Unsettling Oceania - OpenEdition Journals

Commonwealth Essays and Studies

41.1 | 2018Unsettling Oceania

Electronic versionURL: https://journals.openedition.org/ces/371DOI: 10.4000/ces.371ISSN: 2534-6695

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Printed versionDate of publication: 30 November 2018ISSN: 2270-0633

Electronic referenceCommonwealth Essays and Studies, 41.1 | 2018, “Unsettling Oceania” [Online], Online since 05November 2019, connection on 22 August 2021. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ces/371; DOI:https://doi.org/10.4000/ces.371

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Unsettling Oceania

Vol. 41, N°1, Autumn 2018

Unsettling Oceania

Disturbed Australian Spaces

• Salhia Ben-Messahel Introduction (for Sue Ryan-Fazilleau) .......................................................................................................................... 5

• Nicholas Birns The New Historical Novel: Putting Mid-Twentieth-Century Australia into Perspective ..................................... 7

• John Clement Ball “The Shimmering Edge”: Surfing, Risk, and Climate Change in Tim Winton’s Breath ...................................... 19

• Paul Giffard-foret Settling Scores: Albert Namatjira’s Legacy ................................................................................................................31

• Marie herBillon Absent Others: Asian-Australian Discontinuities in Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog ................................... 43

• Maggie Wander ‘It’s Ok, We’re Safe Here’: The Karrabing Film Collective and Colonial Histories in Australia ....................... 53

• Laura A. White Haunted Histories, Animate Futures: Recovering Noongar Knowledge through Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance ................................................................................................................................................................................63

Unsettling Oceania, 250 Years Later

• Christine lorre-Johnston Introduction....................................................................................................................................................................75

• Kara hisatake Revising the Settler Colonial Story in Albert Wendt’s Black Rainbow ..................................................................... 83

• Jessica hurley The Nuclear Uncanny in Oceania ...............................................................................................................................95

• Valérie Baisnée “I’m Niu Voices”: Selina Tusitala Marsh’s Poetic Re-Imagining of Pacific Literature .....................................107

• Marlo starr Paradise and Apocalypse: Critiques of Nuclear Imperialism in Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s Iep Jaltok ....................119

• Otto heiM How (not) to Globalize Oceania: Ecology and Politics in Contemporary Pacific Island Performance Arts ........................................................................................................................................................131

Reviews

• Reviewed by Claire Gallien Fighting Words: Fifteen Books that Shaped the Postcolonial World. Edited by Dominic Davies, Erica Lombard and Benjamin Mountford ...............................................................................................................147

• Reviewed by Helga raMsey-kurz Displacement, Memory, and Travel in Contemporary Migrant Writing. Textet: Studies in Comparative Literature 83. By Jopi Nyman ........................................................................................................149

• Reviewed by Corinne BiGot Inhabiting Memory in Canadian Literature / Habiter la mémoire dans la littérature canadienne. Edited by Benjamin Authers, Maïté Snauwaert and Daniel Laforest ..................................................................151

• Reviewed by Fiona Mccann “No Other World”: Essays on the Life-Work of Don Maclennan. Edited by Dan Wylie and Craig MacKenzie ....153

• Reviewed by Delphine Munos The Postcolonial Epic: From Melville to Walcott and Ghosh. By Sneharika Roy ...........................................................155

Contributors ......................................................................................................................................................................157

Disturbed Australian Spaces

Introduction

(for Sue Ryan-Fazilleau)

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century Australia has entered a phase known as post-reconciliation, which for some artists and writers has marked a turning-point in race relations and issues of belonging to the multicultural society in an Asia-Pacific environment. While post-reconciliation has paved the way for constitutional recogni-tion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, the effects of settler history can still be perceived in debates on the nation and cultural identity. Recent nationalist claims and cultural tensions raise concerns about the country’s ability to overcome the colonial past and fully embrace the multicultural ideal. In his article on recent Australian fiction, Nicholas Birns reminds us that Sue Ryan-Fazilleau, in her extensive study of Peter Carey’s work, suggested that the novelist was engaged in a postcolonial quest for iden-tity. Ryan-Fazilleau’s valuable contribution to the study of Australian literature is raised in Birns’s examination of the works of some twenty-first-century Australian authors and the place of technology in their sense of identity. Birns argues that a new kind of Australian fiction emerged, around 2004, concerned with the temporalities of techno-logy and artifice. He thus shows how indigeneity surfaces in Peter Carey’s latest work, and how the legacy of Indigenous dispossession affects, in fact, the global and mo-dern nation. Indigenous spirituality and the importance of place also surface through John Clement Ball’s piece on Tim Winton’s surfing novel, Breath (2008). Ball considers previous work on Winton’s novel and brings a new insight into ecocritical writing by drawing on risk-theory and the sociology of surfing. The focus on the environment and climate change, issues that are central to Winton, extends to the novel’s engagement with the ethics and aesthetics of surfing. Ball shows how the ocean and the world of surf are oikos, home and territory, and argues that the surfing community is bound to the ocean in an almost spiritual albeit violent manner. Surfing, an icon of Australian identity, implies belonging to liminal spaces, marks the loss of innocence, and harks back to the colonial past and the settler’s distorted perception of the ocean and the land. The deconstruction of the postcolonial country, the subversion of norms, the reconfiguration of the space of the nation, of identities and subjectivities, have become common themes in the literature and the arts of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century Australia. Paul Giffard-Foret addresses the theme of split-identities and the Bhabhan notion of mimicry by revisiting the nature of Albert Namatjira’s legacy in light of the retrocession of the artist’s copyright, in 2017. Giffard-Foret argues that in post-reconci-liation Australia, discourses on race and indigeneity still prompt racist and distorted views of otherness, that Namatjira’s western trajectory bears traces of the anxiety linked to the white settler society and the multicultural nation. Showing how Tracy Moffatt refers to Namatjira’s work in her semi-autobiographical short-film, Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy, Giffard-Foret argues that postcolonialism remains a problematic concept for Indigenous Australians. The sense of un-belonging to the postcolonial nation is also felt by non-Indigenous others, for instance by Australians of non-English background. Marie Herbillon relies on Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs’s critical work Uncanny Australia

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(1998) to launch a discussion on Michelle de Krester’s The Lost Dog (2007); she argues that the legacies of settler history and Indigenous claims disturb the modern nation. By showing that the relation of Australia with Asia tends to rely on the tropes of trauma and gothic haunting, she demonstrates that the sense of belonging and displacement related to history emphasize an unsettling presence, to such an extent that the novel ex-plores “the hydra of modernity itself.” The postcolonial paradigm is envisaged through its many intricacies in Maggie Wander’s article, in which she analyses colonial histories through the study of Windjarrameru (The Stealing C*nt$), the third film of a trilogy which forms the project of the Karrabing Indigenous Corporation. Wander argues that the significance of Indigenous kinship and ancestry, both embedded in the Australian land-scape, implies that they are still at the heart of Australia’s colonial and essentialist views on non-Anglo subjects, that modernity has, in fact, intensified neocolonial approaches to the land and people. The recognition of cultural otherness within the larger scope of postcolonialism and multiculturalism is reflected in Laura White’s piece on Kim Scott’s novel That Deadman Dance (2010). Scott’s skillful use of language and culture, Noongar vocabulary and ontology, creates what White sees as a framework of ecospectrality, a space where Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations can be re-examined. The re- telling of settler history from an Indigenous perspective is a means to re-conceptualize the present and to configure the nation’s potential future. White’s article, which is part of a current research project, shows how story-telling and the incorporation of the uncanny provide an understanding of local communities and the postcolonial nation – Australia, the troubled land in the Asia-Pacific region.

Salhia Ben-Messahel University of Toulon

The New Historical Novel:

Putting Mid-Twentieth-Century Australia

into Perspective

This article argues that, since 2004 or so, a new kind of Australian historical novel has emerged among practitioners of literary fiction, one concerned with the mid-twentieth century. This new historical fiction has been characterized by an aesthetic stringency and

self-consciousness. Though Steven Carroll and Ashley Hay will be the principal twenty-first-century writers examined, reference will also be made to several other writers including Carrie Tiffany, Charlotte Wood, Sofie Laguna, and to the later work of Peter Carey. In all these contem-porary books, technology plays a major role in defining the twentieth century as seen historically.

As the mid-twentieth century recedes into the past, twenty-first-century Australian writers are coming to terms with it in ways that in turn affect their own novelistic practice. Steven Carroll’s The Gift of Speed (2004) and Ashley Hay’s The Railwayman’s Wife (2013) are two prominent examples of this phenomenon. The historical novel – by which, in effect, I mean “the historical novel of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Austra-lian exploration, colonization, and settlement,” has dominated Australian literature for over a generation. Though conventionally associated with international prize winners such as Peter Carey, Kate Grenville, and Thomas Keneally, this sort of historical novel has been practiced by a great range of writers, from Patrick White to Kim Scott. It has played an important role in rebalancing Australian historiography and culture towards a greater awareness of the ravages of settlement and the durability of the anterior and posterior Indigenous presence of the land. More recently, though, a new sort of his-torical novel has emerged in Australia, exemplified by the fiction of Ashley Hay in The Railwayman’s Wife (2013), Carrie Tiffany in Mateship with Birds (2013), Charlotte Wood in The Submerged Cathedral (2004), and, in the most sustained example, Steven Carroll’s Glenroy series, a collection of six books. Moreover, writers whose most famous works have been oriented to the more distant past – Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013) and Peter Carey’s A Long Way from Home (2018) – published novels set in the more recent past. In Sofie Laguna’s The Choke (2018), the troubles of a young girl growing up along the Murray River in the early 1970s are exacerbated by her callous and irresponsible father, but are salved by her heroic grandfather, even though the latter suf-fers from trauma relating to his World War II-era service. This wave of novels features stories all set in the mid-twentieth century and as concerned with temporalities of tech-nology, artifice, and perception as with historical events on a grand scale or a categorical sense of the past as is typically seen in the neo-Victorian colonial novel. One of these developments is the inevitable receding of the twentieth century into history, even as twentieth-century history resonates differently because people are living, and therefore remembering, longer. In addition, media and technology have made the soundscapes and sensations of the near past much more accessible.

Carroll’s The Gift of Speed (2004) is the second book in the Glenroy series, which in five books so far (as of 2018) has chronicled middle-class suburban life in Victoria from the 1940s to 1977. The Gift of Speed chronicles the historic tour of the West Indian cric-ket team to Australia in 1960, the famous “calypso summer” memorable in Australian

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cultural annals, not only in sporting terms but because the prominence it afforded black athletes from the Caribbean played a palpable role in fighting racism in Australia. From Hacker Paine, traumatized by his wartime service, to Peter Black, the Jamesian doctor (meaning “reading Henry James”) who speaks of his patient Rita’s impending death as “the Distinguished Guest,” Carroll loads up the novel with period detail. This detail, however, is not just there as window dressing but to frame the gamut of imaginative possibilities available to his characters.

For the senior generation of contemporary writers, such as Carroll, born in 1949, there is the additional challenge represented by the fact that writing about the past also involves writing about an earlier version of themselves. Michael, who is sixteen in the novel, is five years older than Carroll actually was at the time. He thus cannot be said to be a self-portrait of the author. But Michael is close enough in age to Carroll for Carroll’s own memories of the calypso summer to inflect Michael’s. The temptation for the writer is to let the power of personal memory, and the vividness and conviction of childhood experience, fuel the engine of imagination. Carroll prudently puts a brake on his own imaginative power by differentiating the point of view of the character by making him five years older. Equally, there might be the temptation to picture the par-ents, Vic and Rita, and Frank Worrell, the captain – the first black captain – of the West Indian team as quaint period-pieces that serve as background to the emotional growth of the authorial surrogate. This is a temptation that is hard for a coming-of-age novel to resist. Carroll, though, makes Vic, Rita, and Worrell full characters, gets into their heads, makes them three dimensional characters, makes their hopes, fears, and feelings as or even more palpable than those of the young Michael. In other words, he gives as much space and scope to the people about whom he must speculate as to the character he can know at least to some extent by looking into himself. We also have the more peripheral points of view of Vic’s dying mother, still struggling with her son’s illegitimacy, Black the Jamesian doctor – who would be pleased that his point of view, like all others in the book, is third-person limited – and Webster the factory owner, a neighbor of Vic and Rita, who keeps a secret from his wife that at first seems to be simply a flashy sports car in the garage, but which turns out to be a desire for freedom, even at the cost of life itself. In chapter 33, “The Last Train,” all the voices combine in a glorious tone poem.

Most of these characters are invented or fictional. Carroll also gives Worrell, the real-life character, the character on whom documentary research can and in many respects ethically must be done, as much inner life as he does Michael. In fact, when Michael and Worrell fleetingly encounter each other, one feels that the two react with equal inte-riority, as occurs with Mrs Dalloway’s response to Septimus’ death, in Virginia Woolf ’s novel. This is remarkable considering that one of the two characters in Carroll’s novel is a famous athlete. Carroll gets into Worrell’s head, going into his inner life. Worrell’s thoughts range from details of the game to the stress that he, as a man from Barbados, experiences in dealing with players from the other islands. Furthermore, Worrell muses on the Jamesian irony – referring to C.L.R. James in this case – of a formerly white and elite sport to be the medium of this exchange. The American expatriate cricket writer Mike Marqusee saw cricket indeed as a way for the formerly colonized to strike back against the racism and xenophobia of England. Cricket is a game that can be superbly played by professionals, but also enjoyed by amateurs and fans with far less skill but the same interest. Thus, even though Worrell’s athletic skill marks him out as excep-

The New Historical Novel: Putting Mid-Twentieth-Century Australia into Perspective9

tional, the ability of others to emulate and follow it renders it something that can also be understood and even empathized with through acts of imaginative participation. Cricket for Michael is both a participant and a spectator sport; and he learns from his cricket fandom to be not just a spectator but also a participant in his society, as it is on the verge of significant change.

The 1960s saw tumultuous change in terms of race relations worldwide, including the independence of most of the African colonies, the civil rights movement in the United States, and the acknowledgment of Indigenous Australians as Australian citizens in 1967. It is very important, with respect to Worrell and the West Indian cricket team, to note that the team was truly transnational – featuring players not just from one country but from the sundry formerly British colonies in the Caribbean, plus islands like Montserrat and Anguilla which remained British possessions. It might be said that the cricket team and the University of the West Indies are the only institutions that the British West Indies – which did not resolve themselves into the formal unity that the various Australian colonies acquired with the 1901 Federation – have in common. But even more crucially, the Calypso Summer took place just before Jamaica, the most populous Anglo-Caribbean nation, became independent. What might have once simply been a reaffirmation of imperial ties became an engagement between separate islands and continents, linked by British influence but no longer needing to directly involve Britain in their lateral interrelationships. We need to be aware of the imperial heritage here, but also to be aware that Australian and West Indian peoples, engaging on separate trajectories and to separate degrees in manifesting de jure autonomy, were also participa-ting, de facto, in a more general modernity. Carroll’s novel, while evoking the past in an atmospheric, plangent, and satisfying way, is also about how that past era saw and felt itself to be modern. Pertinent here is how C.L.R. James spoke of the associations and global connections of cricket as “prolegomena” towards an achieved modernity (170). In James’s case this is epitomized by the figure of the English cricketer W.G. Grace and, one might surmise, analogously epitomized in the eyes of young Michael by the West Indian cricketer Frank Worrell.

