived in houses at that time: indeed, most lived in humpies or other makeshift dwellings that did little to protect them from extreme weather conditions. An unreliable diesel generator pumped water from an underground bore. The water was almost undrinkable because it was so high in mineral concentrations. The whites, including myself, had rainwater tanks, and I was one of a tiny minority who shared my precious water supply with Warlpiri people when the generator failed. There were no phones at Lajamanu at that time, only a couple of two-way radios connecting the place with the rest of the world. While in the intervening two decades or so significant advances have been made in the area of housing for the Warlpiri, in other respects Third-World living conditions continue to prevail.

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At the time of my arrival about thirty non-Indigenous people were living there. Mostly they were people in service industries, including a plumber, a man to work the diesel generator, several nurses and a dozen teachers, as well as two distinct groups of missionaries – fundamentalist Baptists and American Summer Institute of Linguistics missionaries of a more liberal mind-set. The Baptists, who had arrived first, felt that it was their patch. They were seemingly intolerant of the more highly educated S I L missionaries, who learned the Warlpiri language and culture and were less overtly evangelical in their approach. Apart from the teachers and nurses, the other non-Indigenous people were frequently unqualified to be holding their positions – a situation that would not be tolerated in Australian metropolitan areas. The overwhelming majority (around 95 percent) of the local Indigenous Warlpiri people were unemployed. In 1982, the school was the largest employer of Warlpiri people, with about ten Indigenous teaching assistants, a home–school liaison officer and several cleaners. In 2005, the rate of Indigenous employment in the school has significantly declined as a result of government cutbacks. High unemployment in Lajamanu remained relatively unchanged in 2005. This was despite a succession of Mickey Mouse ‘work-for-the dole’ schemes that have been put in place over the years, which obscure the real figures. While I was living there, these Clayton’s employment schemes consisted mainly of elderly people doing early-morning circuits of the community, picking up rubbish and papers that had been blowing around overnight. Because garbage disposal was a rarity, often the same papers and garbage would have to be collected the following morning. For this, the work-for-the-dole employees were paid a percentage of the national unemployment benefit, depending on how many hours they put in daily.

Warlpiri people and the Western work ethic There is a long history of imposed meaningless labour on Aboriginal settlements, and Lajamanu is no exception. This serves to explain the widespread Indigenous resistance to working for non-Indigenous bosses on Aboriginal settlements. The tendency is to offer employment ‘crumbs’ to

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Indigenous workers rather than meaningful, dignified work.2 In a 1984 interview, François Ewald asked Michel Foucault, “Why turn your attention to those periods which, some will say, are so very far from our own?” Foucault replied, “I set out from a problem expressed in current terms today, and I try to work out its genealogy. Genealogy means that I begin my analysis from a question posed in the present.”3 It is instructive to take such a genealogical approach in order to examine the relationship between the Warlpiri people of Lajamanu and Western-style work, working backwards from the starting-point of “a problem expressed in current terms today.” The ‘problem today’ is that the majority of Warlpiri people hold attitudes towards Western-style work that range from lukewarm to antipathetic, with some going to great lengths to avoid involvement. This is a product of the history of their relationship with Western-style work and the often menial and pointless ‘jobs’ that have been, and still are, offered to them. The Indigenous art movement has provided the one real exception to this by giving some Indigenous people a sense of genuine self-esteem and recognition via the dignity of work that they actually enjoy. Importantly, it also offers an opportunity to generate income and, in some cases, even to make a living. In this sense, the art movement has, to some extent, acted as a circuit-breaker to this long-term, dismal state of affairs. I will return to this point later in my discussion of Stephen Gray’s representation of contemporary Indigenous art production in The Artist is a Thief, which tends to focus almost exclusively on the downside of Indigenous artistic production – bickering, infighting, rivalries, interfamilial jealousies and internecine black/white politics. When I went to live and work in Lajamanu in 1982, the late Maurice Luther Jupurrurla4 became my first next-door neighbour. As Town Clerk, 2

For more on this, see Christine Nicholls & Ross Shanahan, “Learning Not To Labour: Recent Experiences of a Central Desert Community,” in Australian Labour History Reconsidered, ed. David Palmer, Ross Shanahan & Martin Shanahan (Adelaide: Australian Humanities, 1999): 162–76. 3 Michel Foucault, “The Concern For Truth,” interview with Francois Ewald, in Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988): 262. 4 Maurice Luther Jupururrla passed away prematurely of a heart attack in 1985 while in his house doing something that he really enjoyed – watching the Grand Final of the A F L (Australian Rules football) on television, and drinking beer.

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Jupurrurla,5 like me, lived in a Western-style house. Unlike any other Warlpiri person living at Lajamanu at the time, Jupurrurla was fluent in English. My friendship with him had started before I learned to understand and speak Warlpiri. We would have long talks – at first over our shared side fence and then later in one another’s homes. I learned a good deal from Jupurrurla and remain indebted to him. First contact for these desert people, the Warlpiri, came a good deal later than for many other Aboriginal groups. Like many others of his generation, Jupurrurla did not lay eyes on a white person until the 1950s. He told me that as a young child in the early 1950s he was terrified by the appearance of the Kardiya (white people), believing that they had all been badly burned, causing their outer skin to peel off and exposing their raw, pink ‘inner skin’. These scary-looking and strange-acting people were soon to take over Jupurrurla’s life, in particular by catapulting him into the world of Western work. Virtually all the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people with whom Jupurrurla had close contact acknowledge him as supremely gifted intellectually. This giftedness was apparent from the time he was a small child, according to my older, surviving Warlpiri friends. I can testify to his brilliance from personal experience. Jupurrurla, a huge man with a Falstaffian appetite and a wonderful sense of humour, would sit in an old armchair in his backyard and read, widely and voraciously, everything from encyclopaedias to motor mechanics manuals, law texts and novels, the Bible and various anthropological texts about different Australian Aboriginal groups. He would read almost anything he could lay his hands on, and he never seemed to forget what he had read. He took a fascinatingly anthropological approach to the dominant culture and their (our) customs, mores and antics. As a result he accumulated detailed knowledge about a diverse array of subject-matter, including Western religion and non-Aboriginal British–Australian law. Yet despite his almost universally acknowledged status as a genius, Jupurrurla, like many of his fellow Warlpiri, was pushed into the most tedious, futile, backbreaking, insulting and, ultimately, degrading series of ‘jobs’, for years on end.

5 Maurice Luther Jupururrla was the first Aboriginal Town Clerk ever appointed on an Aboriginal settlement in the Northern Territory.

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As a boy, Jupurrurla had received brief and rudimentary primary schooling at Yuendumu – another Warlpiri settlement to the south of Lajamanu – during which time he became fluent in English and also literate. Following this brief experience of Western education he was taken out into the bush and initiated by old Warlpiri men, receiving a proper Warlpiri education. Returning to Hooker Creek (the name of Lajamanu settlement at that time) after his initiation ceremony in 1959, at which time he estimates he was around twelve or thirteen years old, Jupurrurla found that The whole settlement was in quarantine. We had to stay in the bush for a month and they gave us a job of cutting timber for fence posts. It was my first job, and I worked with an old man. We would cut timber and then lie down for a five minutes’ rest, but then I was kicked about, told to “tie up that fence and cut the bloody timber down!” I was glad that after four weeks we were allowed to come into the reserve again. I didn’t like that job, cutting timber. I became a kind of handyman on the place and I did whatever the superintendent told me to do, to dig a hole six feet down or paint pieces of tin roofing. We painted them this way and then came back next week and painted them that way. It wasn’t used for anything else. It was meant for roofing, but we just painted it on the ground and put it in the stack! We also dug trenches for the orchard, about two metres down. The Headteacher of the school spoke to the superintendent and told him I was wasting my education by digging holes and painting scraps of corrugated iron. The superintendent then put me in the garage to teach me to be a mechanic. So I was sweeping floors, washing trucks, starting engines. To me that wasn’t much of a job either.6

Being shunted from menial job to menial job like this was not an atypical experience for Warlpiri encountering the colonists for the first time; the stories of other Warlpiri men of comparable age or older closely resemble that of Maurice Jupurrurla. Older men have told me stories of ‘Welfare,’ in the 1950s and 1960s, ordering them to paint sets of forty-four gallon drums – ostensibly to be used as rubbish bins – a certain colour one day, and then the next day being ordered to paint them another colour, and so on, without the bins ever being used for waste. Typically, young Warlpiri men were ‘seized’ for work by white men immediately after their initiation ceremonies were completed. This could 6 N.T. Department of Education, Stories From Lajamanu (Darwin, N.T.: Curriculum and Assessment Branch, 2nd ed. 1984): 12.

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be read as another form of initiation. In practice, it meant that many Indigenous labourers were still children, or scarcely more than children, when they were propelled into the workforce. As for Warlpiri girls and women, they were channelled into domestic work according to the dominant culture’s gender regimes of that time, which were strict and inflexible. The life of my good friend Peggy Rockman Napaljarri, who is now in her late sixties or thereabouts, illustrates the gendered nature of this ‘re-education programme’. Peggy Rockman Napaljarri (Yalurrngali) is not really sure how old she is, because she was born in the bush near Mungkururrpa (Mongrel Downs) in the Tanami Desert. In her early years she and her three older sisters lived and moved around in the bush with their extended family. Napaljarri and her family were fortunate, as there was no cattle station or other form of non-Aboriginal settlement in the immediate vicinity of their home – their land was too marginal for the whites to be interested in it at that time.7 This enabled Napaljarri to accumulate detailed and deep knowledge about the local flora, fauna, and Jukurrpa (Dreaming) sites of significance. Such knowledge is acquired only rarely these days by young Warlpiri children, because it needs to be learned by intensive human navigation of local terrain, which cannot be acquired by living inside a house. Young Yalurrngali (later to be renamed ‘Peggy Rockman’ by the colonizers) also learned, in depth, an impressive number of Dreamings8 and their related narratives, which today she paints using acrylics on canvas and for which she has received recognition both in her own community and in the art world.

7

It was only later when large deposits of gold were found nearby that the level of attention rose dramatically. 8 ‘Dreamings’ and ‘Dreaming narratives’ are site-specific. In the Warlpiri language, Jukurrpa is the name for this central religious and legal concept. ‘Dreaming’ is a weak and inadequate English translation. Importantly, for traditionally oriented Indigenous Australian people, religious beliefs are inseparable from the land itself, regardless of the language group to which an individual or family belongs. ‘The Dreaming’ refers to the time of the Ancestral Heroes, of creation, and the institution of the Law, and is the central core of Indigenous religious belief. People ‘own’ or ‘manage’ Dreamings, as an inheritance either from their fathers and grandfathers or from their mothers’ side. A person’s ‘Dreaming’ determines what subject-matter they are permitted to paint in their art-work. To be allowed to paint, a Warlpiri person must first demonstrate a level of knowledge and proficiency with regard to their Dreaming. This is a complex matter.

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Not too far away from Yalurrngali’s family base in the Tanami Desert, a young non-Aboriginal couple was eking out a meagre existence as gold miners. Yalurrngali’s father started visiting the mine, the young miner and his wife on a regular basis, probably for the purpose of getting tobacco. Peggy can’t remember precisely how, when or why these visits started. She estimates that she was about six, seven or eight years old when her family moved to the mine and lived there, camping on the ground beside the young family, for several years. The older men in her family began working in the mine for rations, not wages. By this time her three older sisters had all married the same much older man, Jampu Jakamarra, and had gone to live with their husband on his country. Yalurrngali Napaljarri’s (by now Peggy) first full-time job, immediately after arrival at the mine, was to care for the young couple’s two children, who were scarcely more than babies at the time. Peggy, as has been explained, was herself only a young child. She looked after and held full responsibility for those children all day, while the men worked in the mine and the miner’s wife cooked for the men. This was Peggy Napaljarri’s first job working for non-Indigenous people, and through her childhood she worked at it for a number of years. During those years she acquired excellent, though strongly accented, English. As a result of her interpreting ability, she became the go-between, a kind of cultural broker, between her own family and the young couple – a skill that over the years she has continued to develop to a high level of expertise. She is now widely recognized and sought after as an interpreter and cultural mediator, both by individuals and by organizations like the Central Land Council. After the little girl Peggy had spent some years as an unpaid nanny or babysitter – work to which, incidentally, she had no real objection – the young couple decided that the mine was not viable and abandoned it. They departed, leaving Peggy’s family, who by this time had become attuned to hard labour of the Western kind and dependent on the daily rations, to fend for themselves once more. At the same time, pastoral properties were springing up all around the area, making it increasingly difficult for Warlpiri families to get enough water to drink or food to eat in the Tanami Desert. The family walked around the Tanami for a short time and then continued on to Gordon Downs Station in Western Australia, in search of stock work. By this time Peggy, a pubescent girl, was married to the same Jampu Jakamarra to whom her three older sisters were married.

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The entire extended family went to live and work on Gordon Downs Station. Peggy’s family did not, however, enjoy the regimentation of station life, and so their stay at Gordon Downs station was relatively short and unsuccessful. From Gordon Downs the family was taken, c.1952, by the Native Affairs Branch to the newly created settlement of Lajamanu.9 Peggy, like the other Warlpiri who had volunteered or had been brought to live in Lajamanu, was put to work under the surveillance, control and direct supervision of Native Affairs Branch officials. In Peggy’s case she was placed in the settlement kitchen, along with other girls and young women, cooking three meals a day for the entire population of the settlement, day in, day out, except on weekends, when people were expected to ‘go back to hunting and gathering’.10 This created hardship, because Lajamanu is situated in an arid region where it is relatively challenging to locate a sufficient supply of bush tucker.11 People were therefore often hungry on weekends. The week-day work was arduous and the hours of working in the kitchen were long. There was no remuneration except in the form of three meals a day during the week and occasional meagre rations (occasionally a small flour bag and/or a bag of sugar) on weekends. Peggy found the work boring and irritating, especially because she, like the other women working in the welfare kitchen, was expected to work all year round without any holiday break. In her previous employment there had always been ample scope for one long ‘holiday’ in the bush each year – for instance, the young couple at the mine would pack up around Christmas of each year and go ‘down south’, giving her family the opportunity to do as they wished for a month or so. Nevertheless, she worked in the welfare kitchen for many years, until the unrelieved nature of the work finally got to her. Revolting against the imposed regime, Peggy started binge-drinking. This was a short-lived phase in her life, because, by this stage, she had three young children. She made a binding decision not to 9

Many Warlpiri people were moved to Hooker Creek (Lajamanu) in the early

1950s, soon after the establishment of the new settlement. The main reason for its

creation was overcrowding, poor sanitation and factional fighting at Yuendumu, the original Warlpiri settlement set up by the Native Affairs Branch; Mervyn Meggitt, Desert People (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1962): 29. 10 Personal communication, Peggy Rockman Napaljarri to the author, 1982–95. 11 ‘Bush tucker’ is the Aboriginal English terminology for food native to a particular region of Australia.

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allow grog to rule her life, and she has not touched alcohol since. Like many other Warlpiri people, she became a Christian to help her stop drinking. When I arrived in Lajamanu, Peggy was the head cleaner at the school, for which she received a reasonable wage. She continued to clean the school every weekday for the next decade, and when I resigned as Principal in 1992 she decided to retire. As a result, I entered into a five-year battle on her behalf (waged mostly from Adelaide, where I had taken up residence post-Lajamanu), to obtain the superannuation payments that were her entitlement because she had worked for about 25 years in a substantive position as the school cleaner before retiring. Because Peggy is non-literate and it was a case of writing many letters and providing detailed written evidence to the bureaucracy, including data such as her exact date of birth (which we were unable to do because she was born out in the bush and her birth was unrecorded by any measuring instruments recognized by the dominant culture), she was in no position to fight this fight single-handedly. Eventually we ‘won’, and she now receives regular superannuation payments. Since retirement, Peggy has become recognized as an artist and has collaborated and co-translated, with Lee Cataldi, a well-received book of Dreaming narratives.12 These successful activities have afforded her belated respect and recognition from the dominant culture (as well as generating a small amount of income to supplement her superannuation payments).

The bilingual education programme at Lajamanu and the beginnings of the art movement in 1986 The Warlpiri people employed me as a linguist to assist them in establishing a bilingual education programme. Initially, my job was to collaborate in setting up a Warlpiri literature and accompanying teaching methodology for use in the school’s new bilingual education programme in Warlpiri and English. The community, piloted by the late Maurice Luther Jupurrurla and the late Paddy Patrick Jangala, with whom I was to work closely for many years, had been unsuccessfully lobbying the government for ten years for such a programme. The older people, in particular, were 12 Peggy Rockman Napaljarri & Lee Cataldi, Warlpiri Dreamings and Histories, Yimikirli (Sydney: HarperCollins, 1994).

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concerned that the Warlpiri language would die out under the pressure of English, the language of the colonizers. Eventually, in 1982, the Department of Education conceded that the Warlpiri people of Lajamanu were not going to relinquish their aspirations to have a bilingual education programme in the school, so they appointed me as the new teacher–linguist to work on the programme. It was noted, however, that this concession was to be ‘at no extra cost’ to the department, other than my salary. When I became the Principal of the local Warlpiri Lajamanu School, Lee Cataldi replaced me as the linguist working and developing, with a team of Warlpiri Literacy Workers, Warlpiri literacy materials for use in the school. Over the years, many local Warlpiri people gravitated towards the school in support of its bilingual education programme. Bringing Warlpiri people into the school was one of the programme’s most important achievements because, prior to this, parents and families had been unwelcome in the school. The Northern Territory’s bilingual education programmes, in which local Australian Aboriginal languages and English were used side by side in a minority of Aboriginal primary schools in remote northern Australia, had first come into being in 1973 under the broader federal-government policy imprimatur of ‘self-determination’ for Indigenous Australians. At this point Lajamanu had not been selected for participation. From their inception in 1973, the Territory’s Indigenous language bilingual education programmes represented a considerable paradigm shift on the part of the Australian federal government, signalling changes to Australian Aboriginal education that went beyond the educational and linguistic spheres, and entering the political arena.13 One of the outcomes in the Lajamanu context was to bring the old people into the school to tell the children oral histories, to teach them their Dreaming narratives, and to paint the children with their own Jukurrpa body painting. For Lajamanu, the bilingual education programme paved the way for the art movement that began in 1986. Up until 1986 all Jukurrpa painting at Lajamanu had been done either on the human body, on the ground, or on sacred or ceremonial objects, 13

Tragically, the closure of these bilingual education programmes was effected on 1 December 1998 by the Northern Territory Government, on the recommendation of a review panel made up of four government appointees from outside of those communities.

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using ochres and other natural media. Once the ceremony was finished, the ground painting would be erased immediately, body paint removed, and the ceremonial objects put away, remaining hidden from view until the next ceremony. Symbols or markings of the Jukurrpa were never on permanent display. The painting of Dreamings with acrylics on canvas began as part of the school’s adult-education programme. In April 1986, many adult men at Lajamanu started to paint on canvas, on boards – indeed, on any kind of permanent medium that they could lay their hands on. Not long after this, the women also took up painting their Jukurrpa with the same passion and commitment as the men. The early days of the ‘art movement’ at Lajamanu marked a period of self-conscious development in contemporary Warlpiri cultural politics, insofar as participants deliberately chose to return to an earlier function of art that had been greatly emphasized in classical times – namely, the pedagogical and didactic functions. Neither the classical Greek tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, nor the dramas of Dreaming journeymen and women re-enacted during Aboriginal initiation and other ceremonies, nor the Ramayana cycles, nor the great religious paintings across cultures and eras have attempted to conceal their fundamental educative intentions. So it was with the Warlpiri artists who wished to seize control over their children’s education, which had been wrested from them by the white interlopers. The same cultural impetus that prompted their desire to have their language recognized – in the context of the school – underpinned their desire to paint their Jukurrpa. Many older Warlpiri people discussed with me their reasons for taking up painting their Jukurrpa. The only common thread in their diverse and, at times, contradictory responses was their strongly felt desire to keep their Dreamings alive for their children and grandchildren. They made it clear to me that without the Dreaming as their guiding principle, they felt that the future generations would feel purposeless. Cultural desuetude would be the inevitable result. I can vividly remember a quiet, warm May morning in 1986, soon after the women began painting. A deputation of very old women (most of whom are now deceased) came up to the school, asking to speak to me about something they viewed as critically important. They asked me to give them “strong paper” so that they could record all of their grandchildren’s Dreamings for those children to see. They specifically requested that their paintings, when completed, be held in a collection in the school lib-

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rary. This way their paintings could be kept on permanent display so that their grandchildren would never lose their Jukurrpa. I believe that the library was deliberately selected as the site for exhibiting their Jukurrpa. While never articulated in these terms, the old women understood that it is in books that non-Aboriginal knowledge is documented and stored, and from which that knowledge is ultimately retrievable. Libraries are central repositories for the dominant culture’s knowledge maintenance. The school library at Lajamanu was an institution that at the time represented the stronghold of the assimilationist project, with many English storybooks and their seductive, colourful dust jackets presenting an alien way of life in a foreign language. The small, mostly photocopied, black and white Warlpiri books made in the school’s Warlpiri Literacy Centre were no match for these bright, glossy kids’ books written in English. So, after our meeting, the old women walked off home to their camps. Under their arms they clutched as many old sheets as they could hold of the very ‘strong’ cardboard that I found in the dusty recesses of the art room. Working very quickly, this group of older women produced a unique series of paintings. Eventually these paintings were acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria because they had begun to deteriorate in the harsh Lajamanu weather conditions. These works are unique because they are virtually the only set of contemporary acrylic Jukurrpa paintings produced by Lajamanu artists that did not have the European market in mind, even at a subliminal level. They arose from entirely different, selfreferential cultural politics. What followed over the next few days was an extraordinary procession of old and exceedingly old women flowing through the school in continuing pageant, bearing their completed Jukurrpa works. Some of the women could not walk unaided; others were close to blindness from trachoma or from sheer old age. Often needing physical support from their younger woman relatives, these women entered the school grounds bearing their children’s and grandchildren’s entire inheritance under their frail arms, offering them as gifts for installation in the school library. At no point during my tenure as Principal of Lajamanu School did the community feel so close to the school, or the school so close to the community. There was a sense of heightened reality and of real intellectual excitement as the old women were, temporarily at least, reinstated with legitimacy. They were re-acknowledged for their encyclopaedic knowledge of the Jukurrpa, and for their erudition, by each other, by younger

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Aboriginal people working in the school, as well as by some of the nonIndigenous schoolteachers to whom they explained their Jukurrpa in elaborate detail. To describe this artwork as ‘meaningful’ to its makers is to grossly understate the case. At this point, it is important to note that in pre-contact days, Warlpiri people always had to ‘pay’ for the right to view, however briefly, or receive rights to, another group’s Dreamings, or what would nowadays be glossed as ‘artworks’. Obviously, at that time, payment was not within the framework of a capitalist, cash economy, but by trading something else of value. This was usually other sought-after knowledge in the form of knowledge exchange, but could also involve the exchange of ceremonial items or other valuable objects or information.14 The point here is that there was always some kind of transaction involved in Indigenous artistic production – it never transcended economics. Equally, rights and responsibilities to paint specific subject-matter always involved a certain level of disputation and contestation. This is because Jukurrpa are deemed to be owned by particular groups, or, in some cases, by individuals. To this day, a form of orally transmitted copyright underscored by communal ownership still exists within Indigenous kinship systems. In the past, and even today, severe penalties exist for the unauthorized use of another’s Jukurrpa. To conclude this section: the preceding discussion is intended to serve as a kind of ‘advance organizer’ to contextualize my approach to analyzing The Artist is a Thief.15 This applies especially to those parts of the book in which a particular representation of the politics of Indigenous artproduction is canvassed.

Stephen Gray’s The Artist is a Thief Set principally in the fictitious Aboriginal community of Mission Hole in the Northern Territory, The Artist is a Thief defies neat categorization into any single literary genre. Part murder mystery, part sociological treatise dovetailing into the community-studies genre, with good measures of romance, satire, fictocriticism, para-ethnography and quite a lot of philoso14

Personal communication, inter alia, Liddy Nakamarra to the author, May 1986. The latter received many critical accolades when it was published in 2001, and was awarded the prestigious Vogel Prize for young authors. 15

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phical musing about the current state of remote Indigenous community life and visual art production and politics as well, the richly layered approach of The Artist is a Thief is one of its great strengths. Briefly, the narrative goes like this: Jean–Loup Wild, a young Melbourne-based financial consultant, has been sent to Mission Hole16 to enquire into possible art fraud involving, in particular, the work of prominent Indigenous artist Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy. The inauspiciously named Mission Hole, vaguely located on a remote, semi-coastal mudflat somewhere in the Northern Territory, is apparently a composite of many struggling Aboriginal communities. But there are wheels within wheels at Mission Hole, and on the same day that Jean–Loup Wild arrives at the settlement a man named Valerian Pride, who met Wild at the airstrip, and who was to have been his chief informant with regard to the Gandarrwuy fraud case, is brutally murdered. Blood is spilt, intrigue follows, and it is hinted that the killing of Valerian Pride may be closely related to the same art deception that Jean–Loup has been assigned to investigate. Clever plotting allows Gray’s protagonist, Jean–Loup Wild, to oscillate between the roles of accountant and detective (which, parenthetically, seems to be precisely the direction in which accountancy is heading, if one considers the global fallout from the recent crashes of large multinational companies that subsequently afford their auditors and other financial operatives considerable powers). The melding of the character of Jean– Loup into a kind of hybrid financial advisor/gumshoe figure is just one example of the many postmodern twists and turns taken by the inventive writer of this ambitious book. The book also constitutes a kind of microethnography of the community, particularly of the non-Aboriginal people living at Mission Hole. Interwoven into Gray’s ‘primary plot’ about Indigenous art fraud are several subplots and sub-themes, all of which are deeply imbricated. It transpires that Jean–Loup is also on a private quest, investigating a deeper mystery of a more personal nature. He is trying to understand the death, by suicide, of his much older Indigenous half-sister, Duchess: a product of Jean–Loup’s father’s misspent, itinerant youth. This event took place many years before when Jean–Loup was still a young child. Duchess was a member of the Stolen Generation, forcibly removed from Mission Hole. 16 Note that ‘hole’, when used by speakers of Aboriginal English, is a word that has extremely pejorative, sexual and sexist connotations.

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Duchess’s unidentified mother (was she perhaps the celebrated artist Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy herself?) was a local Mission Hole woman. Wild’s own father, now an ageing, alcoholic hippy, had lived and worked and carelessly fathered this child at the Mission Hole settlement, many years ago. There is also a sense that Jean–Loup is somehow seeking redemption, if not forgiveness, for the tragic fate of his older sister, in which, as a young boy, he had been unwittingly complicit. So, despite his insouciance, he is depicted as having embarked on a difficult journey of great significance, both literally and figuratively. The halting steps he takes towards learning about his own rather unsavoury family history, and acknowledging it, warts and all, functions as a metaphor for Australia’s own protracted and as yet unrealized trajectory in the direction of reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. At the same time, Jean–Loup has embarked on a personal and very challenging learning curve regarding the realpolitik of contemporary Indigenous Australian living. The journey is towards recognition of the reality of Australian history, and how, inevitably, the past continues to live in the present. This is triggered by the young man’s Mission Hole experiences. His inner journey thus functions as a trope for the broader process of reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Australia.

The personal is political: Jean–Loup Wild and Reconciliation As second-wave feminists of the 1970s insisted, and later took up as a rallying cry, the personal is political. This is most certainly so in the case of the reconciliation process in the Australian context, and the truth of this maxim is borne out in the case of Jean–Loup Wild, who functions as a kind of anti-hero in The Artist is a Thief. For Jean–Loup, whose personal journey involves learning something about recent contact history in order to understand his own family history, the personal is most certainly political, even if he is incapable of framing his quest in this way. Without delving more deeply into his own family history – a history that in some respects mirrors the larger national history – Jean–Loup is unable to lay to rest the ghosts of his own family’s past. Therefore, no matter how clumsy and naive Jean–Loup’s approach, however blundering his attempts in this direction, and despite the fact that in

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some ways he is portrayed as a rather silly, trivial person, the book does reveal an important truth: that for genuine reconciliation to occur, a process needs to be set in motion. This necessarily involves more than ‘mere’ legislative action on the part of the government. People must work through these issues on an individual basis, and this really means hard work, both intellectual and possibly other forms of labour, before it can be achieved. It needs to be added at this point that this novel is in no sense explicitly ‘about’ reconciliation or the official policy of Reconciliation, and neither the word nor the concept appears in overt form in Gray’s novel. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which the idea of possible reconciliation or some form of future entente cordiale between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians is a significant seam or thread running through this work. Gray facilitates his protagonist’s getting of wisdom by the introduction of a number of narrative tracts that imitate established styles of anthropological and missionary writing as well as contemporary art criticism. This pastiche of canonical writings about Indigenous matters, as well as including simulacra of existing texts (the originals of which are sometimes vaguely recognizable, although they are always composites), has a satirical function. The inclusion of these texts also functions to educate Jean–Loup, and thereby contributes to his growing enlightenment. The book is so structured as to encourage a presumably predominantly nonIndigenous readership to identify with Jean–Loup’s gradually opening mind. Little by little, Jean–Loup learns that genuine rapprochement involves Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians being prepared to share physical, geographical and epistemological space. People have to be prepared to give a bit, both literally and metaphorically. Thus Jean–Loup also functions as something of a non-Indigenous Australian Everyman on a pilgrimage of great metaphorical significance. His own rather tortured and unresolved family history reflects the broader ‘family’ history that is the national Australian chronicle – that of unresolved, unsatisfactory relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. More than a decade ago now, the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation identified eight key issues as “essential to the community’s understanding of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islands peoples’ past, their plight in the present and their hopes for the future.” They are:

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CHRISTINE NICHOLLS \ 1. understanding the importance of land and sea in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander society; 2. improving relationships between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians and the wider community; 3. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture as a valued part of Australian heritage; 4. a shared ownership of the history of Australia; 5. understanding the causes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander disadvantage in health, housing, employment and education; 6. community responses to the underlying causes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander levels of custody; 7. whether reconciliation would be advanced by a document of reconciliation; (since then a document has in fact been drawn up and agreed to by both major political parties but never realized) 8. opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to control their destinies.17

The Reconciliation process has stalled under the Howard Government: it is rarely discussed these days except when there is threat of media coverage highlighting the Australian people’s dissatisfaction with the stalemate. Events such as people crossing bridges en masse continue to be staged, but mostly they lack substance. In The Artist is a Thief, Jean–Loup is forced to confront, with varying degrees of intensity, the first five of these issues in particular. Of equal importance to the unfolding drama is the blossoming romance between Jean–Loup and Petra Gandarrwuy, a local Indigenous woman who is closely related to the power-wielders and political brokers of Mission Hole, and who works at the local Art Centre. This strand of the book takes a fairly standard ‘boy meets girl’ narrative line, in some respects, but is rendered more complex by the cross-cultural nature of the encounter. Jean–Loup’s naivety and his almost total inability to read the local Indigenous cultural signs and meanings afford an extra dimension to this romance. Is Jean–Loup simply repeating the shabby history of his alcoholic father: a tragic history that reflects the disgraceful national history of sexually predatory white Australian men preying on young Aboriginal wom17

Australians for Reconciliation Study Circle Kit, session 1.6 (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service). This government document contrasts with what many Indigenous people say: that they simply want recognition: recognition of who they are and what they represent.

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en? In the parlance of the day, such white men referred to beautiful young Aboriginal women as ‘Black Velvet’. Jean–Loup is a tad more sophisticated than this, we are led to believe; but is he really? We are also led to believe that he may have been a bit of a social ingénu in virtually any social setting, but in terms of the complex social and cross-cultural milieu in which he finds himself at Mission Hole he is a total space-cadet. Drawing Jean–Loup Wild as an awkward naif and as a mostly, but not always, humble simpleton vis-à-vis Indigenous culture is a clever device that allows Gray to introduce the characters and events through his protagonist’s eyes in what appears to be a non-judgemental manner. The various plots, threads, themes and sub-themes of the book are intricately mapped, and intermesh in an apparently effortless way. But Gray’s characterization is not nearly so strong as his plotting or his layered approach to narrative. And, with the possible exception of Jean–Loup Wild, with whom Gray appears to identify at some level, the other characters never seem to come to life. It may be that the complexity and attention to the narrative has, in fact, been at the expense of characterization. The Indigenous cast (it is difficult not to see this book as a film) are represented as, by and large, opaque if not inscrutable, at least through the eyes of ‘our’ protagonist, Jean–Loup, with whom the majority (presumably white Australian male) readership is apparently encouraged to identify. As is the case with the figure of the so-called ‘Inscrutable Oriental’, with all of its Orientalist18 overtones and resonances, the ‘Inscrutable Aboriginals’ who people this book offer a limited and stereotypical range of representations. Almost everything the Indigenous characters say or do is presented as loaded, coded, and filled with virtually indecipherable subtext – in other words, as pretty well unfathomable. Perhaps Gray, as a non-Indigenous author, is nervous about putting his foot in it with regard to the representation of Indigenous characters, but ultimately this level of opacity may be doing his characters (and the process of reconciliation, by implication) a disservice, as, with the possible exception of the love interest – the heart-stoppingly gorgeous Petra Gandarrwuy – they never seem to really come to life. In addition, many of the non-Indigenous characters in the book verge on the stereotypical, and even on the caricatural in some cases. In the longer term, this will not aid genuine reconciliation. For example, Gray 18

Cf. the work of Edward Said.

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depicts the New-Age hippies who have gravitated to Mission Hole to work in the Art Centre (in pursuit of that ‘authentic’ Indigenous experience) in uni-dimensional terms. Gray’s portrait of Jean–Loup relies, at least to some degree, on the stereotypical projection of accountants as bordering on social and cultural illiteracy or at best semi-literacy. The characterization of the German anthropologist, Ulrich, who hails from Düsseldorf University and who is writing a thesis in which he is attempting to define who are ‘real’ Aboriginals in contemporary terms, is an unfairly parodic representation of anthropologists as well as of Germans. For example, at one point Jean–Loup asks Ulrich, “How have you been investigating, if nobody will talk to you?” “They do not understand,” said Ulrich. “I can not afford to slow down and sit by the river or go fishing for three or ten days. I have a tight schedule. In less than three weeks I have to be back in Dusseldorf. Then I do not return until October.”19

Ulrich, with his frighteningly impercipient ethnocentrism and putatively European self-importance, more or less goose-steps across the pages of this book and over the Mission Hole Aboriginal settlement. This is unfortunate, as Ulrich functions in the book to represent the views and behaviour of European intellectuals generally – hardly an accurate representation. While I fully accept Gray’s satirical purpose in this book, this depiction borders on the burlesque. In recent times, anthropology and its practitioners – to a greater extent than many other academic disciplines in either the arts or the sciences – have been subject to rigorous self-examination and self-criticism because of an earlier, well-documented complicity with the colonial project. As a result, anthropology has had to remake itself, to a considerable extent, in postcolonial times, and today the ‘Ulrichs’ are thus pretty thin on the ground, if not exactly an endangered species. To portray the contemporary discipline of anthropology in this simplistic way seems out of touch, to say the least. Neither is it believable that Ulrich’s offensively racist doctoral project would either receive ethical clearance in academic circles or get the go-ahead from Indigenous-controlled organizations (for example, Indigenous Land Councils in Australia, who are now authorized to scruti-

19

Stephen Gray, The Artist is a Thief (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2001): 89.

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nize and give ethical clearance, or otherwise, to all research projects before they can be undertaken in Australian Aboriginal communities). Ultimately, perhaps it could be argued that the lack of depth in the book’s characterization does not really matter so much, as Gray seems a great deal more interested in mapping out the ‘types’ who inhabit Aboriginal settlements than in presenting them as fully rounded or even believable characters. In the creation of such a sketch map, Gray demonstrates great skill. It has been said that contemporary Aboriginal settlements are peopled by whites who belong to one of three categories: missionaries, mercenaries, or misfits.20 Gray is a master of the broad brushstroke and he portrays these ‘types’ extraordinarily well, which is fine if one is not seeking nuanced characterization. He is also successful in evoking some of the generic issues facing contemporary Indigenous settlements in remote Australia. In terms of the book’s symbolic structure, names and naming assume great importance. Gray reflects on the English names bestowed upon Aboriginal people in terms of being social ascriptions of identity by representatives of the dominant culture. These names can betray perceptions of social dominance (for example, ‘Duchess’, ‘Empress Billy’) and subordination, and sometimes they work as palimpsests tracing earlier Christian missionary activity. They can simply ‘take the micky’ (for instance, ‘Jumbo’) or divulge missionary influence, and occasionally all of the above (for example, ‘Lazarus’). Some of these names are less than flattering and rather disrespectful in tone, apparently being based on certain inherent assumptions, intentions, thoughts and feelings on the part of those who imposed them. Names like ‘Sally Galilee’, ‘Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy’ and ‘Valerian’ (is he named after the Roman Emperor who is remembered for a troubled reign that ended in his death in captivity?) are linguistic productions that cannot be understood outside of existing power relations portrayed by Gray at Mission Hole. Stephen Gray’s clever dramatization of the symbolic violence21 involved in the struggles around

20

On numerous occasions I have heard this phrase variously attributed to different sources, including both Gary Foley and Rolf Gerritson. 21 See Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. & intro. John B. Thompson, tr. Gino Raymond & Matthew Adamson (Langage et pouvoir symbolique; Paris: Seuil, 2001; tr. Cambridge: Polity, 1991).

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naming, resulting in the arrogation by missionaries and others of the colonial subject’s right to name what is rightfully theirs to name (for example, their own children), is accurate and introduces yet another fascinating and compelling layer to the many other complex layers that make up The Artist is a Thief. The names of the non-Indigenous characters are equally significant in this book. But there is also a sense that Gray is playing an elaborate game of cat and mouse with his readers, and enjoying it greatly, gently teasing us by challenging us to deconstruct his symbolism or to draw real-life parallels to the personae presented in this book. But despite the high level of referentiality and the postmodern mood of the book, playing ‘guess the character’s real identity’ is ultimately a zero-sum game here (as was the case in Bruce Chatwin’s inferior and overrated Songlines). This is so because many of the characters and even the places depicted are composites. Examples of this include the semi-fictional story of a Catholic priest who allegedly marries many Indigenous ‘wives’, which closely resembles that of Bishop Gsell in the Tiwi Islands, and the story of ‘Fred’s Zoo’, which has a real-life counterpart outside the old settlement of Rum Jungle in the Northern Territory (now called Batchelor). Stephen Gray’s approach also affords him the opportunity to philosophize about, and generally ruminate on, the current state of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations in this country and also to reflect more specifically on the conditions of production, distribution and exchange of Indigenous art works created in Australian Aboriginal settlements today. His discussion of contemporary Indigenous art and its surrounding human ecology is accurate. The model that Gray projects in The Artist is a Thief places the artist (Gandarrwuy) at the hub of this ‘eco-system’. This, in turn, radiates out to include the artist’s extended family; the art centres and cooperatives and their small army of mainly non-Indigenous workers and volunteers; various courtiers, including attendant bureaucracies, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous; the gallery system and its agents; the art critics; and the various other gatekeepers with a stake in Indigenous art. This is not only, by and large, an accurate portrayal of the reality of ‘the rules of the game’ but also evinces considerable insight into the specific elements making up this complex ecological system and its tricky politics. Importantly, and certainly not incidentally, the artist herself does not appear or speak for herself in the course of the book, and when she finally does, at the end of the book, the context is one that shocks.

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Yet throughout the book Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy is a powerful non-presence who exerts a strong influence over the action. While physically absent for most of the time, Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy is continually being represented by the words of others but rarely through her own voice. This is immensely significant in terms of the overall themes of the novel, and in terms of the underlying motif of possible reconciliation. Moreover, the fact that Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy is not given any voice in the novel does not, in my opinion, augur well for reconciliation in the Australian context, even if it is because Gray is not comfortable in representing Aboriginal characters. On the other hand, this is an accurate representation of the lack of speaking position of certain successful Indigenous artists living in remote settlements at the time of writing – they have little voice in the public or any other arena. This has come about, in part, because of very significant language barriers, but also because such silencing is in the interests of many of the other, mostly but not entirely, non-Indigenous stakeholders in this complex artistic ecology. Gray demonstrates with great clarity that, for the most part anyway, successful Indigenous artists are not born, but made, and for that to happen, collaboration with non-Indigenous stakeholders is necessarily the name of the game. This is one of the most interesting contentions of his book, summed up in the following passage: There was a sense in which Randhawa [the white man who effectively runs the local art centre and has lived at Mission Hole for many years] had created Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy. He had created her image, after all, and virtually everything that was known about her in the non-Aboriginal art world had come through him. Randhawa considered himself to be Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy’s spokesperson, her amanuensis, the mouthpiece through which she communicated her culture to the world. Had he begun to create her paintings as well?22

The major narrative trajectory of the book is driven by an incident involving the slashing of a canvas ostensibly painted by the famous Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy. This art-work has also been defaced with the words “the artist is a thief.” Yet while Gray successfully critiques entrenched ‘Western’ notions of the individual artist-as-genius, his discus-

22

Gray, The Artist is a Thief, 232–33.

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sion of why this act of apparent vandalism might have happened is curiously unsatisfying. While reference is made to the complex forms of Indigenous communal ownership of specific tracts of land and the corollary of this, the communal basis of artistic expression associated with such land ownership, there is no real attempt to explain how Indigenous concepts of ownership of land and notions of intellectual copyright actually work in practice. This is a real weakness of the book and is a lost opportunity. Neither is there a really clear attempt at differentiation between legitimate forms of communal ownership and Indigenous copyright and the matter of the faking of art-works, which is forbidden both in traditional Indigenous culture and in the dominant culture. What actually constitutes fraudulent activity in the context of Aboriginal art is frequently poorly understood and confused with communal ownership. Gray has missed a golden opportunity both to clarify these matters in such a context and, in the longer term, to contribute to greater understanding and to reconciliation. By implication, all of the information is in this book, but I am not sure that those who did not understand these matters at the beginning would be much the wiser after having read it. This seems like an opportunity lost, given the educational tenor of the book, despite its being cloaked in the guise of fiction. The writer, Stephen Gray, is in fact a lawyer, so he would seemingly have been well placed to explain the intricacies of Indigenous copyright. But whether this actually matters depends on whether you are reading the book at the level of a ripping good yarn (which it most certainly is) or to develop your understanding and untangle questions about the status of contemporary Aboriginal art and its conditions of production. The Artist is a Thief has a lot that is worthwhile to say about the politics of representation in the contemporary Indigenous context, particularly the (mis-)representation of people whose voices have been, for whatever historical reasons, suppressed or appropriated by others for their own purposes. It raises all sorts of questions about speaking position, about who can speak for whom, who is authorized to do so, while interrogating issues around authorship and the politics of voice more generally. As the co-author of a recent book about Kathleen Petyarre, and as the artist’s biographer and her friend for many years, I am able to confirm that the issues raised in Gray’s book are not merely ‘academic’ but often have

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a momentous impact on Indigenous artists and their kin. As Bruce James wrote in a review of one of Petyarre’s recent Sydney exhibitions, Time magazine recently dubbed [Kathleen Petyarre] ‘Queen of the Desert’, a transvestite reference that ranks as cultural blooper of the year. On another occasion, a national journal as good as called her a fraud, triggering an Aboriginal art scandal beat-up which covered almost everyone but the artist in cupidity and shame.23

Notwithstanding, in an interview with me some years ago, Kathleen Petyarre stated, “I feel good in my body when I do my painting.” She went on to say that when she is painting is the only time that she feels ‘good in her body’ – connected with her history, her Dreaming, her Ancestors, and passing on something of immense value to future generations.24 So, the issue of the ultimate value of the contemporary Indigenous art movement is not black and white. In the contemporary (post)colonial context, the politics of representation continue to affect Indigenous artists deeply, in many ways. Gray is not, then, pitching it too strong by suggesting in The Artist is a Thief that the stakes are very high indeed for Indigenous artists. He is right in asserting that the issues surrounding representation, finances, widespread poverty, kinship obligations and ownership of images can be issues of life and death. While The Artist is a Thief deals with ideas in a clever and well-informed way about a subject that nobody else – to my knowledge – has written about in the form of a novel, the fact that Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy is not given any ‘voice’ is regrettable. Gandarrwuy’s perspective on what has transpired in terms of the so-called ‘art fraud’ is simply not given. In terms of the book’s discussion of contemporary visual art, however, its greatest weakness is the representation of art production in such uniformly negative terms. While politics surround the production of Dreaming works, which have been intensified by recent contact history, contestation around the questions of ownership of sacred imagery has ever been so. And for every Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy there are at least ten 23

Bruce James, “From the sandhills to the street, Kathleen Petyarre’s work is born of the desert and the Dreaming but she is every bit the urban modernist,” Sydney Morning Herald (2 June 2001), Spectrum: 12–13. 24 Personal communication, Kathleen Petyarre to the author, May 1999.

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Peggy Rockman Napaljarris, who derive immense pleasure and personal satisfaction from painting their Dreamings and being able to pass their sacred, encoded cultural information on to their children and grandchildren. In other words, Gray’s representation of the contemporary Indigenous art movement fails to take into account the complexities of what it really entails and actually means to Indigenous participants themselves, despite some of its messy politics.

Jean–Loup Wild, imagined community, and ‘the pain of unbelonging’ Benedict Anderson has described nations as being “imagined communities”25 – not ‘imagined’ in the sense of ‘fictitious’ or ‘fabricated’, but imagined in the sense that we could not possibly know everyone else who belongs to that ‘imagined community’ or nation. Indeed, nations are also ‘imagined’, in the sense that they arise from our ‘collective imagination(s)’. Nations, as Anderson sees them, are not only ‘imagined’ but also definable as inherently ‘limited’ – that is, they are necessarily limited in size – and they are also imagined as being ‘sovereign’. The notion of ‘imagined community’ and even of ‘community’ in itself is based on an assumed identification between and among ‘members’ of that community. So, in 2006, where in fact do Australian Aboriginal people fit into ‘our’ imagined community, Australia? And, for that matter, where are non-Indigenous people, migrants, or the descendants of the migrants who came to this place now called Australia, located in our ‘imagined community’? These questions have no simple answers, and all responses are contingent on one’s own speaking position. In the general sense, Indigenous Australian people are still regarded by many fellow non-Indigenous Australians as simultaneously belonging and not-belonging (unbelonging?) to the imagined community now called Australia: that is, as existing ontologically and epistemologically both inside and outside of that ‘imagined community’. Whether Indigenous people are positioned as belonging inside or outside of the imagined community fluctuates and depends on a number of variables, the most important of which is whether or not it serves the interests of the socially and polit25 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London & New York: Verso, rev. ed. 1991).

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ically powerful to include or exclude them at any given time.26 But because such inclusion/exclusion is a matter of perspective, and depends on who is doing the ‘positioning’, there are also Australians who continue to exclude Aboriginal people from the imagined Australian community, on a permanent basis. It also needs to be said that there are also Aboriginal people who continue to prefer to place themselves outside of the imagined Australian ‘nation’ or ‘family’. One major reason why many Indigenous Australians refuse to participate, except in superficial ways, in the dominant Australian ways of thinking, seeing and being is that, like their parents and grandparents, they have never been invited into the “imagined Australian community” on anything like equal terms offered to most other Australians. For example, when they are offered jobs, they are often menial and pointless ‘work-for-the-dole’ schemes.27 This factor, I believe, underwrites and overdetermines their apparent refusal to relinquish any aspect of their Indigeneity. What on earth for? In Australian Prime Minister’s John Howard’s ‘relaxed and comfortable’ Australia, for example, the imagined Australian community remains resolutely white, predominantly male, able-bodied, and heterosexual. According to this construction, which is shared by a significant number of other Australians, but not a majority, Aboriginal people, Asians, Arabs, gays, and many women, especially single mothers, are still positioned as existing pretty well outside of Howard’s imagined Australian community, except when it suits people to position them on the inside. The final question that I would like to ask in relation to The Artist is a Thief relates to the extent to which Stephen Gray contests or even vaguely interrogates Howard’s vision of Australia in his novel. I believe that, disappointingly, The Artist is a Thief does not in fact go far in the direction of challenging such views. Its central character, Jean–Loup Wild, from whose perspective the novel is largely written, is a young, white, ablebodied, heterosexual male. Although Jean–Loup experiences some personal and possibly even existential angst around his family and other issues during his stay at Mission Hole, and finds his experiences of living in 26

The 2000 Sydney Olympics is a good example. Aboriginal performers played a high-profile role, despite the two major political parties’ lack of commitment to Reconciliation. 27 In February 1997, the government announced a similar “work for the unemployment benefit” scheme for other young Australians. This move expands the possible meanings of ‘assimilation’ in the contemporary Australian context.

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an Aboriginal community confronting to a limited extent – and there is ample evidence that old colonial wounds continue to be felt, and, indeed, are being lived out on the settlement of Mission Hole – his apparent lack of recognition or awareness of the depth of these colonial scars is a cause for some apprehension. Amazingly, after a comparatively short stay at Mission Hole, Jean–Loup feels as though he belongs there: He watched a plane take off. It was like a tiny white fish rising from an ocean floor of forest-green weed. In the drone of its engines was a certain comforting grammar of normality. Last time out of here a pilot had told him a story about a wet-season storm in which the world had turned dark, the instruments went off their dials and the plane plunged one hundred and fifty metres. He had smiled, staring dreamily out of the window, thinking of the Biggles books he had read as a child. He was part of that landscape now: a white dot in a child’s drawing scribbled with wide brown rivers, with mudflats, mangroves and the glinting sea. The drawing was by an Aboriginal child: a Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy or a Duchess, perhaps, of the future, just now lost in a dream.28

To describe this as ‘the pain of unbelonging’ is pitching it too strong. It is practically the opposite. Far from suffering from any existential malaise arising from a sense of out-of-placedness at Mission Hole, Jean–Loup has retreated to the boyish colonial comforts provided by Biggles and the false, disingenuous belief that he has now been incorporated into an Aboriginal community, despite his short stay and his ambiguous sexual and other politics. Jean–Loup feels that he has become dissolved into an Indigenous art-work. Throughout this book, I found myself wishing quite frequently that Jean–Loup would melt, thaw and dissolve himself into dew, if not more conveniently into this Indigenous landscape. The unreadable, unfathomable exotics in this book are, in fact, the Aboriginal people themselves, and they appear, for the most part, to be standing resolutely outside of the imagined Australian community. By depriving Gandarrwuy of a voice, the author magnifies this sense of exclusion, although Gray’s reluctance in this context to give voice to an Aboriginal character is understandable. Nonetheless, this book – frustrating and infuriating as it may be at times, with all of its internal contradictions, its undercurrent of continuing 28

Gray, The Artist is a Thief, 277–78.

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colonial arrogance and insouciance, and its appropriative tendencies – does represent, on the part of both its protagonist and, by extension, its author, some kind of genuine struggle to come to terms with the ghosts of Australia’s colonial past. Thus, at best it only partially succeeds, exposing par excellence the fact that Australia’s colonial past continues to play itself out in multiple ways. The unresolved issues that manifest themselves in neocolonial arrogance and other related attitudes, as well as the various social pathologies and interracial estrangement that persist in Australia today, are transparently evident in this book.

Conclusion In conclusion, I do not wish to be too hard on this author or his book: very few Australian fiction writers today are prepared to tackle such delicate and controversial issues and it is important that this happens for Australians to move on, in the collective sense. The book takes some significant, albeit wobbly, steps in the direction of reconciliation. Arguably, the major achievement of The Artist is a Thief, however small, is Gray’s portrayal of the ‘learning journey’ undertaken by his nonIndigenous white Australian protagonist, Jean–Loup Wild. Gradually, Jean–Loup learns that genuine rapprochement or reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians necessarily involves both parties being prepared to share physical, geographical and epistemological space. Thus, Jean-Loup, despite his personal failure in this setting, becomes a kind of non-Indigenous Australian Everyman, on a pilgrimage of great metaphorical significance. It will perhaps be apparent to readers that there is a good deal of ambiguity in my response to The Artist is a Thief. It needs to be recognized that Gray, in terms of subject-matter, has boldly gone where others have not. On the other hand, his portrayal of Indigenous art in the context of settlement politics and Indigenous and non-Indigenous relationships29 leaves a good deal to be desired. There is no acknowledgement of the fact that what Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy is doing is actually high-status work, with all its attendant dignity. Does Gandarrwuy, for example, feel ‘good 29

Compared with Katherine Susannah Prichard’s Coonardoo (Australia: HarperCollins, 2002), for example, The Artist is a Thief seems simplistic and disappointing, particularly if we consider when both books were written.

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in her body’ when she paints? Is painting a critically important matter of cultural continuity for Gandarrwuy, a means of keeping her Dreamings alive for succeeding generations, as it is for Peggy Rockman Napaljarri and many other Warlpiri people, and as it is for Kathleen Petyarre? It is a great pity that we, as readers, do not at any point gain access to Gandarrwuy’s thoughts, words or feelings. The one character whose thought processes are disclosed to us is young, white, male and rather cocky. Ultimately, The Artist is a Thief shows just how far we still have to go.

WORKS CITED Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London & New York: Verso, rev. ed. 1991). Australians for Reconciliation Study Circle Kit, session 1.6. (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1993). Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power, ed. & intro. John B. Thompson, tr. Gino Raymond & Matthew Adamson (Langage et pouvoir symbolique; Paris: Seuil, 2001; tr. Cambridge: Polity, 1991). Foucault, Michel. “The Concern For Truth,” interview with François Ewald, in Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988): 255–67. Gray, Stephen. The Artist is a Thief (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2001). James, Bruce. “From the sandhills to the street, Kathleen Petyarre’s work is born of the desert and the Dreaming but she is every bit the urban modernist,” Sydney Morning Herald (2 June 2001): Spectrum: 12–13. Meggitt, Mervyn. Desert People (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1962). Napaljarri, Peggy Rockman, & Lee Cataldi. Warlpiri Dreamings and Histories, Yimikirli (Sydney: HarperCollins, 1994). Nicholls, Christine, & Ross Shanahan. “Learning Not To Labour: Recent Experiences of a Central Desert Community,” in Australian Labour History Reconsidered, ed. David Palmer, Ross Shanahan & Martin Shanahan (Adelaide: Australian Humanities, 1999): 162–76. Nicholls, Christine, & Ian North. Kathleen Petyarre: Genius of Place (Adelaide: Wakefield, 2001). N.T. Department of Education. Stories From Lajamanu (Darwin: Curriculum and Assessment Branch, 2nd ed. 1984). Prichard, Katherine Susannah. Coonardoo (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2002).

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The Spectral Belongings of Mudrooroo Lorenzo Perrona

Talking about Mudrooroo

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‘ B E L O N G I N G ’ has been a central and recurring theme in Mudrooroo’s work from the very beginning. Mudrooroo developed a series of narratives in which ‘belonging’ was formulated anew each time. In Wild Cat Falling (1965) it is the quest for identity, in Long Live Sandawara (1979) social and cultural struggle, in Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World (1983) a new historical perspective, and so on. The theme of ‘belonging’ was a major concern in Mudrooroo’s intellectual engagement with, and activism in, the Aboriginal cause until around 1988 (as it had been for others, such as Oodgeroo, Kevin Gilbert and Jack Davis). After 1988, prompted by the lobby of the Aboriginal movement, the Australian government changed its attitude, thereby giving rise to the period of reconciliation. The notion of ‘belonging’ that had existed until then was displaced and a new meaning took its place: it was presented as a mainstream discourse, and, at the same time, was emptied of radical content (i.e. the issue of land rights). In Mudrooroo’s novels, the problems created by this shift in sociopolitical expression and existential-emotional experiences had the effect of producing characters, both Aboriginal and settler, who are constituted by the ‘belonging’ to or the ‘need to belong’ to something – see, for instance, the character of the Englishman George Augustus Robinson, Fada, in Doctor Wooreddy and Master of the Ghost Dreaming (1991), and his determination to conquer a place for himself in the imperial hierarchy. At HE THEME OF

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the same time, the characters are imbued with a nomadic impulse, which works against any attempt at settling down, accepting the rules of a social group, and belonging to one territory and to one people (see, again, Fada, who travels across the colony on his ‘reconciliation mission’, and ends up creating a precarious and dying Aboriginal community, isolated from the real world, in which he behaves as a master). More recently, in two articles written in 2001 (“Spectral Homelands” and “Globalization in Dharamsala, Genoa and Singapore Airport”),1 Mudrooroo worked on the idea of the “spectral homeland,” which at first sight seems to be a theoretical reflection on what ‘belonging’ means in a postcolonial perspective and at a time when categories such as identity, nation etc. are in crisis – and yet, they are used generally as if they continue to possess their old meaning. Belonging to a community/nation is a dimension which contemporary individuals (citizens) strive for. We can define this contemporary state of being with the Derridean term hantise, of the spectral: an image or a structure which is haunting us is real, but is emptied of substance. According to Mudrooroo, for the exile, this spectre is the image or dream of the homeland as it was in the past; for the refugee, it is the image or dream of the homeland as s/he wants it to be. And it is implied that analogous spectral images arise in the common citizen in his/ her everyday life in his/her country, as existence is based on neo-liberalist global governance practices which render social participation empty, augment consumerism, and offer a system of values that have not been developed through the consensus of the populace but imposed from above. I wish to discuss Mudrooroo’s writing here with the aim of opening up or at least adding to the critical discourse on his work, which often seems unapproachable due to biographical issues that work to inhibit the possibility of understanding relevant developments and new perspectives in that writing. The theme of ‘belonging’ and ‘unbelonging’ is useful to this end. The development in Mudrooroo’s writing involves a shift from a panIndigenous discourse, based mainly on the Aboriginal historical experience in the process of colonization, to a more general, ‘worldly’ discourse, 1 Unpublished in English. Italian editions: Mudrooroo, “Patrie spettrali,” tr. Lorenzo Perrona, in Globalizzazione e Nuovi Conflitti, ed. Marcello Danovaro & Cristiano Ghirlanda (Rome: Derive / Approdi, 2002): 91–99, and “Globalizzazione a Dharamsala, Genova e Singapore Aeroporto,” tr. Lorenzo Perrona, Nuovi Argomenti 16 (2001): 155–63. In this essay, the quotations are taken from Mudrooroo’s original text in English.

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based on the recognition of the condition and status of any person in the age of globalization. Yet Mudrooroo’s literary style and approach are recognizable, characterized by syncretism in the use of cultural sources – a writing strategy involving the layering of different textual levels, both in his fiction and non-fictional work.2

The theme of ‘belonging’ The notion of belonging has been important in the formulation of an Indienous Australian identity and culture in the twentieth century. In the words of the Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo, Much that we loved is gone and had to go, But not the deep indigenous things. The past is still so much a part of us, Still about us, still within us. We are happiest Among our own people. We would like to see Our own customs kept, our old Dances and songs, crafts and corroborees. Why change our sacred myths for your sacred myths?3

A strengthened Indigenous identity will be able to build “harmony and brotherhood” so that “black and white may go forward together.” This poem envisages that a reinforced sense of belonging may promote social progress and community healing. In “We are going,” another well-known poem by Oodgeroo, the sense of belonging is even more intense because it is enunciated in the presence of destruction and death. The vision is focused on the decline of the old ways, the disappearance of a people; a sort of elegiac motif which works to create an intense emotion. They came into the little town A semi-naked band subdued and silent,

2

See my reading of Us Mob: “Inside Us Mob,” in Mongrel Signatures: Reflections on the Work of Mudrooroo, ed. Annalisa Oboe (Cross / Cultures 64; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2003): 153–66. 3 Oodgeroo, “Integration – Yes!,” in Indigenous Australian Voices: A Reader, ed. Jennifer Sabbioni, Kay Schaffer & Sidonie Smith (New Brunswick N J : Rutgers U P , 1998): 22.

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LORENZO PERRONA \ All that remained of their tribe. They came here to the place of their old bora ground Where now the many white men hurry about like ants. Notice of estate agents reads: ‘Rubbish May Be Tipped Here’. Now it half covers the traces of the old bora ring. They sit and are confused, they cannot say their thoughts: ’We are as strangers here now, but the white tribe are the strangers. We belong here, we are of the old ways. We are the corroboree and the bora ground, We are the old sacred ceremonies, the laws of the elders. We are the wonder tales of Dream Time, the tribal legends told. We are the past, the hunts and the laughing games, the wandering camp fires. We are the lightning-bolt over Gaphembah Hill Quick and terrible, And the Thunder after him, that loud fellow. We are the quiet daybreak paling the dark lagoon. We are the shadow-ghosts creeping back as the camp fires burn low. We are nature and the past, all the old ways Gone now and scattered. The scrubs are gone, the hunting and the laughter. The eagle is gone, the emu and the kangaroo are gone from this place. The bora ring is gone. The corroboree is gone. And we are going.4

This notion of belonging as empowering and healing and, at the same time, that which ties the individual to an endangered destiny, was also promoted by Mudrooroo. He worked on the conflict which lies in the very idea of belonging to a past era of happiness and to the despair of a people: the runaway, Wild Cat, the unnamed half-caste protagonist in Mudrooroo’s first novel, Wild Cat Falling (1965), recalls in the bush how he was hunting naked with his ancestors – and in a few minutes the cops will take him back to jail. And in Doctor Wooreddy the myth of past happiness fades into the apocalyptic myth of the ending of the world. More precisely, the theme of ‘belonging’ in Wild Cat Falling is not only clearly expressed but even reiterated. It sounds like a literary topos, an effective motif used by the writer to create a special effect of pathos. 4

Oodgeroo, “We are going,” in Indigenous Australian Voices, 147–48.

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This motif often appears as a clausula at the end of chapters and thereby possesses the greatest force. Consider, for instance, the following examples and key-points: 1) End of chapter one: after the prison initiation the protagonist

finally “belongs” in jail. “After solitary the prison accepted me as I had never been accepted outside. I belonged” (15). 2) Talking to the white girl on the beach, the protagonist says that he doesn’t belong to the bodgies mob anymore and now he is “bored to hell with them” (44). 3) End of chapter eight: the white girl calls to a friend in the “easy belonging of hers” (78), and implicitly the protagonist senses that he doesn’t belong to the middle class student group. 4) Towards the end of the novel the protagonist replies to the old aboriginal rabbit hunter who reveals his origins to him: “I don’t belong anywhere” (126). What is the “belonging” referred to in Wild Cat Falling? At the beginning of the novel, it refers to imprisonment (belonging in jail), which the character welcomes as a familiar and protective environment; and at the end of the novel, it refers to the Aboriginal land which the protagonist cannot reach because he is not free to do so and because he continues to refuse a positive outcome (“I don’t belong anywhere”). Mudrooroo, as an ‘Aboriginal’ intellectual and writer, was working on the very notion of identity from the 1960s up to the 1980s and during that time explored all the implications connected with the Janus-faced myth of belonging to a past era of happiness and to a future of extinction. The issue of identity and the associated mythic images, of course, belonged to the Indigenous minority of Australia and they were going to produce minority political effects – even though they were of major cultural and even legal relevance (as the Mabo case proved to be). Instead, the mainstream notion of what constitutes an Australian identity, which even passively influenced the majority of old and new Australians, was made up of a popular set of images that created a sense of belonging for some people. As Ghassan Hage writes, this popular set of images is constituted by “fantasies of White supremacy in a multicultural society.”5 This was the 5 Gassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (Sydney: Pluto, 1998).