We have been used to thinking about speed and acceleration in modernism in terms derived from Italian futurism or seen in the work of scholars such as Paul Virilio. In this model, speed connotes force, apocalypse, rupture. Carroll’s vision of twentieth-century speed and technology, seen in both this book and in The Art of the Engine Driver, is different: more measured, more gradual, more minute, more integrated in daily life. Speed cannot provide everything; Michael, making a distinction with definite spiritual overtones, differentiates the gift of speed from the gift of grace. As opposed to grace, speed is thus worldly and mutable, and can transpire in different ways in the different athletic skill sets of the West Indian team. It is not a gift involving any inherent morality or immorality. In an extraordinary passage, Michael, on the eve of her farewell to him, finally kisses Kathleen Marsden, the foundling girl from the institution next door and realizes that “there was something out there beyond the sealed, self-enclosed world of speed” (209). Speed is spatial, unbounded, invigorating. But it cannot equal the gift of grace, embodied for Michael by Kathleen’s revelation to him of her secret nickname. In cases such as that of Webster, speed can lead to risk and annihilation. But, in suit-able hands, it can inspire and even transform. Nor is Michael privileged as a recorder. Indeed, one of the novel’s faint comic touches can be seen in the fact that Michael is not

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in attendance or even listening to the radio during many of the key matches, giving his experience of them a sense of futility and peripherality as well as of epiphany. Moreo-ver, it cannot be said that Michael is simply the naïve, young onlooker, and the cricketer Worrell the older, famous hero. Their relationship is too implicit, too evanescent for that. In addition, they are – though hardly like each other – not that different either. The Jamesian doctor spends most of the time dealing with the impeding rencontre of Vic’s elderly mother with the Distinguished Guest. But at the end of the novel, the doctor diagnoses problems with Michael’s back, finding that playing cricket has given Michael the back of a man decades older, and that he should stop immediately for any but highly recreational purposes. Similarly, Worrell, even at the moment of his sporting triumph, feels a faint tremor that bodes ill health. This foreshadows the fact that Worrell will die within a few years, so his achievement as a racial and postcolonial pioneer is darkened by his truncated life.

One of the other aspects of this recent spate of twentieth century-set fiction is that, because the background does not need to be so explicitly paraded in front of the read-er and because a period-appropriate voice does not have to be established, the novel is free to be more concise and to have more moments of implication, such as in the Proustian episodes in legendary cricketer Lindsay Hassett’s Sports Store. Yet, if one of the dangers of writing historical fiction about a time not in living memory is that of being archaic, one of the dangers of writing a kind of living-memory historical fiction is that one is always risking uncertainty. By this I mean uncertainty about whether the way people communicated, spoke colloquially or felt during those times is still com-prehensible today. It is easier to hypothesize about these small social matters with regard to the longer-term past, where the author knows with more certainty these things were fundamentally different from now, than with respect to the near-term past, where the author may be uncertain and have to think about what practices or technologies were or were not present. An example can be seen in the incident where Mr. Webster, in order to secure Michael’s silence about the sports car, gives the boy a ten-pound note; here, the author has to remember what the Australian currency was in 1960, that it was pounds not dollars. This is an example of the kind of detail that comes up in the near past, where the author may be uncertain about just what reference-points of our own reality existed in the fictional world they are creating, and what did not, a question that is raised by any fictional work, but that has to be answered with particular discernment in fiction concerning the near past. Carroll, for instance, presumably is still a cricket fan and follows cricket now, so it must have been hard for him to separate the specific prac-tice of this sort of talk in 1960-61 with what he has picked up in the intervening years.

Carroll is both periodising modernity as he does in his later novels (that fictiona-lize and place in perspective the personal lives of such literary figures as T.S. Eliot and Iris Murdoch) and suggesting that modernity can be potentially present in any ordinary circumstance. It may well be that contemporary Australian fiction is growing more towards the récit – the short, apparently transparent, but on second examination deeply complicated novel that asks the reader to do a lot of work, as a detective story does. Carroll’s style – poetic, yet also spare and austere – fits into this genre, even as the book undertakes an enormous amount of exposition. Some parts of the world have come to expect big, overtly ambitious books from Australian writers, but Carroll’s more self-contained practice – or his willingness to stretch his settings and characters into a


multi-book series, not cram it all into one big book – has gained him acclaim in Europe, most prominently through his shortlisting for the Prix Femina Étranger. Carroll’s work is not a cautious, prudent retrenchment to a kind of middle-modernism. His work is far more than that, takes greater risks and asks us to make profound connections between seemingly disparate worlds. Its lack of self-trumpeting does not mean that it does not possess great depth and power.

Michael McGirr’s 2004 review of The Gift of Speed in The Age explained that, though sport plays a significant role in Australian culture, it has seldom been the subject of major Australian fiction. This can be partially explained by the fact that despite the global nature of cricket exemplified by the very idea of the West Indian tour, much of the world does not play this particular sport. This renders the novel involuntarily paro-chial – the same might be argued with regard to the New Zealander Lloyd Jones’s Book of Fame, a great rugby novel, or the cricket-inflected poetry of Alan Wearne, Mark Pirie, and Nick Whittock. Yet Carroll’s fiction was shortlisted for a major prize in France, har-dly known as a heartland of cricket, and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, a cricket-centered novel, won huge success in the US in 2009. Another point that can be made is that the book is very masculine, dominated by cricket, golf, sports cars – and yet the Jamesian emphasis on the intensities of feeling, combined with the strong characterization of Vic’s mother, Rita, and Michael’s fleeting love interest Kathleen Marsden, does not make its affect stereotypically masculine, even though the material is. Carroll is writing neither a literary prettying-up of a sporting novel nor a sporting novel with literary aspirations. He is seeing sport as an aspect of human experience, as both a microcosm of life and a rehearsal for our experience of existential limits and mortality. Carroll represents sport as part of ordinary life, sharing its aspirations and silences. Sport is a cultural form with the capacity to embody social change and transformation, the hope that “we all might be just a bit better than we thought we were” (348), but not to cure or to account for personal pain and for the vulnerability of individual experience:

The gift of speed comes in different ways. Michael cannot imagine music in the great Lindwall’s ears as he swoops down upon the bowling crease. But he can in the great Worrell’s. And when he reaches his delivery stride does the batsman at the other end hear the sound of metal drums and island voices? (20)

Through watching Worrell play cricket, Michael inwardly hears the music of Worrell’s Caribbean cultural background. Sport is necessarily external, but The Gift of Speed is a deeply interior book, one which understands that external actions and inner feelings are distinct but can be aligned.

Carroll’s fiction has been analyzed, by Nathanael O’Reilly and Brigid Rooney, as exemplary of the novel of suburbia, and by Robert Dixon as an example of scalar modulation and transformation. Yet, I would like to suggest that it plays a more deter-minative role in contemporary Australian fiction in connecting realism and experimen-tation, the referential and the aesthetic. The work of Gerald Murnane, in its suburban Melbourne settings, its investment in horse racing, and its sense of the wonder and fragility of love, could be said to echo Carroll’s themes, albeit on a much more abstract plane; or one could say Carroll embodies some of Murnane’s dreamy impulses in a sol-ider near-past. There is even a resemblance between “reward for effort,” the name of the horse in Murnane’s racing memoir Something for the Pain that momentarily redeems loss and sorrow, and the sense at the end of Carroll’s novel that we might be a bit better

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than we thought we were. This is important because all too often Murnane, a highly self-reflexive and difficult writer, has been walled off from the rest of the Australian literary project. Carroll’s work suggests there may instead be connecting commonalities.

Carroll’s novel is also concerned with the idea of being a bit better than we were, both artistically or in terms of skill, and socially or in terms of progress; not radically better, but just a bit better. This sense of gossamer if palpable improvement is reminis-cent of the phrase “pointless and elegant” (Winton 25) used in reference to surfing in Tim Winton’s Breath. In both Breath and The Gift of Speed, there is an odd combination of the revelatory and the gratuitous; Breath, which is taken up with the risky exhilaration inherent in surfing, is, like The Gift of Speed, concerned with sport. Carroll represents a team sport, a situation where progress has to be coordinated. Carroll presents cric-ket, in its teamwork, sense of tradition, and transnationalism, as a sport which means something beyond the outcomes and statistics of the matches themselves. C.L.R. James, the Caribbean writer who wrote so superbly on the sport, spoke of the game’s “fierce, self-imposed discipline” (26) and “vague ideas of freedom.” Historical fiction set in the near past has to be about freedom as well as constraint, adjacency as much as distance. Unlike the historical fiction set in the nineteenth century, which always faces the temp-tation to pastiche Victorian style because it is so distinctive or risks anachronism by writing in a more contemporary style, writing historical fiction of the nearer past does not demand such a stylistic adaptation, although Carroll chooses to write prose which is visionary in its ambition but modest in its scale, scope, and vocabulary, hinting this might be a sustainable prose model for this sort of fiction:

Vic turns his cheek to the wind then looks down to the road passing by beneath him at the wheels of Rita’s bicycle spinning around, as he moves to the Old Wheat Road for the morning shopping. It is a familiar path, past the school, its red-brick classrooms quiet under the peppercorns, past the tennis courts, freshly raked and sprinkled, and up into the Old Wheat Road. It’s an easy and pleasant ride – best taken in the mornings, before the sun rakes the suburb – and Rita’s bicycle, never used by her, is as good as new and travels smoothly. (150)

The words are ordinary, with little verbal extravagance, but the air they conjure is neither humdrum nor mundane. Indeed, there is something heightened, quickened, in Carroll’s prose even when he is limning the absolutely ordinary. Even as he muses upon the routine, there is an intense awareness of the losses that life, especially when it is closely examined and meditated upon, has in store for us. Even though Carroll knows his liter-ature, and the Henry James reference is important to this book, Carroll’s literariness is less a preoccupation with tradition than a way of representing loss. When Carroll refer-ences literature, he is mapping the states of loss his characters feel. This liberates his fiction from the burden of explicit literariness and allows the beauty of Frank Worrell’s speed to be its own distinct kind of beauty, not a stand-in for a flamboyantly artistic beauty, without any “attempt to recover the moment of inspiration in which everything that is to be written arrived” (131). The growth of Michael during that calypso summer shows that coordinated progress is able to accommodate both the sheer excellence of grace and a growth into anti-racism that carries undertones of the same grace.

Unlike Carroll, Ashley Hay, born in the 1970s, does not have even vestigial personal memories of the era she writes about in The Railwayman’s Wife. But, as in Carroll’s novel, Hay deals with the midcentury period in ways both mundane and literary. The


novel tells the story of everyday Australian destinies that attain a tragic and plangent resonance. Mac Lachlan, a Scottish-born railwayman, meets Anikka Kalm – a surname surely symbolic, as Anikka needs a lot of calm to get through the emotional travails she will endure – in the Riverina of New South Wales; they then go to live in the coastal town of Thirroul, where Mac works on the railway. Although Mac survives World War II, a railway accident in 1948 kills him just before the tenth birthday of his and Anik-ka’s daughter, Isabel. The railway line, as a kind of widow’s pension, gives Anikka a job at the railway’s library. This job intensifies her acquaintanceship with Roy McKinnon, a friend of Mac’s who, however, was a very different sort of person. Roy was an acclaimed poet before the trauma of war silenced him and gave him writer’s block. Roy gives the novel a literary aspect as he is visiting his sister, Iris, and her beau, Dr. Frank Draper, to try to inspire his dormant poetry by writing near the sands and waves of Thirroul and Austinmer that inspired D.H. Lawrence’s novel Kangaroo, written during a very brief sojourn in Australia.

Through Roy’s poetry and Anikka’s librarianship, a literary aspect is introduced into a tale of love and mourning that, emotionally, could thrive without the literary. Elea-nor Dark’s The Timeless Land is mentioned in Hay’s novel as a contemporary bestseller. Dark’s theme of first contact with the Indigenous people makes it possible for Hay’s novel to include an awareness of race and Indigeneity in its purview. As with Carroll having to remember what the Australian currency would have been in 1960, Hay had to think about what a general Australian reader of the late 1940s would be aware of, and what would not be included in his or her readerly horizon. That there are references to Australian as well as world literature in Hay’s book is very important as it gives the book an internal literary pedigree and allows for in-references that only the clued-in reader aware of the minute details of Australian literary history can appreciate. It might be that Anikka’s sojourn in the Riverina is meant to allude to Joseph Furphy. When Roy’s initial efforts at postwar poetry are rejected by his editor, the editor raises instead “another re-turned poet” (206) who “had spilled the hard, parched landscape of some remote place across his desk that very morning” (206-7); we may be meant to think of the Australian poet David Campbell and the region associated with him, the Monaro, and to juxtapose that hard, flat landscape with the very different coastal emptiness of Thirroul. Most sa-liently, McKinnon’s writer’s block recalls a similar issue in the life and work of Kenneth Slessor, the great Australian poet who never wrote a line of poetry after World War II. Hay’s novel thus joins Gail Jones’s Five Bells (2011) in alluding to Slessor at its edges, and Brian Castro’s Street to Street (2013), concerning the earlier poet Christopher Brennan, as contemporary novels that are presenting major Australian poets to the contempo-rary global reader, who likely has not heard of them, and the contemporary Australian reader who may know the name but little more. Indeed, if the historical fiction of the 1980s and 1990s, largely set in the settler or colonial era, tended, intentionally or not, to replace the earlier Australian literature the world reader had not read, these newer books are inclined to solicit these earlier poets precisely for the benefit of the world reader and for the Australian reader who should know them better than he or she probably does.

Indeed, the reader of The Railwayman’s Wife may well think that literariness is the solution to Annika’s loneliness, and love the answer to Roy’s creative dejection. Roy, inspired by Anikka, writes a brilliant poem which he sneaks into her house. She reads it, taking in its cadences of lambent lamentation:

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Another sense. In the lost world whose colorAnd form flared round her, even more intenseAnd as she passed grew duller. (184)

But Anikka assumes it must be by Mac, that he had written it for her but had not shown it before his untimely death (or perhaps even that it was written by his ghost). We might expect the plot, in a Cyrano-de-Bergerac way, to have Anikka discover that it was really Roy who had written the poem (which Roy reveals through mailing the published ver-sion to Anikka), and for her to conclude her period of mourning, and to serve as Roy’s enabling muse. But, in a plot twist that likely disappoints even the most rigorous and jaded of literary readers, Roy drowns himself after realizing that “you don’t dream of taking a muse by the hand” (248), that his love for Ani is doomed to be literary, not real. Yet there is enough ambiguity in Roy’s death – he leaps, perhaps hoping to attain an ultimate, reinvigorating exuberance, not just to die – to make us feel that he has found some redemption. In the wake of this, the reader realizes that his or her initial desire to see Roy and Ani happy together and, even more, to see literariness as a healing agent of love, is contrary to the emotional realities of the novel. Roy feels himself superfluous, not only to Ani, but to his sister Iris and her beau, and, eventually, fiancé, Frank. In a revealing incident, when a bicyclist is killed in Sydney – just after Roy’s editor has refused his poetry written before the Anikka poem – Roy gives his name to the police as Dr. Frank Draper, indicating a willingness to have his identity fade into his brother-in-law’s, a man who is able to heal his own wartime trauma – he had been a witness to the death camps in Europe – by marrying Iris. He also has a long and instructive talk with Isabel before his drowning. Ani’s and Mac’s daughter, a precocious child who is carefully made young enough that she could still be alive, if elderly, at the time of the novel’s actual publication, 2014, becomes a time-spanning figure like Jocelyn in Wood’s Submerged Cathedral or Essie Gormley in Hay’s own A Hundred Small Lessons (2017): the reference to Isabel counting “two thousand and fourteen” (48) stars in the sky may have just this application. There is an implied sense, in narratological terms, in which it could be Isabel in effect remembering this story, even though, unlike Carroll’s Michael, there is here no possible identity with the author. But although Roy leaves a lasting poetic legacy, his poetry cannot be part of the solution to the character’s trauma; he can offer some healing to others, but none to himself. The literary is not salvific. For all the finely wrought, literary cadence of Hay’s style, the novel affirms the extraliterary or nonliterary as a category, much as do Carroll’s meditations on the beauty of speed. As in Carroll’s novel, where sport stands as a register of beauty and form that is aesthetic, but not literary, the beach, the sands, and the railway itself are shown to be tokens of beauty that are illuminated by the literary but not redeemed by it.