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image of the ‘white Australia nation’, which was not yet questioned or deconstructed in the 1980s as it would be by critics of multiculturalism from the postcolonial perspective of the 1990s. Against this background, one can say that Mudrooroo’s work has been seminal and has touched the heart of the problem of identity and belonging: to identify and belong to what? “From what position do we observe and identify?”6 This was an essentially political question, to which Mudrooroo knew the kind of answer that was required. In the Preface to the 1994 edition of Kevin Gilbert’s Because a White Man’ll Never Do It (1973) he writes: In 1987 Kevin Gilbert helped to draft a comprehensive treaty which he first published that year. This important document could form the basis of laying to rest both the ghost of reconciliation and the various Mabo legislation messes. If reconciliation is to be successful it must be from negotiation directly entered into between representatives of the Aboriginal People and the Australian government.7

Providing political substance, and engaging in dialogue, imbuing Aboriginal representatives with the power of ‘enunciation’, would have dispelled the ‘ghost’ and spectre of belonging. Instead, ‘belonging’ was destined to remain a concern of cultural awareness, with mythic overtones, which easily transforms into Said’s “rhetoric of belonging” when a nationalist attitude prevails and selectively strings together history in narrative form.8 In his more recent novels, from Doctor Wooreddy on, Mudrooroo has developed these mythic insinuations, this ambiguous, paradoxical meaning which the term ‘belonging’ connotes, leading to an amplification of the gothic, even fetishistic, narrative of desire, blood and possession in his later novels of the Master series. This works as a means of deconstructing European colonialism – which sounds like a ‘writing back’ in fictional terms to the failure of politics, which did not answer, or answered by default, the political questions posed by Kevin Gilbert. And here the theory of Derrida comes into play.

6

Mudrooroo, “Patrie spettrali,” 91. Mudrooroo, Foreword to Kevin Gilbert, Because a White Man’ll Never Do It (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994): vii. 8 Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2000): 176. 7

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Spectral homeland In July 2001, Mudrooroo delivered a paper in Genoa, Italy, at a conference on culture and globalization which took place a few days before the G-8 meeting. In the city the barricades were being systematically erected to protect the ‘red zone’ from the protesters and demonstrations. Mudrooroo’s paper, “Spectral Homelands,” addressed the issue of the homeland in a problematic way, considering homeland as “an archetype in the collective or individual unconsciousness,” some “thing” to which “we aspire to belong to or gain, though it always escapes us.” I see “Homelands” not as an intellectual or even conscious political idea or postulate, but an archetype in the collective or individual unconsciousness: a spectre or presence which is seeking to emerge in its entirety, though as this is ideal it may never achieve reality, but some model may, especially with the new “reality” of globalisation, be being thrust upon us.9

Mudrooroo adopts the perspective of the ‘refugee’, as The world at this time has become the wandering ground of Non-Resident Persons such as the Tibetan refugees who have travelled to set up camps across the globe. […] the homeless ones have only the spectre of homelands to comfort them and to give them the strength to struggle to actualise the archetype.10

Jungian and Derridean terms are used as an approach to articulate the condition of the refugee, always seeking to give substance to the spectre, always striving for a sense of belonging, of an absolute surety that this phantom has the reality of substance; but alas, when we confront the spectre of our longings we find that there is little substance there, that the face beneath the visor merely reflects back to us the emptiness in our own selves. Ghost confronts ghost and the homeland, the fatherland, the motherland lacks substance and when it speaks it utters only one word, “Swear,” and what is this swearing to, but an oath of allegiance to the spectre itself of homeland.11

9

Mudrooroo, “Patrie spettrali,” 97. “Patrie spettrali,” 98–99. 11 Mudrooroo, “Patrie spettrali,” 91–92. 10

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Mudrooroo’s text makes more than direct reference to the Hamlet paradigm that Derrida utilizes to construct his discourse about the Specters of Marx: it is, in fact, interwoven with it. Derrida sees Marxism as spectral in origin (in Marx’s own words in his Manifesto, “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism”)12 and finds in Hamlet’s having to face the ghost all the elements of the existential condition of contemporary times: the “world out of joint,” the hantise of the spectre, the inheritance that we receive from the spectre, the injunction to swear allegiance to the spectre, the sense of guilt that pervades us. When Mudrooroo writes “The face beneath the visor merely reflects back to us the emptiness in our own selves,” he is paraphrasing and modifying, according to his poetic vision, the passage in which Derrida talks about the gaze of the ghost (the “visor effect”) and its injunction to swear allegiance and submission: This spectral someone other looks at us, we feel ourselves looked at by it, outside of any synchrony, even before and beyond any look on our part, according to an absolute anteriority (which may be on the order of generation, or more than one generation) and asymmetry, according to an absolutely unmasterable disproportion. Here anachrony makes the law. To feel ourselves seen by a look which it will always be impossible to cross, that is the visor effect on the basis of which we inherit from the law. Since we do not see the one who sees us, and who makes the law, who delivers the injunction (which is, moreover, a contradictory injunction), since we do not see the one who orders “swear,” we cannot identify it in all certainty, we must fall back on its voice. The one who says “I am thy Father’s spirit” can only be taken at his word. An essentially blind submission to his secret, to the secret of his origin: this is a first obedience to the injunction.13

The chilling stare of the Father’s Spirit “merely reflects back to us the emptiness in our own selves,” states Mudrooroo; but the image of its gaze recalls the concentration-camp image in Wildcat Screaming, where all convicts must be closely watched in a prison organized according to the Benthamian model of the Panopticon. Under the gaze of the Father’s

12

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, tr. Peggy Kamuf (Spectres de Marx; Paris: Galilée, 1993; tr. New York & London: Routledge, 1994): 4. 13 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 7 (author’s emphasis).

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Spirit we are trapped in ourselves and we give new form and strength to the spectre. Their memories [those of the Non-Resident Persons], their stories give a ghastly “existence” to spectres, ghosts and “things” that go bump in the night. We enter a realm of ghosts, in which spectre lies with spectres seeking comfort in the dry bones of corpses from which such ghosts as that of homeland arise at the moment of incomplete orgasms. The coming together is not for erotic fulfilment, but is a ritual of bereavement for the loss of a love. It is rite of mourning as well as an act of faith in the apparition, which orders us to “swear” and regain what has been lost even through acts of bloody vengeance. Such spectres and apparitions when they make their appearance do so with such a force that it is “hair raising.”14

Here lies the burden of ‘belonging’, which is comforting in its familiarity and provides the strength to continue the struggle, but at the same time produces the hantise in the individual who is sceptical about the given inheritance and does not want to “swear” unconditionally. This individual is also aware of living in the liminal, in-between spaces of the contemporary world. Mudrooroo uses literature to cross boundaries, to declare the existence of change, doing so, as usual, with a polemical end. He seeks to alert us to the danger represented by essentialism, patriotism and the push for the radicalization of identity in the globalized world (which is exactly what is happening in these days of widespread ‘war’). At the same time, however, the nature of spectrality may offer a way out of the ghastly appearances of reality, since, according to Derrida, the effect of spectrality may consist in evading the dialectical opposition between the effective presence and its ‘Other’: Why […] is the specter felt to be a threat? What is the time and what is the history of a specter? Is there a present of the specter? Are its comings and goings ordered according to the linear succession of a before and an after, between a present-past, a present-present, and a present-future, between a “real time” and a “deferred time”? If there is something like spectrality, there are reasons to doubt this reassuring order of presents and, especially, the border between the present, the actual or present reality of the present, and everything that can be opposed to it: absence, non-presence, non-effectivity, inactuality, virtuality, or even the simula-

14

Mudrooroo, “Patrie spettrali,” 93.

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crum in general, and so forth. There is first of all the doubtful contemporaneity of the present to itself. Before knowing whether one can differentiate between the specter of the past and the specter of the future, of the past present and the future present, one must perhaps ask oneself whether the spectrality effect does not consist in undoing this opposition, or even this dialectic, between actual, effective presence and its other.15

Evading the opposition between presence and non-presence gives theoretical support and space to the dimension of the ‘spiritual’. In Mudrooroo’s writing, the dimension of the ‘spiritual’ is evident in the poetic of maban reality,16 with its reference to the mythic and metaphysical world (such as the Aboriginal Dreaming) and its magical and polymorphic totem figures, as illustrated in chapter six (pp. 89–105) of Milli Milli Wangka: The Indigenous Literature of Australia. In this way, a new meaning for the notion of ‘belonging’ is created by Mudrooroo, a meaning which has lived through and has absorbed, beyond spectrality, the condition of ‘unbelonging’, the condition of displacement: leading to a “belonging to a spiritual geography”: If I sample Australians and their identity as Australians, I shift beyond the national apparatus, beyond any spectre of race and confront the spectre of homeland, that ghostly apparition beyond mentality and physicality, an “is and is not” of belonging to a spiritual geography, some “thing” to which we cling, some “thing” to which we aspire to belong or gain, though always it escapes us, as does identity for that matter.17

The sense of homelessness that Mudrooroo explores is at the core of the work of another Australian writer, Brian Castro. Castro casts a dark shadow over the idea of belonging and the construction of identity, breaking with family ties, dealing with the process of assimilation, acting the tricks of appropriation. Disinheritance is a risky but productive denial of belonging as an automatic entitlement, an unacquired heritage. For Castro, disinheritance is essential to writing: 15

Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 39–40 (author’s emphasis). “Maban [or Indigenous] reality might be characterized by a firm grounding in the reality of the earth or country, together with an acceptance of the supernatural as part of everyday reality”; Mudrooroo, Milli Milli Wangka: The Indigenous Literature of Australia (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1997): 97. 17 Mudrooroo, “Patrie spettrali,” 91. 16

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To push for disinheritance... in order to call down those worlds which only exist between translations. He wasn’t claiming truth with the imperialism of the monoglot, generalising it; universalising it. There were too many other voices, too many other worlds, a world of difference between facts and truths. Truth slips sideways, falls between languages, words, the weather ... a meditation, a layering, a personal testing. There is truth in the weather, but not in facts. Facts may look bare, but never entirely. […] You have to be the inventor of your own legacy. Not to soak up the static accumulations of what has gone before, but to light upon what can be constructed. To invent in the old sense of the word; invenire: to find written or to come upon in writing: a montage built by blasting out the myth of the past. To dispense, as Walter Benjamin suggested, with the continuum.18

While Mudrooroo feels the presence of the past – which spiritually enriches the present, albeit in an “anachronic” way – Castro places emphasis on the notion of “disinheritance” as the determination of the individual to construct her/his own “legacy,” ignoring and even destroying the myth of the past. Yet the attitude of Mudrooroo and Castro towards the Australian literary establishment is similar, in that both reveal the limits and narrowness of the general discourse on Australian culture. Mudrooroo and Castro, in fact, go beyond the indigenous/colonizer binary (of which the dualism belonging/unbelonging can be viewed as a consequence) to deconstruct the barriers of identity and reclaim the notion of freedom. The deconstructive system of Mudrooroo reveals, therefore, that ‘belonging’ is a desire whose object, at the level of reality, is unstable, uncertain. With globalization, the notion of homeland may become as redundant as the idea of nation in the contemporary international arena. I feel that it may be precisely this “globalisation” that may actualise, may give armour to some model of spectral homelands, for with the whole world being subject to global overarching governance and economic policies these may render the 19th century structures of nations redundant.19

18

Brian Castro, “Dangerous Dancing: Autobiography and Disinheritance,” Australian Humanities Review (December 1998), http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive /Issue-December-1998/castro.html (author’s emphasis). 19 Mudrooroo, “Patrie spettrali,” 97.

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Exile The condition of exile acts predominantly on one’s sense of belonging. On this point, a question concerning the persona of Mudrooroo might be relevant. We should consider whether Mudrooroo, who has lived in Kathmandu, Nepal, since 1990, left Australia of his own free will or whether he was in some way ‘forced’ to do so. Is he a writer in exile (or selfexiled), or a “global nomad” (as he likes to call himself), or a refugee? Exile could be an alternative to the mass institutions that dominate modern life.20 It is not a problem of personal status – even though there is this problem of personal status in the globalized contemporary world. Rather, the issue is the sense of deracination, cultural disorientation and ontological destabilization which results from the colonialism inherent in the Australian cultural establishment. But there is a positive aspect as well: what Edward Said calls the contrapuntal awareness of a plurality of vision and simultaneous dimensions.21 The point is, that globalization seems to provide new possibilities even for the exile. In his article on “Globalization in Genoa, Dharamsala and Singapore Airport” (2001), Mudrooroo states: Dharamsala and Singapore airport represent two versions of globalization. The airport seeks to submerge local content or culture which is allowed only to have a token presence, whereas in Dharamsala the local is still the foundation on which globalization rests or in which it has its roots. The former is absolutely spectacle and the latter I may term “spectral” in the sense that certain underground forces are still seeking to humanize globalization, to render it “homely” as it were.22

It is clear from this quotation, therefore, that the condition of the “spectral” has a dynamic dimension. The trajectory of the meaning of the spectral reinforces the fact – which is crucial in Mudrooroo’s case – that his writing executes a strategy which undermines the persistence of (neo)colonial discourse. A couple of short stories that Mudrooroo wrote in the same summer of 2001 elucidate with a sense of irony the crossing of boundaries enacted 20

Said, Reflections on Exile, 184. Reflections on Exile, 186. 22 Mudrooroo, “Globalizzazione,” 162. 21

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by two Tibetan adolescents, an elder sister and her brother, protagonists respectively of “How I tried to change my name” and “School boy hero.”23 Out of their juvenile vigour and desire for experience, they both end up crossing the boundary of tradition and the rules of the school they attend, acting under the influence of, and literally lending their bodies to, the popular spectres of the American world – Julia Roberts and the superheroes of the comics– with catastrophic consequences when reality prevails. The experiences of the protagonists in the respective stories produce, in the end, a growth in awareness and a higher level of maturity. These stories appear as small-scale parodies of the tragic themes outlined previously. But what is remarkable is the subtle drive towards belonging to some “thing” (being Tibetan, being like a Hollywood star, being a hero) and the calm relief and freedom that we intercept when crossing the in-between space of unbelonging.

WORKS CITED Castro, Brian. “Dangerous Dancing: Autobiography and Disinheritance,” Australian Humanities Review (December 1998). http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive /Issue-December-1998/castro.html Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, tr. Peggy Kamuf (Spectres de Marx; Paris: Galilée, 1993; tr. New York & London, Routledge, 1994). Gilbert, Kevin. Because a White Man’ll Never Do It, foreword by Mudrooroo (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994). Hage, Gassan. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (Sydney: Pluto, 1998). Mudrooroo. “Come ho tentato di cambiare nome,” tr. Lorenzo Perrona, Nuovi Argomenti 21 (2003): 204–21. ——. Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1983). ——. “Globalizzazione a Dharamsala, Genova e Singapore Aeroporto,” tr. Lorenzo Perrona, Nuovi Argomenti 16 (2001): 155–63. ——. Long Live Sandawara (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1979). ——. Master of the Ghost Dreaming (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1991). ——. Milli Milli Wangka: The Indigenous Literature of Australia (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1990). 23

Unpublished in English, the two stories were published in Italian under one title “Come ho tentato di cambiare nome,” tr. Lorenzo Perrona, Nuovi Argomenti 21 (2003). The quotations are taken from Mudrooroo’s original text in English.

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——. “Patrie spettrali,” tr. Lorenzo Perrona, in Globalizzazione e Nuovi Conflitti, ed. Marcello Danovaro & Cristiano Ghirlanda (Rome: Derive / Approdi, 2002): 91–99. ——. The Promised Land (Sydney: Angus&Robertson, 2000). ——. The Undying (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1998). ——. Underground (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1999). ——. Us Mob. History, Culture, Struggle: An Introduction to Indigenous Australia (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1995). ——. Wild Cat Falling (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1965). ——. Wildcat Screaming (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1992). Oboe, Annalisa, ed. Mongrel Signatures: Reflections on the Work of Mudrooroo (Cross / Cultures 64; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2003). Sabbioni, Jennifer, Kay Schaffer & Sidonie Smith, ed. Indigenous Australian Voices: A Reader (New Brunswick N J : Rutgers U P , 1998). Said, Edward W. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2000).

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The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith and the ‘Pain of Unbelonging’ Sue Ryan–Fazilleau

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‘the pain of unbelonging’1 brings us face to face with the much bandied concept of identity – individual, group, national. In this essay, I am going to focus on the national level in my analysis of Peter Carey’s novel The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994). The term ‘identity’ implies an oscillation between similarity and difference; identity is constructed through a dual movement between assimilation and differentiation, whereby one identifies oneself with others and distinguishes oneself from them.2 There is no such thing as a ‘natural’ national identity. Every political strategy of identity is a construction rationally undertaken by identifiable actors.3 The European nation-state is a nineteenth-century creation resulting from an ideological revolution that took place at the end of the eighteenth century when the notion of the sovereignty of the people replaced that of the sovereignty of the monarch and the principle of social division into discrete orders was challenged.4 The nation was posited as indepenHE RECENTLY COINED PHRASE

1 This phrase was used by Germaine Greer in an interview about her new work Whitefella Jump Up (London: Profile, 2004). 2 Edmond Marc, “La construction identitaire de l’individu,” in Identités: L’individu, le groupe, la société, ed. Catherine Halpern & Jean–Claude Ruano–Borbalan (Auxerre: Sciences Humaines, 2004): 34. 3 Sylvain Allemand, “L’imaginaire dans l’affirmation identitaire: Entretiens avex Jean–Francois Bayart,” in Identités, ed. Calpern & Ruano–Borbalan, 326. 4 Anne–Marie Thiesse, “La fabrication culturelle des nations européennes,” Identités, ed. Calpern & Ruano–Borbalan, 278.

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dent of dynastic and military history, as an entity that existed before the monarch and would outlive him. It was conceived as a community whose members were born into it, and it assumed the principle of equality and fraternity between them. In order to justify this subversive equality between aristocrat and labourer, a collective identity had to be forged. Its function was to give the members of the community a sense of belonging.5 A common heritage was constructed, based on national History,6 cultural monuments, historical monuments, popular traditions, emblematic landscapes.7 The imposition of a national written language was a central tool of cultural unification. Education was granted a monopoly of ‘legitimate’ national culture and became the essential vehicle of its propagation, although artistic creativity also played an important role in this process.8 It was the intellectuals and the artists who shaped the heritage that gave form and power to the notion of national identity.9 This cultural heritage, which was used to create a sense of belonging in order to engender social cohesion within the nation-state, was also used as a weapon of imperial oppression in the European colonies. It was passed on to the ‘natives’ through the school system, thus making education “a massive cannon of the artillery of empire.”10 This military metaphor is, however, misleading insofar as education affected, “in Gramsci’s terms, a ‘domination by consent’”11 rather than by force. In English colonies, English culture was passed on to the ‘natives’ and the colonial settlers in the full confidence that it would have a civilizing influence, while serving as a continual reminder of where civilization was really located – in the imperial 12 centre.

5

Thiesse, “La fabrication culturelle des nations européennes,” Identités, 278. This History had its roots in the far-distant past and related glorious events and the exploits of national heroes (Halpern & Ruano–Borbalan, Identités, 258). 7 Thiesse, “La fabrication culturelle des nations européennes,” Identités, 279. 8 “La fabrication culturelle des nations européennes,” Identités, 280. 9 “La fabrication culturelle des nations européennes,” Identités, 284. 10 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, ed. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (1995; London: Routledge, 1999): 425. 11 Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 425. 12 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Postcolonial Culture, Postimperial Criticism” (1992), in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 476. 6

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Colonized subjects were taught to venerate the imperial culture, and this undermined their confidence in their own culture. The cultural model presented by the authorities at school implicitly defined the colonized subject as Other, since there was an insurmountable distance between this model and his/her own everyday experience.13 This process provoked ambivalence in the colonial subject – veneration of the idealized imperial culture cohabited with resentment and the pain of exclusion because this ideal was by definition unattainable in the colonies. The term ‘the pain of unbelonging’ alludes to this particularly poignant mixture of veneration, longing and resentment of insurmountable exclusion. In his exploration of Australian national identity, Peter Carey has frequently examined the Australian sense of exclusion from the meta-narratives of British and American history and culture and its consequences on national behaviour. For instance, in Illywhacker (1985) he identified it as the reason why Australians lie to themselves about their celebrated antiauthoritarianism while behaving like a nation of “pets” towards the great imperial powers. In The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, within the context of a study of the relations between culture and imperialism, the pain of unbelonging is once more central to his concerns, this time as it affects national cultural production. In this novel, the pain of unbelonging is materialized through the creation of a protagonist whose multiple physical handicaps condemn him to social exclusion. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith is a Bildungsroman (and also Künstlerroman) describing the trials Tristan must undergo before he can overcome his identity crisis in order to become a cultural warrior capable of safeguarding Australian sovereignty. The title, a clear reference to Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759–67), gives the false impression that Carey is here ‘writing back’ to the English canon. The experienced reader assumes the novel will be a classical postcolonial exercise in turning the tables on the former colonizer, making the periphery into the centre and vice versa. Carey reinforces this impression by reproducing certain idiosyncrasies of Sterne’s novel, including his direct addresses to the implied reader.14 13

For example, children in Australian schools read stories extolling the virtues of a ‘white Christmas’ and defining the Australian colonies as a places where evil outcasts, like Magwitch in Great Expectations, were sent into exile. 14 Sterne’s “Sir” and “Madam” become Carey’s Voorstandish equivalents “Meneer” and “Madam.”

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However, we soon realize that the implied reader represents not the former English colonizer but the American neo-imperialist. In several interviews, Carey admitted that the novel is about Australia and America “‘yet all of my effort was to complicate it, to make it much more than that’.”15 Carey’s fictional U S A , Voorstand, has some characteristics that distinguish it from the real U S A : for example, geographically, it is closer to the Arctic; politically, it has a prime minister; historically, it is a former colony of both the English and the Dutch. But the similarities are more striking and numerous than the differences. The same is true of Efica, the novel’s fictional Australia: for instance, politically, Efica is already a republic; geographically, it is an archipelago composed of eighteen small islands; historically, it was ‘discovered’ around 200 years before Australia and was colonized first by French dyers and only after by English convicts and their gaolers. But, once again, the similarities – language, place names, climate, flora, fauna, even the ubiquity of corrugated iron as a building material16 – are more numerous. More importantly, Australian readers were eager to see Efica as an allegory for Australia; they had been following the development of Carey’s ideas on Australian national identity ever since the publication of his first novel, Bliss (1981), where he put himself forward as a teller of Australian stories and history. The setback they had received with the publication of The Tax Inspector (1991), the novel he wrote before The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, had made them even more anxious to read about national identity again. The lack of an exact correspondence between Australia and Efica allows the writer to side-step criticism – no doubt a significant consideration after the attacks sparked off by his previous novel – but also to offer general reflections on the neocolonial relations between two former settler colonies and thus to participate in the theoretical debate on postcolonialism. The Eficans (Australians) are the “laconic, belligerent, self-doubting inhabitants of the abandoned French and English colonies, descendants of convicts” (9). They identify with “the lost, the fallen” (136), the underdog, and, having been forsaken by both their mother countries, have a psychological wound that will not heal; the pain of unbelonging creates 15

A.P . Riemer, “The Creation of Careyland,” Independent Monthly (September

1994): 69. 16

Peter Carey, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (St Lucia: U of Queensland P ,

1994): 30–31. Further page references are in the main text.

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nostalgia and an exaggerated reverence for cultural manifestations that come from the ‘centre’ from which they are excluded. For example, each Christmas, Jacqui’s father,17 Jesse Lorraine, drives a refrigerated truck up into the mountains and brings back a load of snow that he deposits on his urban garden. Then, while the snow melts in the tropical sun, he reads stories about snow, taken from the European and especially the English canon, to his neighbours, who have all gathered there for the annual show: “they were Eficans, and their history had given them [a] nagging loss which the cold white snow temporarily eased” (325). Since literature and emblematic landscapes were two elements of the common cultural heritage constructed for the nation-states in the nineteenth century, it is no accident that these two elements are associated here: the despised Efican natural environment is fleetingly – and crudely – forced to resemble that of the revered mother country while extracts from the English literary canon are intoned. Thus the ‘orphaned’ Eficans can briefly fantasize that they belong to the imperial culture. But this criticism contains an element of compassion, and the only really negative point in Carey’s national portrait is the fact that the Eficans’ ancestors massacred the native peoples; this crime has not yet been officially acknowledged, a reminder that the process of reconciliation in Australia was incomplete in 1994 (and remains so today). Carey’s allegorical portrait of the American national character is less benevolent. Voorstanders indulge in car-worship and their popular culture titillates the audience with representations of violence and death. Carey gives a satirical account of the behaviour of the Saarlim (New York) cultural elite. He sketches an even more biting satire of the cynical way the Americans exploit immigrants and compares it with their historical welcoming of the persecuted minorities of other lands – illegal Voorstandish “facilitators” prey on the illegal immigrants, whom they, revealingly, call “fresh meat.” After fleecing them, the facilitators bring them to Saarlim, where, after hours of queuing, they receive a “pink slip of paper” (300) by which the administration hypocritically grants them “P O W ” status. There is an inscription on this ‘pink slip’ that ironically echoes the welcoming inscription on the base of the Statue of Liberty. In a gesture which recalls what was done to the Jews in Nazi concentration camps, their wrists are then branded with a “‘Guest’ number [that] gave no 17

Jacqui is the undercover spy who has a job as Tristan’s nurse.

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guarantee of residency or protection of the law but [...] was, just the same, there for life” (300) and they are free to be exploited on the lowest rung of the economic ladder in Voorstand. In this context, however, Carey underlines the difference between the immigrant experience and the experience of the colonized subject – the immigrants are willing to accept this economic exploitation, for the moment, in exchange for entry and they choose to embrace the culture of their new nation, as demonstrated by the enthusiastic reaction of those in the queue to Tristan’s performance in the Bruder Mouse suit. Carey also uses the equivalence established between Voorstand and the U S A to denounce what he presents as an American tendency to propagate witch-hunts. The Saarlim millionaire Peggy Kram and her lawyer suffer an attack of paranoia when they see the repulsive deformed dwarf who has been masquerading as their hallowed Mouse. They conclude that such an ugly being with such a lack of respect for a Voorstandish icon must be a terrorist. So Tristan becomes the victim of a witch-hunt and must flee back to the “sanity (412)” of Efica. Carey, who is himself in the business of simplification, homogenization, codification and representation of national identity that the artists and intellectuals of the European nation-states undertook in the nineteenth century, presents us with an allegorical Australia that is unsure of herself and ready to identify with the underdog opposite an allegorical America that is too sure of herself, ready to impose her point of view and to exploit the weak. His ‘Australians’ suffer from that existential malaise which Greer baptized as “the pain of unbelonging,” whereas his ‘Americans’ do not. In the opening chapter of The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, the narrator announces his educational project and explains his choice of medium: If you were my students I would direct you to read Efica: from penal colony to welfare state,† The Caves of Democracy,‡ and Volume 3 of Wilbur’s The Dyer’s Cauldron.* But you are not my students and I have no choice but to juggle and tap-dance before you, begging you please sit in your seats while I have you understand exactly why my heart is breaking (5–6).

By analogy, we can conclude that Carey wishes to educate his readers in Australian colonial and neocolonial history but that he believes the only way to get them to read to the end is by entertaining them. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith is a work of historical popularization that seeks to

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reach a wider reading public than the one that would read a history book. He is also following in the footsteps of postcolonial writers who have chosen literature as their medium because they consider they have been denied access to the ranks of those who write History. Carey places his study firmly within the context of the international debate on postcolonialism. He does this by invoking a simplified version of some of its consecrated concepts. In several interviews,18 for instance, he declared that his goal in writing this novel was to explore the relations between the ‘periphery’ and the ‘centre’. The narrator also uses these terms in the narrative. For example, at the beginning of the ninth chapter, in a direct address to his implied Voorstandish readers, he justifies his need to explain the Efican viewpoint to them: As you yourselves were once subjects of the Dutch you will understand my passion to set this right before we move on – it is the periphery shouting at the centre, and you will forgive me, I hope, for surmising that you know even less about Efica than the British and the French who colonized the eighteen islands, murdered its indigenous inhabitants, set up dye works and prisons, and then abandoned us as being an unsuccessful idea. (32)

It seems to me that Carey adds his own voice to the postcolonial debate in the Australian context, where the U K is generally considered the ‘centre’, by transferring the notion of the ‘centre’ to Voorstand (the U S A ), the neocolonial power. Carey is interested in studying the neocolonial relations between two former settler colonies with opposing ‘national characters’. He also borrows the vocabulary of postcolonial theory when Tristan, once again addressing the Voorstandish reader, says “you are a settler culture, like ours” (165). And he attributes to Jacqui Lorraine a PhD thesis with the explicitly postcolonial title “‘Orientalist Discourses and the Construction of the Arab Nation State’” (268), an obvious allusion to Edward Said’s Orientalism. As soon as Tristan is able to speak comprehensibly for the first time in his life, thanks to the “‘Two-pin Vocal Patch’” (376), a piece of technical wizardry developed for the Saarlim water Sirkus, he chooses to recite a speech from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (377–78), that

18

See, for example, Robert Dessaix, “An Interview with Peter Carey,” Australian Book Review 167 (December 1994 – January 1995): 18–20, and Riemer, “The Creation of Careyland.”

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famous allegory of colonized/colonizer relations. Significantly, he chooses the role of Caliban, the archetypal colonized Other. Through all these clear allusions to some of the best-known concepts, terms, theorists, symbols of postcolonialism, Carey invites the cultivated but non-specialist reader to situate The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith within the framework of the international postcolonial debate. This approach is in keeping with his self-appointed role as artisan of an Australian national identity. The Eficans have an ambivalent attitude towards the Voorstanders. On the one hand, their intelligentsia resent the political, military and cultural dominance that Voorstand exercises over their country. On the other, they revere Voorstandish culture. Jacqui, an intellectual whose specialization is postcolonial studies, is also “a Voorwacker, a fan, a follower of the Sirkus and all its trivia” (295), and, when she gets to Saarlim, sees the mythical places, and even meets members of its high society, she regrets that someone from home is not around “to witness her entrance into such glamorous society” (368). Felicity Smith, an activist fighting to defend Efican culture against the onslaught of Voorstandish culture, chooses to read her son a Voorstandish tale to comfort him on the day she forces him to leave his childhood home (129). And when her lover, Bill, debates whether he should leave Efica to accept the job he has been offered in Saarlim, she tells him that he has to go, for there he will see “’the best theatre in the world, every night. You’ll do voice with Fischer and movement with Hals or Miriam Parker. You’ll be a great actor. You’ll never be a great actor here’” (52). Vincent, a political activist whose ambition is to see an end put to the military pact between the two countries and the Voorstanders and their military installations thrown out of Efica is, paradoxically, also a devoted student of Voorstandish culture, especially the Sirkus (56–57). Tristan formulates this Efican ambivalence towards Voorstand: even when we write our manifestos against you, even when we beg you please to leave our lives alone, we admire you, not just because we have woven your music into our love affairs and wedding feasts, not just for what we imagine you are, but for what you once were – for the impossible idealism of your Settlers Free who would not eat God’s Creatures, who wanted to include even mice and sparrows in their Christianity (292).