The new historical novel of the mid-twentieth century chronicles time that, although slipping into the past, retains a proximity. The first chapter of The Railwayman’s Wife has Anikka reflect that “It could be any day, any year, call it 1935, 1938, 1945” (1). It is Anik-ka’s reading that gives her this sense of simultaneity, and it is a kind of layered simulta-neity, not a cathartic alterity of having-been, that these novels augur. In Carrie Tiffany’s Mateship with Birds (2012), the action is set both remotely – in rural Victoria – and back in time – in the 1950s. Yet this setting is not pastoral, nor does it attempt to absorb the action, to trope on Eleanor Dark’s title, into a timeless landscape. The improvised and secondary nature of Henry’s relationship with Betty, the way they meet and marry late


in life, represents adjustment and adaptation, change that in a way is more meaningful because it does not trumpet itself as change. And, much like Tiffany’s earlier Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living (2008), which emphasizes the changes wrought on the land by modern farming techniques, Mateship with Birds examines the characters’ ever-deepening coexistence with the kookaburras that live on their land with an awareness of how the Anthropocene, and human interference in nature, has changed our idea of the apposi-tion between the human and nonhuman.

If the way Henry instructs Betty’s son, Michael, in the mysteries of sex is at times comic and awkward, it also intimates that even “the facts of life” have to be altered and changed in a modernity that being in rural Australia in no way evades. The book mani-fests an all-pervasive sense of kinship with nature, yet nowhere presumes the organic; Henry and Betty’s relationship is constrictive and reparative, but hardly ordinary or foundational. Everyman’s Rules contains many pages of agricultural manuals which are not meant as pastiche or to be satirized but scrutinized seriously for their reflection of the states of minds of the characters. This is a corollary of the novel not portraying yesterday, but an earlier form of today. Similarly, in Mateship with Birds, Tiffany des-cribes Hazel, Betty’s daughter, borrowing a book from the school library with “pictures of modern cars and trains and aeroplanes” (105). These forms of transportation are forms we still use, albeit in transformed shapes. This kinship to our own practices and technologies enables a respectful conjuring of imagined characters within a real past close enough to our present for us to judge them as we might ourselves. Similarly, in Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living, Tiffany shows how modern technology can quickly become assimilated into the daily. Jean Finnegan, the novel’s narrator, sees her “dress-making mannequins” in the same kitchen as “an electric tea kettle” (193). Tiffany’s delineation of everyday technology is neither quaint nor anachronistic. It constructs a past distant from and accessible to us in nearly equal cognitive measures.

Whereas a twenty-first-century novel set in the twenty-first century is going to be global in terms of having to address instantaneous communication and the daily reali-ties of cultural heterogeneity, and a twenty-first-century novel set in the late eighteenth or nineteenth century is going to be global in the sense of colonialism being global, a twenty-first-century novel about the mid-twentieth-century would seem to present Australia as a nation-state reading, albeit in a marginal way, in a world of nation-states. Moreover, the Indigenous issue also is affected by a shift in historical focus to the mid-twentieth-century. The issue of Indigenous Australians is bound to be there in colonial-era fiction, which must confront their displacement and the usurpation of their land, or in twenty-first-century-set fiction, occurring in the charged atmosphere after the Mabo decision of 1992, the Northern Territory Intervention of 2007, and a far increased awa-reness of Indigenous issues. Yet the fiction set in the mid-twentieth-century transpires when the Stolen Generation is in the act of being stolen, when Indigenous Australians are not yet citizens, and when a majority of white Australians thought the Indigenous issue belonged either to the past or to eccentrics such as the white Jindyworobak poets who tried to embrace a sort of Indigenous aesthetic. The mid-twentieth-century was not an era when Indigenous Australia was listened to by a majority of the white sett-ler population. Twenty-first-century novelists treating the period have to at once ac-knowledge this absence and tacitly fill it in with their own implied awareness.

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Peter Carey’s A Long Way from Home (2017), a book centered on the Redex Trial, a motor rally that involved cars driving around Australia, is a case in point. Like Carroll in The Gift of Speed, Carey, whose family ran an auto dealership in Bacchus Marsh, Vic-toria, takes the car as an emblematic instance of mid-twentieth-century technology, as a totem of a particular kind of interaction with the world. Unlike Carroll though, whose fiction is deliberately provincialized and ensconced in suburbia, Carey’s chronicling of the Redex Trial, necessarily, takes in the whole of Australia. The novel argues that any attempt to grasp Australia will have to confront the violence and injustice physically and viscerally suffered by the Indigenous people. Through the story of Willie Bachhuber, the navigator in the auto rally who finds he has an Indigenous identity and family of which he was unaware, Carey portrays a modernity coming to terms with a colonialism it thought it had surpassed. Towards the end of the novel, Bachhuber’s son says that “my so-called German father had given me the genes that made me Aboriginal” (309), pre-senting not just a genealogical revelation but an upending of assumptions of racial hie-rarchies entwined deeply in both Australian identity and modernity itself. The national self-confidence of mid-twentieth-century Australia led to a misplaced conclusion that it had dealt with the Indigenous issue through forced assimilation. This created a false sense of confidence, a feeling that Australian nationhood had been achieved without genocide or interference. By talking about the Indigenous issue in the context of the modern Australian state rather than British colonial structures, Carey’s novel shifts the guilt of racism and oppression away from colonial associations. Colonialism can thus be seen by modern white Australians as safely in the past and extrinsic to an emergent Australian identity, which is itself bent towards a modern polity that is hypocritical if it does not admit the continuing dispossession of Australia’s first inhabitants. A common theme in these books is the co-presence of science and technology – the railway, the engine, the motor-car, clinical medicine – with historical change, as if science was at once external to this change and in another way part of it or inflecting it.

The twenty-first-century historical novel of the mid-twentieth century must come to terms with technology. In Hay’s novel, part of Anikka’s mourning process involves understanding that it was Roy, not Mac, who wrote the beautiful poem she finds and shows to her daughter Isabel. When Dr. Frank Draper tells Anikka “Your husband wasn’t a poet; he was a railwayman” (262), he is allowing her to continue the mourning process by separating out spheres of imagination and machinery, insisting each has its own validity. That Mac Lachlan was not capable of writing Roy’s poem does not make his love for his wife any less radiant. Machinery is put on nearly the same level as art. This is evident in Carey’s A Long Way from Home as well, as Titch Bobs’s “genius” (5) resides in being a car salesman. Willie Bachhuber’s son, in trying to come to grips with the continuing legacy of racism that his father’s traumatic midlife realization of his own ancestry had tapped, speaks of analogies to the “encryption” (313) of “alchemical literature.” This is an acknowledgment that the historical novel of the mid-twentieth-century makes a world in which history cannot function alone; that it needs the aid of science, technology, machinery. That Carey, who more than any other novelist is asso-ciated with the historical novel of the colonial era, in this late masterpiece turned his attention not just to the mid-twentieth-century but to the particular way the Indigenous issue was embodied there – in suspended half-acknowledgment – shows how what Sue Ryan-Fazilleau termed Carey’s postcolonial quest for Australian identity cannot just be


confined to the nineteenth century, but calls for us to understand the more recent past with just as much scrupulousness and scrutiny.

The world that Peter Carey and Steven Carroll were born in during the 1940s, and that Richard Flanagan, Ashley Hay, Carrie Tiffany, Sofie Laguna, and Charlotte Wood came into in later decades, saw Australia as provincial, as behind the times. A.A. Phillips, in the 1950s, spoke famously of “the cultural cringe,” and Geoffrey Blainey of “the tyranny of distance.” Australia often blamed itself not just for its own provincialism but, in Phillips’s model, for its own self-underestimation in light of that provincia-lism. But it could be that global modernity, in provincializing Australia, was seeking to divest itself of the association with colonialism and white supremacism that Australian history inevitably proclaimed. This is especially true of avant-garde and left-wing lite-rary movements, who wanted to chart a Euro-American subversion free from Euro-American prejudices and imperialisms – to not be equipped with them, but also to not acknowledge them. If one of the motives behind Carey’s nineteenth-century-set Australian historical fiction was, as Sue Ryan-Fazilleau put it, to take apart “myths put forward by official Australian history” (11), to write of the mid-twentieth century is to take apart myths fostered by global modernity: that the twentieth century had achieved racial, social, and gender justice when in fact it had not, and that Australia was an uneasy reminder of this lack. That the world now, intermittently, permits Australia to resonate more than it did in midcentury is an index of how the world, intermittently, is coming to terms more with issues of race, empire, and colonialism. What Carroll, Hay, Carey, and Tiffany tell us is how technology and mechanization, and their corollaries in aesthetic form, help bring this story closer to our time. The new Australian novel of mid-twen-tieth-century history, in juxtaposing different registers of speed – in Carroll’s novel, sport, the literariness of loss, and decolonization; in Hay’s the war, the surf, the railroad, and the literariness of loss – demonstrates how, as the railwaymen tell Ani Lachlan when informing her of her husband’s death, that “an engine, coupled with anything […,] exerts a powerful lot of force” (27). By placing fictional narratives in a time when Australia was no longer a colony, but was still struggling with issues of identity, legiti-macy, and its place in global temporality, these novels make a significant contribution to the ongoing Australian literary project. By insisting that Australia, and its legacy of Indigenous dispossession, is part of global modernity, they importantly question that modernity’s potential complacency.

Nicholas Birns

New York University

W orks Cited

carey, Peter. A Long Way from Home. New York: Knopf, 2018.carroll, Steven. The Gift of Speed. Melbourne: Penguin, 2014.dixon, Robert. “‘Communications from Below’: Scalar Transformations in Richard Flanagan’s The

Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013) and Steven Carroll’s A World of Other People (2013).” Antipodes 31.1 (June 2017): article 11. <https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/antipodes/vol31/iss1/11/>.

flanaGan, Richard. The Narrow Road to the Deep North. New York: Vintage, 2014.hay, Ashley. The Railwayman’s Wife. New York: Atria: 2016.JaMes, C.L.R. Beyond a Boundary. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.Jones, Gail. Five Bells, London: Harvill Secker, 2011.

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Marqusee, Mike. Anyone but England: An Outsider Looks at English Cricket. London: Aurum P, 2005.Murnane, Gerald. Something for the Pain. Melbourne: Text, 2016.o’reilly, Nathanael. Exploring Suburbia: The Suburbs in the Contemporary Australian Novel. Amherst, NY:

Teneo, 2012.rooney, Brigid. “Colonizing Time, Recollecting Place: Steven Carroll’s Reinvention of Suburbia.”

JASAL 13.2 (Spring 2015): 1-16. <https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/viewFile/9873/9762>.

ryan-fazilleau, Sue. “Bob’s Dreaming: Playing with Reader Expectations in Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda.” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 59.1 (2005): 11-30.

tiffany, Carrie. Everyman’s Guide to Scientific Living. New York: Scribner: 2006.—. Mateship with Birds. Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2012.Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics. Trans. Mark Polizzoti. New York: Semiotexte, 2006.Winton, Tim. Breath. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008.Wood, Charlotte. The Submerged Cathedral. Sydney: Vintage, 2014.

“The Shimmering Edge”:

Surfing, Risk, and Climate Change

in Tim Winton’s Breath

Breath, Tim Winton’s coming-of-age surfing novel, indirectly links the voluntary risk- taking of adolescent surfers with that of a society teetering on the edge of oceanic cli-mate change. This paper draws on risk theory, the sociology of surfing, oceanic studies,

and Winton’s related writings to provide an ecocritical reading of Breath.

We [Western Australians] are not sea people by way of being great mariners, but more a coastal people, content on the edge of things.

Tim Winton, Land’s Edge (41)

Surfing is a form of spectacular but deferred arrival. Wave-riders, often but not always young, white, and male, perform an approach to the liminal, transitional space of a coastline that they usually do not reach – and may need to avoid reaching – until they have finished surfing. Breath (2008), Tim Winton’s novel about an Australian boy’s coming of age in the 1970s through what he calls the “pointless and beautiful” activity of surfing (218), meditates on the addictive risk-taking and sensation-seeking that often accompany the adolescent male’s emergence. Winton’s characters pursue what theo-rists of voluntary risk- and excitement-seeking call “edgework” or “peak experience” activities (Lyng, “Edgework” 3; Ford 158): surfing for the three main male characters, aerial skiing and auto-asphyxiation for the main female character. Some eventually die from high-risk pursuits, or become physically or psychically damaged, and while they all survive adolescence, they never fully transcend it. The spatial liminality and defer-red arrival of the surfer become analogous to the fluidity and temporal liminality of the adolescent, who is no longer a child under the control of others but not yet an autonomous adult who has taken control. Winton offers an ominous symbol of that suspended state in his description of a roadkill kangaroo, strung up by its tail, that “looked as though it was caught in a perpetual earthward dive. […] The roo aimed and aimed and never arrived. Only its blood made the journey” (63).1 The novel begins with a similarly gruesome image of an adolescent boy’s “[a]ccidental” hanging through erotic auto-asphyxiation (8); having taken a risk – taken control and then lost it – he too never arrives. In Breath, such images prove instructive as they reach beyond the individual pleasure-seeking contexts of surfing and sexuality to resonate globally and ecologically.

In an essay on voluntary risk-taking, sociologist Stephen Lyng writes of edgewor-kers’ desire “to control the seemingly uncontrollable,” which he says is often a way of compensating for “the lack of control that people experience in their institutional lives” (“Sociology” 45). The challenges and thrills of extreme sports, for instance, come not just from defying gravity or distance or bodily limits or one’s own fear. For Lyng, “the exploration of limits or the ‘edges’ between sanity and insanity, consciousness and unconsciousness, or life and death provides a way to break free of the rigidified sub-

1. Bridget Rooney offers a compelling interpretation of this scene’s “meditation on mortality” (251): “In its urgent futility, the striving self is an automaton monotonously caught in its mortal body, repetitively aiming but never arriving. Likewise, surfing becomes a process of perpetually aiming but never arriving” (252).

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jective categories created by disciplinary technologies that circumscribe almost every aspect of human experience” (43). Engaging in such activities is a way “to re-enchant a disenchanted world” (22). Surfing at a time before the rise of extreme sports, Winton’s characters aspire to be and to do something “extraordinary” rather than “extreme” (Winton, Breath 102), but this motivation to compensate for constraints or disenchant-ments still applies to the adolescent protagonist, Bruce Pike, who is attracted to sur-fing – and to the small fraternity he surfs with – as an escape from his bleak mill-town environment and his passive, unadventurous parents. He seeks increased autonomy and individuality by doing something unconventional, counter-cultural, and thrilling, along with a wild friend of his age, named Loonie, and an older mentor, Sando, who teaches both boys the skills and initiates them into the culture of surfing.

The limited control that Pike (a.k.a. Pikelet) actually achieves over his adolescent and later life is consistent with the peculiar qualities of surfing. At once sport, art form, lifestyle, and subculture (Ford 59), surfing is both active and submissive: the wave-rider skillfully engages powerful natural forces without any prospect of determining or al-tering them. Aiming to control what his body does on the wave, but not the wave itself, the surfer knows that unpredictable nature determines the limits of what he can do. His skill involves reading the sea and anticipating its effects – the swells and waves it generates – in order to manoeuvre on it gracefully and safely, but he does not physically affect that oceanic environment. Winton addresses this ecological dimension in an essay that describes surfing as “walking on water, tapping the sea’s energy without extracting anything from it. […] Few other water pursuits,” he writes, “have this non-exploitative element” (“Surfing” 12). Indeed, as Nick Ford and David Brown note in Surfing and Social Theory, because the surfers’ play space is active and dynamic, not static, they must be “reflexive performers” (18). The rider is “completely at the mercy of the wave,” as a celebrity surfer puts it in Susan Casey’s The Wave, an account of big-wave riders (93); Ca-sey notes that surfers’ “respect” for the sea helps them survive, “and they under[stand] the hubris of humans trying to impose their will on the ocean” (99, 100). As the global oceanic environment becomes both more dangerous and more endangered than ever, and as humanity teeters precariously and spectacularly on the edge of climate calamity while deferring transformative change to its exploitation of nature, Winton’s novel in-vites readers to link the risky pleasure-seeking of adolescent surfers to that of a society that has long imposed its will on the ocean and the larger global ecosystem, and that risks surrendering whatever control it may once have had over its environmental future.