Carolyn Bliss states that “the Jamesian germ of the novel was a visit to Disneyworld in Florida” that Carey and his family made in 1990. She goes on to point out that

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the ambivalence in Carey’s response to Disneyworld – moral condemnation mixed with guilty pleasure – is reflected in the whole register of feelings that the Eficans, former colonists [...], direct toward giant Voorstand, which once freed itself from colonial domination [...], only to impose cultural imperialism on the rest of the world.19

As for the Voorstanders, their ambivalence towards Efica is of a different nature. Although, on the one hand, there are Voorstandish scholars who study Efican culture (44), and the Voorstandish government considers Efica strategically important enough to interfere in its internal politics in order to prevent the election of a government hostile to maintaining the two nations’ strategic alliance, on the other hand, the average Voorstander does not even know where Efica is (229). Several Efican characters express their wonder at this paradox, which seems all the more perplexing since both countries are former settler colonies. Should not their common experience of colonization bring them together? This is how Sparrow, one of the actors of the Feu Follet theatre company, explains the relationship: ‘Both countries have old-world parents [...]. You would think we had so much in common, but we’re the little brother – we love them, but they don’t notice us. [...] It’s like seeing a Vedette in the supermarket. You know the Vedette like he’s your friend, but you’re nothing to him.’ (169)

Wendell Deveau, agent for the DoS, the Efican secret service that is completely subservient to its Voorstandish counterpart, the V I A , goes even further: ‘Do you know how many years if took for us to persuade the V I A to take us seriously? They’re New World people like us, but you would never know it from their patronizing attitude. They’re worse than the English or even the French. Do you know what it took, the things we did for them so they would trust us? The shit we ate?’ (373)

So why is the balance of power between these two former settler colonies so lopsided? Why is one hamstrung by the pain of unbelonging and not the other? Carey has been interested in the balance of power between Australia and the U S A for decades. He began to explore it in his short stories in the 19 Caroline Bliss, “Time and Timelessness in Peter Carey’s Fiction: The Best of Both Worlds,” Antipodes 9.2 (December 1995): 103.

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1970s. For example, “American Dreams” and “Report on the Shadow Industry” examined American cultural hegemony; “A Windmill in the West” criticized the existence of American military bases in Australia.20 Carey continued studying the balance of power between the two countries in his first novel, Bliss (1981). In The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, he encourages the reader to wonder why two countries with an apparently similar colonial history should today find themselves in a neocolonial relationship where one dominates the other – culturally, economically, strategically and, ultimately (if one accepts, as Carey does, that the C I A plotted to overthrow the Australian Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, in 1975), politically. He implicitly invites the reader to discover the solution to this enigma by comparing the colonial history he gives each of his fictional nations in the novel. And the fundamental difference between the two histories lies in the original reason why white settlers invaded these two lands: Efica (Australia) was first used as a human rubbish dump. The dregs of English society were transported to the other end of the world, where they could be left and forgotten. The French settlers of Efica were also forcibly transported and then abandoned by their mother country (33). Louis X I V “shanghaied the master dyers of Rheims and shipped them to” Efica to extract red dye from a local cactus (33). When he found easier ways to get red dye at home, he simply abandoned them. The Voorstanders, on the other hand, chose to leave Europe, where they were persecuted for their heretical religious beliefs. Plainly, these historical backgrounds recall, in a simplified version, those of Australia and the U S A . Since the notion of identity covers fields as different as personal, group and national identity, there is a constant temptation to borrow comparisons across the borders of the three. Here I would like to recall the wellworn analogy between the psychological development of a human being and that of a nation. On one side, we have a ‘child’ forsaken by her ‘parents’. This child cannot grow into a well-adjusted adult until she has dealt with the psychological wounds of her past. On the other side, we have a child who has developed ‘normally’, who enters into conflict with her parents during her adolescent years, and then chooses to leave home when she feels ready to lead her own life. This child grows into a welladjusted adult. As such, she may reject certain of her parents’ values, specifically those at the root of the conflict which led her to leave home. 20

These three short stories are to be found in The Fat Man in History (1974).

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But, in general, the ‘normal’ adult’s behaviour largely reproduces the model she unconsciously absorbed from her parents; she shares many of their values. Such is the case of Voorstand/America today, which perpetuates its parents’ imperialist heritage. Carey uses the filial metaphor to explain why Efica, unable to overcome the trauma of having been abandoned by her ‘parents’, is ever in search of surrogate ‘parents’ and therefore offers herself up as a willing victim to neocolonial powers (the U S A but also, as Carey suggested in Illywhacker, Japan). According to this analysis, Australia’s experience of premature abandonment has created a festering wound that will not heal and prevents the country from getting beyond the postcolonial phase of its national development. Australia’s penal heritage differentiates it from many other former settler colonies. But in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith Carey is not directly interested in the postcolonial relations between the U K and Australia. Unlike Australia, Efica is already a republic. These relations only interest him insofar as they help elucidate the neocolonial relationship between Australia and the U S A . Individual Eficans are complicit in the oppression of their nation by Voorstand, as is shown through three concrete examples in the novel. The first example is Wendell Deveau, who proves his good intentions by ‘saving’ Tristan (against his will) when he finds him alone on the side of the road. Wendell is of limited intelligence and joins the Efican secret service because he believes their imperialist propaganda. The second example is Jacqui Lorraine, who has no such excuse. She is intelligent, educated and quite aware of the methods used by the agents of neocolonialism, yet she is seduced by Voorstandish culture despite herself and sells out knowingly in exchange for a trip to the mythical city of Saarlim. Then there is Wally Paccione. He has no illusions and is not duped by the glamour, and yet he refuses to stand up and resist Voorstandish imperialism. His passive attitude is attributed to his penal heritage – both historical and personal.21 We have seen that the imperialist authorities use culture to shore up their hegemony. But culture is such a powerful and insidious weapon of colonial oppression that decolonized societies continue to revere the culture of the former imperial power and to denigrate their own long after

21

His ancestors were convicts, and he himself has done time in gaol.

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political independence has been achieved (for example, the cultural cringe still exists in Australia). In an interview with Dessaix, Carey declares: because of the power of the culture, whether popular or high, that comes from [the old imperial powers], the colonies really grow up believing the real world is elsewhere. The periphery believes that the real world is at the centre, which of course is ludicrous, because 90% of the world is on the periphery. And I think that the hunger Eficans have for Voorstand is that hunger of the historically dispossessed or transplanted for what they feel is the real world.22

During the period of colonization, the imperial power imposes its culture through the education system, which is under its control. This method is no longer available to the neocolonial power. Voorstand cannot openly invade and colonize Efica. Although it is free to exercise economic imperialism, its military imperialism must remain ‘secret’.23 Since its culture can no longer be imposed by the education system, the neocolonial power must resort to less coercive means, such as seducing the public with cultural productions that offer the vicarious satisfaction of the individual’s basest fantasies. In exchange for this thrilling opportunity to indulge guilty impulses, the public willingly eschews the effort of thinking for itself and is thus primed to swallow the accompanying ideological message. Thus, in Efica the Sirkus shoulders out national cultural productions that may be less seductive and require an effort of reflection, and neocolonial culture becomes an instrument of imperial power. As Tristan’s mother remarks, in Saarlim the Sirkus is a native cultural manifestation, a legitimate expression of Voorstandish national identity; in Efica it becomes an imperialist weapon (49–50). As Tristan says to his Voorstandish readers, It was through your charm and your expertise that you conquered us, with your army, yes, and with the V I A , but you kept us conquered with jokes and dancers, death and beauty, holographs, lasers, Vids, with perfectly engineered and orchestrated suspense. (294)

22

Robert Dessaix, “An Interview with Peter Carey,” Australian Book Review 167 (December 1994 – January 1995): 19. 23 For example, Felicity Smith is assassinated by V I A agents, but this is passed off as a suicide, and other members of the Blue Party are discredited by wrongful accusations of corruption (also the work of the V I A ) that are disproved only after the election.

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The Sirkus is a cross between Disneyland and Hollywood super-productions; the Dog, the Duck, the Mouse (Carey’s working title for the novel24), who obviously recall Goofy, Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, reign supreme there; the techniques used in the Sirkus remind us of Spielberg-type special effects; the rhythm is racy, the suspense intense, the violence shocking and, even if the overall effect lacks subtlety and is unashamedly mercantile (with its T-shirts, caps and other spin-off products), the Sirkus is “thrilling, spectacular, addictive” (50). Surprisingly, idealism played a part in its original conception: * The Voorstand Sirkus began its extraordinary development, not as the powerful entertainment industry it is today, but as the expression of those brave Dutch heretics, the ‘Settlers Free’, who were intent on a Sirkus Sonder Gevangene – a Circus without ‘prisoners’, that is, one without animals. (10)

Originally, the Dog, the Duck and the Mouse were symbols of the ideological stance for which the first Voorstand immigrants were persecuted in the Old World. It is ironic that these symbols of the Voorstandish refusal to bow to oppression should have degenerated into tools with which today’s Voorstanders ‘oppress’ other nations. The origins of the Voorstand Sirkus are hybrid – “Dutch and English” (295). And yet no-one would dream of applying the label ‘postcolonial’ to this cultural manifestation of the uniquely Voorstand national identity. The cultural influences of the historical colonizers were long ago absorbed and digested. In The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, the town of Saarlim is a metaphor for Voorstandish culture, but it is also the cultural capital of the world (52). Large areas of this city have fallen into a state of decay that shocks Efican tourists when they first arrive: Tristan is upset by the pitiful state of the roads leading to Saarlim, with their cracked and weedy verges “littered with abandoned pieces of cars and trucks” (292). Then he is disappointed when he discovers how seedy the “Grand Concourse [...] the home of Sirkus” (294) (Broadway) really is. Saarlim only transmogrifies into “the fairy city of the vids” (352) under cover of night. The name chosen by Carey for the town that represents New York underlines several of its diverse characteristics: “Saarlim” evokes “Har24 Peter Carey, “From The Dog, the Duck, the Mouse,” World Literature Today 67.3 (Summer 1993): 541–47.

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lem” (the black ghetto), “Salem” (the site of the seventeenth-century witch-hunts), “Saleem” (the narrator of Salman Rushdie’s celebrated postcolonial novel that writes back to the English canon, Midnight’s Children). The name “Saarlim” also has a Dutch ring to it that reminds us both of New York’s Dutch history and of the colonial history of Voorstand. The mercantilism of the contemporary Sirkus and the deterioration of the capital city of Voorstandish culture invite the reader to reflect on the evolution of culture in general. Carey orients our reflections on this issue through the example of Peggy Kram, the Saarlim cultural mogul, who owns four Sirkus Domes and claims to be the custodian of Voorstand identity: she also owns “twenty Ghostdorps (where she had whole families of actors playing out ‘The Great Historical Past’)” (358). She maintains that Voorstand’s history would be lost if she did not thus hand it down from generation to generation (406). Under the influence of her new lover, Tristan disguised as Bruder Mouse, she suddenly becomes aware of how much Saarlim has decayed and of how much violence there is out on its streets. She decides to use her power to remedy the situation single-handedly. Her plan is to buy the streets and parks of Saarlim “back from the foreigners” (408) and forcibly impose on its citizens the values of their Dutch founding fathers. This is an illustration of how the concept of national identity can be used as a weapon of exclusion. In the words of Bayart, any affirmation of cultural identity is a potential source of conflict and even of totalitarianism. An ‘authentic’ culture defines itself in opposition to neighbouring cultures, which it represents as radically different. This supposition of alterity is a principle of exclusion which, if taken through to its logical conclusion, can lead to ethnic cleansing. Intercultural exchange is felt to be a threat to the authenticity of the ‘pure’, national identity.25 Kram’s lawyer recognizes that she is mad, and sees the true nature of her vision of Saarlim – a prison (409). Thus Carey expresses his vision of the nature and role of culture and of the dangers inherent in the quest for national identity: identity evolves and its different stages are preserved in its myriad cultural productions. However, a living society cannot be forced to conform to, or even be accurately represented by, any of these historical manifestations of its changing identity; this would be tantamount to incarceration. Although cultural pro25 Allemand, “L’imaginaire dans l’affirmation identitaire: Entretiens avex Jean– François Bayart,” in Identités, ed. Calpern & Ruano–Borbalan, 327.

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ductions do represent historical facets of national identity, because of their static nature they cannot keep pace with the flux that is also one of its fundamental characteristics. Carey has been interested in this notion for many years.26 Carey’s vision corresponds to that presented by Albert Memmi in his 27 2004 portrait of the decolonized subject. Memmi claims that culture is a collection of odds and ends where tired old recipes cohabit with brilliant new ideas. He believes that ‘living culture’ constantly tests traditional elements to see if they still correspond to today’s problems and constantly modifies them so that they will. ‘Living culture’ is by nature dangerous, iconoclastic and heretical. In order to maintain his own power, the despot in the recently decolonized country imposes the most fossilized part of cultural tradition and uses it as a bastion against the first faltering steps of ‘living culture’. This is precisely the technique used by the colonizer during the period of colonization.28 The besieged Efican culture is young and its means of expression are limited. We first encounter it in the language Carey’s characters use: English flavoured with French (and French-sounding) vocabulary and expressions. We also discover that Efica has an indigenous circus with its roots in the English tradition, a circus with lions, elephants and horses, which differentiates it from the Voorstand Sirkus, which has no animals. Felicity Smith undertakes to reinforce this slim cultural heritage by creating a national theatre. She incorporates elements of the indigenous circus and an activist postcolonial message denouncing Voorstand imperialism – the Empire plays back. Her company, the Feu Follet, is a theatrical collective whose members take themselves very seriously: “What this poor theatre saw itself doing was inventing the culture of its people” (50). Their aim is educational – they hope to stop their fellow county(wo)men behaving like colonial subjects by opening their eyes to the real power balance between Efica and Voorstand. Here: you could forget the franchised Sirkus Domes and the video satellites circling above the ozone layer, and you could imagine that theatre could still change 26

See Peter Carey, “American Dreams,” in The Fat Man in History (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1974): 101–13. 27 Albert Memmi, Portrait du décolonisé arabo-musulman et de quelques autres (Paris: Gallimard, 2004). 28 Memmi, Portrait du décolonisé, 58–59.

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the destiny of a country. In Efica you could have the illusion of being a warrior in a great battle, and when you toured you lived with others who shared the same illusion. When you toured, you performed as if art mattered. Doing agitprop under a petite tente you were inventing your nation’s culture. (77)

But, in fact, members of the Feu Follet preach to the converted and nothing changes (93). When she is made to see this, Felicity is devastated and feels that her life’s work has been wasted effort. Since the Feu Follet is the locus of the intradiegetic postcolonial discourse, we can establish an analogy between this theatre company and the locus of extradiegetic postcolonial discourse: i.e. the novel itself. Is Carey suggesting that all he has written here will do nothing to change the balance of power between Australia and the U S A because he, too, is preaching to the converted? If so, his attitude towards the role of the activist writer in a young postcolonial society has changed since he wrote Illywhacker in 1984. In the latter he aspired to make the Australian reader rebel against Australia’s economic submission to the U S A , here he apparently aspires only to present his postcolonial ideas to an audience of like-minded readers. Felicity Smith loses faith in the power of a nascent culture to achieve her activist agenda. In her despair, she succumbs to the pain of unbelonging and writes both her company and the whole Efican nation off as a cheap and insignificant gimmick: ‘Did we even begin to define a national identity? [...] No one can even tell me what an Efican national identity might be. We’re northern hemisphere people who have been abandoned in the south. All we know is what we’re not. We’re not like those snobbish French or those barbaric English. We don’t think rats have souls like the Voorstanders. But what are we? We’re just sort of “here.” We’re a flea circus.’ (117)

She abandons her life’s work and tries to achieve her anti-imperialist aim through politics, where she is a great success. Opinion polls show that her party is set to win the election. They have promised to expel Voorstand military bases from Efica if they come to power. Felicity’s enemy is no longer Voorstand culture but the V I A , who kill her. Her activist cultural enterprise dies with her and Tristan inherits the empty Feu Follet theatre building. Tristan has so many physical handicaps that he appears monstrous and the doctors want to kill him at birth, but his mother refuses. He is very ugly, with white eyes and a lipless mouth; he is a dwarf and his legs are so

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deformed that he cannot walk on his feet but must shuffle along on his ankles. His speech organs are so deformed that he cannot speak comprehensibly, either. In The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, Carey’s disabled protagonist is a concrete manifestation of the pain of unbelonging. Tristan, with his hybrid genealogy, represents Efican culture; his-story, with his personal experience of social rejection and parental abandonment (by Bill, who goes away to Voorstand and leaves his son for many years), mirrors his country’s history. Felicity presents her deformed baby to the audience during a production of Macbeth. The critics use the word “homunculus” to describe the monstrous infant (45). This is the term Sterne used in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy to describe his protagonist when he is still but a potential baby inside a spermatozoid. But Carey gives another definition of his “homunculus” – a “marsupial not ready to leave its mother’s pouch” (46). A marsupial is a mammal whose young are born unfinished and must complete their development in the mother’s pouch before they are equipped to face the world outside. A young marsupial taken prematurely from the mother’s pouch is a misshapen and repulsive-looking creature that will probably not survive. The marsupial being, moreover, a typically Australian animal, this is an obvious metaphor for Carey’s vision of Australian culture: a culture that did not have time to complete its second phase of gestation before being torn from the mother country’s protection and abandoned, far from home, incomplete and vulnerable. Tristan is akin to the pathetic marsupial torn from the pouch; although he has intelligence and will-power, he must supply a superhuman effort to achieve what ‘normal’ beings accomplish effortlessly. During his childhood, Tristan’s mother protects him from the horrified gaze of the outside world and surrounds him with people who accept him; she leads him to believe that only evil people find him repulsive. When he briefly finds himself in hospital surrounded by other handicapped people, it is he who finds them repulsive and refuses to identify with them. By thus isolating him, Felicity misleads him. She also misleads him by making him believe that he can choose any means of artistic expression that he wants. He learns painfully that this is not so, goes through a period of introspection, then explores his roots before selecting, later in life, a medium that is better suited to his handicaps than his first choice, acting. After Felicity’s death, he shuts himself up inside the Feu Follet for twelve years and carries on the family tradition of resistance to Voorstandish neo-

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imperialism by writing obscure tracts and reading banned books. He inherits his mother’s belief in culture as a defence against neocolonialism. During his isolationist phase, he advocates cultural protectionism as the only way to foster an Efican culture: * ‘If we let ourselves imagine this is solely a question of military defence, we are deluding ourselves. Our greatest defence is our culture, and the brutal truth is – we have none. The terms of our alliance with Voorstand means we are prohibited (for instance) from placing a 2 per cent tariff on their Sirkus tickets to subsidize our theatre. They call this unfair trade, yet we know that every ticket we buy to the Sirkus weakens us, swamps us further, suffocates us. If we wish to escape the vile octopus, our escape must be total. For some time we will need to be poor, defenceless and, yes, bored.’ (231)

This passage underlines the link between national identity and culture, the dilemma of ‘young’ nations which have not yet created a cultural heritage and the difficulties of this undertaking for countries which have limited economic resources and, consequently, little clout in the global balance of power. In a discussion about the power relations between the cultural identities of ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries, Dominique Wolton reminds us that rich countries possess relatively stable identities compared to ‘southern’ countries, which have no control over the global flow of information or the products of the cultural industries.29 As we have seen, Tristan’s proposed solution of isolationism in quest of a ‘pure’ national culture is not without its dangers. However, he eventually abandons this illusory search. After his years of isolationism (comparable to a period in the pouch, though without the mother’s presence), he decides to go to Voorstand in quest of his hybrid identity: son of a Voorstandish mother who chose to leave Voorstand for Efica and of an Efican father who chose to leave Efica for Voorstand,30 he also has the neo-imperial legacy as part of his heritage. Once there, he happens to dress up as one of Voorstand’s popular cultural icons. For the first time in his life, Tristan the monster is revered and even desired by a powerful woman. Obviously, the experience is intoxicating, even if he is literally imprisoned inside his mouse suit. This situation suggests the temptation 29 “Pour une cohabitation... culturelle: Entretien avec Dominique Wolton,” Identités, 340. 30 Like Peter Carey himself, who chose to leave Australia and settle in New York.

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for Australian artists to dress up their art in American forms that will ensure commercial success.31 But as soon as the horrified Voorstanders discover the ugly little antiestablishment being behind the mask, they react in a paranoid fashion that is presented as typically Voorstandish: Tristan is branded a (cultural) terrorist and hunted by the authorities. This reaction suggests that they are fully aware of the role played by culture in the imperialist balance of power. Tristan is even put on trial for terrorism in Voorstand, in absentia. Thirty years later he takes up the pen to continue his mother’s antiimperialist battle by rewriting the Voorstand version of his-story. Unlike Felicity, who addressed her message exclusively to the Eficans, Tristan – ostensibly – addresses his to the Voorstanders. He chooses literature as his medium, as it is more compatible with his handicaps than the theatre. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith is the result. While the Voorstand authorities choose first the mass media and then their legal institutions to put forward their version of his-story, he chooses the genre of the novel to rewrite imperial History and break the silence of the oppressed. In The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, the disabled artist, the aborted, unfinished marsupial, represents Australian culture branded and stunted by the pain of unbelonging. According to Carey, how should this culture go about completing its interrupted development so that it can resist the onslaught of American culture? The time Tristan gives himself before writing back suggests that Australian culture needs time to develop. His unsuccessful experiments with drama and political tracts before finally choosing fiction as his means of expression suggest that Australian culture should assume forms compatible with its youth and lack of means. Tristan’s approach also leads us to wonder which reader should be the target of the postcolonial Australian writer who wants to resist American cultural imperialism. In this novel, Tristan ostensibly addresses the Voorstanders, calling his implied readers by the Voorstandish forms of address “Meneer” and “Madam.” This may give the impression that Carey has chosen to write The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith for an American readership after having been attacked by Australian critics for the way he depicted Australia in his preceding novel, The Tax Inspector (1991). At the beginning of the narrative, Tristan goes to great lengths to avoid offending his Voorstandish reader: he begs the latter’s pardon each time he 31

Once again, one is tempted to make comparisons with Carey himself.

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is ‘obliged’, for the needs of his presentation of Efican history, to describe underhand dealings on the part of the Voorstandish government; he tries to temper his criticism of the Voorstandish national character: I am not one of those Ootlanders who wish to blame you personally for everything your government has ever done, so let me say it clear: I know you are not responsible for my mother’s death. Indeed, I write this assuming your individual innocence, believing you unaware of Gabe Manzini or any of his criminal activities. (231)

But, little by little, the reader realizes that, in spite of his denials, in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith Carey is actually making a virulent attack on certain machinations of the American government and certain American ‘national characteristics’. He denounces American interference in the internal politics of other nations in the interest of American national defence; the moral decay of American popular culture; and a certain collective paranoia that imagines terrorists everywhere. There is, however, a gradual slippage in the identity of the implied reader. For example, in Book 1 the footnotes apparently seek to explain to the Voorstandish reader certain particularities of Efican life that will help him/her to understand the narrative. Then, in Book 2 we discover footnotes that similarly explain certain particularities of Voorstandish life, implying a different reader, perhaps Efican. Through The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, Carey writes back to the Australian critics who accused him of being anti-Australian in The Tax Inspector (1991). In an interview with Ray Willbanks, who asked him if he hated Australia, Carey protested energetically and pointed out that if Voorstand represents the U S A and Efica Australia, then anyone can plainly see that the Australians “‘get off pretty lightly’,”32 yet the American critics did not take his attack on American imperialism personally. In fact, Carey admitted he was “‘occasionally shocked’” at American reviews that did not even see the parallel between Voorstand and the U S A . He concluded that this is an illustration of the selective blindness of a major power.33 It is not until the end of The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith that we discover why the narrative is ostensibly addressed to the Voorstandish 32 33

Ray Willbanks, “A Conversation with Peter Carey,” Antipodes 11.1 (June 1997): 14 Willbanks, “A Conversation,” 14.

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reader: it turns out to be a speech in his own defence addressed to a Voorstandish jury. Once again readers of a Carey novel find themselves in a position where they have to change perspectives at the end of the novel and re-examine the whole narrative in a new light. Around thirty pages before the end, Tristan attempts to explain why he hid his true identity from Peggy Kram when, for the first time in his life, a woman wanted him and everyone admired him in his Bruder Mouse disguise: I was standing in the place where Sirkuses are born, where the fabled city itself was either saved or damned. I was impressed. I was excited. Will the judges at the Guildcourt consider this when they attempt to determine my motive? (387)

The “judges at the Guildcourt”? This is the first hint we receive that Tristan is on trial. Then we discover a footnote that is obviously an extract taken from legal archives: “Item 3 of the charges against Tristan Smith: ‘[that he did] wilfully, blasphemously, seditiously disguise his being and therefore lead others to believe he was Bruder Mouse’” (387). A little further on, Tristan quotes this charge in full (401) in his own speech addressed to the Voorstandish reader. On the same page we find another footnote quoting a further legal charge laid against him. These passages are given in the context of what is clearly a plea to the jury to grant him attenuating circumstances (401). On the final page of the narrative, we encounter the text of the “Deposition given by Margaret Kram, Produkter, to the Bhurgercourt of Voorstand” (414). This text is fourteen lines long and in it the reader recognizes key elements of the story the narrator has just spent 400 pages telling. We realize that, through The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, the narrator has rewritten the imperial version of his-story which the Voorstandish authorities had reduced to a few lines in a legal document. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith develops the content of these imprisoning lines from the other side of the mirror. In order to underline the parallelism of the two texts, Tristan has reproduced in his version the exact terms that were used in Kram’s deposition. On an intradiegetic level, the narrative is a plea made before a court of law. It aims to reassert the perspective of the periphery on the Tristan Smith affair and on the hostile intervention of the V I A in Efican internal affairs. On an extradiegetic level, the narrative is a case study, an exercise in applied postcolonial/neocolonial theory. While The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy debunks literary realism, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith debunks historical realism.

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A final rebuttal of reader expectations lies in wait in the novel’s last sentence: “at that time, although I did not know it, my unusual life was really just beginning” (414). This statement refers us back to the title. We believed we had just finished reading about the unusual life of Tristan Smith. His final surprise announcement implies that his ‘real’ life – when he overcame his handicaps and gradually made himself an artist capable of ‘writing back’ – only began at the moment when he chose to flee Voorstand in order to escape persecution. This brings us back to the filial metaphor that has so often been used in the context of the republican debate in Australia and to the analogy this novel suggests between the psychological development of a child and that of a nation. The normal development of a young adult necessitates her choosing to break with parental authority. In the case of Australia, this break was not chosen by the child nation but imposed by the parent nation which banished its subjects and abandoned them on the other side of the world, thus provoking a psychological handicap that put a stop to the normal growth-process. According to Carey’s vision, in order to cure the pain of unbelonging, Australia needs to perform a break with ‘parental authority’ comparable to the one effected by the young American colony at the end of the eighteenth century. Thus, American imperialism represents a second chance for Australia, a country he represents as psychologically stunted by its penal history, to burst the bonds of ‘childhood’ and thus prepare the ground for its blossoming into an ‘adult’ nation. Carey suggests Australia can heal the psychological wounds inflicted by its first colonizer – the U K – by choosing to enter the postcolonial phase in its relationship with the neocolonial power – the U S A . In The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, Carey practises what he preaches: he has gone beyond the postcolonial phase in his literary relationship with the ‘mother country’. He demonstrates this by making unmistakable references to an English canonical work, while manifesting no conflict and making no attempt to ‘write back to’ the former colonizer; he simply absorbs the English cultural influence, thus reflecting the hybrid nature of all new societies. This is not the case regarding his attitude towards the relationship between American and Australian culture; here the battle has not yet been won, and that is why he chooses to ‘write back’ not to the British but to the Americans, in the hope of easing the pain of unbelonging that is the legacy of the British. In The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith,

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he offers his Australian readership a literary version of a group-therapy session.

WORKS CITED Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, ed. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (1995; London: Routledge, 1999). Bliss, Caroline. “Time and Timelessness in Peter Carey’s Fiction: The Best of Both Worlds,” Antipodes 9.2 (December 1995): 97–105. Carey, Peter. Bliss (London: Picador, 1981). ——. The Fat Man in History (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1974). ——. “From The Dog, the Duck, the Mouse,” World Literature Today 67.3 (Summer 1993): 541–47. ——. Illywhacker (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1985). ——. Oscar and Lucinda (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1988). ——. The Tax Inspector (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1991). ——. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1994). ——. War Crimes (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1979). Dawson, Carrie. “‘Who was that Masked Mouse?’ Imposture in Peter Carey’s The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith,” Southern Review 30.2 (1997): 202–11. Dessaix, Robert. “An Interview with Peter Carey,” Australian Book Review 167 (December 1994 – January 1995): 18–20. Greer, Germaine. Whitefella Jump Up (London: Profile, 2004). Halpern, Catherine, & Jean–Claude Ruano–Borbalan. Identités: L’individu, le groupe, la société (Auxerre: Sciences Humaines, 2004). Hassall, Anthony J. “Power Play: The Sirkus in Peter Carey’s The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith,” in From a Distance: Australian Writers and Cultural Displacement, ed. Wenche Ommundsen & Hazel Rowley (Geelong, Victoria: Deakin U P , 1996): 141–47. Memmi, Albert. Portrait du décolonisé arabo-musulman et de quelques autres (Paris: Gallimard, 2004). Mitchell, W.J.T. “Postcolonial Culture, Postimperial Criticism” (1992), in The PostColonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin (1995; London: Routledge, 1999): 475–79 (excerpt only). Pierce, Peter. “Peter Carey’s Testaments,” in The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety (Melbourne: Cambridge U P , 1999): 181–84. Pordzik, Ralph. The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia: A Comparative Introduction to the Utopian Novel in the New English Literatures (New York: Peter Lang, 2001). Riemer, A.P. “The Creation of Careyland,” The Independent Monthly (September 1994): 69–70. Robb, Peter. “The Mouse that Scored,” The Independent Monthly (September 1994): 66–68.

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Willbanks, Ray. “A Conversation with Peter Carey,” Antipodes 11.1 (June 1997): 11– 16. Wyndham, Susan. “Peter Carey: An Unusual Life,” Australian Magazine (20–21 August 1994): 42–48.

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the bone people Contexts and Reception, 1984–2004

Sarah Shieff

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F E B R U A R Y 1 9 8 4 , a book by a comparatively unknown writer blasted its way across New Zealand’s literary firmament. the bone people had arrived, and from the moment of its first publication, it polarized opinions. I first read the book as a student in 1985, and was unable to put it down: its interrogation of a violent past, and the search for identity it dramatized, resonated powerfully with what it felt like to be a young New Zealander at that time. I was astonished to find that my teachers, Bill Pearson and C.K. Stead, were, for their own reasons, reluctant to set it as a text for their graduate seminar in New Zealand literature. I now teach the bone people myself, and, over twenty years after its first publication, find that it still retains the capacity to provoke. It seems that while many young New Zealanders are still drawn into the world it describes, a significant minority find it almost unreadable. Some are repelled by its violence; others find it too long and too hard to follow. Still others, especially those from non-English speaking backgrounds, find themselves terminally disconcerted by the book’s linguistic and structural idiosyncrasies. While I would at no point equate these responses with those of Antony Beevor, D.J. Enright and C.K. Stead, all of whom expressed reservations about the book in early reviews and commentary, I am nonetheless interested in charting the bone people’s history as a cultural phenomenon, and in offering what I hope might be a timely reconsideration of the myths of belonging it appeared to offer its first pakeha1 readers. 1

N

Pakeha: non-Maori New Zealander of European descent.

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At the time of its publication, the bone people was hailed locally as both unflinchingly realist and visionary, acclaimed as much for its representation of the pain of unbelonging as for its concluding utopian vision of an achieved – if tenuous – biculturalism. the bone people’s vision suggested that the pain of unbelonging experienced by both Maori and pakeha – for which the book’s horrifying domestic violence becomes emblematic – might be healed through mutual trust, shared spirituality and the joint guardianship of the land and its inhabitants. It is perhaps significant that pakeha readers were the most avid latchers-on to this myth. All we need do, the novel suggests, is develop a deep sense of bicultural responsibility and all the suffering of colonialism will be as magically washed away as Kerewin’s cancer. This fantasy of spiritual healing may have seemed fresh and appealing at the time, but its adequacy as an allegory of the nation’s past and possible future is long overdue for reconsideration, especially in the light of its continued force in pakeha discourses of self and place. In order to explain why a novel that is not ostensibly about politics or the state of the nation came irresistibly to be read that way, I would first like to recover some of the circumstances surrounding its initial publication. I will then describe its vision of biculturalism, and finally address the broadly political implications of the solutions to the pain of unbelonging that it proposes.