Given its characters’ obsessions, Breath is clearly interpretable through the lens of risk. As Colleen McGloin notes in her reading of its construction of gender, early reviews and scholarship focused on the novel’s “central theme of risk-taking as this relates to the male characters, and specifically, to Australian surfing masculinities” (109). Nicholas Birns’s essay on Breath examines its characters’ risk-taking and risk-avoiding acts in relation to neoliberalism’s imposition and imbalanced distribution of risks. The novel has also been read through the lens of ecology: Salhia Ben-Messahel proposes that Breath “suggests that the individual is a component of place; it encapsulates an ecological vision […] whereby the ecological spectrum participates in the search for an Australian identity and thus provides the means to explore deep psychological aspects of belonging and not belonging” (14). William Lombardi, beginning with the figure of the breaking wave as a “material emblem of the give-and-take between global influence

“The Shimmering Edge”: Surfing, Risk, and Climate Change in Tim Winton’s Breath21

and local places” (41), makes the novel a case study for theorizing a “postlocal ecocriticism” that accommodates both a local, rooted place-sense and a globally aware identity so of-ten seen as its opposite (41). In the titular image of breath and breathing as an interna-lization of one’s environment, Lombardi finds a positive image of “the land inscrib[ing] the human instead of the human inscribing the land in a rarefied form of environmen-tal determinism” (48). What previous critics have not undertaken, and which this essay attempts, is an ecocritical reading of Breath that deploys insights from risk theory, the sociology of surfing, and oceanic studies to ask what its engagement with the ethics and aesthetics of surfing, and with adolescence, implies about the environmental risks of catastrophic climate change.

The ocean’s vast scale, relative inaccessibility, resistance to human inscription, and uninhabitability make it the world’s least understood and mapped space. In 2010, PMLA published an editor’s column and a large section devoted to oceanic studies, a then-de-veloping “blue turn” to literary and cultural studies that complements ecocriticism’s “green turn” in order to combat what Margaret Cohen calls “hydrophasia”: “a pervasive twentieth-century attitude that […] Allan Sekula has called ‘forgetting the sea’” (658). Scholars of postcolonial and Commonwealth literatures, like literary critics in gene-ral, have typically been guilty of this: we most often approach our subject terrestrially, even when we are critiquing territoriality, contesting boundaries and national categories, and theorizing such sea-spanning phenomena as transnational migration and diaspora. However, by 2010 some literary scholars had begun, as Cohen writes, “pioneering new paradigms and concepts of critical and cultural analysis scaled to what the early modern period called the terraqueous globe” (658). In postcolonial studies, scholars such as Paul Gilroy and Ian Baucom have been among the pioneers, focusing on the Atlantic Ocean in particular as the central space of European imperialism and the middle passage of slavery and trade – of the circulation of peoples, commodities, and ideas.2 Edouard Glissant has written movingly of the overdetermined, multiple meanings of the Carib-bean Sea in that region’s literature and culture.3 In framing his fascinating book on Shakespeare’s ocean, Steve Mentz writes, “When we stand at its edge, the sea appears at once too vast and too obvious for inquiry. In the modern West, the ocean is everywhere and nowhere, at once the most meaningful and most overlooked feature of our cultural imagination” (2). As the one truly shared space on our ever more integrated planet, and given its historical centrality to empire and role in both dividing and connecting far-flung peoples – dividing them geographically, connecting them through maritime technologies – the sea is a space to which we should pay more attention.

In her PMLA editor’s column, Patricia Yaeger links the sea to what Garrett Hardin has called the “tragedy of the commons” – the tendency for publically owned, shared space to degrade and atrophy through the neglect, abuse, overuse, and simple taking-for-granted of its multiple owners, who, because there are so many of them, do not see themselves as owners and therefore take little responsibility (Yaeger 525; Hardin 264). As Yaeger laments our ever bigger and more damaging “plastic footprint” in the sea (528), she advocates an “oceanic ecopoetics” that would “start with a recognition that our relation to the sea is always already technological” and that “late-capitalist seas are becoming more techno than ocean” (526-7). As waste stuff spills into the sea from

2. See Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (1993), and Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic (2005).3. See Glissant, Caribbean Discourse (1989).

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ships, oilrigs, upriver technologies, and irresponsible dumping – and with plastic waste of particular concern4 – human culture affects and begins to crowd out nature. A surf-board, however, is a unique form of maritime technology. No doubt more than a few of these objects, lost through wipeouts, contribute to our plastic footprint, but other-wise surfboards, and the surfing that takes place on them, are ecologically benign. John Fiske in Reading the Popular writes that “[t]he skill and art of the surfer resemble more the way a dolphin interacts with the sea or a bird with the air than man’s more normal technological imposition of his will and needs upon nature, typified by the modern giant ships” (60). Relatedly, Fiske describes the surfboard as “the perfect example of a category anomalous between nature and culture,” in that it enables its users to “violate the boundary between man and fish” (60, 49). While the word “violate” may imply an unwelcome transgression, for Fiske, as for Winton, boundary crossing is enabling and rich with transformative possibility.

The beach or coastline where surfing takes place – that transitional zone between land and sea – is also an anomalous category in Fiske’s terms, and Winton talks about it as such in Land’s Edge: A Coastal Memoir: “Nowhere else on the continent is the sense of being trapped between sea and desert so strong as in Western Australia. In many places along this vast and lonely coastline the beach is the only margin between them” (42). As liminal spaces, he analogizes beaches with verandas on houses, quoting Philip Drew’s compelling observation that “The veranda is an interval, a space, where life is impro-vised. The beach, in Australia, is the landscape equivalent of the veranda, a veranda at the edge of the continent” (41). That spatial liminality also makes the beach suitable for transitional or liminal temporal processes and states, and indeed Winton agrees with Robert Drewe’s view “that almost every Australian rite of passage occurs on or near the beach” (Winton, Land’s 40). Childhood has historically been seen as a long transition: from the primal, natural, instinctive animal wildness of the infant to the acculturated, domesticated, conditioned rationality of the adult. Adolescent youths are located in a liminal zone on that temporal continuum from nature to culture, and if they surf they can be located in a liminal zone spatially, as noted above, and often, though in varied and unpredictable ways, behaviourally as well.

Risk-taking, as Lyng notes, is “a form of boundary negotiation – the exploration of ‘edges,’ as it were” (“Edgework” 4). In Breath, Pike’s aquatic risk-taking begins at age 11 when he and Loonie explore aerobic boundaries, competing to see who can hold his breath longest at the bottom of a river in order to induce panic among bystanders; the panic is followed by anger when the unwitting spectators realize they have been duped, no longer good citizens responding to an apparent drowning but the audience for a prankster’s performance. “We scared people,” Pike writes, “pushing each other harder and further until often as not we scared ourselves” (16). In this pre-surfing embrace of a liminal state between boy and fish, the friends maintain a high degree of control and are at low actual risk: they choose how long to stay underwater and resurface into their air-breathing human identities at will. But others perceive them to be at high risk, dangerously displaced into inhospitable nature. The “solitary and feral” young Loonie’s “wildness” involves taking similar controlled risks in the realm of culture when he rou-

4. The non-profit organization Plastic Oceans Foundation estimates that humans now produce nearly 300 million tons of plastic a year, and that over eight million tons are dumped into the oceans (Plastic). In June 2018, French swim-mer Ben Lecomte began a swim across the Pacific Ocean to raise awareness of plastic pollution.


tinely “played chicken with log trucks” (17-8). As he and Pike begin surfing under San-do’s tutelage, they take increasingly greater risks in a less easily controlled environment; a big wave is more unpredictable than still water or even a lumbering truck, and the wave takes much more skill to challenge safely.

“[G]reedy about risk” and indifferent to authority (33), Loonie inspires Pike to take greater risks; in an era of more laissez-faire parenting, Pike’s parents are either ignorant or in denial of the extent to which he puts himself in harm’s way. The boys do it, as most surfers do, for the in-the-moment thrills of confronting a challenge and feeling at one with a force of nature. Pike writes,

There was never any doubt about the primary thrill of surfing, the huge body-rush we got flying down the line with the wind in our ears. We didn’t know what endorphins were but we quickly understood how narcotic the feeling was, and how addictive it became. […] We talked about skill and courage and luck – we shared all that, and in time we surfed to fool with death – but for me there was still the outlaw feeling of doing something graceful, as if dancing on water was the best and bravest thing a man could do. (26)5

This ultimately “pointless” pursuit challenges not only the powerful waves but the mill-town’s prevailing models of masculinity and productive labour; in Sawyer, Pike says, “men did solid, practical things, mostly with their hands” (25).6 Valorizing the extraor-dinary, transcendent possibilities of the sea over the daily ordinariness of life on the land, Pike not only embraces surfing values but echoes an older tradition dating from the eighteenth-century discovery of the sea and the shoreline as spaces of pleasure and self-knowledge. As Alain Corbin notes in his masterful history The Lure of the Sea, “For the Romantic hero, real life is the sea, an intact place of freedom that insulates him from the triviality of the earthly sojourn” (170). W.H. Auden writes similarly of the Roman-tics’ view of the sea as “where the decisive events, the moments of eternal choice, of temptation, fall, and redemption occur. The shore life is always trivial” (13).

In Breath, the unbounded, uncontrollable sea is the primary space for self-discovery and growth through taking on the challenges and risks of wave riding. The exhilaration surfing provides as Loonie and Pike take on bigger and more dangerous waves, parti-cularly a notoriously shark-filled spot named Barney’s, makes them feel stronger and older; as Pike says, “the exhilaration of the rides themselves inoculated us both against the worst of our fear” (75). However, insofar as this personal development represents a form of progress, it is articulated in the novel – and in Winton’s short essay “Surf-ing” – as an ecologically neutral, pure, and private kind of development. Indeed, when Loonie’s success at Barney’s has him wishing his best rides had been photographed, Sando is dismissive, saying there is no need to prove it, to have his ride witnessed by

5. Comparable descriptions of the enchantment of waves and surfing can be found in many non-fiction accounts of their affect. William Finnegan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life (2015) provides many vivid examples, beginning with this passage conveying his youthful discovery of the sea’s pleasures and alluring dangers: “I waded into the waves […], diving under pummeling lines of foam, thrashing toward the main sandbar, where the brown walls of the big waves stood and broke. I couldn’t get enough of their rhythmic violence. They pulled you toward them like hungry giants. They drained the water off the bar as they drew to their full, awful height, then pitched forward and exploded. From underwater, the concussion was deeply satisfying. Waves were better than anything in books, better than movies, better even than a ride at Disneyland, because with them the charge of danger was uncontrived. It was real. And you could learn how to maneuver around it.” (71).

6. Lombardi reads this moment as presenting further contrasts in which “‘useless beauty’ is valued more than utility, and play replaces work as a cultural touchstone,” remarking that “the working men of Sawyer are defined by the extrac-tive work of global capitalism, […] while the emerging surf subculture refuses to participate” and thus “causes a rupture in the cultural identity of Sawyer” (46).

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others: “Son, he said. Eventually there’s just you and it. You’re too busy stayin alive to give a damn about who’s watchin” (77). Instead, Sando says, “It’s about you. You and the sea, you and the planet,” and he describes success at surfing, which for him means risking death with the most dangerous waves, as a brave transcendence of the realm of the “ordinary” that is its own kind of progress (77). “Every day,” Sando counsels the boys, “people face down their own fears. They make calculations, bargains with God, strategic manoeuvres. That’s how we first crossed oceans and learnt to fly and split the atom, how we found the nerve to give up on all the old superstitions” (116). Taking risks, Sando suggests, is essential not only to one’s own development but to society’s.

Of course, the analogies Sando makes here are to technological developments, two of which, ocean-crossing and flying, are broadly (if not unequivocally) seen to have benefited humanity, whereas the third, splitting the atom, has been more clearly damag-ing. But whereas surfing is “pointless” and ecologically benign (218), these develop-ments are purposive and intrusive. Whatever nerve it took, whatever fears and risks were faced to develop such technologies in the first place, their presence in the world has generated further risks and fears, including those tied to their environmental, social, and economic impacts. As Deborah Lupton explains in her book on risk theory, the concept of risk as understood today, and indeed the word risk itself, has its origins in “early maritime ventures in the pre-modern period” in Europe (5); the concept of insurance begins around the same time, introduced to deal with the uncertainties of ocean voyages in particular and only later being applied to other perils. In earlier times – e.g., the Middle Ages – fears and insecurities and associated “superstitions” of the sort that Sando alludes to existed, involving plagues, diseases, demons, witches, monsters, natural disasters, hostile others, and acts of God. In the face of such beliefs, magic, rituals, and religion were ways to try and attain some degree of control (see Lupton 1-3). As human technologies developed alongside increased knowledge and control over the physical world, however, the modern concept of risks caused not by supernatural agents but by human actions, institutions, and technologies emerged. New indeterminacies, new risks, new anxieties replaced older ones, including environmental risks and anxieties that result from humankind’s accelerating ability and willingness to impact upon the natural world. Hence the idea of what Ulrich Beck calls a “risk society” (19) and Anthony Giddens calls a “risk culture” (3): an era, beginning in the late twentieth century, when an increa-sing capacity for technological control has produced whole new types of uncertainty and worry at global and local levels – risks humans have brought on themselves.

In an article on surfing and risk, Mark Stranger calls surfing a “risk-taking leisure activity” (267) and as such motivated partly by what he sees (following Giddens and Lyng) as “the cathartic properties of risk-taking in the context of the uncertainty in-herent in the current rapid rate of social change” (265). In other words, to offset the lack of control one may feel in the face of societal risks and uncertainties, one takes on voluntary risks that one’s courage and skills can enable one to overcome. The embod-ied experience of surfing – the ecstatic feeling of harmonious oneness with the wave that permeates the sport’s folklore7 – can enable the realities of reading the wave and controlling the body to extend to an illusion that one is controlling the wave itself, even as one recognizes, rationally, that this is impossible. When Winton’s Sando speaks of

7. “Surfers ride with waves, not simply on them. They are part of our bodies and our bodies are part of them. It can reach the point where I do not know where I begin and the wave ends” (Evers 898).


that oneness, he inspires Pike and Loonie to seek the extraordinariness that will result from pushing the limits of their fear and skill on “the shimmering edge” of the biggest, most dangerous waves available to them (43-4). At such moments Pike feels “immortal” (98) and experiences the “intoxicating power” of being “an outrider, a trailblazer […] doing things that no one else dared try” (117).

However, when Sando’s ambitions extend to an ugly, rocky wave called Nautilus that he describes as “[t]he next frontier” (115), Pike hesitates. Loonie goes headlong toward it and gains some stature as a result, but Pike’s more cautious approach to “the most dangerous wave [he’d] ever seen” separates him from Sando and Loonie (145). Refusing to surf it despite Sando’s taunts – “I thought I brought surfers with me. Men above the ordinary” (147) – he justifies his decision to himself on the basis that this deformed wave, “as ugly as a civic monument,” is unnatural – indeed, in that simile, associated with unlovely cultural space – and therefore unsuitable for surfing (148): “A small, cool part of me knew it was stupid to have been out there trying to surf a wave so unlikely, so dangerous, so perverse. […] You could barely call such a mad scramble surfing” (148).

While Sando and Loonie survive their encounter with Nautilus, the trajectory of the novel establishes respect for environmental forces – and limits on one’s ability to survive challenging them – as prudent: Pike lives on to middle age, whereas Loonie, who continues his aggressively risky behaviour into adulthood, does not. Nor does Eva, Sando’s 25-year-old American girlfriend, through whom Pike recognizes both the tantalizing allure and the danger of risk in entirely different contexts than surfing – and in terrestrial rather than aquatic space. A high-flying aerial skier before she ruined her knee and found herself washed up and bitter on the snowless Australian coast, Eva is, to Pike, “a woman not in the least bit ordinary” (172); in what he learns of her fearless acrobatics and determination to pursue what rationally is an “impossible, pointless, stupid, wasteful” goal of gravity-defying extraordinariness (173), he recognizes “the sin-glemindedness it took to match risk with nerve come what may” (173). But while Pike in this passage identifies her directly with Sando and with himself, the character Eva most resembles, in her “idiot resolve” (173), “warrior spirit” (172), and “implacable need to win the day,” is Loonie (172). Moreover, it is Loonie, as Sando’s disciple, who shares with Eva what Pike calls “the contempt she felt for those who withdrew from the fray or settled for something modest or reasonable” (172). To replace the thrills skiing used to provide, Eva takes up auto-asphyxiation to achieve more intense sexual climaxes, and coerces 15-year-old Pike, after seducing him, to help her choke herself. The novel di-rectly correlates auto-asphyxiation and surfing, given the precarious edge on which each act places those who undertake it: between a transcendent, fleeting high and a deadly, permanent low of drowning or suffocation.8 However, Eva’s high-risk leisure pursuit involves technologies – albeit simple ones: a rope and a plastic bag – and it is clearly an intervention in the natural process of sexual arousal and fulfillment. In attempting to challenge and improve on that natural process through risky, artificial means – as with her daring freestyling – Eva is more like the devil-may-care Loonie than she is like Pike. Indeed, she is close to the risk-takers of human history that Sando celebrates. This dif-

8. A big-wave surfer quoted in Casey’s The Wave is one of many to compare the feeling of surfing to sexual exci-tement: “When you blow down the side of a wave and the thing’s growling at you and snorting and all that power and fury and you don’t know whether you’re gonna be alive ten seconds from now or not, it’s as heavy an experience as sex! If you surf, you know” (176).

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ference may attract Pike – “She was all about going hard or going home […]. At fifteen you can buy such a philosophy” (173) – but he honours boundaries she disregards, disapproving of her unnatural sexual risk-taking and trying to get out of helping her with it just as he earlier pulled back from surfing the Nautilus in fearful respect for the wave’s power.9 Again, he survives; Eva, like Loonie, does not.10

In one of his meditations on the past, Pike as middle-aged narrator sounds not unlike the risk and edgework theorists deployed in this essay as he diagnoses what drove his younger self and his friends in their risk-taking ways. He writes,

More than once since then I’ve wondered whether the life-threatening high jinks that Loonie and I and Sando and Eva got up to in the years of my adolescence were anything more than a rebellion against the monotony of drawing breath. It’s easy for an old man to look back and see the obvious, how wasted youth and health and safety are on the young who spurn such things, to be dismayed by the risks you took, but as a youth you do sense that life renders you powerless by dragging you back into it, breath upon breath upon breath in an endless capitulation to biological routine, and that the human will to control is as much about asserting power over your own body as exercising it on others. (43)

The human will to control, like the impulse to take risks, applies not only to bodies and other people, however; it applies also to the environment. Yet in humanity’s efforts to increase control over the physical world – for instance, with petroleum-powered tech-nologies that conquer such environmental fundamentals as the distance between places – it has created new collective risks through human-induced global warming or climate change. The health of the oceans that cover 71 percent of the earth’s surface – whether in terms of warmer temperatures causing more frequent, intense, and unpredictable storms, or rising sea levels threatening coastal communities – is at the forefront of cli-mate-change concerns. As Susan Casey writes in her study of freakishly giant waves and the surfers, scientists, and insurers trying to understand them, the “details about what a warmer planet will look like are still coming into focus, but there is one thing our envi-ronmental future will clearly hold: a lot of restless water” (17). The current century has borne witness to numerous natural catastrophes, with hurricanes and tsunamis devas-tating many regions, and the 2011 tsunami in East Japan precipitating disaster in the atom-splitting nuclear industry as well, with enormous human and ecological damage.11 How, then, might we extend Winton’s vision of individual risk-taking offset by humility and respect before the ocean to understand its implications for humanity’s hubristic risk-taking with its collective environment?

Ursula Heise, in her important book Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, argues lucidly “that the study of risk perceptions and their sociocultural framing must form an inte-gral part of an ecocritical understanding of culture” (13). Climate change, as a subject of scientific and policy debate, is always framed in terms of risk and danger, but one

9. Rooney, reading Breath’s engagement with discourses of the sublime and the uncanny, sees it pivoting between the two at the moment when Pike refuses the Nautilus, thus shifting the plot from surfing adventures to sexual ones. Both the Nautilus and Eva, she notes, are associated with “deformity,” with the ugliness of the rock and the ex-freestyler’s ruined knee identifying them with each other (254) – and, one might add, contrasting with the beauty Pike finds in the forms of surfing he admires.

10. Their deaths both occur years after the main events of the novel and are conveyed in the epilogue-like final chapter: Eva from “asphyxiation,” alone in an Oregon hotel room (208); Loonie from a gunshot wound in a Mexican bar after a “drug deal gone bad” (211).

11. See Helmreich for a fascinating analysis of how the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai’s 1829 woodblock print “Under the Wave at Kanagawa,” which Helmreich calls “the world’s most iconic portrait of ocean waves,” has been adapted and reimagined by later artists “to speak to contemporary human-generated global oceanic crisis” (203).


of the challenges of this particular global threat, as with oceanic space, is its vast, seem-ingly unfathomable temporal and spatial scale. Although its effects may be seen in sud-den, short-term events, climate change occurs gradually and almost imperceptibly, with predicted effects until recently extending beyond normal lifetimes of individuals and certainly of governments. It therefore, as Timothy Clark notes, “eludes inherited ways of thinking” (11) and narrative representation, and is relatively absent from ecocriticism and ecologically themed literature. In fact, when climate change is present, it usually takes the form of “apocalyptic” and speculative narratives (Heise 206) – in Amitav Ghosh’s words, “as though in the literary imagination climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel” (7).12 Moreover, as risk theorist Glenn Croston argues, evolutionary biology has equipped humans poorly to respond to risks presented by “the glacial creep of slow-moving threats like climate change that don’t feel like an imminent peril” compared to an attack by a nearby predator (15), for ins-tance. As the Norwegian environmental philosopher Arne Naess bluntly writes, in hu-man awareness “the nearer has priority over the more remote – in space, time, culture, species” (qtd. in Heise 34). Climate-change risk thus registers relatively low on what risk theorists call the “risk thermostat”: the calculation of the degree of risk one is willing to accept to achieve whatever reward the activity in question will bring (Croston 135). Croston introduces this concept in relation to voluntary risk-taking by teenagers, noting how the risk thermostat is adjusted when teens’ feelings of invulnerability eventually pass “as we age and reality teaches us that we are all too vulnerable, leading us to throttle back on the risks we take” (134).

In this truism, and the rite of passage it describes from a dangerously high risk thermostat to a more moderate one, lies the foundation of a reading of Breath as a climate-change fiction – not an apocalyptic one but an indirect one premised on the imaginative extensions of allegory and synecdoche. As Pike balks at the crest of the Nautilus, trading short-term glory for longer-term safety, his risk thermostat prioritizes that which is temporally faraway, diffuse, and invisible – his future – over that which is close at hand – the present-tense challenge and opportunity. In this moment of matu-ration, his view implicitly extends spatially as well: beyond the local (the breaking wave) to embrace the global (the larger ocean whose endless flux and uncontrollable processes produce the wave). And this perspective on surfing and the self invites us to extend its implications further: from the vast, encompassing ocean to the larger climatic systems it synecdochically represents and directly influences. If, as Mentz writes, “The moment when bodies enter salt water represents the absolute loss of human control” (82), that water must be approached with humility and even a healthy dose of fear. In the figure of Bruce Pike – whose respect for the big wave’s autonomy and power trumps any idea he may have of conquering it; who glides and dances gracefully on the water without

12. In The Great Derangement, Ghosh asks why “climate change casts a much smaller shadow within the landscape of literary fiction than it does even in the public arena” (7). His answer is a brief but compelling history of the literary novel, with its focus on everyday experiences, as eschewing the improbable, exceptional, and miraculous (which permeated older narrative forms such as epic and romance) in favour of the probable, ordinary, and realistic (16-9). Furthermore, he argues, the novel developed at a time of “relative climatic stability” in which “the complacency and confidence of the emergent bourgeois order” assumed (and wanted to assume) “that Nature was moderate and orderly” (21-2). As I note in the final paragraph of this essay, insofar as Breath is a climate-change novel, it is so in an indirect, allegorical way; it does not explicitly thematize climate change or include meteorological events suggestive of climate change. And while it does thematize the “extraordinary” in human action, it is of course written in a mode of realism fully committed to the probable.

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altering it, putting anything into it, or extracting anything from it; and who survives to surf another day – Winton offers not just surfing but surfing in a particular way as an in-structive, cautionary image.13 Like the undertow that pulls invisibly away from the shore as the spectacular waves crash onto it, this resonant figure moves quietly but powerfully beyond the Western Australian shoreline to speak to a global society that has not yet arrived at ecological maturity and that, by refusing to put the teenager’s cavalier and hubristic risk-taking ways behind it, teeters on the edge of a calamitous loss of control over its environmental future.

John Clement Ball

University of New Brunswick

W orks Cited

apter, Michael. The Dangerous Edge: The Psychology of Excitement. New York: Free P, 1992.auden, W.H. The Enchafèd Flood: or The Romantic Iconography of the Sea. 1950. New York: Vintage, 1967.BaucoM, Ian. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham, NC:

Duke UP, 2005.Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Trans. Mark Ritter. London: Sage, 1992.Ben-Messahel, Salhia: “‘More blokes, more bloody water!’: Tim Winton’s Breath.” Antipodes 26.1 (June

2012): 13-7.Birns, Nicholas. “A Not Completely Pointless Beauty: Breath, Exceptionality and Neoliberalism.”

Tim Winton: Critical Essays. Ed. Nathanael O’Reilly and Lyn McCredden. Crawley: U of Western Australia Publishing, 2014. 263-82.

casey, Susan. The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

clark, Timothy. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011.

cohen, Margaret. “Literary Studies on the Terraqueous Globe.” PMLA 125.3 (May 2010): 657-62.corBin, Alain. The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside 1750-1840. Trans. Jocelyn Phelps.

Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994.croston, Glenn. The Real Story of Risk: Adventures in a Hazardous World. Amherst, NY: Prometheus,

2012.eVers, Clifton. “‘The Point’: Surfing, Geography and a Sensual Life of Men and Masculinity on the

Gold Coast, Australia.” Social and Cultural Geography 10.8 (2009): 893-907.finneGan, William. Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life. 2015. New York: Penguin, 2016.fiske, John. Reading the Popular. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989. ford, Nick, and David BroWn. Surfing and Social Theory: Experience, Embodiment and Narrative of the

Dream Glide. London: Routledge, 2006.Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: U of Chicago P,

2016.Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford: Stanford

UP, 1991.Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.Glissant, Edouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Trans. J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: UP of

Virginia, 1989.hardin, Garrett. “The Tragedy of the Commons.” The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing. 1968. Ed.

Richard Dawkins. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. 263-6.helMreich, Stefan. “Hokusai’s Great Wave Enters the Anthropocene.” Environmental Humanities 7.1

(2016): 203-17. <https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3616407>. Consulted 10 July 2018.

13. In a similar vein, Birns, arguing that Breath points away from forms of risk taking identified with neoliberalism, writes, “Pikelet’s continued affirmation of a completely pointless and beautiful ideal signifies aesthetic, not cultural capi-tal. The book holds out hope that art – and the ‘art’, not the competitive ‘sport’ of surfing – can be different, that it can take risks without hurting anybody, that with its unselfish pointlessness it can protect the integrity of the truly beautiful” (278). Extending that idea to the current reading, the “truly beautiful” would naturally include the environment in which that “art” takes place.


heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.

loMBardi, William V. “Global Subcultural Bohemianism: The Prospect of Postlocal Ecocriticism in Tim Winton’s Breath.” New International Voices in Ecocriticism. Ed. Serpil Opperman. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2015. 41-54.

lupton, Deborah. Risk. London: Routledge, 1999.lynG, Stephen. “Edgework and the Risk-Taking Experience.” Edgework: The Sociology of Risk-Taking.

Ed. Stephen Lyng. New York: Routledge, 2005. 3-14.—. “Sociology at the Edge: Social Theory and Voluntary Risk Taking.” Edgework: The Sociology of Risk-

Taking. Ed. Stephen Lyng. New York: Routledge, 2005. 17-49.McGloin, Colleen. “Reviving Eva in Tim Winton’s Breath.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 47.1

(2012): 109-20.Mentz, Steve. At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean. London: Continuum, 2009.plastic oceans. “The Facts.” Plastic Oceans Foundation, n.d. <https://plasticoceans.org/the-

facts/>. Consulted 10 July 2018.rooney, Bridget. “From the Sublime to the Uncanny in Tim Winton’s Breath.” Tim Winton: Critical

Essays. Ed. Nathanael O’Reilly and Lyn McCredden. Crawley: U of Western Australia Publishing, 2014. 241-62.

stranGer, Mark. “The Aesthetics of Risk: A Study of Surfing.” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 34.3 (1999): 265-76. Sage Publications Online. <http://journals.sagepub.com/toc/irsb/34/3>. Consulted 10 July 2018.

Winton, Tim. Land’s Edge: A Coastal Memoir. 1993. London: Picador, 2014.—. Breath. 2008. Toronto: Harper Perennial, 2009.—. “Surfing.” In “P.S.: Ideas, Interviews and Features.” Breath [appendix] 9-13.yaeGer, Patricia. “Editor’s Column: Sea Trash, Dark Pools, and the Tragedy of the Commons.”

PMLA 125.3 (May 2010): 523-45.

Settling Scores:

Albert Namatjira’s Legacy

Aboriginal Australian artist Albert Namatjira resists identification. Was Namatjira a pro-duct of Australia’s assimilation, a “mimic man” who adopted a Western referential frame, or was his trajectory the product of a “split identity,” as alleged during his lifetime? Can

Namatjira’s watercolours be viewed as a critique of Eurocentrism? This article seeks to revisit the nature of Namatjira’s legacy in light of the recent retrocession of the artist’s copyright.

This article examines Albert Namatjira’s legacy following the retrocession of the artist’s copyright in October 2017. The story of Namatjira (1902-1959) is emblematic on several grounds. One of the first Aboriginal artists to paint in the Western medium, Namatjira grew up in a Lutheran mission on Arrernte land in Central Australia. He also became one of the first Aborigines to be granted Australian citizenship, though in practice, “all it meant was that he was no longer subject to the rules and regulations that so-called full-bloods had to observe and thus, from one point of view, [it] was less an invitation to join white Australia than an excision from his own people” (Edmond ch. 9). Namatjira’s legacy raises legal, artistic and politico-cultural questions. To what extent is Namatjira’s work the property of his family, his community, the Australian public, and/or the art market (Brown)? To what degree can Namatjira’s artistry be understood from the perspective and criteria of indigenous and/or Western aesthetics? What ef-fects do these antagonistic and competing claims have on interpretations of Namatjira’s aesthetic? In what way does Namatjira’s story anticipate indigenous mobilisations from the 1970s regarding Native Title and cultural self-determination? How did Namatjira’s agency as an artist challenge the assimilationist policies?