A Maori novel Partly because of its publication pre-history, the bone people quickly attained the status of urban legend. In outline, this legend proposed that Hulme, a virtually unknown writer equally proud of her Kai Tahu, Kati Mamoe, Orkney Scots and Lancashire ancestry, living at Okarito on the West Coast of the South Island, completed the book over a period of twelve years in between stints as a tobacco picker, a short-order cook and a postal-delivery worker. Rather than acquiescing in the editorial suggestions made by the many rejecting publishers to whom she offered her book, all of whom appeared to regard it as “too large, too unwieldy, too different,”2 Hulme was about to embalm the bone people in perspex, when 2

Keri Hulme, “Preface to the First Edition,” the bone people (Auckland: Spiral Collective / Hodder and Stoughton, 1985): n.p. One of those “differences,” preserved in

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it was rescued from oblivion by a feminist publishing cooperative, the Spiral Collective. Spiral undertook a further, fruitless search for a publisher, and finally decided to publish the book themselves. Spiral members Miriama Evans, Marian Evans and Irihapeti Ramsden then began a search for funds, but they, too, faced rejection: ironically enough, an advisory committee on women turned down their request for support on the grounds that the novel “did not give a positive enough image of women, especially Maori women.”3 Support did come, however, from sources as various as the Commission for Evangelisation, Justice and Development (Wellington Diocese), the Maori Education Foundation, the Willi Fels Trust and the New Zealand Literary Fund, as well as from women writers, both Maori and pakeha. The book was typeset by members of the Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Association, and members of the Spiral collective took responsibility for proof-reading and paste up, which they often did at night, once they were free of other commitments.4 the bone people, in an edition of 4,000 copies, with a cover design by the author, was finally launched at a hui5 at Wellington Teachers’ Training College in February 1984. The difficulties the book had faced in reaching the public only served to amplify the almost messianic fervour with which it was greeted. Apparently happy to ignore the book’s obvious and stated debts to FirstWorld fiction, the novelist Joy Cowley opened her review of the bone people in terms fit for an indigenous second coming: I have been waiting for this novel, watching the earth, knowing that it had to come. We all knew it. Someday there would be a flowering of talent which had not been transplanted from the northern hemisphere, which owed nothing to the literary landscapes of Europe or the film sets of California, but which would grow – seed, shoot, roots and all – from the breast of Papa. Now we welcome it with a glad cry of recognition. (60)

this essay, was the author’s typographical preference for the title of the bone people: only the first edition uses lower-case letters. 3 Elizabeth Webby, “Keri Hulme: Spiralling to Success,” Meanjin 1 (1985): 16. 4 Perhaps not surprisingly, the first edition, now a collector’s item, looks quaintly ‘home-made’: aside from the poor copy-editing, its inking and margins are uneven, page numbers go in and out of italics, and bindings vary. 5 Hui: a gathering for celebration or discussion.

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In another early review, Aorewa McLeod sounded a note that would find many later echoes: “I ended knowing that this, for me, was the most important book yet written in New Zealand.”6 Michael King, for example, felt similarly: just when everyone had given up looking for the great New Zealand novel, it seemed, “along [came] the bone people.”7 In 1984 the bone people won the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction.8 Clearly, this novel struck a deep chord in pakeha readers who were more than ready for a fitting imaginative response to an era of profound social upheaval. The decade in which the novel was conceived had seen the high-water mark of Prime Minister Robert Muldoon’s interventionist isolationism, the fiscal effects of which further deepened the gulf between rich and poor in New Zealand.9 Historically, Maori had been over-represented in the latter category, a fact reflected in unemployment levels, welfare dependency and crime, and access to health services and education. Growing anger with Muldoon’s autocratic leadership style and his championing of expensive, ecologically irresponsible or morally indefensible causes fuelled a swing to the left in New Zealand politics during the late 1970s and early 1980s, catalysed by the disastrous Springbok rugby tour of 1981 and culminating in 1984 when Labour swept to power on a wave of egalitarian, nuclear-free optimism. Over the same period, Maori political activism had begun to raise public awareness of historical injustice: the Whina Cooper-led land march of 1975, the Bastion Point occupation of 1977–78 and the Raglan golf course protest of 1978 galvanized pakeha 6

Aorewa McLeod, “the bone people by Keri Hulme,” Craccum (17 April 1984): 18. Michael King, “The Original Mouthful,” New Outlook 11 (July–August 1984): 41. 8 The novel’s international reception is the matter for another paper. Although it won the Booker McConnell Prize in 1985 and has subsequently become part of the canon of ‘postcolonial’ literature written in English, at the time, mainstream international reviewers tended to regard it as a sentimental mish-mash of muddled mysticism and modernism. Locally, however, the award of a major international prize was a further validation of the sentiments already expressed by early reviewers. See Antony Beevor, “Me-Decade Mutations,” Times Literary Supplement (25 October 1985): 1202, D.A.N. Jones, “Whakapapa,” London Review of Books 7 (21 November 1985): 16, and D.J. Enright, “Worlds of Wonder,” New York Review of Books 33.16 (27 February 1986): 16. 9 Kerewin’s comment that she will go to the pub dressed as “[conservatively] as a ‘Tamaki pig’” (243) reminds modern readers exactly how thoroughly Muldoon’s presence pervaded the popular imagination: Robert “Piggy” Muldoon held the electoral seat of Tamaki for National from 1960 to 1991. 7

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as well as Maori; protests led by Bob Hawke and Eva Rickard eventually saw land returned to tribal hands. As a corollary of this activism, some liberal pakeha began asking themselves hard questions about what it meant to be pakeha in New Zealand. What if being pakeha – being a non-Maori New Zealander – meant that Maori had been displaced from their rightful inheritance, and that pakeha occupancy and identity might therefore be based on theft? An awareness, long manifest as a settler anxiety, that pakeha ‘roots’ were shallow and alien compared to those of the indigenous culture became newly coupled to a politically charged acknowledgement that the indigenous presence may be what shaped one’s sense of oneself as pakeha. The early 1980s, then, were ripe for a vision of a bicultural future for New Zealand, and the bone people seemed to provide such a vision. Crucial to this was the author’s ethnicity: Hulme preferred to identify herself as Maori, and had been anthologized with other Maori writers in Into the World of Light;10 further, the Spiral collective formed to publish the bone people felt the book had run into a mainstream publishing prejudice against Maori writers who “sought to incorporate bilingualism and to integrate Maori and European literary traditions.”11 The book’s status as a Maori novel was further validated in 1984 when it was awarded the Pegasus Prize, offered that year to a novel or autobiography by a Maori, written in English or in Maori. This point is made not in order to enter the debate about the bone people and the politics of ethnic identification initiated long ago by C.K. Stead and taken up by Margery Fee and others; rather, it is made in order to affirm that when the book was published, there was no question – for most readers, anyway – that this was a Maori-centric novel.12 This was 10 Into the World of Light: An Anthology of Maori Writing, ed. Witi Ihimaera & D.S. Long (Auckland: Heinemann, 1982). 11 Miriama Evans, “Politics and Maori Literature,” Landfall 39.1 (March 1985): 41. 12 See: C.K. Stead, “Keri Hulme’s the bone people and the Pegasus Award for Maori Literature,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 16.4 (October 1985): 101–108; Margery Fee, “Why C.K. Stead Didn’t Like the bone people: Who Can Write as Other?” Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 1 (Spring 1989): 11–32. Merata Mita’s objection to describing the bone people as a Maori novel is worth quoting in full: “the bone people cannot be categorized as a Maori novel. In spite of the fact that only Maori writers reflect a true bi-culturalism in New Zealand literature, any true Maori literature must be written in the Maori language”; Mita, “Indige-

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partly to do with the unprecedented amount of te reo Maori in the book13 – so much that it was felt necessary to include a glossary. The author’s ethnicity (and her gender), too, were felt to authenticate her representation of personal alienation and domestic violence in Aotearoa,14 and to validate a healing vision which drew equally on Maoritanga,15 utopian feminism and New-Age spirituality – a vision of belonging which both satisfied the desire for a myth of origin for pakeha, and described an ideal bicultural future characterized by reconciliation and peaceful cohabitation.

Towers and spirals In order to quantify the texture and detail of this utopian vision, it may be helpful to recapitulate the movement of the plot, as it follows its trajectory from suffering and alienation to a tentative personal redemption for its main characters. Kerewin Holmes, an artist, one-eighth Maori, lives an ostensibly content but solitary life in the tower she has built herself on the remote West Coast of the South Island. She has recently won a lottery, which means she doesn’t have to worry about money or work, and has fitted out her tower with all the treasures her heart desires – books, guitars, jewels, shells, weapons, taonga pounamu,16 food, wine, and spirits. She spends her time fishing, playing her guitar and drinking, and trying to draw like she once could: it seems the lottery win has blighted her artistic talent, and may also have blighted her relationship with her family, although the cause of the painful familial breach is not specified. Into her well-organized hermit’s life comes Simon Peter, a mute pakeha child with sea-green eyes and long blond hair: Simon has hurt his foot and breaks into Kerewin’s tower while she is out fishing. They spend the day together, communicating via scraps of paper, striking up a guarded friendship.

nous Literature in a Colonial Society,” The Republican (November 1984): 4 (emphasis in the original). 13 Te reo Maori: the Maori language. 14 Aotearoa: one of several Maori names for New Zealand, usually translated as “Land of the Long White Cloud.” 15 Maoritanga: Maori traditions, cultural knowledge and world-view. 16 Pounamu: jade/greenstone; taonga pounamu: treasured greenstone artefacts.

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Simon’s father Joseph Gillaley comes to pick up the boy: to Kerewin’s surprise, he is Maori, rather than the “loud and boisterous Viking type” she had imagined (28).17 Joe later tells Kerewin their story. Two years previously, Simon had been washed up on a nearby beach, the sole survivor of a mysterious shipwreck (83–85). Joe and his wife Hana had taken the child under their wing but Hana and their baby son Timote died of influenza not long after, leaving Joe alone with Simon; Hana’s dying wish had been that Joe should look after him (353). Although Joe has a large and supportive whanau,18 he is lonely, but unlike Kerewin, he is more ready to admit it. A three-way friendship blossoms: Simon often plays truant and spends his days with Kerewin, and the three of them join in the evenings to eat, smoke and drink. But one day Kerewin notices the terrible wounds on Simon’s body. With hints from Joe’s whanau, she pieces the clues together: Joe beats the boy. Keeping her own counsel, Kerewin takes Joe and Simon on holiday to her family’s beach cottages at Moerangi. There she gives Joe a taste of his own medicine, flattening him with her lottery-funded black-belt expertise in Aikido. Joe recognizes that his beating is no more than he deserves; in turn, Kerewin agrees to take some responsibility for Simon: if Joe feels he has to beat the child, he must consult her first (195). This pattern of reconciliation following violence has long been familiar to Simon; indeed, Simon loves Joe desperately in spite of his brutality, and will provoke fights simply to diffuse his father’s anger and frustration. Simon knows Joe is lonely and wants him to be happy. Further, he knows Kerewin makes his father happy, so he does his best to keep Kerewin in their lives, even if this, too, means provoking violence. Believing he deserves his thrashings, the child, in its logic, believes that if Joe punishes him, Kerewin will realize that it is Simon who is bad and not Joe, thereby bringing Kerewin and Joe closer together. The book’s pivotal moment is one such episode of violence. Kerewin has told Joe that they cannot be lovers: she describes herself as ‘neuter’ and tells him that she relates sexually to neither men nor women (266). Simon intuits that he may be in some way responsible for the attenuation in the relationship, rather than Kerewin’s growing distress that she can no 17 This and all subsequent references to the text can be found in Keri Hulme, the bone people (Auckland: Spiral Collective / Hodder and Stoughton, 1985). 18 Whanau: family, usually encompassing extended family.

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longer paint, and her increasing resentment at the emotional demands she feels the Gillayleys make of her. His method for ensuring that their hostility is directed away from each other and towards himself is simple but effective. He has been warned not to visit the alcoholic pederast Binny Daniels, but he disobeys, and finds Binny dead, horribly (303). Simon then goes to visit Kerewin, who accuses him of stealing her talisman knife. He denies this palpable truth, reminding himself that he must pretend to be angry (304). He punches Kerewin in the stomach and when she retaliates he kicks in her beloved guitar. Simon then heads into town and breaks all the shop windows in the town’s main street. Nobody then remembers that Simon will only resort to violence if he cannot make himself understood (49); nobody tries to find out what has upset him. Kerewin breaks her promise to defend him, and Joe beats him to within an inch of his life. Until this point, the novel’s mode could best be described as a kind of gritty social realism with mythic overtones; from this point on, it tends towards magical realism and allegory as it traces each of the characters’ separate journeys towards healing. Joe serves three months in jail for child abuse; after his release he travels to a remote area of the coast where he makes a drunken attempt at suicide by leaping off a bluff. He is rescued by an old kaumatua,19 who has been waiting there all his life, on the instructions of his grandmother, for the arrival of a “digger, or stranger or broken man (338)” to whom he can pass the mantle of responsibility for guarding the mauri, the waning life-force of the country. The mauri’s resting-place is a luminous pierced stone; its home is a water-filled grotto, the final resting-place of one of the canoes of the Great Fleet that brought the Polynesians to Aotearoa. The kaumatua mends Joe’s broken arm, and passes on the responsibility for the guardianship, before himself dying. An earthquake destroys the grotto of the mauri and Joe realizes he must take the precious stone home with him (385). Meanwhile, Kerewin has undertaken a journey of her own. She realizes she had the power to prevent the assault on Simon, and believes the abdominal pain she has suffered since her Aikido attack on Joe is the physical symptom of a spiritual malaise – specifically, her selfishness and her 19 Kaumatua: a senior or elderly male, often a repository of traditional tribal knowledge.

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alienation from her family. Her solution is to dismantle her tower, burn its remains, and journey into the wilds of Central Otago, where she expects to die of cancer. At the nadir of her suffering, she realizes that her life is meaningless without Joe and Simon, family and community. This is the turning-point in her illness: cleansed by suffering and newly aware of her responsibility as a leader, she recovers, helped by a mysterious stick-like creature of no specified gender, who gives her a healing potion which tastes like red currant juice (425). Simon, too, makes his own journey toward recovery. Although he has been deafened by Joe’s last assault and made a ward of the state, he yearns to return home to the people he loves. He escapes from his foster home and returns home, only to find Joe gone and a strange family living in their house. He stumbles on to the tower, to find it burned and Kerewin gone, too. He is returned to welfare custody. In the interim, Kerewin has journeyed back to her disused family marae20 at Moerangi, which she rebuilds. She then returns to Whangaroa and starts to rebuild her home – this time, as a spiral structure rather than as a tower. Her new-found sense of responsibility means that she can now give Simon the security he needs, and she offers both Joe and Simon, who has never been formally adopted, “that unlikely gift, her name” (444). She is reunited and reconciled with her family; the mauri Joe has brought with him is absorbed into the earth.

Transition arrangements for a new world-order One of the most readily available keys to the novel’s vision of biculturalism is that it appears to offer an imaginative resolution to – via a synthesis of – the putative binary oppositions which dictate the shape of life in a contemporary Aotearoa. The novel shows that in order to reconfigure a purified ‘bone people’ – a new or beginning people who will become the “instruments of change” (4), and who might also model new ways of being for readers – it is also necessary to reconfigure the institutions, beliefs and metaphors which currently constitute personal identity. Hence, the novel imagines a world in which hybrid identities based on choice rather than ‘race’ might replace hard distinctions between Maori and 20 Marae: a courtyard or meeting ground in front of a meeting-house or at the centre of a settlement.

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pakeha, where groups of caring individuals might replace biological families, where alternative therapies and holistic approaches might complement Western medicine, where korero21 might replace violence, and where spirals might replace towers. Equally close at hand for a reading of the novel that would see it charting a difficult, mythic, transition from an old world-order to a new is its deployment of familiar Christian motifs of sacrifice and redemption.22 This symbolic network is configured most fully around the character of Simon Peter. He first appears in Kerewin’s tower “like some weird saint in a stained gold window” (16); also like some weird saint, he has a “halo” (16) of hair and a puncture-wound to his foot. Christ-like, he appears to suffer Joe’s beatings with stoicism (171), is a peacemaker (192), and dreams of himself as a life-giver, or a bringer of resurrection (203). Fishing at Moerangi, he draws up an enormous groper (214–17), an incident which resonates with both Christian and Maori symbolism: the apostle Simon Peter was the fisher of men and the ‘rock’ upon whom the church was built; Maui was the original fisher-up of Aotearoa.23 As the narrative unfolds, however, it becomes obvious that these familiar myths of origin will need to be transcended before a new Aotearoa, catalysed by Simon’s suffering, can come into being. (The Christian imagery also extends to the book’s central family: this trio, too, consists of a virgin, a father who is not a father, and a mysterious “god-given” [175] child who appears to be shouldering more than his fair share of suffering.) If the movement of the plot up to and including Simon’s final beating could be said to describe a kind of passion, the narrative equally demonstrates the inadequacy of a theology that requires the sacrifice of a marked individual to bring about personal redemption. Instead, the novel proposes a spirituality which revolves around a wakeful and watchful god, tied to the spirit of the land and the people who inhabit it:

21

Korero: talk; language; discussion. In one of the most suggestive pieces of writing on the bone people, Rod Edmond has described this movement in terms of the novel’s “deep structure […] of wounding and healing, sickness and recovery”; Edmond, “No Country for Towers: Reconsidering the bone people,” Landfall, New Series 1.2 (November 1993): 278. 23 Also like Maui-Tikitiki-O-Taranga, the infant Simon was washed ashore wrapped in hair, and adopted by an older man who raised him as his own child. As he grows up, Simon, like Maui, becomes a trickster and a troublemaker. 22

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The mauri, set down, sunk itself into the hard ground. Or maybe the earth turned willing water beneath its touch. It vanished completely. But we all came back to it, after the hoha24 died down, and each of us can feel where it is resting. A sort of pricket and tremble in our gut (445).

The new god lives within the bone people themselves, and it is they who must safeguard the future of Aotearoa and its inhabitants – but this time with aroha, not with the utu of the bad old days.25 Seen in this way, Simon’s ‘passion’ during the first three quarters of the novel is a necessary precondition for events in the last quarter. These events in turn pave the way for the literal and metaphorical new day with which the novel ends – a day which brings with it the promise of personal regeneration for the main characters and, by extension, for the country as a whole: “ ‘Ka ao, ka ao, ka awatea…’. It is dawn, indeed it is dawn, and bright broad daylight braiding our home” (445).

An ethic of presence Perhaps most fundamental to the novel’s vision of regeneration is its structuring belief in the ultimate transcendence of a set of values revolving around the primacy of feeling over intellect, fullness over emptiness and presence over absence. Spoken language, for example, usually regarded as a marker of authenticity, authority and ‘presence’ over and above the printed word (a second-order system of sign substitutions denoting absence), comes to mean something rather different in the novel, in the light of Simon’s muteness. Simon certainly understands spoken language, but when he wants to communicate himself, he writes and gestures in a very concrete system of substitutions which nonetheless require his presence to be effective. The success of these systems predicated on presence – disaster only strikes when they break down and Simon can’t make himself understood – points to a narrative anxiety about the usefulness of spoken language as a medium for communication at all. Spoken language mediated electronically is the most pernicious marker of alienation – Kerewin’s tongue-lashing over the radiotelephone precipitates Simon’s final beating (307) – but elsewhere, too, it has been at the root of discord 24 25

Hoha: fuss, nuisance. Aroha: love; utu: revenge or payment (blood-money).

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and estrangement. Harsh words have caused Kerewin’s split from her family: “We rowed irreparably. … We wounded each other too deeply for the rifts to be healed” (90). Kerewin uses her prodigious vocabulary, as often as not, to dazzle others and keep them at bay, thereby ensuring her isolation rather than enhancing connection with others. She is, however, aware that her “wordplay” and “mere quoting” take the place of any more meaningful vocabulary – in particular, the lost vocabulary of her art (91–92). The exception to the narrative suspicion of spoken language is te reo Maori, which is used at moments of greatest emotional intensity, and denotes a special level of sincerity in interpersonal connection.26 The novel would have us know that those who understand te reo also understand its place in an ethos where the sharing of breath is an acknowledgement of shared humanity.27 The hongi28 is the paradigm for this order of communication, and although Kerewin understands its significance – and also understands the inadequacy of ‘words’ to convey important emotions – she believes she is too cold a person to speak this intimate language of gesture and of the heart, and hongi with Joe (88). By extension, if Kerewin could only reconnect with her taha Maori29 and her family, the necessary warmth would return: “Whereas by blood, flesh and inheritance, I am but an eighth Maori, by heart, spirit and inclination, I feel all Maori. Or….I used to. Now it feels like the best part of me has got lost in the way I live” (62). Spoken English, then, comes to denote coldness and absence; te reo Maori, because of its imbrication within a language of gesture, comes to

26

Interestingly, food, too, works this way in the novel. While many readers have noted that the bone people is full of recipes, none, it seems, have noted that these recipes appear only at moments of heightened emotional connection. The preparing and sharing of food – signalled by detailed lists of invariably wholesome and home-grown ingredients – comes to constitute its own language of presence, connection and caring, and lays the groundwork for the concluding ideal of commensalism. 27 For example, Hulme has Joe “breathe for” Simon after the shipwreck, making plain that this is the gift of a shared life-force (85); the Pakeha policeman, on the other hand, unsuccessfully gives “artificial respiration” (84). 28 Hongi: the rubbing or touching of noses (the sharing of the breath or life-force) in a traditional greeting. 29 Taha Maori: literally, Kerewin’s Maori side; her Maori inheritance.

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stand for presence, and connection and ‘the heart’.30 It is significant, however, that although Simon ‘speaks’ neither English nor Maori, his improvised language relies on both. This language becomes, in effect, a ‘third term’ between te reo and English, and puts both Maori and pakeha ‘speakers’ at an equal disadvantage. Successful negotiation of this potentially fraught terrain requires its own highly nuanced interpretative regime of “glance and gesture, intuition and guess, brief note and long wordy inquiries and explanations” (94) – a regime of sensitivity which might model possibilities for approaching difficult and unfamiliar interpersonal contexts as they occur outside the text. By means of Simon’s muteness, therefore, the novel proposes an ostensibly ‘unmediated’ language of gesture and deed – a true language of the heart – that will be able to transcend a past marked by division and misapprehension, and their corollary, violence.31 While such languages are undoubtedly problematic – Simon is reduced to violence when he can’t make himself understood, and Joe’s beatings similarly serve as a reminder of what happens when verbal communication fails – they seem to offer the best promise of personal wholeness. Just as Simon can only ‘speak’ his true name in the concrete language of stones (“Clare was he,” 435), Kerewin’s future involves transcending the alienating tools of the intellect in order to become the peaceful “digger” (254) of her prophetic dream. Joe’s redeeming act is to embrace his taha Maori, which he had previously tended to regard as little more than a crippling anachronism. This enables him to accept the kaumatua’s gift and the responsibility it brings with it.

30

The novel does not uncritically validate all things Maori, however. The domestic violence at its centre is seen as a ‘Maori’ problem, in that it stems in large part from Joe’s feelings of disenfranchisement. Piri Tainui’s assault on Joe, perhaps as utu for his treatment of Simon (230), is seen as a similarly unhelpful way of addressing a deepseated spiritual malaise. 31 Seen in this light, Simon’s loss of hearing could be regarded as sad but ultimately of little consequence if it has also precipitated the cleansing fire which ushered in this new age, and its language of the heart. After all, if the essence of communication is the loving gesture, he is still able to hold out his hand to people, and smile (3). The apparent ease with which this morality slides into place has led some commentators to suggest that the novel may require a degree of imaginative complicity in the violence it depicts. (See Stead, “Keri Hulme’s the bone people and the Pegasus Award for Maori Literature,” 108.)

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The relics which litter the text also signify the alienating pressure of absence. In lieu of family, Kerewin has surrounded herself with possessions, which are intended to fill the gap left in her heart. Chief among these is her beloved collection of pounamu: the fact that she has bought this collection rather than inherited it simply underscores her spiritual emptiness (313). Although she appears to know how to contact her family, she actively perpetuates the estrangement; instead, and as a sign of the depth of her malaise, she can boast that she knows where all her gear is, “at all times” (304). It is Simon’s theft of her talisman knife Seafire and the destruction of her beloved guitar that precipitate the narrative’s climactic violence, but it is only in the wake of that crisis that Kerewin comes to realize the true nature of her treasures: “They were supposed to be a delight and an inspiration. They turned out to be the same sort of detritus as everything else. Junk and mathoms and useless geegaws” (314). Simon, on the other hand, while equally bound to possessions – especially other people’s – has an intuitive appreciation of their true nature. He knows that possessions can connect you to people, or to a person, or to the past, and treats them accordingly. He takes what he needs from Kerewin to maintain a sense of connection over physical separation (from moneycowries, paper-clips and cigars to chess pieces, rings and scented oil), but he can be hard on other people’s possessions, especially those that signify a sentimental connection with a dead past. He destroys the contents of a glass-fronted china cabinet full of mementoes of Joe’s life with Hana, for example, revealing them to be nothing more than “little springs and sprigs and plastic and odd rubber bands” (81). Rather than being simply wantonly cruel or vandalistic, Simon’s action serve to remind that ‘things’ are only useful to the degree that they enable closeness, but can cripple when they stand in the place of meaningful connection.32 Simon only has one possession of real value, which he uses in exactly this way. For the whole first year of his life with Joe, he had been inseparable from his “lucky talisman” (87) – an opulent rosary of gold and semiprecious stones which had also come ashore after the wreck. Once Simon realizes the significance of Kerewin’s friendship, he gives her his 32

Simon also understands this point in relation to language: as he blows into Kerewin’s ear to remind her that her fancy words are no more than air and that the touch of his hand is more real, he thinks “Knowing names is nice, but it don’t mean much. […] Names aren’t much. The things are” (126).

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rosary as a gesture which conveys his feelings of profound connection with her. It is not simply a token of love: in making this gift, Simon endows her with all that he is. Kerewin quickly identifies the nature of the gift and, despite her reservations that the rosary might be an heirloom and therefore “not to be alienated” (80), accepts it in the spirit in which it was intended. Simon’s rosary is one of the few possessions she takes with her as she prepares for her journey towards death (329). The rosary introduces one of the text’s most important motifs. It carries a ring bearing a coat of arms, depicting a long-necked bird nesting in flames: “A phoenix, bejabbers” (66). The first hint that this might be significant comes only a few pages later: Simon, who has a gift for seeing auras, sees Kerewin covered with flames like knives (73). Further, like the phoenix, Kerewin appears to be sexless; unlike the phoenix, however, she cannot bring about her own metamorphosis. This requires the painful but ultimately transformative engagement with others. The phoenix fire which Kerewin lays for her tricephalos in the ruins of her tower signals the death of her old self and the promise of a new way of being. This same fire welds the three protagonists into a single phoenix entity, composed of child and adult, male and female, Maori and pakeha. It also signals the apotheosis of the novel’s ethic of doing over talking, feeling over thinking, and peaceful co-presence over selfish individualism.

A pakeha novel Although the bone people’s bicultural intentions are clear and doubtless laudable, there are many reasons why its message of reconciliation might offer substantially more solace to pakeha than to Maori. An ethic that appears to value a felt sense of community over an arid and alienating intellectualism, for example, brings with it the corollary that if pakeha can simply feel sincerely bicultural, this may be enough to transcend or at least elide the intellectually demanding problems of historical injustice toward Maori. Similarly, the novel imagines its refurbished local identities as largely performative, where actions come to outweigh “mere words” as a way of defining the self. This ethic, too, helps bracket off history – which for pakeha exists as narrative or “mere words” – as a determinant

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for inter-ethnic relationships.33 (Ironically enough, this bracketing-off of the past, convenient and appealing as it may be to pakeha, runs exactly counter to the concept of time as it is embedded in Maori ontology and in the structure of te reo Maori: the word mua indicates the past and that which is in front of the speaker, while muri indicates the future and that which is behind. Thus, the past is always in front of the speaker as she moves backwards into the future.) Set against this apparent desire to transcend history, however, is the novel’s vision of the past as a kind of spiritual compost out of which the future might grow. The trope of the phoenix relies on this assumption, as does the equally structuring injunction that Kerewin will need to take “the kaika road/the glimmering road of the past/into Te Ao Hou” (91).34 The latter metaphor suggests that the seeker will find in a return to traditional values – the values of the kainga35 – an important source of truth, and that these traditional values and ways of knowing might help formulate new ways of being, or feeling. The kaumatua Tiaki Mira comes to stand for this dynamic in the text. Although he possesses the arcane traditional knowledge that has been necessary to safeguard the mauri and rescue Joe, the mauri is sleeping, having despaired of the despoilers of Aotearoa. The old man is unable to do more than watch it sleep: it will take the new being – the stranger, the digger and the broken man, rejuvenated by contact with the values of kaitiakitanga and manaakitanga the old man represents – to nurture the mauri to wakefulness. The immediate responsibility for the mauri, however, falls to the most ‘Maori’ of the three: as Tiaki Mira says, it would have been very hard to explain things if Joe had been European (345). It may not have been difficult, however, for Tiaki Mira to ‘explain things’ to an ideal pakeha reader of the bone people. Such a reader would have understood that the novel offered an important, messianic version of Maoritanga, that Joe’s hard lessons had enabled his innate and intuitive spirituality to shine forth, and that it was therefore ‘only natural’ that Joe, 33

The novel’s syncretic mythography does, however, allow aspects of the past to be heard, if they are useful as a way of accounting for present being: Simon’s presumed Irish ancestry, for example, is held to account for his musicality, his sentimentality, and his fondness for alcohol. 34 “Kaika = Ngai Tahu dialect for home or village; Te Ao Hou = the new world, the shining world.” (the bone people, Glossary, 447). 35 Kainga: the home; the home village.

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as a Maori, should assume kaitiakianga, or guardianship, in the first instance. Further, this reader might also have understood that Joe’s mission could only be completed with the help of Kerewin and Simon as they live out Kerewin’s ideal of commensalism, and that the ideal’s life outside the text might require that pakeha also come to share the responsibilities entailed in kaitiakitanga, whanaungatanga and manaakitanga.36 Simultaneously, then, the novel’s version of Maoritanga becomes part of a new myth for pakeha agency, enabling a sense of spiritual connection with place based on an intuitive and sympathetic identification with notionally Maori understandings of place, being and belonging.37 This scenario would probably be unexceptionable if it did not also have implications for Maori. The end of the novel finds Joe, the Maori factory worker, the guardian of the spirit of the land. While this image may have rhetorical force in terms of the novel’s redemptive morality, it also helps to maintain the belief that Maori are inherently more ‘spiritual’ than pakeha, and therefore have more important priorities than the grossly material. Further, the text affirms that social position and material possessions are no measure of human worth.38 However, when material advantage tends to accrue through ownership of property, the notion that spiritual guardianship should be vested in Maori hands takes on rather a 36 Kaitiakitanga, whanaungatanga, manaakitanga: traditional values and responsibilities relating to guardianship of the land (kaitiakitanga), family responsibilities (whanaungatanga) and responsibilities towards visitors (manaakitanga). 37 The text does not even suggest that the newly bicultural Pakeha should go to the trouble of learning te reo Maori. If its ethic of presence overrides mere linguistic communication, and if Maori is the language of the heart, Pakeha need do no more than know their own hearts, and the implicit fundamental goodness thereof, to be able to communicate successfully on this transcendental level. The presence of the glossary, therefore, underscores the point also made by Simon’s muteness: the language of the heart should be equally available to all, regardless of actual linguistic competence, and, in the case of te reo, regardless of the mundane fact that literal knowledge of both languages might enhance inter-ethnic understanding. 38 Kerewin offers a somewhat tendentious version of this moral as a consolation to Joe, who is worried that he may be a “typical hori” after all, made to work on a freezing-works chain or to be a factory hand, and not to “try for high places”: “High places in whose world? And high is as you decide it […] I’ve known roadies who knew theirs was a high place in the scheme of things, and I’ve met a cabinet minister who realized he was the bottom of the dung heap” (230). (Hori: literally, “George”; a generic, racist term for Maori males. “Used by Maori among themselves in a jocular fashion but is an insult when used by an unfriendly Pakeha”; the bone people, Glossary, 448.)