Namatjira’s legacy has been the object of intense debate, turning the artist into a figurehead of Australia’s “culture wars.” It is part of a recent history of successful legal claims on behalf of Aboriginal artists whose work had been reproduced without permission and misappropriated, starting with the Carpets Case in 1993 (Janke). Na-matjira’s legal settlement and copyright transfer have further fuelled speculation about issues of intellectual property in Aboriginal art. Arguments in the media have become distorted by the polarised, binary structure of discourse on issues of race. This article calls for a deconstructionist approach by viewing Namatjira’s legacy as open-ended, agreeing with the view that “in Australia Aborigine researchers speak also of the many levels of entry which must be negotiated when researchers seek information” (Smith 15). Firstly, I consider how those tensions betray anxieties regarding Australia’s ambiva-lent positioning as a white settler colony and immigrant / postcolonial / multicultural nation. Postcolonialism remains problematic for indigenous peoples, considering the latter “represent the unfinished business of decolonization” (Wilmer, qtd. in Smith 7). Yet postcolonial criticism’s concern also bears on Empire and its long-term aftermaths, and the responsibility of researchers is “to share the theories and analyses which inform the way knowledge and information are constructed and represented” (Smith 16).

This article actively engages with (post) colonial theory, since so much of our knowledge of Namatjira’s artwork is shaped by (post) colonial discourses on indige-

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neity. These cannot be brushed under the carpet but ought to be deconstructed. Se-condly, I revisit Namatjira’s legacy through the lens of other indigenous Australian art movements and Tracey Moffatt’s artwork in particular. Its avant-garde character parallels Namatjira’s unorthodox positioning as a watercolour artist of indigenous back-ground. Their respective approaches to their craft – subjects broached, time frame or format (photo portraits for Moffatt, watercolour landscapes for Namatjira) – otherwise have little in common. Yet both reached beyond their local communities directly to the (inter) national art scene, destroying dividing lines in the process. They developed a sense of light while opting for a vivid colour palette and falsely naive representation of their subjects. A history of violent trauma and colonial desire transpires from Namatji-ra’s quietly contemplative topographic arrangements as they find an echo in Moffatt’s photo-narratives and uncanny assemblages.

Dis/cursing Namatjira

Cursing harks back to Shakespeare’s figure of Caliban in The Tempest. Caliban curses instead of producing “proper” speech, remaining voiceless in the face of Prospero’s colonisation of his island. Cursing also is a widely used “defence mechanism” in some Aboriginal English contexts (Burbank). A non-native English speaker, Namatjira did not hold the epistemological knowledge to translate himself to others, though in Ed-mond’s biography Namatjira’s voice can be heard at times. It was otherwise left to anthropologists, art critics or biographers to discuss and at times “curse” his legacy. One of Namatjira’s relatives bemoans in the film documentary Namatjira Project (2017): “I see his painting in art galleries, in books, I didn’t see Albert.” Scott Rankin, writer and director of the theatrical performance Namatjira (2010) is also heard advising Tre-vor Jamieson, the Aboriginal actor playing Namatjira’s part, to improve his diction for whites for there are “specific moments that whites can’t hear.” Namatjira’s watercolours must therefore speak for themselves, potentially concealing behind the figurative repre-sentations of Central Australia secret-sacred Dreamtime stories, as well as “the mani-fold wounds suffered by the Arrernte during the enforced colonisation of their land” (Edmond ch. 6). Yet the herme(neu)tics surrounding Namatjira cannot be abstracted from the assimilationist discourse prevailing at the time of the artist’s death, when an assessment of his legacy became opportune.

Various discourses emerged after his death that sealed off understandings of Na-matjira’s art. Firstly, there was Namatjira’s portrayal as a “mimic man,” recalling V.S. Naipaul’s eponymous novel and its hero Ralph Singh, an Indo-Carribean subject of the British Empire who changed his name from Ranjit Kripalsingh to adopt an Eng-lish-sounding identity. Namatjira adopted a renaming strategy by initially “sign[ing] his works with a simple ‘Albert,’ the name he was christened when he was three years old” (Williams). The subsequent indigenisation of the artist’s signature as “Namatjira” marked him as distinctly Aboriginal in contradiction with his appropriation of the Wes-tern pictorial tradition. As Julie Wells and Michael Christie noted: “Access to the settler economy required Aborigines like Namatjira to take on this uniform naming system. Most were given a Western, Christian first name and an Aboriginal surname” (114). Namatjira learned watercolour at the Hermannsburg Lutheran mission under white Australian artist Rex Battarbee’s tutorship. This led in part to Namatjira’s dismissal as a pale imitator by prominent Australian art galleries in the 1950s: “Namatjira’s work is

Settling Scores: Albert Namatjira’s Legacy33

just not up to standard […] there are twenty or thirty white Australian watercolourists who depict Australian landscape with greater skill […]. Curiosity, not aesthetic value has made him so popular” (Edmond ch. 10).

Secondly, the commonly held view was of a “wanderer living between two worlds” (Wells and Christie 127; see also McCoy) whose fall from grace was only a matter of time. As Wells and Christie argue: “For Namatjira’s settler contemporaries […] the ‘wanderer’ metaphor was compelling, largely because of the absence of a discourse in which an individual could have multiple identities based in more than one culture, or of a reality in which one could be culturally other, yet equal before the law” (127). Thus, while The Sunday Telegraph described Namatjira as “the Arunta tribesman who in two months mastered the difficult and alien technique of watercolour” (emphasis added), others viewed him as an “uppity black who had to be kept in his place” (Edmond ch. 8). Applying the term of “mastery” to praise Namatjira’s artistry indirectly served to disqualify him in a White Australia, its racial undertones suggesting somehow that Namatjira sought to usurp the white man’s place. Namatjira’s perceived threat to the superiority of Western civilisation also constituted an opportunity to reignite debates over assimilation. T.G.H. Strehlow, a missionary’s son growing up with Namatjira in Hermannsburg, viewed Namatjira’s inability to access land and his premature death following imprisonment for smuggling alcohol on his community’s behalf, as evidence of the fundamental “unassimilability” of Aboriginality, unless “he came on his own, free from the contaminating influences of Aranda society, as a man in whom European artistic achievements had obliterated the old stains of Aranda culture” (Strehlow, qtd. in McGregor 47). Both anti- and pro-assimilationists, like Paul Hasluck, Commonwealth Minister for Territories from 1951 to 1963, took as their point of departure (assimila-tion to) Western culture, whether to critique or support it, thereby preventing Namatji-ra’s artistic mastery from providing a path to social agency and cultural autonomy.

“Mastery” also refers to the relationship between master and disciple in art and the friendship between Namatjira and Battarbee. Battarbee was quick to foresee that Namatjira’s gift would lead the disciple to surpass the master: “As the tutor watched the extraordinarily rapid progress of his pupil he was filled with astonishment, that such a man [...] could, in a matter of months, understand and utilise the fundamentals of art that had taken white men years to learn” (Mountford 55). Namatjira inherited from Battarbee’s tutorship his technique but imbued it with his own sensibility, both men mutually learning from one another (Edmond). Namatjira’s artwork, though, was cou-ched in cultural or racial terms by art critics such as Mountford and Strehlow, anthro-pologists or ethnologists by trade. Mountford was known to be a collector of tjurunga totemic stones whose value resided as much in the scientific knowledge they conveyed as in their aesthetic qualities. For other early art collectors like Karel Kupka, the artistic production of Aboriginals was all the more precious since it was believed Aborigines were an “endangered species.” In Kupka’s book Dawn of Art on the master-painters from Arnhem Land, “Kupka is himself the agent of this threat. He is the despoiler coming into the garden: whatever he touches will fade and rot, for in his hands he holds the curses of reward and fame” (Rothwell; emphasis added). Similarly evoking the trope of corruption, Namatjira’s detractors regarded him as an ethnic curiosity whose work is “entirely false to his own culture and is merely a clever aping of a completely different one” (Edmond ch. 7). The film Namatjira Project shows a TV host, at the time

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of Namatjira’s visit to the Sydney zoo, making racist comments on the parallels between apes and Aborigines.

Namatjira’s breakthrough and move from pokerwork to watercolour however re-sided in his deconstruction of the demarcation between different forms of artisanship, from the crafting of tools such as boomerangs or woomeras to artistic painting: “While woomera had sometimes previously been decorated for use in ceremonies, the idea of painting representational landscapes upon them seems to have been Albert’s alone. […] As tools they were inert, mere potentials, while as painted objects their actual function became decorative, aesthetic” (Edmond ch. 5). Legend Press’s purchase of Namatjira’s copyrights in 1957 was part of an early shift in the appreciation of indigenous art as a source of revenues through mass reproduction by the culture industry rather than a pre-served artefact of exotic difference. The company was quicker to envision the business prospects Namatjira’s watercolours offered than the Arrernte indigenous community of Hermannsburg, ill-equipped with respect to the workings of the art market in which a breach was for the first time opened. The 1957 deal with Legend Press President John Brackenreg, “now described as ‘exploitative’ and ‘unconscionable’” was that “out of every $8 generated by net sales of Namatjira reproductions such as prints, Christ-mas cards and placemats, the artist received $1 and Legend Press received $7” (Neill). With “only a primary-school level of written English,” (Neill) Namatjira’s “curse,” like Caliban’s, resulted from his being deprived of the discursive tools which the granting of Australian citizenship required. As Edmond concurs, “the other consequence of Albert’s new status was that he could now sign away his copyright without the consent of the Northern Territory government or anyone else” (ch. 9).

Subaltern “unspeakability” does not spring from indigenous people’s inability to adapt but from white Australians’ ignorance of Aboriginal cultures, languages and art forms. For Linda Burney, “the reason for this ignorance is that there was a conspiracy of silence about Aboriginal Australia through all the dark years of White Australia” (17). The silencing of Namatjira’s legacy is somewhat prolonged by postcolonial discourse. Although postcolonial critiques such as Burn and Stephen (1992) have contributed to seeing Namatjira in a positive light, their reversal of Hegel’s dialectic of the master/slave may end up not so much displacing as reiterating old terminologies. From being condemnable, Namatjira’s “unauthenticity,” “mimicry,” “ambivalence” or “hybridity” are to be reappraised: “For Burn and Stephen, Homi Bhabha’s discourse on ‘colonial mimicry’ offers a key to the interpretation of ‘the ambivalence presence’ of Namatjira’s art” (Poignant 89). One should also consider the following review of Edmond’s biogra-phy: “Albert Namatjira, rather than a wanderer between worlds, was a bridge; that was what he painted and that was where he was torn apart and died; and we are still conten-ding over the bones on the bridge that he made” (Cochrane). Namatjira’s portrayal as a hyphen represents a discursive tour de force that would be nice if it were not rhetorical. That there is still contention over Namatjira’s legacy is evident, but the “bridge” was arguably built, crossed and severed long ago when British settlers invaded the island-continent. Namatjira was raised on a Christian mission that not so much “replaced or displaced Indigenous religious beliefs and practices” (Brock & Van Gent 303) as created “separate systems of knowledge and behaviour” (304).

Namatjira’s multiple attempts to own a patch of land and build a home reflect a willingness to settle down on his terms rather than function as a mending bridge for the


coloniser’s split consciousness: “For all his material wealth, money could not buy him the one thing he wanted most: a home of his own in Alice Springs” (Edmond ch. 8). Settler colonialism, as “that violent force that makes the land unhomely” (Farred 800), constitutes a disruptive force whose far-reaching shadow can be felt in the way the signifier of Namatjira may be construed as an aporetic “Third Space” of enunciation (neither fully Australian nor indigenous, “white but not quite”). The tendency in post-colonial criticism to fetishize the coloniser-colonised relationship as an “unhomely” site of indeterminacy (Bhabha, “The World and the Home” 141) risks leaving out the antagonistic side of the relationship. Edmond emphasises zones of incommensurability between Namatjira and Battarbee, capturing the sense of injustice Namatjira must have felt at seeing his lifelong friend nicely settled in his home of Alice Springs when he was condemned to living in a wurley (Aboriginal term for a makeshift hut) on the outskirts of town. In Namatjira’s words: “We are tired of walking around reserves like animals, and of living in tents like new people […]. I would like to settle before it’s too late” (Edmond ch. 8). As the Namatjira copyright dispute shows, what the colonised wants is determinate: having been unsettled, the latter desires to settle scores with the coloniser through material reparation beyond symbolic reconciliation built on apology. Frantz Fanon puts it bluntly: “There is no native who does not dream at least once a day of setting himself up in the settler’s place” (xV).

The retrocession of Namatjira’s copyright involved Australian philanthropist and businessman Richard Smith, who acted as a go-between on behalf of Namatjira’s fam-ily. Smith convinced Legend Press owner’s son Philip to agree to their buyback for the symbolic sum of $1. This felicitous denouement looks like divine intervention, both men appearing magnanimous in their roles as benefactor and “white saviour.” This truncated narrative however leaves aside a history of grassroots lobbying on the part of the arts performing company Big hART. Besides making a film documentary and play on Namatjira’s life and opening the Iltja Ntjarra gallery in Alice Springs, the com-pany was involved in the creation of the Namatjira Legacy Trust. As Namatjira’s family declared: “We are hoping that the Trust will help us to achieve better living conditions for our families, better schooling for our kids, and better resources for our art centre” (“Namatjira Legacy Trust”). Namatjira did not only conceive his art as an aesthetic pur-suit but as an economic necessity. Ultimately, he hoped for his art to buy himself and his community freedom: “Albert painted primarily because his pictures offered a means of survival in a harsh world” (Megaw 7-8, qtd. in Wells & Christie 115). His watercolours cannot be grasped without acknowledging the socio-historical conditions that continue to impact descendants of Namatjira’s family, who are part of the Hermannsburg school, who have followed in the artist’s footsteps and taken up watercolour painting as their source of revenue.

Un/settling Namatjira

By unsettling Namatjira’s artwork from its original context, I hope to build what Bill Ashcroft calls the “material resonance” of a postcolonial aesthetic, a “moment of non-cognitive apprehension […] that lies beyond interpretation” (419). By highlighting ma-terial resonances with other acclaimed indigenous artists, I aim to break through the discursive stranglehold that has made Namatjira’s watercolours “unassimilable.” Accor-ding to Meaghan Morris,

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There really is something unassimilable in the way that these utterly familiar paintings send a historical image of “our” own visual culture back to us. […] There is also something unassimilable about ourselves to ourselves when we ask why it might seem odd to package a Namatjira painting today as an emblem of “Aboriginal Art” – and what would need to change in Australian society for that sense of oddness to vanish. (Morris)

Transpiring here is the uncanny feeling the contemplation of Namatjira’s watercolours stirs up, despite their closeness to Australians. Namatjira’s paintings are encrypted as “a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man” 126). For Sigmund Freud, the uncanny arises at the crossroads between the familiar and the exotic. As Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs explain, “one has the experience, in other words, of being in place and ‘out of place’ simultaneously” (171). Australia’s “tyranny of distance” derives from a sense of remoteness from its Euro-British and indigenous roots. The white Australian “is a permanently displaced person whether he sits under the gum tree or walks upon the Pont Neuf” (Smith, qtd. in McLean 20). While Austra-lians grew up with Namatjira copies in their homes, few possess an intimate knowledge of the Outback as city-dwellers. Indeed, Namatjira’s paintings were “showing better than those of any European artist […], the brilliant colour of Central Australia – the rich reds, the deep violet-blues, the golden-yellows – colours that Southerners find dif-ficult to believe until they have seen them with their own eyes” (Mountford 68).

Although the Western artistic medium was initially foreign to him, Namatjira appro-priated it for local purposes. He is thus a truly native Australian artist, although Abori-ginals waited till 1967 to gain legal status as citizens and subjects of the national polity. Gazing at a Namatjira painting, the Australian artist sees himself or herself copying what is a medium borrowed from European and US modernity and “such great painters as Constable, Turner and Winslow Homer” (Brooks 19). Namatjira conveyed mastery of the watercolour technique in his use of colours and light. Limited by their Wes-tern heritage, Australian artists from the Impressionists to the Modernists struggled to transcribe the chromatic nuances and singularities of this Terra Incognita. To quote from Namatjira’s mentor Rex Battarbee: “Here was a man, a full-blooded member of a race considered the lowest type in the world, who had in two weeks absorbed my colour sense” (12). White Australia’s monochromatic outlook, intolerant of shadings beyond the pale such as “half-castes,” contrasts with Namatjira’s gaudy palette, so that “his vibrant use of colour, such as purples and reds, many Europeans viewed as an exag-geration” (Williams). Battarbee however proved sensitive to Namatjira’s palette: “He [Namatjira] has got a colour sense and puts it on even stronger than I do and good light in his pictures too” (Edmond ch. 4). In their colour excess, Namatjira’s paintings served to highlight the European settlers’ limitations and short-sightedness, “his fluent toning and shadowing demonstrat[ing] his appreciation of how the light of Central Australia could darken or lighten that spirit of place” (Williams).

As Lorenzo Veracini demonstrates, the settler is limited by his liminal positioning on the cusp of two worlds: “One of these is the originating world of Europe, the Impe-rium – the source of its principal cultural authority. Its ‘other’ First World is that of the First Nations whose authority they not only replaced and effaced but also desired” (9). The settler, not the native, is thus a fraught, ambivalent figure. In deploying excess water to obtain the “fluent toning” characteristic of the ochreous hues of Central Australia, Namatjira metaphorically diluted red pigment otherwise supposed to remain immacu-


late (“full blooded”) under a White Australia. While “attesting to the permeability of a membrane that both reflects and allows passage” (Edmond ch. 4), Namatjira displayed his understanding of the way “a watercolor should be toward the transparent, not the opaque” (“More on Watercolor”). Namatjira’s unmatched aesthetic authority has contri-buted to redefining landscape painting. Initially considered a second-rate genre and thence relegated to the background, landscape painting came to the fore in the West in the late eighteenth- and throughout the nineteenth-century, coinciding with the colonial impulse to sight and map out the New World. In nineteenth-century American land-scape paintings by artists such as Thomas Cole, Nature, though taking centre stage, only exists in its sublimated capacity to dwarf humans, often signalled by the presence of a miniature-sized man pitted against a majestic waterfall or mountainous crest. In Namatjira’s paintings, Nature lies unthreateningly dormant – a space that no human (or animal) presence has come to disrupt yet. Nature in its native state of “iridescence” and “immanence” (Edmond ch. 4) appears as the chief subject rather than vicarious object of Namatjira’s study.

In Namatjira’s Ghost Gum series, trees do not end up as an ornamental device framing the canvas and directing the viewer’s eyes towards a focal point, as is usually the case in Western painting. Instead, Namatjira adopts modern techniques of cropping and close-up inspired by photography. The ghost gum’s distinct white bark is the focal point, its erected verticality a formal contrivance bringing into perspective the MacDonnell Ranges at the back. It lingers as a shadowy presence, as if detached from the scenery and overbearing at once. Namatjira’s mastery resides in the care for details with which he painted it, the folds and knots of its sinewy boughs bearing anthropomorphic quali-ties. The quasi-human appearance of the tree’s texture might be a way for Namatjira of staging himself as embodied in the tree. The painting hereby mentioned1 is exhibited at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, and dated circa 1948. It corresponds with the peak of Namatjira’s career. In 1944, the artist entered Australia’s Who’s Who, yet was “refused a grazing licence in 1949-50 and prevented in 1951 from building a house on land he bought at Alice Springs” (Kleinert). In light of this double bind, the tree’s milky envelope, beneath which hides a darkened, burnished and partially mangled skeleton, can be interpreted as holding the white mask of colonialism over brown skin, a duality enhanced by the chiaroscuro effect over its smoothened surface. The anthropomorphic dimension of Namatjira’s trees (Edmond) tempts us to see the ghost gum as a self- portrait, thereby reversing a journalist’s words shortly before Namatjira’s death: “The black skin of Albert Namatjira hides the sick heart of a white man – a white man if ever there was one” (qtd. in Wells and Christie 126).

In this painting, the totemic figure-tree allows for a multi-perspectival plane, en-hanced by “the introduction of a side-on as opposed to a top-down view of landscape” (Edmond ch. 4) through the presence of blue sky covering over half of the canvas. It is worth here quoting Edmond at length concerning the totemic quality of Namatjira’s paintings:

In this way his paintings, and especially the paintings of the 1940s, function like tjurunga, those objects of painted or inscribed wood or stone that do not just embody totemic beings, but in some sense are those beings. In the same way, a Namatjira painting

1. For a viewing of Namatjira’s Ghost Gum, follow this web link: <https://artsearch.nga.gov.au/Detail.cfm?IRN=182062>.

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can be representational of a landscape, an actual simulacrum of it and also embody equivocal presences that resemble – and perhaps are – totemic beings who are neither representations nor simulacra but partake of the essence. (ch. 6)

The overall composition makes it seem as if the viewer/painter were gazing at the tree/himself gazing at the open-space fields and mountains further into the distance. This formal mise en abîme helps balance the power play between the (Western) viewer, its transmogrified artist and the painted landscape behind, matching the Aboriginal appre-ciation of Nature as an undivided whole. As Roslyn Poignant concurs: “This re-ordering of the formal elements […] creates the effect of being in the landscape, rather than outside it, ‘detached and contemplating it’” (89). The traditional relegation of trees to a cameo appearance in Western art also stems from the intimacy required to paint them. According to Leonard Brooks, “to really paint a tree, you should know it intimately. […] How to take those thousands of twigs and leaves […] and develop from them forms and contours which are spirited and alive” (19).

Spirituality carries a material resonance for Aboriginal artists. For Ian McLean, “Albert Namatjira’s watercolours, previously cited as exemplifying the imposition of a Western visual schema, instead are understood as images ‘anchored in the evocation of country’ and thus of ancestral beings” (Gilmour 454). At a time when colour photography was not so widespread, Namatjira’s paintings could be seen as part of the mapping of Aus-tralia and likened to the topological representation of the landscape and Dreamtime sto-ries of creation associated with it by contemporary Central Australian artists of Papunya using dot painting or religiously significant geometric shapes as their artistic medium. This analogy requires deconstructing binaries of figuration/abstraction, indigenous/Western art to emphasise underlying correspondences and cultural syncretism. Edmond devotes a whole concluding chapter to Papunya, which “had begun at Albert Namatji-ra’s last home, north of Haasts Bluff, in 1971, and continues to this day” (ch. 10). On the one hand, Papunya artists used non-Western means to project their canvas onto the floor instead of using an easel, privileging a flattened-out, one-dimensional bird’s-eye view. On the other, they adopted the Western technique of painting on a hard surface with synthetic acrylic, instead of natural pigments on the sand or body. Most impor-tantly, as custodian bearers of Dreamtime stories attached to the land, Papunya artists bear responsibility for the way stories are circulated and transmitted: “The community is dependent upon the artist being available, able, and willing to pursue the infringements, because the unauthorized use of the artist’s work has adversely affected the interests of the entire community” (Van den Bosch and Rentschler 125). Socio-economic immisera-tion often compels these artists to sell themselves short to tourism art, further exposing them to counterfeit and mass reproduction, a reality that was true in Namatjira’s time.

Indigenous Australian artist Tracey Moffatt manufactures Namatjira’s colour palette in her early photographic and filmic works Something More and Night Cries: A Rural Trag-edy (1989). The distinctly lush, red and purple hues characteristic of Namatjira’s colours can also be found in Moffatt’s comic-strip Adventure Series (2004). Moffatt’s transposi-tion of Namatjira’s landscapes onto the background of her montage pays tribute to the Surrealist otherworldliness and illusory peace inhabiting Namatjira’s more lurid water-colours. It counteracts their domestication within Australian households as a quaint, passé postcard of a colonial rural Australia, conveying feelings of homesickness and “nostalgia” (Bernays). This archaic vision owes a great deal to the reception of Namatji-


ra’s artwork. As Roslyn Poignant observed, “his entry into the art market coincided with the rise of a Modernist aesthetic that considered the “gum-tree” art typified by Heysens landscapes an anathema, and situated Aboriginal art within the discourses of primitiv-ism” (89). However, Hans Heysens’ transcendental treatment of light and inclusion of both cattle and humans, inspired by a Western, Christian pastoral tradition, can hardly be compared to Namatjira’s. As Stephen Muecke argued, Namatjira “both mastered and invented conventions that present an alternative to the pastoral vision” (159). While the pastoral offers a domesticated version of Nature, Namatjira’s paintings contribute to a pre-colonial imagery showcasing a pristine environment unsullied by farming and mining industries.

In the video still2 from her semi-autobiographical short film Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1989), Moffatt stages her female protagonist, an Aboriginal adoptee part of the Stolen Generation, against the backdrop of a Namatjira-looking landscape. As the artwork description states: “Her colour palette alludes to the watercolour landscapes of Albert Namatjira (1902–59), a popular artist who was seen as a ‘traditional’ Aboriginal successfully working in a western medium.” Moffatt’s hyperreal gloss and lunar atmos-phere appear unnatural in the postmodernist fashion. Unlike Namatjira, whose colour sense was at times deemed excessive in a White Australia, Moffatt received critical ac-claim for her use of colour in a multicultural era following the polemical bicentennial anniversary of Australia in 1988. Perhaps owing to its racial connotations, Battarbee confessed “[he] was very nervous about the word ‘colour.’ Albert’s knowledge of En-glish was limited. His main language was Arunta and strangely enough the most freely used word in that language is the word ‘colour,’ which occurs in almost every sentence” (11-2). The multicoloured, oily surface of the soil in Moffatt’s video still allows for the free interplay between “True Blue” Australianness and brown-red Aboriginality. Yet the barren rocky ranges seamlessly jutting out from the implacably canvassed sky in the background belie the substantiality of such interplay. Laid bare in Moffatt’s composi-tion while not immediately felt in Namatjira’s watercolours is this tension between fore and backgrounds, horizontal and vertical axes, and between different colour patches.

In Moffatt’s work, tension builds upon the artist’s mixed-race background growing up in rural Queensland in the 1960s when miscegenation was a taboo to be fought against by removing “half-caste” children from their families. The computerised- looking backdrop in Moffatt’s work is set against desolate surroundings. The panorama generates a feeling of “entrapment,” as stated in the artwork description, rather than of “being in the landscape” (Muecke 159), as in Namatjira’s. It constitutes more of a threshold opening onto the unknown than the familiar representation of the Outback with which Namatjira’s paintings are associated. It is a “post-contact” (Gilmour 454) zone, its deadly atmosphere perhaps alluding to those “frontier wars” between indige-nous Australians and white settlers that marked colonial Australian history until the late 1930s. Moffatt succeeds in uncovering the colonial settler’s mental state of “dis-ease,” “collective malaise” and “homelessness” (McLean 20) latent in Namatjira’s landscapes. Like this stooped woman leaning against a rusty shack in Moffatt’s video still, one might wonder what Namatjira’s gumtree, looking partially maimed and charred, bears witness to. Besides the decimating spread of tuberculosis at the Hermannsburg mission, Morris

2. For a viewing of Moffat’s video still, follow this web link: <https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/work/66036/>.

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recalls how “in 1928, there was a massacre of Aborigines at Coniston Station; in 1929 the railway, and thus, eventually, tourism, reached Alice Springs; in 1932 the white land-scape painter Rex Battarbee and others visited Hermannsburg.” Either hidden, absent, repressed or implicit in Namatjira’s watercolours, the historical forces of colonialism that plagued and incapacitated Aboriginal cultures, while offering new outlets, return with suggestive force in Moffat’s work.

Measuring Namatjira’s legacy through Moffatt’s eyes reaffirms Namatjira’s position as a visionary artist: “Given this framework, Namatjira’s famous and massively repro-duced painting Ghost Gum could now be perceived as a remarkable experiment with the rules for painting his country” (Morris). Moffatt’s postcolonial/modern pastiche calls attention to Namatjira’s copyright dispute. An exemplar of “intellectual bricolage that characterizes postcolonial settlement society” (Berson 206), Moffatt “imitating” Nama-tjira “imitating” Western art not only generates dissonance, as a postcolonial critique would argue by stressing how “the essence of Namatjira’s practice is that it sets up a resemblance that produces its own difference” (Poignant 89). Mimicry also produces a ripple effect, to return to Ashcroft’s concept of “material resonance.” Its echo, repeated across a multiplicity of locales, emphasises intertextuality and the need to move beyond questions of cultural authority/authorship. Could Namatjira’s legacy be part of the col-lective commons in the same way that Namatjira shared the financial rewards from his painting with his clan? Namatjira’s earnings could amount to £7500 a year (today’s equi-valent of roughly £250 000) while most Arrernte men at the mission only made a few shillings as stockmen or camel boys. As the film documentary Namatjira Project suggests, part of the Australian government’s rationale for granting the artist “citizenship” was to make Namatjira’s revenues taxable. Namatjira himself must have seen the opportunity for a lucrative business in the sales of parts of his copyright to Legend Press, for which the Namatjiras were originally paid 12.5 %.

Legend Press’s specialisation in print reproductions paved the way for the transfor-mation of Namatjira’s art into an innocuous decorative ornament. Namatjira’s fight for land ownership towards the end of his life illustrates the unsettled yearning for a place to call home, from the Western Arrernte’s outstation movement in the early 1970s – “the first successful step in a journey away from the forced dependency of mission life” (Austin-Broos 76) – to the 2007 Northern Territory Intervention that effectively saw the “resettlement” of indigenous communities into “town camps” on the outskirts of Alice Springs. Namatjira’s grandson and watercolour artist Kevin was himself forcibly evicted from the Albert Namatjira’s artists’ camp at Tjuwanpa. Tjuwanpa had been an integral part of the Arrernte’s outstation movement, “understood as self-determina-tion for Aboriginal people” (Austin-Broos 63). In a moving scene in the documentary, Kevin, along with Albert’s nephew and watercolourist Lenie, meets Queen Elizabeth II almost sixty years after Namatjira met her in Canberra. In London, Kevin admits, he is treated like “royalty” while “after I come home from seeing the Queen I’ve got no house, no car.” The journey constitutes the high point of a theatrical tour about Nama-tjira’s life involving acting in front of the Arrernte community in Ntaria (Hermanns-burg’s Aboriginal name). By being performed there, Namatjira’s story was symbolically returned to his community.

Besides, Namatjira’s legacy is best summed up by the Queen. After seeing his pain-tings during her first trip overseas in 1954 and becoming fascinated by the colours in


them, the Queen is heard saying in the documentary: “No one will be able to tell me that central Australia is a dead heart.” Battarbee’s daughter’s comment equally reveals the lingering view by white Australians of the bush as a blank slate: “There’s a stillness to the outback that would have been very therapeutic for Battarbee” (emphasis added). Indigenous people never considered Australia as “dead still”; British colonisers did. Depicting Australia as terra nullius foreshadowed “cultural genocide” (Burney 21) and the crippling of Aboriginal existence, as a dead animal’s skull and wheelchair suggest in Moffatt’s video still. The misrepresentation of Aboriginal Australia as a cleansing haven is not lost on Moffatt, who shows an Aboriginal foster care woman caring for her dis-abled surrogate white Australian mother in Night Cries. Moffatt’s acknowledgement of Namatjira’s legacy however bears witness to a cross-generational indigenous dialogue extending across five generations of Arrernte watercolour artists settling scores with the art world for financial retribution and cultural recognition. Namatjira’s copyright will expire in 2029 and the goal is now “to lobby to have Namatjira’s copyright granted in perpetuity” (Brash and Haskin), so the fight is not over.

Paul Giffard-foret

University Paris XIII

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edMond, Martin. Battarbee and Namatjira. Sydney: Giramondo, 2014. Kindle Book.“Family of Namatjira Recover Copyright After 30 Year Battle.” Huffpost, 15 Oct. 2017. <https://www.