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hollow ring: in allowing that the spirit of the land is rightfully Joe’s, and in suggesting that material possessions only stand in the way of spiritual union, the novel requires readers – and Joe himself – to forget that land itself was ever removed from his ancestors. the bone people’s assumption that the tangata whenua39 have an inalienable, spiritual and ‘authentic’ relationship with the land and with each other enables a complementary strategy for pakeha. As long as Maori can be associated with a set of desirable, non-material values largely absent from the economically and politically dominant (but spiritually impoverished) pakeha majority, there is less need to confront the pressing problems of poverty, health, education and access to political power that have historically beset Maori: after all, the poor, the sick and the powerless have spirituality, and whanau, and are the guardians of Aotearoa.

“We are one people” Perhaps most significantly for pakeha readers, the mauri does not remain in Joe’s hands. Once it has led him back to Kerewin and Simon, it sinks into the earth near the spiral home they will share: the novel proposes that while the ‘spirit’ of the land may be Maori, responsibility for it must be shared; similarly, the mauri itself, which initially inhabited a pierced stone, must come to inhabit this new people, holed by guilt and suffering but made whole by a shared and uniting spirit of aroha. This saving idea of aroha is the novel’s gift to its pakeha readers. Like Joe and Simon, we can still be “fashed in the head” while “making it in the heart” (198): the novel’s ethic of presence suggests that ‘right feeling’ might be a sufficient basis for a new contract between Maori and pakeha in Aotearoa, and further, its deep suspicion of material possessions suggests that such a contract might only be encumbered by efforts to sort out the tacky, difficult, litigious – and emphatically material – legacy of colonialism. the bone people proposes instead that a physical or spiritual ordeal may be needed to transcend the past and its evils, and obliges readers with a vicarious experience of the results of the alienation and disenfranchisement experienced by the subjects of colonialism – both Maori and pakeha – and a concluding catharsis. In advancing its myth of suffering and re39 Tangata whenua: literally, people of the land. The indigenous inhabitants of Aotearoa / New Zealand.

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demption as an allegory for a possible future for Aotearoa, the bone people produces a vision of one people united by a violent past, now sharing breath in a transfigured landscape. However, such utopian visions tend to repeat a past they are unaware of: parables for change need history, rather than the myths required by fantasies of utopian transformation.40 Although the novel promotes a political reading, it leaves out the only term on which such a reading can proceed: without history, one is condemned to live in a world of new beginnings which only repeat the past. It would take other novelists, and a generation of revisionary historians, to put the past back in front of us again. In order to make a future together, the bone people proposes that while we all must learn from the past, in the end we must put it behind us. In this, Hulme’s novel now appears less a standard-bearer for contemporary biculturalism than the precursor of a recent moment of reaction in New Zealand politics. In January 2004, the National Party leader Don Brash addressed the Orewa Rotary Club on the subject of Nationhood. On that occasion, Dr Brash represented the Treaty as a divisive anachronism which required “people who weren’t around in the nineteenth century [to] pay compensation to the part-descendants of those who were.”41 In an effort to claw back support for his party from the country’s conservative heartland, he went on to call for an end to what he believes to be the special treatment of Maori in education, health-care, parliamentary representation and local-body politics: it is now essential, he said, to put [the settlement of historical grievances] behind us if all of us – and Maori in particular – are to stop looking backward and start moving forward into this new century as a modern, democratic and prosperous nation. (13–14)

Having done that, “we really will be one people – as Hobson declared to us in 1840.”

40

Forms of social transfiguration have often been dreamed here. The vision articulated in the bone people sits comfortably next to the community of drop-outs and dreamers who followed the poet James K. Baxter to his commune at Jerusalem on the Whanganui River in the late 1960s, the vision of race relations articulated in Bruce Mason’s play cycle The Healing Arch, and the prophet Te Whiti’s messianic leadership and passive resistance to armed British soldiers at Parihaka in 1881. 41 Don Brash, “Nationhood” (an address to the Orewa Rotary Club, 27 January 2004): 4, http://www.national.org.nz/Article.aspx?articleId=1614

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In advancing the notion that ill-defined Maori entitlements under the Treaty have come to take precedence over pakeha interests, Brash advocated instead the idea of one people under the law and – despite the fact that the two things are not incompatible – the elimination of any special legal status, under the Treaty, for the tangata whenua. This reversion to the assimilationist policies of the 1950s – under which Maori and pakeha may have been treated equally in sameness, if not in fairness – finds a surprising echo in the bone people’s myths of wholeness. Hulme’s narrative, too, allows pakeha readers to feel an unqualified sense of entitlement, without any concomitant acknowledgement of the historical complexities that will always define relationships between Maori and pakeha in New Zealand. Beneath both Don Brash’s one-nation equalitarianism and the comforting myth of equal belonging through common suffering that the bone people advances lies the belief that the only way to deal with a traumatic history is to turn the page and start over. But unless history continues to be heard, and memory maintained, the fragile social and economic gains made by Maori in the last thirty years may yet prove to be at risk, threatened by the very same ahistorical politics of willed homogeneity.

WORKS CITED Beevor, Antony. “Me-Decade Mutations,” Times Literary Supplement (25 October 1985): 1202. Brash, Don. “Nationhood” (an Address to the Orewa Rotary Club, 27 January 2004). (http://www .national.org.nz/speeches_.aspx?ArticleID=1614 Cowley, Joy. “We Are the Bone People,” New Zealand Listener (12 May 1984): 60. Edmond, Rod. “No Country for Towers: Reconsidering the bone people,” Landfall, New Series 1.2 (November 1993): 277–90. Enright, D.J. “Worlds of Wonder,” New York Review of Books 33.16 (27 February 1986): 16. Evans, Miriama. “Politics and Maori Literature,” Landfall 39.1 (March 1985): 40–44. Fee, Margery. “Why C.K. Stead Didn’t Like the bone people: Who Can Write as Other?” Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 1 (Spring 1989): 11–32. Hulme, Keri. the bone people (1983; Auckland: Spiral Collective / Hodder & Stoughton, 1985). Ihimaera, Witi, & D.S. Long, ed. Into the World of Light: An Anthology of Maori Writing (Auckland: Heinemann, 1982). Jones, D.A.N. “Whakapapa,” London Review of Books 7 (21 November 1985): 16. King, Michael. “The Original Mouthful,” New Outlook 11 (July–August 1984): 41.

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Mason, Bruce. The Healing Arch: Five Plays on Maori Themes (Wellington: Victoria U P , 1987). McLeod, Aorewa. “the bone people by Keri Hulme,” Craccum (17 April 1984): 18–19. Mita, Merata. “Indigenous Literature in a Colonial Society,” The Republican (November 1984): 4–7. Stead, C.K. “Keri Hulme’s the bone people and the Pegasus Award for Maori Literature,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 16.4 (October 1985): 101–108. Webby, Elizabeth. “Keri Hulme: Spiralling to Success,” Meanjin 1 (1985): 14–23.

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Integrating, Belonging, Unbelonging in Albert Wendt’s Sons for the Return Home Françoise Kral

A

L B E R T W E N D T ’ S F I R S T N O V E L , Sons for the Return Home, chronicles the life a Samoan family who migrate to New Zealand when ‘the boy’ (one of their two children and also the nameless protagonist) is still a child. They eventually return to Samoa after their two sons have completed their studies. This novel takes up some of the grand clichés of migration literature in a postcolonial context; it deals with loss and dispossession, enforced oblivion and vivid memories of the mother country, trauma and emotional nowhereness, but also mythification of the homeland and impossible return to the past. As some critics have pointed out,1 Wendt’s novel bears certain similarities with Wildcat Falling2 by the Australian writer Mudrooroo. Both novels are young-men narratives whose plots focus on the wanderings of an indigenous character (a half-caste Aborigine in the case of Mudrooroo and a Samoan in the case of Albert Wendt) at odds with white society. Unlike Mudrooroo’s anti-social hero, who shies away from relationships with Australians of Anglo-Saxon descent, Wendt’s protagonist is a college boy who falls in love with a pakeha3 girl. In Sons for the Return Home, the boy-meets-girl story develops beyond the encounter scene and allows Wendt to tackle the issue of unbelonging on both sides of the fence. It is

1

Paul Sharrad, Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature (Manchester: Manchester U P ,

2003). 2 3

Colin Johnson (Mudrooroo). Wild Cat Falling (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1965). A ‘pakeha’ in Maori signifies a person of European descent.

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not only posed in relation to the difficulties experienced by the Samoan family in adapting to New Zealand and finding their bearings in a place they never consider as home – until they have left it and start thinking back on it with a certain nostalgia. Wendt offers a more complex diachronic reflection on what it means for the first generation not to belong, as well as for the second generation of settlers and migrants who never really belong to the new land, any more than they do to the mother country – at least in the case of their children, who were born and bred in New Zealand. The fact that Wendt recounts the life of a Samoan family – who at the same time bear witness to the experience of native people and to that of immigrants – allows him to pinpoint the specificities of the experience of settlers and that of native populations without limiting himself to a binary approach. In this essay, I would like to demonstrate that Wendt’s first novel not only provides an insight into the trauma of unbelonging for native populations deprived of their land, but also successfully delineates a common ground of experience. This common ground allows him to reach beyond local problems while remaining attentive to specific contexts and issues.

Diagnosing unbelonging The theme of unbelonging crops up at a very early stage in the novel and is first introduced through the protagonist, a student from Samoa who was wrenched from the mother mountry at a very early age. Removed from his island when he was still a child, ‘the boy’ finds himself uprooted and rerooted in a new land (New Zealand) where he is surrounded by strangers and has to wear strange clothes. As far as he can remember, and despite the fact that he is now an outstanding student (the first Samoan in his school ever to pass School Certificate), he keeps being asked where he is from, and is thus reminded that he does not belong. In her book Strangers to Ourselves,4 Julia Kristeva reflects on the trauma of the foreigner. She contends that being foreign is to experience a sense of unbelonging on a regular basis, whether it be when someone deliberately wants to make you feel foreign, or when someone inadvertently and out of genuine interest asks you where you are from, which ostracizes you all the same. All it 4 Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, tr. Leon S. Roudiez (Étrangers à nousmêmes; Paris: Fayard, 1988; tr. New York: Columbia U P , 1991).

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takes is a nasty comment or a harmless question. Yet this genuine question opens up an abyss of pain and resonates long after it has been asked. In chapter 7, the boy’s girlfriend is surprised because he won’t dance; she then says she thought all Islanders were good dancers. Hardly has she uttered this rather unfortunate statement than she realizes her mistake; the stereotyped representation of Islanders behind her comment is proof of her awareness of his unbelonging and serves only to ostracize him. In her book, Kristeva also analyzes one of the main symptoms of unbelonging: the silence of the foreigner. Her take is that the foreigner is inbetween languages. Even when he fully masters the new language of the adopted country, he remains a split self whose polyglossia fails to conceal the fact that he is condemned to silence. Whatever he says in a new language is disconnected from affect; it makes sense and allows him to express himself, but it fails to help him express his self. Shortly after they have started dating, the heroine makes another unfortunate comment when she tells her Samoan-born boyfriend that he is talented in the “use of silence.” “You are talented!” “But at what?” She stopped walking and, gazing steadily up at him and trying not to laugh, said. “In the use of silence.”5

This ironic comment, meant to shake him out of his mutism, strikes at the heart of the experience of unbelonging. If silence is a sign of unbelonging, this poses the problem of its expression in a literary text. How can unbelonging be voiced if the in-betweener cannot word it? The first point I would like to demonstrate is that Wendt does not resort to pathos or hyperbolic descriptions of pain and suffering but opts for a more subtle approach. Wendt develops an aesthetic of silence; it hinges on displacement – in particular the displacement of affect from the character onto his surroundings – which seems to duplicate the experience of migration and displacement of the foreigner. The third-person narrator’s omniscience contrasts sharply with the distance he introduces when he refers to the characters as “the boy,” “the girl,” “the girl’s parents.” The absence of 5 Albert Wendt, Sons for the Return Home (1973; Honolulu: U of Hawaii P , 1996): 10. Further page references are in the main text.

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names not only suggests that the characters are archetypal figures standing for Samoan boys and white girls in general, but also creates a certain emotional no-man’s-land between the reader and the characters and prevents any form of understanding through identification. Wendt thus circles the silent core of suffering experienced by the displaced self and spirals around the mute pain and unvoiced trauma – only hinted at and always described from the outside. The sadness linked to the sense of unbelonging resonates from each page of the second chapter and is mirrored in the tears shed by the child on the journey across to New Zealand. The first chapter of the first part offers very telling examples of how the characters’ mood is hinted at through descriptions of his surroundings. The raindrops rolling down the window conjure up a certain melancholy, as if the character’s feelings were reflected onto the setting: The window-pane was blistered with raindrops; he watched them as they slid, like peeling strips of skin, down the glass. The dark heads of the trees immediately below the windows nodded noiselessly in the wind. (2)

Later on in the novel, when the boy has become a grown-up, his sense of unbelonging is expressed through his reluctance to touch upon personal matters and speak of himself with others. Yet it is never expressed in his own words but only suggested through non-vocal and non-verbal markers; hence the idea I have put forward of an aesthetic of silence. This melancholy is also expressed in analepses recounting episodes from the boy’s childhood, when he was building houses with boxes collected from the dump: Out of discarded tins, cardboard boxes, twisted pieces of metal, hulks of cars and refrigerators, tattered clothes and shoes, broken furniture – in fact out of the discarded, useless ends of the city, the boys constructed castles, houses, and roads: a miniature city which belonged totally to them. They destroyed their city before leaving for home in the late afternoon, only to reconstruct it in a different pattern the following week. (25)

The games played by the two Samoan boys already bear the marks of unbelonging. Made from scraps, from what others no longer want, their miniature cities are not meant to last but to be brought down and rebuilt. Wendt also suggests that there is a difference between integration and a sense of belonging, which is independent of the degree of integration. You can be objectively integrated without feeling that you truly belong. In

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other words, integration is not only the sum of external marks of integration (among these your ability to learn the language or to be successful at school) but also the feeling that you truly belong to a place. In the fourth chapter of part one, the boy’s parents are asked to meet the school principal, who congratulates them on having given birth to such a brilliant boy (“‘your whole race should be proud of this boy’, says the principal,” 13). Unlike his parents, who feel proud and flattered, the boy knows better; he knows that he will never be like any pakeha and that he will be praised when others can’t do anything but praise him: “Look at how they have helped you get where you are!” “Only because they can’t do anything else, Papa. I’m better than them at that stupid game they worship so much. I can compete with the best of them in class as well. I speak their language, their peculiar brand of English as well as any of them. They have to pretend I’m their equal […].” (13)

Although he is Samoan, Albert Wendt does not limit himself to recounting the trauma of indigenous populations; he also registers the sense of in-betweenness of the children or grandchildren of settlers who have to live with a sense of guilt and bear the burden of their family’s high hopes and expectations. Recent criticism has addressed the question of unbelonging in relation not only to the indigenous populations but also to settler populations. Terry Goldie has raised the problem of the colonists’ sense of exile and displacement and the lack of a locus standi.6 As Goldie reminds us, colonists were not always there of their own free will – as witness Australia’s convicts – and felt displaced and exiled. In Fear and Temptation7 Goldie explains that in order to really settle a new land, colonists have to be able to map it, to find their bearings but also to inhabit it spiritually. The fact that the colonization of New Zealand by white settlers is still a relatively recent phenomenon makes it difficult for white settlers and their descendants to connect with long-established traditions. Goldie contends that in recently settled countries, like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, settlers use the indigenous culture as a means to inhabit the land,

6

This expression is used by Arundhati Roy in The God of Small Things (London: Flamingo, 1997) to refer to the way colonized populations are left without bearings and are overwhelmed by a sense of displacement and exile. 7 Terry Goldie, Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s U P , 1989).

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not only its surface but its culture. Goldie gives the example of indigenous place-names retained by the settlers after colonization or of indigenous names given to companies, etc. It seems to me that the notion of indigenization may prove an interesting tool with which to analyze the passage relating the couple’s trip inland. Yet while the boy as a native should be instrumental in the girl’s indigenization, according to Goldie’s analysis, it happens the other way round. The girl, who is used to outdoor life, proves to be a lot closer to the land; she knows her country better than he does. She takes him through a process of initiation, and the word “baptism” is even used to refer to his first swim in the river. The narrator also recounts an episode in which the girl and her boyfriend take a walk; the girl tells him the names of all the trees, thus allowing him to map the land and find his bearings in New Zealand: As they made their way down through the trees over the precariously steep track, he asked her to tell him the names of the trees and ferns. Rimu, tawa, ponga were some of the names she knew. (82)

Although the narrative occasionally takes up hackneyed clichés such as the idea that you become one with the country when making love to a pakeha girl, which culminates in a scene of love-making in the river, Wendt successfully departs from the stereotype of the indigenous boy at home in the wild. Later on in the novel, Wendt tenders the idea that unbelonging is not only generated by the white settler’s refusal to accept other communities, but that this attitude is shared by Islanders themselves. Wendt thus avoids the pitfall which would consist in condemning whites, and shows how accepting others is a challenge. It is not to be put down solely to white racism or to colonization. At one stage in the novel, the boy’s mother, who is trying to talk her son out of getting seriously involved with the pakeha girl, warns him that their community will reject and destroy her. But Wendt also shows that identity is not fixed and frozen in time, it changes and depends on what you become. It is not determined solely by the ‘given’ but by the choices you make and the life you lead. I shall return to this point in due course when dealing with the family’s homecoming. To conclude this first part, we can say that what Wendt explores in this novel is not so much the difference between pakeha and native populations as between first-generation migrants and their children. The girl’s family have lived in New Zealand for three generations and it is

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clear that her grandparents came with the intention of returning to England. So did the boy’s parents. Unlike them, their children are trapped between two places and unable to bear the burden of the family’s moral heritage and of their dreams and aspirations, unable to go all the way because they don’t feel that they really belong anywhere. Most characters in the book experience a sense of unbelonging, yet in the case of the boy’s parents it is more a temporary difficulty of (re)adjusting to life in Samoa, while for the boy, it is more a case of not having a locus standi. Wendt’s text thus anticipates a shift in the problematics of postcolonial literature from novels dealing with loss and dispossession to those dealing with the trauma of never having belonged. Although Wendt’s novel reads like a traditional homecoming narrative pervaded with a sense of nostalgia and longing for the island, it develops into a coming to terms with reality. I would like to suggest that Wendt’s novel is characterized by a certain awareness of the fact that the past cannot be regained and by a sense that the displaced, the migrant or the colonized (ostracized in his own land) may gain a double perspective on his own culture and that of the colonist’s. I thus propose to analyze how the topos of the island is revisited and how its pivotal status can act as a paradigm for the in-betweenness of the postcolonial situation.

From the island to the archipelago: Rewriting the cliché of the island as a paradigm for a solipsistic experience into a possible double orientation Islands have a long tradition of haunting not only postcolonial texts but literature in general. Whether they act as a perfect locus for a utopia, or as counter-images of the mainland, which they then help to satirize, literary islands are characterized by a tension between sameness and difference. They are no longer attached to the mainland but used to be; they are separate, but not independent, tied to the continent.8 In the context of Australian and New Zealand literature, islands are often places where the brutal encounter between settlers and native populations is pushed to its radical end (for example in Australian writer Mudrooroo’s Doctor Woo-

8 See Marimoutou & Racault, L’Île des merveilles: Mirage, miroir, mythe (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995).

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reddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World (1983).9 They represent the invasion of the most remote and secluded parts of the land, which suggests that there are limits to the intrusive presence of the colonists. I would stress the fact that although Wendt, in this early novel, does not always avoid binary oppositions, the setting he sketches in Sons for the Return Home questions the solipsism of the island, the motherland to which the characters long to return. The first chapter does not come across as the chapter in which isolation is foregrounded. This idea is hinted at in the second chapter, once the binarism has been debunked. In other words, there is a process of undermining the cliché before the cliché actually appears. The second chapter describes the journey of a Samoan family leaving their island for the first time, with their boy in tears refusing to leave the cabin, and his parents having to arrange for his meals to be brought to him. And here, of course, the motif of nourishment echoes this idea of the island as the nurturing land. Their first morning at sea the boy screamed and clung to his mother when they ventured from their cabin. His father tried to soothe him with caresses and whispered affirmations that there was nothing to be afraid of. […] The sight and smell of all those strange white people speaking a language he didn’t understand only frightened him more. (5)

The retreat into the self and the fear of mixing are developed throughout the chapter. The boat, which is described as a place of encounter and interaction – where the parents who cannot speak any English find an English-speaking passenger who agrees to act as an interpreter – is seen from the boy’s perspective as a dangerous place, threatening and foreign. That afternoon his parents persuaded a Samoan passenger who could speak English to ask one of the stewards to bring their meals to the cabin. For the rest of the journey, which took six days, they rarely left their cabin. In the evening, when there were no people on the decks, the man and the woman would go out and enjoy the cool refreshing breeze and salt spray while the boy slept. (5)

Although the symbolism of the boat as a threshold between the native culture and New Zealand is suggested in a rather obvious way and further emphasizes the polarity island/mainland, centre/periphery, the topogra9 Colin Johnson (Mudrooroo), Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1983).

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phy becomes pregnant with meaning(s). In this chapter, the harbour serves as a distant background to the scene. It emerges in the distance, thereby conjuring up a sense of communication and interaction between the different islands, and announcing the paradigm of the archipelago as opposed to the solipsism of the island. A passenger liner was ploughing a thin furrow of foam across the dark blue waters of the harbour, heading for the entrance. […] He looked down at the harbour. The liner was disappearing through the harbour entrance; it rose and fell in the swell of the open sea. He gazed at the Rimutuka Range across the harbour and saw a wall of storm clouds shifting ponderously down towards Eastbourne and the harbour. (2–3)

The passage is replete with images of separation and confinement which seem to hint at the solipsistic experience of the protagonist. However, this impression is counterbalanced by the description of the harbour and of the liner, which embodies the link between the islands. Wendt’s novel also stresses the fact that the island is not marooned in time and that it has never been a lost Eden. It is presented in a less flattering light and in a more realistic way. It soon becomes clear that the motherland has been embellished and made more glamorous in the parents’ accounts to their children; it is thus a mix of the real island and its fantasized reconstruction through nostalgic memories. This deceptive image, frozen in time, does not bear witness to the changes and alterations brought by the passing of time – so much so, that it bears only a very slight resemblance to the actual island. In the chapter telling of the homecoming, all the clichés are debunked as the real island emerges from the glittering varnish: His mind was analysing the life around him, cutting down through the glittering surface of the myths to the bone. For a few days he tried to stop himself from doing this. Then he gave up; he had to be honest with himself. […] He had returned unprepared for the flies and mosquitoes. In New Zealand they had found no place in his parents’ stories of Samoa. (Unimportant creatures like these rarely played important roles in any mythology.) (175)

I would suggest that the archipelago is more than an exotic setting but can be read as a paradigm for the articulation of entities. The opening chapters clearly show how the protagonists are neither from the island nor from the mainland, but belong to different networks. The following analysis draws

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on the notion of ‘scape’ as developed by Arjun Appadurai in his book Modernity at Large.10 Appadurai shows that the complexity of postcolonial situations cannot be narrowed down to the tension or antagonism between a centre (both in the political and economic sense of the term) and a periphery. He contends that these poles are tied together and in constant interaction, not on a one-on-one basis but through different networks, which he calls ‘scapes’. In using the term ‘scape’, Appadurai is thinking of landscape (and therefore suggests a certain subjectivity, since a landscape is perceived by an observing subject). He coins different expressions such as ‘ethnoscape’, ‘financescape’, ‘technoscape’, ‘ideoscape’ and ‘mediascape’ to refer to the different forms of networks and interactions across borders. This theory has the advantage of avoiding the pitfalls of already made oppositions (you can belong to one ‘scape’ while being excluded from others). For example, you can have access to the mediascape without having access to the financescape. And this theory also leaves room for a certain flexibility and dynamic interaction. As early as in the first scene, when the young boy sees the girl for the first time, Wendt suggests that belonging is a lot more problematic than it seems. The boy (who was crying on the boat and did not want to leave the island) is now a young man, a student, who leaves a lecture because he is bored. He has become part of an ‘ideoscape’, so to speak (and is bored just like any other student). Yet his mother speaks to him in Samoan, which means that he belongs to two ethnoscapes. When he sees the girl for the first time, he immediately thinks that she is “attractive, blonde […] like a model out of a fashion magazine” (3), which makes it clear that his references are that of mainstream popular culture and the widely shared references of students his age. What this shows is that his problem does not stem so much from a sense of unbelonging as from a sense of belonging to too many scapes. To a certain extent, the fact that he belongs to so many scapes, and to a lot more scapes than pakeha characters, is but a heightened form of the multiple belonging of his parents. Although they had never left the island before the big trip to New Zealand, they had been exposed to the settler’s ways, through religion. Several passages lay emphasis on the parents’ attachment to the Church and the precepts of Christianity – for ex-

10 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1996).

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ample, when the boy takes his girlfriend to a dance organized by the church and for which she is not appropriately dressed. Like most other Samoan families in Wellington, their lives revolved round the Pacific Islanders church. This was why they had shifted to Newtown: it was closer to the church. After a few years the man was appointed a deacon, his younger son – in his final year at high school – taught Sunday school and his wife became a respected member of the church social committee. (30)

Interestingly, Wendt suggests that the changes in the natives’ life-style did not take place overnight but followed a pattern of gradual acceptance of further scapes. For example, certain episodes stress the fact that the grandfather was a healer, and that Samoan families only gradually accepted pakeha doctors. In the last chapters of the novel, the boy decides to take a break from the stifling family life and decides to visit Apia, where he stays in a hotel. In the hotel restaurant, the waitress is reluctant to serve him a meal, thinking that he is a penniless Samoan who wants to enjoy a free ride. Later, when he switches to English, she realizes that he is educated and her attitude changes. “Look, my bloody money is the same as any palagi’s or half-caste’s,” he said in English. The fact that he could speak English (and English of high quality) did the trick. It proved to her that he wasn’t trying to have a free meal, that he wasn’t Samoan from what the townsfolk referred to cynically as ‘the back districts’. [ …] For the rest of his stay in the hotel and in Apia he had no more trouble. He used English or the unique town mixture of English and Samoan whenever he wanted something. He didn’t really like doing this, but because he wanted peace of mind he did it. Money and the quality of a person’s English were two of the town’s peculiar ways of estimating status. To be fluent in English and yet speak to someone in Samoan was interpreted by that someone as an insult, a deliberate attempt on your part to show that the unfortunate someone didn’t know any English. (195)

In this episode, Wendt draws our attention to the way the island has been contaminated by Western mentalities which have slowly taken over, ‘scape by scape’, so to speak. While the family return to Samoa with different habits, other Samoans are equally mentally colonized, in the sense that they have come to accept the ways and bearings of New Zealand and that speaking Samoan is resented and places you very low in the social hierarchy. It is also suggested that the religion imported by the mission-

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aries has become essential in Samoan society and is now necessary to hold together the social fabric. This analysis could also be theorized in terms of deterritorialization. In the same way that Deleuze11 shows how territoriality originates in a networking process, in an inscription of networks upon the land, which situates territoriality not on the side of the given but as a construct, the archipelago as fictionalized by Wendt debunks the idea of a naturally organized landscape to reveal the mechanism inherent in new fluxes and connections.

Integrating, belonging or dis-belonging: The predicament of the interstitial self What the novel leads to, ultimately, is an understanding of identity as provisional and changing, as necessarily unbounded. In the same way that Wendt chooses the archipelago as a setting rather than the island, the self is studied in its complex relation to others. In the last chapters of Sons for the Return Home, Wendt’s characters – the protagonist and his father – reach a similar conclusion when they realize that there is no such thing as a radical return to the island, that there is no turning back the hands of the clock to live in their homeland the way they used to. Whatever they have experienced in New Zealand has become part of them. What this idea opens out to is a dialectic of dispossession, mourning and gradual integration of dispossession as a constitutive element of the colonized’s psyche, a fact the colonized people have to learn to live with. The question raised by the novel is that of the notion of belonging. Belonging to different scapes is also what prevents people from wholly belonging anywhere. That is why I would say that, although the novel contains episodes in which the characters ‘go native’ and return happily to a pristine land, Wendt’s novel is suffused with a sense of the impossibility of ever totally belonging anywhere. At the end of the novel, the father admits that if his return to the island has been successful, he misses the factory and admits that it has become part of him:

11

Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia tr. Brian Massumi (Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie Paris: Minuit, 1988; tr. London: Athlone, 1987).

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“Funny, but I miss New Zealand too. I miss that factory and that machine I worked with and lived with for nearly twenty years. Funny how we come to love things that are so inhuman, isn’t it. Even now I love the feel and smell of plastic, steel, iron, concrete… I miss that ugly, cruel city, with its insatiable roots stabbed into the earth, choking it […].” (209)

We could probably compare the idea of interstitial identity developed by Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture to this situation, when he writes: The move away from the singularities of ‘class’ or ‘gender’ as primary conceptual and organizational categories, has resulted in an awareness of the subject positions – of race, gender, generation, institutional location, geopolitical locale, sexual orientation – that inhabit any claim to identity in the modern world. What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood – singular or communal – that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, in the act of defining the idea of society itself.12

Wendt’s reflections on identity and belonging also call to mind what the Indian-born critic Aijaz Ahmad wrote about Rushdie’s idea of migrancy as a posture shared by all human beings: Rushdie’s idea of ‘migrancy’, for example, which is quite central to this selfrepresentation both in fiction and in life, has come to us in two versions. In the first version, fully present in Shame and in the writings that came at more or less the same time, ‘migrancy’ is given to us as an ontological condition of all human beings, while the ‘migrant’ is said to have “floated upwards from history.” In the second version, articulated more fully in the more recent writings, this myth of ontological unbelonging is replaced by another, larger myth of excess of belongings: not that he belongs anywhere, but that he belongs to too many places.13

Consequently, home is no longer where you were born, but the immaterial scape where the different scapes you are part of intersect. Shortly after their return to the island, the family decide to have a house built. Unlike 12

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994): 1. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (New York: Verso, 1992): 127. 13

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other houses in the village, their new home is designed to have all the modern conveniences and to be equipped with electrical devices no one but competent members of the family will be allowed to use. Roughly a year after their homecoming, the house is ready for use. This moment coincides with the departure of the boy, who has made up his mind to return to New Zealand. Ironically enough, the mother accidentally refers to New Zealand as home, as if the ‘real home’ was where had they lived and spent their lives. Although she won’t admit it, returning to the island is not very fulfilling. Looking at him, she said, “I’m glad. I knew you’d love it here.” She paused. “I love it here,” she added. “Of course I do miss our old home now and then.” “But this is your home,” he said, testing her. She laughed. “Yes, I meant our home in New Zealand.” (213)

Coming home only enables the characters to boast about their success story. The third part of the book is replete with references to the mother’s attachment to her social ascent or to that of her children. She is proud to donate a hundred dollars to the church when the rest of the congregation can only afford ten dollars. She becomes an active member of the community and takes to speaking English in front of her Samoan friends to show that she is educated. In this sense, the whole future of the family is to bear witness to the past and prove to others as well as to themselves that they have lived up to their dreams and expectations. It is a sterile move rather than a move forward. This clarity in the understanding of their inbetweenness is reached by the boy, but as such he is condemned to be a permanent exile. At the end of the novel it becomes clear that he does not belong to the Samoan community any more than he belongs in New Zealand. The account of his observations of life in Samoa is characterized by a certain ambiguity around the focalization. The narration is still omniscient, the focalization still that of the boy. But a certain change has been introduced between the boy and his surroundings as he discovers that he is very different from them. There is even a stylistic shift from the ‘we’ to the ‘they’ as the boy realizes that he does not belong. Some of his comments verge on the anthropological: His people – and it was difficult for him to refer to them as his people because he was now more papalagi than Samoan – measured life in proportion to their

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physical beauty […]. They believed themselves inanely fit […] their tempers would explode and they would send one another to hospital […]. (177–78; my emphases)

The last point I would like to stress is that Wendt’s approach to the question of unbelonging is far from being exclusive, radical or systematic. Some characters, such as the mother or her other child, happily return to Samoa and readily assume the role of successful migrants who have ‘made it big’ in New Zealand, while the other boy feels the urge to return to New Zealand, not because it is home but, rather, because it is less painful to feel ostracized in a country which is not your home country. It has been my contention that Wendt shows how unbelonging can be an enlightening experience or may originate in a definite refusal to belong. Yet if the in-betweener is blessed with intellectual clairvoyance, he is also condemned to solitude and can never be with others. I would like to end on a quotation from Kristeva’s book that is a very good illustration of the predicament of the protagonist: “Always elsewhere, the foreigner belongs nowhere.”14 In this essay I hope to have showed that Wendt suggests (and here I would be tempted to say ‘like many postcolonial writers’) that belonging is not to be understood in terms of a place and a set locus but in terms of articulation and posture – what Bhabha calls negotiation. This, to me, is what makes the postcolonial novel so valuable as a means of understanding the predicament of contemporary identity in a world of mobility and hybridization where the local resurfaces in all its constraints but also as a reassuring framework. To me, this may provide the key to understanding the predicament of postmodern identity. Zygmunt Bauman once wrote: The modern ‘problem of identity’ is primarily how to construct an identity and keep it solid and stable, the postmodern ‘problem of identity’ is primarily how to avoid fixation and keep the options open.15

One of the reasons why Wendt’s novel is so interesting to read thirty years after it was published is that we can see how it heralds an idea developed in more recent postcolonial fiction, the idea that this in-between place where the colonized are to be found is not only a very uncomfortable and 14 15

Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 10. Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995): 88.

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precarious locus but that it can become an interesting vantage-point and source of empowerment.

WORKS CITED Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (New York: Verso, 1992). Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996). Bauman, Zygmunt. Life in Fragments (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Deleuze, Gilles, & Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia tr. Brian Massumi (Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie; Paris: Minuit, 1988; tr. London: Athlone, 1987). Goldie, Terry. Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s U P , 1989). Johnson, Colin. Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1983). ——. Wild Cat Falling (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1965). Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves, tr. Leon S. Roudiez. (Etrangers à nous-mêmes; Paris: Fayard, 1988; tr. New York: Columbia U P , 1991). Marimoutou, Jean–Claude, & Jean–Michel Racault, ed. L’insularité, Thématique et Représentation. (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995). Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things (London: Flamingo, 1997). Sharrad, Paul. Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature (Manchester: Manchester U P , 2003). Wendt, Albert. Sons for the Return Home (1973; Honolulu: U of Hawaii P , 1996).

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Margaret Mahy’s Post-National Bridge-Building Weaving the Threads of Unbelonging

Anne Magnan–Park

Passwords to the disoriented North

F

N E W Z E A L A N D E R S , Margaret Mahy is an icon of national culture, albeit a paradoxical and eccentric one.1 As the recipient of two Carnegie Medals, for The Haunting in 1982 and The Changeover in 1984, along with, in 1993, the Order of New Zealand – New Zealand’s highest civil honour – Mahy is one of the most distinguished authors of her country.2 As such, she embodies New Zealand’s literary talent at its best, both at home and abroad. Yet Mahy has been persistently criticized for failing to propose to her young readership substantial representations of her home country. As a matter of fact, throughout 1

OR

Mahy is quite literally an iconic figure, since she was recognized as an Icon Artist by the Arts Foundation of New Zealand in 2005 along with Peter Godfrey, Patricia Grace, Alexander Grant, Patariki Harrison, and Donald Monroe. 2 The other two writers to receive this honorific title are Janet Frame and Allen Curnow. Mahy’s distinctions also include a Lifetime Achievement Award from the New Zealand Literary Fund (1985), a honorary doctorates from the University of Canterbury (1993) and from Waikato University (2005). She became President of Honour of the New Zealand Society of Authors in 1997, and won the A.W. Reed Lifetime Achievement Award (1999) and six Esther Glen Medals: for A Lion in the Meadow (1969), The First Margaret Mahy Story Book (1973), The Haunting (1982), The Changeover (1985), Underrunners (1993), and 24 Hours (2001). Mahy was also nominated twice for the Hans Christian Andersen Medal (2002 and 2004).

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the years, Mahy has had to answer the inevitable interview question of how, as a New Zealander, she became such an integral part of her culture while letting so little of New Zealand emerge from her work. Given the genre Margaret Mahy adopted from the start, one may question the appropriateness of such nationalistic reservations regarding the slender nature of Mahy’s fictional signs of cultural belonging. As a children’s writer who delights in giving birth to supernatural beings, nonsensical situations, and improbable places, Mahy uses the real as but a stepping-stone to enter the realm of the imaginary. She thus often resorts to indefinite locales, semi-imaginary places that belong nowhere in particular and thus escape the geographical confines and characteristics of a given country. Furthermore, Mahy’s atypical literary career was launched internationally when the American and British publishers, Franklin Watts and J.M. Dent, published her very first picture books in 1969.3 As a result, her prose and cultural idiosyncrasies underwent the adjustments her American and British editors required to appeal to a larger anglophone market. For these two reasons – the genre she committed to and the streamlining exigencies of the international market – Mahy’s cultural affiliation to her native country was not exactly bound to stand out. However, Margaret Mahy’s portrayal of New Zealand, or lack thereof, within her early work needs contextualizing. The notion of establishing national identity through literature was at the core of New Zealand literary awareness ever since the 1890s, but it was not until after World War I, in the 1920s–30s, that a decidedly postcolonial literature emerged. It subsequently affirmed itself in the 1940s–50s, thanks to literary journals such as Landfall, which was launched in 1947 by the Christchurch-based Caxton Press, and the emergence to full prominence of such writers as R.A.K. Mason, A.R.D. Fairburn, Frank Sargeson, Allen Curnow, and Charles Brasch. As New Zealand’s national literary identity grew stronger and more defined, the idea of a literature which ought to reflect the localized postcolonial ‘here and now’ instead of eurocentric colonial values gained currency in the debates prompted by such publications as Allen Curnow’s anthology A Book of New Zealand Verse, 1923–45 and the New Zealand Poetry Yearbook edited by Louis Johnson in 1951 and 1952. Nevertheless, Curnow’s promotion of literary nationalism was opposed by a younger 3 Before coming out as picture books in America and Britain, Mahy’s stories appeared in New Zealand’s School Journal from 1961 onwards.

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generation of poets like James Baxter and Louis Johnson who argued in favour of a more modernist internationalism that advanced a universal sense of national identity transcending the idiosyncratic virtues of the specifically regional. Meanwhile, a similar debate on national characteristics was taking place in the area of children’s literature. In the 1960s, Margaret Mahy herself was busy trying to secure a publisher at a time when only a handful of New Zealand children’s authors were published at home and overseas. Their collective annual output then was a meagre twenty books. Some of these writers believed in helping young generations of New Zealanders identify with their own cultural heritage by providing them with fictional yet unmistakably familiar landscapes and by promoting the regional and national aspects of their shared culture. For example, Joyce West depicted the rural farming communities of Northland in The Year of the Shining Cuckoo (1961), Ron Bacon stressed Maori values in The Boy and the Taniwha (1966) and Rua and the Sea People (1968), Elsie Locke set her story in the Southern Alps and the West Coast in The Runaway Settlers (1965), Anne de Roo located hers in Central Otago and the Southern Alps in The Gold Dog (1969) and Moa Valley (1969), and Ruth Dallas’s takes place in her native South in The Children in the Bush (1969). In this regard, Margaret Mahy, of British immigrant descent and educated in New Zealand, presents an atypical case of artistic displacement within the postcolonial context of New Zealand. Mahy’s debut stories were first rejected by New Zealand publishers for failing to display explicit nation-specific content from their homeland.4 Indeed, Mahy is inclined to opt for unidentifiable self-reflexive fictional locations traversed by nomadic and nationally carefree characters such as pirates, witches, and magicians. They are places that avoid pointing to the outside world while translating the nature of imagination in topographical terms. The landscape in her stories “isn’t Britain […] or New Zealand, and it isn’t the U S , either. It is simply the country of story,” where Mahy herself is “a citizen 4

“I had built up enough stories for a collection, which I sent off to most New Zealand publishers but they all rejected it. They wrote me notes back saying, we don’t think they’re sufficiently New Zealand in their content to enable us to publish them.” Sue Kedgley, “Interview with Margaret Mahy,” in Our Own Country: Leading New Zealand Women Writers Talk about their Writing and their Lives, ed. Kedgley (Auckland: Penguin, 1989): 139. The publishers Mahy contacted include Blackwood and Janet Paul, A.H. & A.W. Reed, and Whitcombe & Tombs.

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of the country of story,”5 paying tribute not to her nation but to our imaginative faculty. That is not to say, however, that reality is altogether absent from her tales. Mahy is intent on promoting the idea that imagination is “the ability to work creatively with reality,”6 that it can ultimately alter the real.7 Her inclination towards the genre of magical realism derives from her desire not only to write stories for children but also, and more importantly, to explore the real and the discrepancy between what she terms one’s “inner and outer landscapes”8 from a more dramatic yet far less popular angle. I have previously speculated as to why British and European adult literature discarded fantasy for a while, and think that in New Zealand’s case the necessity of defining a day-to-day New Zealand identity was expressed in defining our relatively new and uncertain identity rather than playing any surrealistic games. It was partly a sort of fidelity to fantasy that made me (I conjecture) a writer for children, since it seemed back in the 1950s and 1960s that fantasy had no place in respected adult writing.9

Deeply influenced by nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British children’s authors such as Lewis Carroll, Kenneth Grahame, A.A. Milne, Alison Uttley, and Beatrix Potter, Mahy found herself doubly at odds with her local coevals, who were determined to forge a nation-specific literary identity reflecting New Zealand’s essence. However, as her career evolved, Mahy grew increasingly aware of her role as a female postcolonial author based in the Pacific Rim and proceeded to incorporate occasional Kiwi elements into her stories. This change of setting became more substantial once Mahy started writing young-adult novels in 1982, with The Haunting as her first title. While fantasy still lies at the core of these 5

Margaret Mahy, “Margaret Mahy: The Writer in New Zealand: Building Bridges through Children’s Books,” Bookbird 34.4 (Winter 1996): 10. In the paragraphs from which the quotation is drawn, Mahy comments on her appreciation of Steven Kellog’s illustrations for The Boy Who Was Followed Home. 6 Mahy, in Tessa Duder, Margaret Mahy: A Writer’s Life (Auckland: HarperCollins, 2005): 164. 7 As is the case in A Lion in the Meadow; Duder, Margaret Mahy, 118. 8 Margaret Mahy, “Building Bridges between our Outer and Inner Landscapes,” in Reading is Everybody’s Business, ed. W.B. Elley (Wellington: I R A , Wellington Council, 1973). 9 Mahy, in Duder, Margaret Mahy, 78–79.

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stories for young adults, New Zealand’s urban and coastal settings are more prominent, and the daily lives and idiomatic expressions of the characters signal their cultural distinctiveness. The Changeover (1984), for instance, takes place in the fictionalized urban setting of Christchurch, a city in which Mahy had worked and lived. As such, this novel represents a ‘homecoming’ for Mahy. It contributed to mending what the author terms her “imaginative displacement”: i.e. her British fantasy-induced imagination trapped in the Antipodes or an “imagination colonised by reversed seasons.”10 In doing so, Mahy was not so much fictionalizing part of her real life in New Zealand, since she had done this all along, as referencing at last the tangible cultural, linguistic, and geographical roots it shared with New Zealand. Paradoxically, Mahy had, very early in her career, attempted unsuccessfully to set her stories in her homeland, a shortcoming she attributed to her lack of exposure as a young reader not so much to New Zealand literature per se as to New Zealand as a literary subject. Mahy was born in 1936, and during her childhood, the children’s literature produced nationally was represented by a mere handful of titles, which Mahy’s parents ignored, convinced as they were of the literary superiority of its European counterpart. Mahy’s imagination was thus nourished by very real yet almost unverifiable facts and realms of possibility emanating from a politically present yet geographically remote former colonial power. Curious animals which young Mahy had never encountered in her native land, enchanting narratives, and unfamiliar landscapes – all of which her family considered part of their cherished heritage – infused Mahy’s inner world. In fact, so powerful was the influence of British literature on Mahy that, to her dismay, she soon found herself incapable of translating her own Kiwi background convincingly in any literary shape or form. I had already discovered that when I tried to write stories specifically about New Zealand, I just did not believe them. Perhaps this was because the stories I had heard and read in my childhood disconnected me from my surroundings. For instance, I had climbed pohutukawa trees for many years, but, once included in my stories, pohutukawas seem to have no extension beyond the page. If I wrote of a pine or a willow, there was an imaginative resonance. Not only were the pines and willows all around me, expensively planted by indus10

Margaret Mahy, The Changeover: A Supernatural Romance (London: Dent,

1984): 283.

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trious colonizers, but they were in the stories too – mentioned by A.A. Milne or Kenneth Grahame, to choose two classic examples. The word pohutukawa, however, sat self consciously on the page and could go no further.11

Margaret Mahy replaced the hic et nunc of her daily life with a fantasized version of the ‘there and then’ of British tales. Her experience as a reader of British literature was so satisfying that New Zealand, no matter how tangible and inspiring, lacked the primal, essential literary connection fulfilled early on by a more distant and highly desired part of the world. As a consequence, New Zealand just failed to belong to the written page. It was certainly the theatre where Mahy’s mind wandered on a daily basis, but it was not the land from which her creativity – at least at first – could draw its inspiration. Probing the ancient crater of a volcano in Lyttelton harbour (near Christchurch) in search of a visual echo, Mahy compares her fractured sense of belonging with the notorious geology of her homeland. Both Mahy and New Zealand are traversed by a fault-line, and while Mahy became aware through her work of the dividing rift between her imagination and the real, it is through her creative writing – line after line – that she intends to address and explore the depth of this chasm originating in a postcolonial wound. This fault-line “divid[ing her] interior landscape from [her] outside one”12 is also what she terms “the New Zealand paradox,”13 whereby Mahy “makes[s her] stories out of what New Zealand has offered [her …:] an enormous concentration of English imagery.”14 Margaret Mahy’s self-analysis regarding her incapacity to write about New Zealand, even though it refers to a strictly personal realization, is nonetheless symptomatic of a society that was momentarily unable to imagine itself as having left the colonial era wholly behind it – whose imagination was taken over by an outside force, and whose sense of cultural belonging and relationship to the real was significantly disrupted. As Mahy points out in a different essay, it is ironical that settlers, in this

11

Mahy, “Margaret Mahy: The Writer in New Zealand,” 8. Margaret Mahy, “On Building Houses that Face towards the Sun,” in A Track to Unknown Water: Proceedings of the Second Pacific Rim Conference on Children’s Literature, ed. Stella Lees (Melbourne: Melbourne State College, 1980): 106. 13 Duder, Margaret Mahy, 235. 14 Duder, Margaret Mahy, 235. 12

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context, should share a sense of discontinuity and deracination with the native people on whom they have imposed their values and ways of life: Australia and New Zealand share an approximately similar history and geographical situation: they are Pacific countries in which an indigenous population was displaced and marginalized by Western, largely British, incursions. In a curious way, the colonizers marginalized themselves as well. Australians, Canadians, and New Zealanders consider with wonder the imaginative dislocations implicit in colonialism, for a full imaginative relationship with the place in which one finds oneself does not come about automatically.15

By contrast, Patricia Grace, a contemporary of Mahy, attributes her sense of alienation as a young girl to the overwhelming displaced presence of British culture in New Zealand and the notable absence of her Maori ancestral cultural heritage outside of her own home. At secondary school the books we were given to read were English classics and English poetry, work distant from us in time and place. […] When we wrote we did so from our reading experience, often using words and phrases that we had come across in books, but had never heard spoken because they were not words or phrases used in this country – ‘meadow’, ‘brook’, ‘bathing costume’, ‘briny’. We were not encouraged to think that our own experience had value […]. We were not permitted to use words such as bike’, ‘kid’, ‘mum’, ‘sweat’ – no slang or colloquialisms, our own real vocabulary often being considered inappropriate. Of course, I would not have dreamt of using any Maori words in my writing, not even ‘whare’; which is the only Maori word, apart from proper nouns, that I remember coming across in a school text. However, I didn’t recognise the word then because teachers pronounced it ‘worrie’ and it meant, in that context, ‘hut’ or ‘makeshift dwelling’. I remember feeling upset when I finally realised where the word had come from.16

Although these kinds of testimony emanating from a nation with a recent colonial past are by no means unusual, both Mahy’s and Grace’s works, as much as they differ in aim, content and style, attest to the fact that, regardless of its now well-established postcolonial literature, New Zealand is still in the process of negotiating its transition from colonial to post15

Mahy, “The Writer in New Zealand,” 7. Jane McRae, “Interview with Patricia Grace,” in In the Same Room: Conversations with New Zealand Writers, ed. Elizabeth Alley & Mark Williams (Auckland: Auckland U P , 1993): 286. ‘Whare’ is the Maori word for ‘house / home’. 16

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colonial status. In this regard, both writers reject the idea of New Zealand as an already “imagined” nation, in Benedict Anderson’s term.17 If New Zealand, formerly Nieuw Zeeland and, well before this, Te Aotearoa, is indeed acknowledging its past, its literature has long disregarded the colonizer’s desire to “safeguard [its] continuing parallelism”18 with Europe, regardless of the country’s not-so-distant status as a Dominion. For Mahy, then, being aware of one’s fault-line is the first step towards counteracting the settlers’ dream of cultural continuity and allegiance to Europe. In New Zealand there were cases where early builders built their houses facing south, away from the sun, even though the sun must have shone on them sometimes as they worked. No doubt they lifted their heads and looked at the sun, but, in their building imagination, south-facing houses were strongly established and that was what they built, because the reality inside mattered more than the reality outside. […] We cannot exist as total New Zealanders until our imaginative focus, our imaginative reality is established and the fault line that separates inner and outer landscapes is bridged, or until the power of our collective vision applies pressure and makes both landscapes move together. […] On these hills our eyes and our ears make time travellers of us, particularly if there is a writer to give us the passwords.19

The second step, then, would entail exploring one’s sense of belonging in relation to a multi-layered present as well as allowing a new generation of

17

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London & New York: Verso, rev. ed. 1991). 18 From Anderson, Imagined Communities: Already in the sixteenth century Europeans had begun the strange habit of naming remote places, first in the Americas and Africa, later in Asia, Australia, and Oceania, as ‘new’ version of (thereby) ‘old’ toponyms in their lands of origins. Moreover, they retained the tradition even when such places passed to different imperial masters, so that Nouvelle Orléans calmly became New Orleans, and Nieuw Zeeland New Zealand. (187) This new synchronic novelty could arise historically only when substantial groups of people were in a position to think of themselves as living parallel to those of other substantial groups of people – if never meeting, yet certainly proceeding along the same trajectory. (188) The aim was not to have New London succeed, overthrow or destroy Old London, but rather to safeguard their continuing parallelism. (How new this style of thought was can be inferred from the history of earlier empires in decline, where there was often a dream of replacing the old center.) (191). 19

Mahy, “On Building Houses that Face towards the Sun,” 105–107.

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readers to commit to a new path – in other words, to “make it possible for [New Zealand’s] children to build houses that don’t have to face south.”20 Houses facing south only make sense if one is located north of the equator, like Britain, rather than south, like New Zealand, where north-facing houses take maximum advantage of the sun. And yet, as much as Mahy’s characters have become noticeably more Kiwi throughout the years, they are nevertheless disinclined to put down roots. In fact, the vast majority of them are wanderers in a Kiwi setting with a surreal edge. They are travellers who do not always trust the compass of the real, nomads exploring the margins of the domestic sphere. How can one account for such contradictions? Mahy has certainly voiced her desire to produce stories where New Zealand would not be so much an actual setting as an internalized landscape.21 Then, one may wonder, what does this internalized landscape look like? Could it be the magical-realist touchstone by which the surreal nature of the colonial gaze and, by extension, postcolonial awareness are being gauged? Mahy’s commitment to children’s literature goes beyond her taste for pirates and vagabond magicians. As will become clear through a study of two of her short stories, “The Illustrated Traveller’s Tale” and “The Bridge Builder,” Mahy’s magical realism explores the depth and peculiar fusion of the fault-line meandering between the colonial aura and postcolonial displacement along with the added necessity for post-national relocation.

Belonging at home: journeying within and beyond an ‘unhomely’ dominion Departures, adventures, and initiatory journeys are recurrent themes in the symbolic narratives of children and young adults. Given New Zealand’s obsession with the inevitable adult Kiwi’s rite of passage, ‘OE’ (Overseas Experience), it should come as no surprise that these motifs abound in Margaret Mahy’s work. Be that as it may, journeying away from the 20

Mahy, “On Building Houses that Face towards the Sun,” 118. “Nevertheless, I do feel that I have come to a point where I would write a story which had a New Zealand setting, but that setting of the New Zealand would be inside the character, they wouldn’t be “living in New Zealand,” New Zealand would be inside them. Like myself, the characters would have to incorporate the fault lines, the uneven movement of volcanoes becoming harbours that are part of the landscape”; Mahy, “On Building Houses that Face towards the Sun” (118). 21

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domestic sphere is truly one of Mahy’s major themes mainly because leaving home is what children and young adults do. Whether they are compelled to follow in the path of their family members’ dare-devilish unconventionality (The Man Whose Mother was a Pirate and “Perdita and Maddy”), to escape from a threatening situation (“The Bird Child”), to solve a family trauma (The Changeover, Memory, and The Tricksters), or to abandon Earth for good once they are old and willingly caught by a legendary wind (“The Wind Between the Stars”), most of Mahy’s characters are driven from the comfort of their family nest to reveal and develop their full and at times even magical potential. And yet, if Mahy’s protagonists quit the domestic space, they often come back to it, too. At this point, they have outgrown the limitations of their homes and matured enough to secure for themselves a promising transition into adulthood. As Alison Waller observes, In The Changeover, Laura battles with her malicious desire to keep [the incubus who threatened her brother’s life] suffering in eternity, but shortly after she mercifully returns him to oblivion the narrative moves from supernatural battlefield to the home, to making sandwiches and looking after [her brother]. Harry feels elevated to enchantress status at the end of The Tricksters, but the final chapters show her retreating into the background of the family drama once more. By placing the heroines firmly back into domesticity and reality as soon as they have become comfortable with their magic, Mahy makes it clear that, although witchcraft empowers the female characters in the narratives, it is not a simple means of escape from the difficulties of growing up within the constraints of modern life. It is, however, an enticing theme for the exploration of these concepts of development and maturation.22

Home is both the protagonists’ point of departure and their place of return once their détour of maturation has taken place. Still, the notion of ‘home’ in Mahy’s fiction also reaches beyond the universal motivation for physical, emotional and intellectual growth to incorporate political connotations. Indeed, her notion of a ‘home country’ where inner and outer landscapes compete while fused along an unstable fault-line permeates the characters’ domestic sphere. Here, ‘home’ is sometimes a cherished yet 22

Alison Waller, “’Solid All the Way Through’: Margaret Mahy’s Ordinary Witches,” in Marvellous Codes: The Fiction of Margaret Mahy, ed. Elizabeth Hale & Sarah Fiona Winters (Wellington: Victoria U P , 2005): 39–40.

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surreal grey area haunted by the ghosts of colonization, a zone possessed by the past, which the main characters strive to reclaim for themselves. This is the case with the family mansion in The Tricksters, as Ruth Feingold explains in one of the rare postcolonial readings of Mahy’s fiction: Carnival’s Hide can be said to be not so much haunted as colonised. This modern midsummer colonisation – signalled via standard-issue markers of colonisation such as the takeover of land and house, sexual adventuring and threatened rape, and the confusion of identities – is not merely the expression of individual traumas, both past and present, but also the re-imagination of Edward Carnival’s initial colonising impulse. Ultimately, the novel’s chief ghost could be said to be New Zealand’s colonial past – something expressed not only through Carnivals, dead or alive, but also the Hamilton’s own understanding of self and place. It is not until the novel’s contemporary Kiwis come to terms with their national and cultural identity that the ghosts of more private dislocations can be laid at rest.23

In the light of Mahy’s essay “On Building Houses that Face towards the Sun,” the protagonists in The Tricksters, by reclaiming Carnival’s Hide, find a way to turn around an inherited colonial home metaphorically reluctant to face into the sun – the past is given a chance to resurface and be dealt with. In this regard, the coming of age of The Tricksters’ main character, Harry, parallels that of a nation coming to terms with its colonial past. Once this is done, the country’s younger generation inherits a hybrid domain still bearing the traces of the colonial passage but with which it has healed its wounds as it prepares to start anew. Helena, the female protagonist in “The Illustrated Traveller’s Tale,” equally undergoes a coming of age of sorts. While hers is distinct from Harry’s, it is nevertheless metaphorically postcolonial in nature. Unlike Harry, Helena does not reclaim the private space of her family home; instead, she willingly walks away from the conjugal arena. It is precisely the ‘unhomely’ nature of Helena’s conjugal sphere and the postcolonial readings it entails that will be studied below. “The Illustrated Traveller’s Tale” is one of Margaret Mahy’s very few short stories intended for a more mature readership. It is a magical-realist tale divided into fourteen segments, the first and last of which are entitled 23

Ruth P . Feingold, “Gardening in Eden: Margaret Mahy’s Postcolonial Ghosts and the New Zealand Landscape,” in Marvellous Codes: The Fiction of Margaret Mahy, ed. Hale & Winters, 211.

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“Possible Nomadic Lines” and “Setting out.” As the titles of these sections suggest, “The Illustrated Traveller’s Tale” features a character about to undertake a journey of initiation. During a visit to the cartography section of a museum, Helena feels that the surface of her skin has turned into a living map. She checks herself in the woman’s bathroom of the museum, but failing to see anything unusual on her pale naked body, she rushes out. She passes a tattoo parlour with a sign stating: “L E T M E I L L U S T R A T E Y O U […]. M A P S A S P E C I A L I T Y . W I T H O R W I T H O U T 24 P A I N . Y O U R C H O I C E .” She enters the shop and pretends to entertain the idea of a tattoo. She shares her concern for the indelible character of the artwork displayed, only to hear the female tattoo-artist say that she can tell Helena is “fully illustrated already” (65). Helena protests, since she believes herself to be “all space,” “nothing but blank skin” (65). The tattooist, “a trained perceiver” (65), refuses to believe her. Quite puzzled by this, Helena goes back home, determined to spring-clean her wardrobe, in the hope that this “would re-establish her” (65). Unfortunately for her, a skin she had shed years before resurfaces from the depths of her wardrobe and starts making itself at home, gradually gaining more substance. Helena takes this ghost-like appearance of herself to be tattooed with the map the tattoo-artist had sensed in her. It turns out to be a labyrinthine jungle traversed by a dotted line, emblematic of her life’s journey. When Helena and her art-work come back home, Helena decides that she has the strength and courage to bear her own tattoo. In the meantime, Helena’s partner, Brian, seduced by the skin, makes love with it. The tattoo is then magically transferred from the skin onto Helena, who leaves her home, serene, ready to undertake her own journey. Before embarking on a postcolonial reading of “The Illustrated Traveller’s Tale” centred on the ‘unhomely’ character of Helena’s living space, a brief study of the gender issues at play in this text is necessary, since the two analytic approaches are intricately interwoven. The plot of this short story revolves around a woman’s reassessment of her current life and the emancipatory steps she subsequently takes. This story’s feminist agenda is particularly apparent when Helena comments on her mother’s preference for men over women: “My mother grew up thinking that men know the truth, and she thinks that if she hangs around them she might know some 24 Margaret Mahy, “The Illustrated Traveller’s Tale,” Soho Square 4 (1991): 64. Unless otherwise indicated, further page references are in the main text.

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of it too” (69).25 Hanging around, somewhat like a garment in a wardrobe “waiting to come back into fashion” (73), is precisely what Helena refuses to do as the story draws to a close. Yet Helena’s decision to leave her husband is triggered off by her realization that she has repressed her past. This repressed element manifests itself to Helena in a somewhat ironic and surreal adult version of Lacan’s mirror stage. The past comes face to face with Helena in the form of a discarded skin emerging from her wardrobe minutes after Helena senses her life’s purpose and itinerary surface in the shape of a map from under her own real skin. Helena, though disoriented and confused at first, attempts to reconcile the present with the forgotten past. The fault-line in the story is thus temporal. Helena’s sense of unbelonging corresponds to her disjunction with her past as well as life’s purpose. By asking the tattoo-artist to inscribe her emerging journey onto the formerly discarded skin, Helena tries to reconnect her forgotten past with her potential future. Because she is afraid of the feeling of pain that may ensue from wearing the tattoo on her own present skin, Helena makes the mistake of excluding herself from her own future. As a result, her present skin is left blank while her past bears the trace of her potential. Moreover, the female body in this story is not so much a virginal, pre-linguistic page, as it were – “all space,” “nothing but blank skin” (65). Instead, its words and intricate designs are partly erased during intercourse by the male character who consequently triggers off the woman’s Lacanian méconnaissance: 26 all the lines had faded from the skin that Brian embraced so insistently, leaving it coloured in, yellowish-white, shot with pink, but as blank as she had once believed herself to be. (73).27 25 The idea of a feminist reading is all the more tempting in that at the end of this short story the protagonist becomes a ‘jungle’: “PRICELESS ARTWORKS SET OUT ON JUNGLE JOURNEY […]. Holding her illustrated arms wide like a loving somnambulist, Helena advanced to envelop the jungle which advanced to greet and envelop her. Just which of them was the embraced and which the embracer was impossible to determine” (73). The term ‘jungle’ was previously used by the tattooist to describe a woman’s pubic area: “I once did a very nice line of butterflies for a lady, […] down there, say, two inches under the navel, hovering over the jungle, you might say, from one side right over to the other” (70). 26 The principle whereby the subject misrecognizes and misinterprets itself. 27 It is also stated earlier that the reappearing skin may have been shed by Helena during intercourse with Brian (67).

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Once Helena lets her journey transfer itself from the skin of the past onto her own body, the once ethereal scriptures revealed by the tattoo artist who “laid down what was there already!” (71). allow Helena as a reader of her resurfaced path to venture into her own journey cryptically spelt out before her: “when she wanted to know which path to take she glanced down at her own body, and followed the path taken by the stitching scarlet line, the confident cursor, leaping ahead of her, dancing from word to word of her story” (73). In this regard, the endings of The Tricksters and “The Illustrated Traveller’s Tale” are reminiscent of each other, as they both emphasize the possibility of future “nomadic lines” finding their way into Harry’s pristine open book and Helena’s artistic, riddle-in-progress, tattooed body. Both women characters have let go of the past and are now in charge of their future. Still, the postcolonial reading of the fictional personal narrative of Harry, the teenage writer, can also be applied to Helena, the somnambulistic, albeit mature reader of her own living epidermal manuscript. In this respect, the emphasis on the idea of a “journey” via the motif of the “map” and, by correlation, the deserting of the “home” in “The Illustrated Traveller’s Tale” requires further analysis. Indeed, the previously mentioned fault-line experienced geographically, temporally and culturally by Mahy, which prompted her to think in terms of transhistorical inner and outer landscapes out-of-synch with each other, is present here. In this respect, “The Illustrated Traveller’s Tale” explores in allegorical terms the transition between the colonial and the postcolonial domestication of New Zealand. In the revised edition of Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson states that the “nation-building policies” pursed in the colonial states of Asia and Africa were not so much based upon eurocentric values as on the “imaginings of the colonial state”28 itself. Anderson asserts that this is particularly evident in three “institutions of power,” namely: the census, the map, and the museum, which “together, […] profoundly shaped the way in which the colonial state imagined its dominion – the nature of the human beings it ruled, the geography of its domain, and the legitimacy of its ancestry.”29 Census, map, and museum all worked together to inscribe

28 29

Anderson, Imagined Communities, 163. Imagined Communities, 163–64.

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the settlers’ imaginary onto its new environment, the ripple effects of which were felt after decolonization. Interlinked with one another, then, the census, the map and the museum illuminate the late colonial state’s style of thinking about its domain. The ‘wrap’ of this thinking was a totalizing classificatory grid, which could be applied with endless flexibility to anything under the state’s real or contemplated control […]. The effect of the grid was always to be able to say of anything that it was this, not that; it belonged there, not there […]. The particular always stood as a provisional representative of a series, and was to be handled in this light. (184)

However, in the case of Mahy, all three tropes of imposing order on the state are undermined. In “The Illustrated Traveller’s Tale,” Mahy presents a fictional world which challenges Anderson’s state apparatus. First of all, the imperfect nature of the census as frozen in time is all the more incomplete in Helena’s world. The ability of individuals to leave behind traces of their lives multiple times in the course of their existence makes the census utterly obsolete in its very logic. Since it is possible, in Helena’s world, for someone’s past self to lead an independent life of its own, the census’s logic of counting each and every individual as only one entity produces a gross undercount. Furthermore, in the opening scene of the story, Helena is pictured as a purposeful, studious flâneuse – an oxymoronic state of being that matches her inner fault-line – “wandering through the museum, studying maps of ancient journeys,” when she suddenly “imagin[es] her surface alive with a network of nomadic yet highly purposeful lines” (64). In Helena’s world, museums are not so much the instruments of the state as the enclosed chambers within which art is being kept. As such, the art of travelling paradoxically becomes a sedentary display. Therefore, the carefully preserved museum maps stand in sharp contrast to the ‘live art’ of the tattoo parlour where Helena rejects the idea of a permanent ready-made tattoo. Instead, she opts for a creative custom-made landscape to match not only her inner self but also the layout of the cryptic and labyrinthine city in which she will eventually begin her own journey. In other words, Helena shuns the already imagined maps of the nation-state to come up with her own enigmatic journey-in-progress which reads like a map in the process of becoming. Consequently, the street-facing tattoo-parlour embodies the juncture between the colonial and the postcolonial imaginary. It promotes

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the idea of ‘choice’ between the nation as already imagined and the purposefully imaginative nation as still requiring imagining. Whether or not Margaret Mahy had intended to set her story in a fictionalized version of New Zealand is a matter of speculation. The posters and tabloid headlines referring to Prince Charles and Lady Diana’s marital difficulties can be interpreted as diplomatic différends between the Crown and the ‘home country’ of the story.30 Helena’s grid-defying moves, which allow her to grow from the status of “Merivale Housewife” (64) to that of “illustrated traveller”/nomadic “priceless artwork” (73), are better understood in terms of Homi Bhabha’s notion of the “unhomely” as discussed in The Location of Culture. In the second section of his introduction, entitled “Unhomely Lives: The Literature of Recognition,” Bhabha underlines the relationship between the domestic and the public spheres within a postcolonial context: Fanon recognizes the crucial importance, for subordinated peoples, of asserting their indigenous cultural traditions and retrieving their repressed histories. But he is far too aware of the dangers of the fixity and fetishism of identities within the calcification of colonial cultures to recommend that ‘roots’ be struck in the celebratory romance of the past or by homogenizing the history of the present. The negating activity is, indeed, where ‘presencing’ begins because it captures something of the estranging sense of the relocation of the home and the world – the unhomeliness – that is the condition of extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiations. […] The unhomely moment creeps up in you stealthily as your own shadow […]. The recesses of the domestic space become sites for history’s most intricate invasions. In that displacement, the borders between home and world become confused; and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting.31

To a less traumatic degree than Bhabha’s assessment of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Helena’s ‘unhomely’ moment dramatizes New Zealand’s postcolonial status as well as Mahy’s desire for a postnational relocation as a means to go beyond the ‘domestic’ limitations of the home country. New Zealand’s colonial stage was known to have been the least hostile of all. It acquired its status as a dominion in 1907. The terms ‘domestic’ 30 “CHARLES AND DI DANCE BACK TO BACK ,” to quote only one instance (Mahy, “The Illustrated Traveller’s Tale,” 73). 31 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994): 9.

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and ‘dominion’ share the same Latin root of dom- as in domus ‘home’ and dominus ‘master’. Helena’s personal dissatisfaction as a housewife can thus be read as emblematic of New Zealand’s former status as a dominion. Her hesitation to follow her own inner map is equally emblematic of the dilemma New Zealand has faced as a postcolonial power. Whether the amalgam of the name Brian and ‘it’ – the ghostlike incarnation of the past in the shape of a discarded and regained resilient skin – is to be read as ‘BriTaIn’ is debatable. Moreover, one can only conjecture whether Mahy meant the crucial role of the tattoo-artist in this story, which enables the pakeha32 character to read her own path to be an echo of the Maori traditional art of moko. Similarly, it is uncertain whether or not the equivocal maps of this story refer to the highly controversial issues revolving around the Maori Land Rights. Be that as it may, “The Illustrated Traveller’s Tale” insinuates a need to go beyond the idea of the ‘unhomely’ nature of lingering dominion status. Helena’s purposeful first steps away from the domestic enable her, as a pakeha, to marginalize herself by opposing an imagined past with a network of “possible nomadic lines” reaching beyond the domestic sphere. As such, the possibility of thinking from the margin is the first step towards re-imagining the central position of the domestic. In this new context, the domestic is not rejected but creatively outgrown as Helena becomes a nomadic inhabitant of a community she belongs to yet strives to re-create. Mahy’s magical realism does not altogether reflect that of the LatinAmerican tradition, inasmuch as the political environment of her country as well as her position in her home country as a highly respected intellectual are in no way comparable. However, her choice of a literature that foregrounds fantasy in addressing a cultural fault-line becomes clear in the light of its political implications, as it serves as a bridge-building device between the imagined and the purposely imaginative.

Weaving threads of unbelonging As an anglophone nation with a limited domestic literary market, New Zealand has very little choice but to reach beyond the national borders if 32

The Maori term ‘pakeha’ originally referred to non-Maori foreigners. Based on New Zealand’s colonial encounter, ‘pakeha’ in common usage refers to Caucasians: i.e. anyone of European descent.

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publishers want to make a profit, let alone break even. In Mahy’s humorous yet realistic words, “while New Zealanders do rank as the biggest buyers of books per capita in the world, there are not a lot of capitas.”33 As a consequence, New Zealand writers are not always at liberty to indulge in the celebration of culturally specific material if they aspire to be marketed internationally, at least within the realm of the anglophone market. This has prompted Mahy to envisage New Zealand writers as de facto global bridge-builders/crossers: While New Zealand needs stories with local content and idiom to help its children become New Zealanders, local content may disadvantage the story when international sales are explored. New Zealanders are great bridge crossers. They have to be. The food has often been on the other side of the bridge. Publishers, however, are cautious bridge builders, for, given the choice, many people do not want to cross over. […] No doubt you have heard other antipodeans expand with varying degrees of indignation on the intransigence of publishers in the U S A . Why shouldn’t our voices be heard, we howl. Why is our language and vernacular edited out or translated into the idiom of some other country? Haven’t our children adapted to books from the U S A and the U K for years and years? Haven’t we had to cross over?34

Crossing over, then, is second nature, a fact of life for New Zealand authors and readers alike, whose imagination reaches easily across and beyond international cultural differences. Under these circumstances, being a New Zealander involves engaging constantly in the act of “Looking Inward, Exploring Outward,”35 to quote the title of a recent article by Mahy. As builders of a national consciousness, New Zealanders have become well-versed in the art of simultaneously weaving and unravelling the thread of national belonging in an effort to exist within and without global national boundaries. It is precisely this Kiwi trait that Mahy illustrates in a partly autobiographical36 short story entitled “The Bridge Builder.” In this story, Mahy portrays a bridge-builder involved in a compulsive and quite unusual kind of illegal bridge-building. As a retiree, the protagonist shifts from constructing functional bridges to exquisite bridges composed of 33

Mahy, “On Building Houses that Face towards the Sun,” 109. Mahy, “Margaret Mahy: The Writer in New Zealand,” 9. 35 Margaret Mahy, “Looking Inward, Exploring Outward,” Horn Book Magazine 80.2 (March–April, 2004): 213–18. 36 Mahy’s father was a bridge-builder. 34

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utterly extravagant material, which mushroom in the most unexpected places. Running foul of the law, he is rescued by his younger son, Merlin, who is a part-time magician and part-time traveller. If one chooses to read Margaret Mahy’s magical-realist tales as subtle political allegories, “The Bridge Builder” can be interpreted as starting where “The Illustrated Traveller’s Tale” left off. While both the bridgebuilder, in the former, and Helena, in the latter, stand as marginal figures who escape the normative discourse of the nation, the bridge-builder’s approach is more transgressive and broader in scope. In “The Illustrated Traveller’s Tale,” Helena, after much hesitation, chooses to disrupt the essentialist narrative continuum of the nation by subtracting herself from its agency and exploring the national space and time from a personal, perambulatory, and open-ended perspective. The bridge-builder, on the other hand, confidently works his creative magic in the unexplored recesses of national and international spaces. Unlike Helena, he works at creatively expanding and transforming these unimagined places. The bridge-builder is thus a visionary who ventures beyond the trodden paths to create spontaneous, unprecedented forms of expressions in situ. Merlin states: Soon my father [the bridge-builder] took it into his head to build bridges in unexpected places. He gave up building them where people were known to be going and built them where people might happen to find themselves. Somewhere far from any road.37

The bridge-builder’s marvellous works prompt people to become global wanderers; the bridges assist them in crossing over their own fault-lines as well as the chasms of the world, but most importantly they are counterdiscourses of the seemingly unified national space. His bridges are not meant to lead people anywhere in particular, nor are they are built to last. The bridge-builder’s creative genius is to envision national and international territories in a fundamentally alternative way. What truly matters to the bridge-builder is the transformative property of the world. His bridges emphasize his taste for divergence as well as people’s potential to transform themselves and the world around them if given the chance to cross over: “This world (my father thought) was play37

Margaret Mahy, “The Bridge Builder,” in Mahy, Door in the Air and Other Stories (1988; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990): 24. Further page references are in the main text.

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ing a great game called ‘change’, and his part in the game was called ‘crossing over’” (26). Crossing over requires leaping over the hidden chasms of the nation’s discourse as well as one’s own. Here, the nation’s desire to function as a gap-filler to mask its own fault-lines as well as those of its subjects is rejected.38 In fact, Margaret Mahy’s bridgebuilder’s idea of cultural space resembles Homi Bhabha’s: The ‘locality’ of national culture is neither unified nor unitary in relation to itself, nor must it be seen simply as ‘other’ in relation to what is outside or beyond it. The boundary is Janus-faced and the problem of outside/inside must always itself be a process of hybridity, incorporating new ‘people’ in relation to the body politic, generating other sites of meaning and, inevitably, in the political process, producing unmanned sites of political antagonism and unpredictable forces for political representation.39

The story’s bridges are designed neither to emphasize nor to ignore the gap over which they cross. They are engineered to underline the sheer experience of crossing over. Crossing over, in turn, produces change, which produces discourse. The bridges are performative instruments of change. As such, they are strategically placed so as to explore alternative boundaries. In fact, they do not bridge a gap so much as generate a passage between two disconnected locations. They are connectors made out of unforeseen combinations of materials prospering between two unlikely sites. In literary terms, these bridges are poetic licence operating within the national text. They work at questioning its linear narrative as well as altering its predictable lines. But most importantly, they work in between those lines, subverting the contradictions of its Janus-faced discourse. ‘Ambivalence’ for both the bridge-builder and Homi Bhabha is a key word, the site from which the nation can be perpetually re-imagined.40 In 38

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 140:

The nation fills the void left in the uprooting of communities and kin, and turns that loss into the language of metaphor. Metaphor, as the etymology of the word suggests, transfers the meaning of home and belonging, across the ‘middle passage’, […] across those distances, and cultural differences, that span the imagined community of the nation-people. 39

Homi K. Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” in Narration and Nation, ed. Bhabha (1990; London: Routledge,1991): 4. 40 Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” 3: It is the project of Nation and Narration to explore the Janus-faced ambivalence of language itself in the construction of the Janus-faced discourse of the nation. This turns the familiar two-

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this respect, the hidden marginal bridges make it possible for people literally to explore the nation’s ambivalence as well as their own. The man on the right bank of the ravine – was he truly the same man when he crossed on to the left? My father thought he might not be, and his bridges seemed like the steps of a dance which would enable the man with a bit of a left-hand spin on him to spin in the opposite direction. (26)

Hence, one of the bridges’ virtues is to enable the crossing-over between two binary opposites, turning them into an interface. No wonder, then, that the bridge-builder soon comes to be a threat to the nation’s normalizing discourse. It was upsetting for those people who wanted to stick to the road to know that some people used my father’s hidden bridges. They wanted everyone to cross by exactly the same bridges that they used, and they hated the thought that, somewhere over the river they were crossing, there might be another strange and lovely bridge they were unaware of. […] They started insisting that there should be no more bridge building. Some of these people were very powerful – so powerful, indeed, that they passed laws forbidding my father to build any bridge unless ordered to do so by a government or by some county council. (26–27)

The interstitial bridges become, in the Derridian term, ‘supplementary’ to the national construct, since they infuse the nation’s narrative with an unwelcome overabundance of meaning from the inside out. They are equally and paradoxically the network of passageways that questions and marks as incomplete the holistic vision of the nation-state.41

faced god into a figure of prodigious doubling that investigates the nation-space in the process of the articulation of elements: where meanings may be partial because they are in medias res; and history may be half-made because it is in the process of being made; and the image of cultural authority may be ambivalent because it is caught, uncertainly, in the act of ‘composing’ its powerful image. 41 Jacques Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967). Cf. Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” 3:

The address to nation as narration stresses the insistence of political power and cultural authority in what Derrida describes as the ‘irreducible excess of syntactic over the semantic’. What emerges as an effect of such ‘incomplete signification’ is a turning of boundaries and limits into the in-between spaces through which the meanings of cultural and political authority are negotiated.

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Predictably, the mission of the government agents sent on the labyrinthine trail of the bridge-builder turns out to be a failure: They would think they had him cornered and, behold, he would build a bridge and escape – a bridge that collapsed behind him as if it had been made of playing cards. (28)

Ironically, at the end of the story, the soldiers standing on the opposite bank from the bridge-builder find themselves in dire need of a bridge, “marooned on a crumbling ledge […] weighted down with guns, ammunition belts and other military paraphernalia” (32). Could this be a metaphor for nationalist discourse? At this point, the bridge-builder saves their lives with the help of his son, Merlin. The bridge-builder turns into the essence of what he had always been: a bridge, leaving the soldiers to realize that “unexpected bridges would be needed” (34). This in itself is without doubt the greatest achievement of the bridge-builder’s work. As the embodiment of the nomadic and the marginal, the bridges force the centre – here, the soldier, and by extension, the body politic – to acknowledge dissent and be saved from imminent death by joining its path. In this text, the margin’s tour de force consists in having the centre consider crossing over itself. “The Bridge Builder” goes beyond the binary opposite between centre and margin, however. It is to be noted that what enables the bridge-builder to escape his pursuer is the rhizomatic nature of his extravagant and illicit bridge-building. Indeed, his bridges spring up like subversive tubers out of reach of the ‘territorializing’ national discourse, exposing the latter’s gaps and contradictions. In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari set out the chief characteristics of a rhizome: unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple. […] It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It is neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills.

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[…] A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.42

The nation’s normative sense of belonging triggers off the pain of unbelonging by masking and failing to address its most intimate fault-lines and ambivalent horizons. By contrast, the bridge-builder enables alternative visions of national belonging to come into being and prosper of their own accord. By letting them connect with each other in unpredictable ways, the bridge-builder prompts these combined yet independent visions to expand gradually in a trans/international fashion. These creative passageways that originate from the margin can, in turn, re-create the centre, thanks to their rhizomatic un/interconnectedness with each other. In this new context, the notion of national belongingness bears a different meaning from the one celebrated by the narrative of the already imagined. Once retired, the bridge-builder quits the centre to produce a marginal work that modifies the way the centre sees itself. The bridge-builder’s creative, rhizomatic journey from the centre outwards and then from the margin inwards is emblematic of his critical engagement with the nation’s iconic image. According to this new parameter, to belong to the nation is to distance oneself from it first and then repeatedly again, and again, and again. In fact, to belong to the nation is to weave at the nation’s very core the threads of unbelonging. The bridge-builder’s son, Merlin, actualizes his father’s rhizomatic network of bridges, inasmuch as he is a global traveller as well as the bearer of a magic word, “a sort of bridge”43 which closes men’s inner chasms.44 42

Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Brian Massumi (Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie, 1980; tr. 1987; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2003): 21, 25. In the original : à la différence des arbres ou de leurs racines, le rhizome connecte un point quelconque avec un autre point quelconque, et chacun de ses traits ne renvoie pas nécessairement à des traits de même nature, il met en jeu des régimes de signes très différents et même des états de nonsignes. Le rhizome ne se laisse pas ramener ni à l’Un ni au multiple. […] Il n’est pas fait d’unités, mais de dimensions, ou plutôt de directions mouvantes. Il n’a pas de commencement ni de fin, mais toujours un milieu, par lequel il pousse et déborde. (31) Un rhizome ne commence et n’aboutit pas, il est toujours au milieu, entre les choses, interêtre, intermezzo. (36). 43

Mahy, “The Bridge Builder,” 32. “I think people are all, more or less, creatures of two sides with a chasm in between, so to speak. My magic word merely closes the chasm” (“The Bridge Builder,” 31). 44

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He is an extension of the spirit of the bridge and, perhaps, the fictional answer to Mahy’s personal fault-line. Mahy’s sense of displacement originated in the gap between her formative experience around the colonial aura and the postcolonial status of her home country. This uneasy situation set in motion her desire to cross over. The postcolonial sense of displacement engenders a paradoxical form of relocation in the post-national. Here, the nation crosses over itself, allowing its innermost contradictions to be voiced. Its dis-course is reconnected with its etymological sense of journey, a discourse in the making, in the process of being imagined beyond any form of boundary. This new open space has no pre-calculated or predictable horizons. It is not a linear space but a rhizomatic network which, one can only hope, directly “faces toward the sun”; for is there a better way to face the sun than to become a traveller, setting out to follow its path? Once more, Mahy’s bridge-builder’s “national consciousness” is highly reminiscent of the vision of Frantz Fanon and, later, Homi Bhabha: It is from such narrative positions between cultures and nations, theories and texts, the political, the poetic and the painterly, the past and the present, that Nation and Narration seeks to affirm and extend Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary credo: ‘National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension’. It is this international dimension both within the margins of the nation-space and in the boundaries in-between nations and peoples that the authors of this book have sought to represent in their essays. The representative emblem of this book might be a chiasmatic ‘figure’ of cultural difference whereby the anti-nationalist, ambivalent nationspace becomes the crossroads to a new transnational culture. The ‘other’ is never outside or beyond us; it emerges forcefully, within cultural discourse, when we think we speak most intimately and indigenously ‘between ourselves’.45

Mahy’s stories explore the lingering effect of colonialism from a pakeha perspective. She addresses their displaced sense of belonging, dramatizing the exploration of their individual fault-lines. However, as a children’s writer, Mahy leaves us on a positive note: the perspective of a postnational New Zealand left to our imagination. Here, her Kiwi characters are full-time travellers sent on a perpetual post-national ‘O E ’ within and beyond the vanished boundaries of their home country. Mahy’s post-

45

Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” 4.

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national characters are not confined by any boundaries, not even that of the margin or the interstice where their journeys originated. At the end of “The Bridge Builder,” Merlin turns into a journey, “crossing [his] father’s bridges and the bridges of other men, as well as all the infinitely divided roads and splintered pathways that lie between them” (35). In this respect, Mahy’s stories, “The Bridge Builder” in particular, foreground the redemptive potential that the pain of unbelonging can enable. The enchanted bridges transform those who traverse them by embracing the motto of “crossing over” as the most viable means by which to shift from a nationalist to a trans- and even post-national mode of communal belonging.

WORKS CITED Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London & New York: Verso, rev. ed. 1991). Bacon, Ron. The Boy and the Taniwha (Auckland: Collins, 1966). ——. Rua and the Sea People (Auckland: Collins, 1968). Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (1994; London: Routledge, 1995). ——. “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” in Narration and Nation, ed. Bhabha (1990; London: Routledge, 1991): 1-7. Curnow, Allen. A Book of New Zealand Verse, 1923–45, ed. Allen Curnow (Christchurch: Caxton, 1945). Dallas, Ruth. The Children in the Bush (London: Methuen, 1969). Deleuze, Gilles, & Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Brian Massumi (Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie: 1980; tr. 1987; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2003). Derrida, Jacques. L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967). De Roo, Anne. The Gold Dog (London: Rupert Hart–Davis, 1969). ——. Moa Valley (London: Rupert Hart–Davis, 1969). Duder, Tessa. Margaret Mahy: A Writer’s Life (Auckland: Collins, 2005). Feingold, Ruth P. “Gardening in Eden: Margaret Mahy’s Postcolonial Ghosts and the New Zealand Landscape,” in Marvellous Codes: The Fiction of Margaret Mahy, ed. Elizabeth Hale & Sarah Fiona Winters (Wellington: Victoria U P , 2005): 210–33. Kedgley, Sue. “Interview with Margaret Mahy,” in Our Own Country: Leading New Zealand Women Writers Talk about their Writing and their Lives, ed. Sue Kedgley (Auckland: Penguin, 1989): 133–55. Locke, Elsie. The Runaway Settlers (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965) McRae, Jane. “Interview with Patricia Grace,” In the Same Room: Conversations with New Zealand Writers, ed. Elizabeth Alley & Mark Williams (Auckland: Auckland U P , 1993): 285–97. Mahy, Margaret. 24 Hours (London: HarperCollins, 2000).

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——. “The Bird Child,” in Wait for Me! (1973; London: Orion, 2003): 1–10. ——. The Boy Who Was Followed Home (New York: Dial, 1975). ——. “The Bridge Builder,” in The Door in the Air (1988; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990): 21–35. ——. “Building Bridges between our Outer and Inner Landscapes,” in Reading is Everybody’s Business, ed. W.B. Elley (Wellington: I R A , Wellington Council, 1973). ——. The Changeover: A Supernatural Romance (London: Dent, 1984). ——. The First Margaret Mahy Story Book (London: Dent, 1972). ——. The Haunting (London: Dent, 1982). ——. “The Illustrated Traveller’s Tale,” Soho Square 4 (1991): 64–67. ——. A Lion in the Meadow (London: Dent, 1969). ——. “Looking Inward, Exploring Outward,” Horn Book Magazine 80.2 (March– April, 2004): 213–18. ——. The Man Whose Mother Was a Pirate (1985; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987). ——. “Margaret Mahy: The Writer in New Zealand: Building Bridges through Children’s Books,” Bookbird 34.4 (Winter 1996): 6–11. ——. Memory (London: Dent, 1987). ——. “On Building Houses that Face towards the Sun,” in A Track to Unknown Water: Proceedings of the Second Pacific Rim Conference on Children’s Literature, ed. Stella Lees (Melbourne: Melbourne State College, 1980): 104–18. ——. “Perdita and Maddy,” in The Door in the Air (1988; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990): 59–68. ——. Underrunners (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992). ——. “The Wind Between the Stars,” in The Door in the Air (1988; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990): 50–58. New Zealand Poetry Yearbook: An Annual Collection (Wellington: Reed, 1951–64). Waller, Alison. “’Solid All the Way Through’: Margaret Mahy’s Ordinary Witches,” in Marvellous Codes: The Fiction of Margaret Mahy, ed. Elizabeth Hale & Sarah Fiona Winters (Wellington: Victoria U P , 2005): 21–43. West, Joyce. The Year of the Shining Cuckoo (1961; London: Dent, 1963).

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Notes on Contributors

P A B L O A R M E L L I N O is completing his doctoral dissertation, “Ob-Scene

Spaces in Australian Literature” (on the socio-topographic construction of landscape in Australian narrative), at the University of Turin. For the past two years, he has been Honorary Visitor at La Trobe University, Melbourne, researching postcolonial and Australian literature. In 2003 he majored in English at the University of Turin with a thesis on the Australian Aboriginal author Kim Scott. His most recent publication is “The Disappearance of God in Contemporary British Fiction.” S H E I L A C O L L I N G W O O D – W H I T T I C K is a senior lecturer in the English Department at the University of Grenoble I I I , where she teaches several courses on postcolonial studies. From 2002 to 2004, she lectured on

postcolonial literatures at the University of Geneva. Since the completion of her doctoral dissertation on the francophone novel in colonial Algeria, her scholarship has focused on postcolonial fiction in English, and her research interests cover all aspects of colonial and postcolonial cultures. Her publications include articles on Raymond Carver, J.M. Coetzee, David Malouf, Katherine Mansfield, Sally Morgan, William Styron, and Patrick White. She also edited a collection of essays on “Genre/Gender” for the Autumn 2003 edition of Commonwealth: Essays and Studies. Most recently, she has concentrated on the field of Australian literature and its representation of Aborigines. She is currently working on the role of scientific discourse in the othering of indigenous peoples. M A R C D E L R E Z teaches literatures in English (new and established) at the University of Liège, Belgium. His publications in the postcolonial field include a number of articles on David Malouf, Randolph Stow, Nicholas Jose, Richard Flanagan, Salman Rushdie, and Janet Frame. A study of Janet Frame, Manifold Utopia: The Novels of Janet Frame, was

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published in Rodopi’s Cross/Cultures series in 2002, and he is currently working on another Frame monograph commissioned by Manchester University Press. He has also edited, with Bénédicte Ledent, a collection of essays on postcolonial literature entitled The Contact and the Culmination (Liège, 1996) and, with Geoffrey V. Davis, Peter H. Marsden and Bénédicte Ledent, two volumes of essays entitled Towards a Transcultural Future: Literature and Society in a ‘Post’-Colonial World (A S N E L Papers, Rodopi, 2005). F R A N Ç O I S E K R A L is a senior lecturer at the University of Paris X, Nanterre. After a doctoral dissertation on the Australian writer Mudrooroo, she published several articles on the representation of settlers and natives in Australian literature and edited a collection of essays, Re-Presenting Otherness (2005), on cross-cultural representations of historical figures in Australia and New Zealand. She has published several articles on writers of the Indian diaspora (Jumpha Lahiri and Monica Ali) as well as on Philip Roth and Matthew Kneale, and is currently preparing a study of interstitial identities in anglophone diasporic literatures. A N N E M A G N A N – P A R K is a visiting scholar in French and English at the University of Notre Dame, USA and has taught anglophone and francophone literature in France, the U S A , and New Zealand. She specializes

in twentieth-century anglophone (New Zealand) and francophone (Franco-Asian) literature and, more recently, the cinema. Her postdoctoral ventures derive from her interest in translinguistic and transcultural writers. Her current projects include the translation into French with Professor Jean Anderson (Victoria University of Wellington) of a collection of short stories by Patricia Grace (Electrique Cité, 2006), theoretical essays on Alice Tawhai and Gaylene Preston, and, with the film director Yvonne Mackay, a documentary on Margaret Mahy. C H R I S T I N E N I C H O L L S is a writer, curator and academic who works in Australian Studies at Flinders University in Adelaide. From 1982 to 1992 she lived and worked at Lajamanu, a remote Aboriginal settlement in the Tanami Desert of the Northern Territory, first as a linguist and then as principal of the local Warlpiri Lajamanu School. She subsequently held the position of Principal Education Officer with responsibility for the Northern Territory’s bilingual education programmes in Indigenous languages and English. Christine Nicholls has published more than a hundred

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articles about indigenous Australian art and languages, many of which have been translated into languages other than English. A biography of an Eastern Anmatyerr artist, Kathleen Petyarre: Genius of Place, coauthored with Ian North, was co-winner of the award for the best art book published in Australia and New Zealand in 2002. From 2004 to 2005, Christine held the post of Professor of Australian Studies at the University of Tokyo. Her most recent book publication is Yilpinji Love Art and Ceremony (2006). L O R E N Z O P E R R O N A , a former researcher under the Australian–Euro-

pean Awards Program at La Trobe University, Melbourne, is currently completing a doctorate on “Literary Representations of Italian Identity” at the University of Lausanne. He has translated into Italian short stories and articles by the Australian authors Brian Castro, Archie Weller and Mudrooroo, and, in 2003, translated and introduced the Italian edition of Mudrooroo’s Wild Cat Falling (Gatto selvaggio cade). His essay on Mudrooroo’s Us Mob was published in the collection Mongrel Signatures (Cross/Cultures, Rodopi), edited by Annalisa Oboe. Lorenzo is the curator, with Silvana Tuccio, of the yearly festival “Sguardi australiani” (www.sguardiaustraliani.com), on Australian film culture. E L V I R A P U L I T A N O currently teaches in the Ethnic Studies Department of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. From 2002 to 2005, she taught postcolonial literatures and theory in the English

department at the universities of Geneva and Lausanne. Her publications include Toward a Native American Critical Theory (2003) and the forthcoming edited collection Transatlantic Voices: Interpretations of Native North American Indigenous Literatures, as well as various essays on contemporary Native American and postcolonial writing. Her interests in cross-cultural, global approaches to contemporary anglophone literatures have become the focus of her recent scholarship. She is currently working on a monograph exploring notions of home and belonging in anglophone Caribbean literature. S U E R Y A N – F A Z I L L E A U is currently a senior lecturer in English at the

University of La Rochelle, France, where she teaches Australian, Aboriginal and New Zealand studies and postcolonial theory. Her doctoral dissertation consisted of a ludic reading of four novels by Peter Carey. She is completing a book-length study of Carey’s postcolonial search for an

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Australian identity. Her field of research is contemporary Australian literature, particularly crime fiction and literary representations – white and black – of aboriginality. S A R A H S H I E F F teaches at the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New

Zealand. Her main research areas are New Zealand literature and cultural history, literary theory, contemporary Jewish writing, and Gothic fiction. She convenes the University of Waikato’s programme in New Zealand studies and edits the Journal of New Zealand Literature. E L E O N O R E W I L D B U R G E R is a lecturer in cultural studies (Indigenous

Australian studies) at Klagenfurt University in Austria. She is currently working on a postdoctoral research project on intercultural methodology / Indigenous Australian studies. Her recent publications include Politics, Power and Poetry: An Intercultural Perspective on Aboriginal Identity in Black Australian Poetry (2003).

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