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fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1967. London: Pluto, 1986.Gelder, Ken, and Jane M. JacoBs. “Uncanny Australia.” Ecumene 2.2 (1995): 171-83.

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GilMour, Joanna. Review of Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art, by Ian Mclean. Australian Historical Studies 48.3 (2017): 453-5.

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“More on Watercolor.” Design 57.3 (1956): 102.Morris, Meaghan. “Beyond Assimilation: Aboriginality, Media History and Public Memory.” Rouge

2004. < http://www.rouge.com.au/3/beyond.html>. Consulted 28 June 2018.Mountford, C.P. The Art of Albert Namatjira. Melbourne: Bread and Cheese Club, 1951.Muecke, Stephen. “The Case for Aboriginal Modernity.” Angelaki 9.2 (2004): 155-63.Namatjira. Dir. Scott rankin, Belvoir St Theatre & Big hART, 2010.naMatJira, Albert. Ghost Gum. 1948. Watercolour painting in watercolour over pencil. National Gallery

of Australia, Canberra.Namatjira Project. Dir. Sera Davies. Umbrella Entertainment & Journeyman Pictures, 2017.neill, Rosemary. “Namatjira Received a Pittance for Art Rights.” The Australian, 23 Sep. 2017.

<https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/namatjira-received-a-pittance-for-art-rights/news-story/60b18e69e4fda30393dc597bd244f251>. Consulted 28 June 2018.

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Veracini, Lorenzo. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.Wells, Julie T, and Michael F. christie. “Namatjira and the Burden of Citizenship.” Australian

Historical Studies 31.114 (2000): 110-30.WilliaMs, Christine. “Albert Namatjira: The Rich Heritage of Our Desert Earth Painter.” Australian

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Absent Others:

Asian-Australian Discontinuities

in Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog

This article relies on the tropes of trauma and gothic haunting to examine Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog (2007), in which the protagonist’s discarded Indianness allegori-cally parallels Australia’s unwillingness to confront the ghosts of its past. As the novel

and its critique of settler culture seem to suggest, the Australian nation should arguably develop alternative cultural paradigms that seek to accommodate both otherness and the most unwel-come aspects of its history, instead of repressing them.

As of times predating its European settlement in 1788, the Australian land was constructed, in the Western world, as an abstract, empty space. Yet, the process by which Australia became a figment of the European imagination was not a harmless one. The colonial myth of terra nullius, which, first and foremost, legitimised colonisation, had other dire consequences, many of which have persisted to this day. Instead of being conceived as a geographical palimpsest inscribed with multiple temporal layers, the Aus-tralian continent has tended to be thought of as a spatial and cultural vacuum – a land bereft of history. Not only has this mythical misconception induced a sense of ontologi-cal blankness and cultural belatedness among the descendants of the British colonisers; it has also justified the continued oppression and occultation of Aboriginal populations.

In Australia, where the defamiliarizing return of this repressed history has inevitably affected the processes of identity-formation, such foundational historical obliterations have been strongly interconnected with the Freudian notion of the Uncanny. From the colonial era onwards, a ghostliness that cannot be separated from the trauma of Abo-riginal dispossession has informed issues of national identity in a country where “the confidence of rightful possession is absent” (Merrilees 67) or at least fragile (The Lost Dog 225). As convincingly argued by Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs, who see the doctrine of “terra nullius” as “the founding fantasy of modern Australian nationhood” (135-6), the concept of the Uncanny is a valuable tool to approach postcolonial Australia: they note that while the latter is unthinkingly referred to as “a ‘settler’ nation, […] the ‘uncanny’ can remind us that a condition of unsettledness folds into this taken-for-granted mode of occupation” (24), thus rendering “‘home’ […] unfamiliar” and giving rise to “the experience […] of being in place and ‘out of place’ simultaneously” (23). In other words, the Uncanny, which these critics use “to elaborate a modern Australian condition where what is ‘ours’ may also be ‘theirs’” (138), is instrumental in “the unsettlement of one’s assumptions” (142) about “the issue of possession” (and, by extension, of belonging), which, in Australia, “is never complete, never entirely settled” (138). In this context, rather than being conceived as a naive, utopian ideal positing that silencing the traumatic spectres of history will make it possible to lay them to rest, “reconcilia-tion” becomes “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 colo-nisation to the story of Australia’s being-in-the-world” (30).

In Gelder and Jacobs’s footsteps, numerous scholars have suggested, on the one hand, that this postcolonial identity crisis was still current in Australia and, on the

44

other, that it concerns not only the nation’s original settlers (and their descendants), but also more recent settlers (not necessarily of European descent). Margaret Merrilees, for example, has pointed out that “settler Australia [was] still searching for a way of belonging in an alien land” (67), while Lyn McCredden has asserted that “post-colonial and diasporic hauntings […] continue[d] to provoke […] questions about Australian culture’s relationship to elsewhere” (13) – to Asia, in particular.

Such “uncanny unsettlement,” which bespeaks “the haunting anxiety of not belong-ing” (Crouch 102), has unsurprisingly been reflected in Australian literature, not least (though not exclusively) in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In parti-cular, ghost stories, which Gelder and Jacobs have described as “a marginal [colonial] genre” (30) that has survived to this day, are generally “concerned with the continuity and legitimacy of settlement” (Crouch 102). They appear to “reveal repressed fears about place” (Crouch 94) indicating – in David Crouch’s terms – that “occupation is never free of ghostly vicissitudes” (95) in a country like Australia. As Crouch further expounds, the ghosts these stories feature (not always literal ones) “might return the violence of colonialism as an ever-present displacement” (95) insofar as some of them at least “can be read as traces of historical traumas” (94). As for these texts’ “haunted sites,” they “may appear empty or uninhabited – but they are always more than what they appear to be” (Gelder and Jacobs 31). As this article will show, the iconic Australian bush, with the ranks of shadows that populate it, is, of course, a case in point.

The Lost Dog, published in 2007 by the Sri-Lankan-born writer Michelle de Kretser, whose family relocated to Australia when she was fourteen, is a ghost story of sorts, “a haunted work” (Knight 21) which arguably relies on gothic motifs to deploy the themes of history, displacement and belonging in a contemporary Australian context. For all its mostly realistic nature, the author’s third novel is indeed underlain by a ghostliness that possibly points to its allegorical dimension and, more specifically, to both its main character’s and Australia’s histories of repression. The text can also be said to offer a meditation on the constitution of Australian history and, in particular, on the impact of its lacunae on both the concept of nationhood and the formation of exilic identities in a society where the condition of migrancy of many displaced populations remains quite recent. As opposed to the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century immigra-tion, subsequent immigration to Australia has indeed led to the development of ever more numerous transnational connections. As a non-white writer, De Kretser has criti-cally pondered these connections in order to determine the extent to which Australia’s national imaginary could accommodate the non-European, more precisely Asian, immi-grant experience. Can this experience allow non-dominant, i.e. non-Anglo, Australian citizens to develop a sense of national belonging or have these successive waves of mi-gration precluded the creation of a truly multicultural nation? In the (unpublished) PhD chapter she devotes to The Lost Dog, Lyn Dickens contends that while the novel criticises “the limited range of Australian multiculturalism, […] which involves the acquisition, conditional inclusion and containment of racial difference” (169), i.e. the continuation of colonial structures, its “multiracial and transcultural qualities” also “create a space […] that encourages alternative imaginaries and modes of relating to difference” (165). As the same scholar indicates, “it is through [… its main characters] Nelly and Tom’s encounters with the modern racial imaginary that most of the novel’s interventions take shape” (167).

Absent Others: Asian-Australian Discontinuities in Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog45

Like De Kretser herself, the mixed-race male protagonist, who was born in India to a Eurasian mother (Iris de Souza) and an English father (Arthur Loxley), settles in Australia at the age of fourteen. In his new environment, the young and “dark-skinned” (40) Tom Loxley is soon faced with racial prejudice: identified as one of the “black bastards” (25), he opts for cultural assimilation with a view to shielding himself from further discrimination, thus choosing to repress his Indianness in order “to withstand the humiliations that awaited him in an Australian schoolyard” (40). In later life, he fur-ther internalises the quintessential codes and values of his new society. As an academic specialising in literary studies, he embraces the rational, analytical, language-based, dis-tanced and controlled frame of mind that can be regarded as typical of post-Enlighten-ment Western cultures. While the unfathomability of pictures fascinates him, literature is a “medium” he feels “at home” with: unlike images, which “belong to the world of things” and thus “cannot be contained in language,” words and narratives, “for all their shifting play, […] did not exceed his grasp” (7). As James Ley has pointed out, The Lost Dog, while it “retains interest in the cross-cultural identities of its characters,” also “casts its thematic net far wider” by exploring what he has called “the hydra of modernity itself ” in contemporary Australia. Tom Loxley’s attachment to modernity does seem to point to his quest for a form of archetypal Australianness: when Tom’s desire to “lead a modern life” is stressed by the narrator, the latter also underscores that “in that respect he was an exemplary Australian” (145). Significantly, Tom’s taste for modernity is indistinguishable from a wish to master his environment through a reliance on the characteristically (post)modern trope of irony. In the narrator’s terms,

irony was the trope of mastery: of seeing through, of knowing better. And it was a reflex with Tom. He had invented himself through the study of modern literature, and it had provided him with a mode. To be modern was to be ironic. Among the things he was ashamed of was seeming out of date. (238)

No doubt his shame extends to his elderly, utterly unmodern and unironic mother Iris, who emerges as the most obvious antithesis of his modernity. Portrayed as “a relic,” she is the vestigial remnant of a different time, an “archaic” (57) embodiment of her son’s discarded Indianness.

However, the deliberate yet irrational attempt to bury one’s past (especially a trauma-tic one) is rarely a harmless process and is likely to result in the untimely return of this repressed history. In this context, the narrator himself notes that “when understanding fails, the consequence is always a haunting” (244). As Tom has just completed, away from the distractions of Melbourne, a book dedicated to the Uncanny in the works of Henry James, his (unnamed) dog literally escapes his control and goes missing in the Australian bush. Arguably, the stray animal epitomises loss at several levels. Not only is it reminiscent of its original owner, Tom’s former wife Karen, whose absence was made permanent by the failure of their marriage, but it also hints at the loss of “otherness” (22). It emblematises, in this case, Tom’s de facto rejection of his Asian background in the wake of the racial trauma he experiences upon his arrival in Australia. Crucially, we are also made to understand that this trauma based on the dismissal of racial difference, more exactly of a constitutive form of otherness, is shared with his adopted homeland, which he therefore appears to allegorise in this regard. The dog’s additional association with childhood can also be construed as being of high symbolic significance. As De Kretser has emphasised in a video interview, Tom Loxley is a character who has “lost his

46

childhood” as a consequence of his migration to Australia. Terrified at the prospect of a “terrible future” in a world that would be rendered permanently uncanny by migration, “never entirely alien but riddled with strangeness” (20), he discards his Indian past soon after leaving his homeland and immerses himself in his new environment, although the Australian landscape, which “could only just remember colour” (52), has little to do with “a faultless place,” which “for him would always be a green [or India-like] one” (2). His decision to blend in culminates in a “sense of having got away with something” when he moves away from his mother, who was “part of what he was intent on leav-ing” (164), so as to enter university. Around the age of thirty, however, a perceived “narrowing of his life” results in the “epiphanic” adoption of a dog, whose “wild” core breathes some of the “unruliness” and “grace” of childhood back into his all too “ordered existence” (168). Originally “acquired to please his wife,” the animal ends up fulfilling “a need that was his alone” (168), as if it had gained the status of a surrogate child for this man who sees himself as being “childless” (82) by choice (Karen, who later bears two children to a different partner, even finds it natural to have an abortion when she is still married to Tom – see 91-2). The novel’s dog, which can thus be said to stand for both Tom’s own lost childhood and the child he never had, plays a major part in the narrative’s allegorical framework, all the more so since it keeps haunting the protagonist “like a revenant” (141 – see also 68, 99-100, 118, 136 and 217). This ghostly presence indeed keeps on recalling the intrinsic “racial” alterity that the absent creature represents – one that its owner loses, as we have seen, with his Indian childhood and that his allegorical counterpart, namely Australia, has all too often tended to reject. The ways in which the text’s allegorical traits allow De Kretser to critically explore the matter of Australian identity and collective consciousness will be expanded in what follows through a reliance on the tropes of trauma and gothic writing.

Clearly, the colonisation and settlement of Australia – depicted in the novel as “a country in which the old ideal of rural solitude had been bought with violence” (119) – can be approached as a traumatic historical occurrence “that was characterised by an in-built inability to understand itself ” (Delrez, “Symmetries” 53) – hence the “deep ambivalence” that also “characterised the emergence of trauma studies in Austra-lia,” a former penal colony endowed with “an unsavoury propensity for representing white settler citizens as the victims rather than the beneficiaries of conquest” (Delrez, “Ghosts” 195). Indeed, the process of settlement (not least when it results from acts of colonialism) generally implies various types of erasure which can be seen to constitute a multi-layered traumatic experience. This trauma of erasure regards, in the first place, the impact on the indigenous populations of their history and culture’s cruel annihilation. Yet, it also affects the settlers themselves, who suffer, on the one hand, a cultural loss in the wake of displacement and are tempted, on the other, to discard the memory of the violent dispossession they inflicted on others. While it is possible to consider that trans-portation traumatised the early settlers and, by extension, modern-day (non-indigenous) Australians, it is therefore imperative to distinguish between what LaCapra called “per-petrator trauma” (79) and “the trauma of dispossession suffered by the Aborigines” from the time of invasion onwards, for any failure to make this distinction authorises a “discourse about the universality of trauma” which “obfuscates the materiality of exploitation and allows the speaker to achieve legitimacy by proxy, through the pursuit of spiritual equivalence with the victims” (Delrez, “Symmetries” 62 and “Ghosts” 199).


Since any condition of trauma, as David Lloyd notes, “persists in and as a differential relation of power between the perpetrator and the victim” (214), the mutuality of trau-matic suffering needs to be relativized in order to avert this particularly insidious kind of cultural appropriation, which tends to obscure unpalatable historical circumstances. However, “Australian society’s contempt for all things out-of-date” (Mirza 9) and ina-bility to accommodate history in general, which mirrors Tom’s own “flight into moder-nity” even as it betrays a land defined by its very antiquity, does not make Australia modern but only turns it into a “childish” (The Lost Dog 116) and spectral place, where even the vegetal metonyms for the landscape are depicted as “tree-ghosts” (101). Ignor-ing the past, i.e. seeking to erase it or refraining from coping with its consequences, is not an appropriate strategy if one’s goal is to evade it (see 117). Instead, it is likely to be merely repressed: what is “estranged from [the psyche]” (Freud 148) through a process Freud (and his disciples) called “repression” is bound to reappear at any point in time and to influence the present in all kinds of ways.

In The Lost Dog, “history,” both personal and collective, “becomes,” as one of the reviewers observed, “a ghost that is almost more present than the present” (Anon.). Although Australia’s landscapes seem “emptied of history” (219), inhabiting them is likened to “living in a house acquired for its clean angles and gleaming appliances; and discovering a bricked-up door at which, faint but insistent, the sound of knocking could be heard” (102), disrupting “the huge Australian silence” (228). In a settler colony where the Aboriginal inhabitants were oppressed and dispossessed by non-indigenous populations who still seem unwilling to come to terms with the ghosts of the past, history is doomed to repeat itself at each new encounter with otherness – and will keep haunting the oppressor until previous traumatic events are properly confronted. In this connection, a scene encapsulating a critique of the country’s handling of asylum- seekers during the early twenty-first-century migrant crisis provides an illuminating case in point which is not devoid of irony, since white Australians were themselves forced exiles at one point in history:

Buried deep in Australian memories was the knowledge that strangers had once sailed to these shores and destroyed what they found. How could that nightmare be remembered? How could it be unselfishly forgotten? A trauma that had never been laid to rest, it went on disturbing a nation’s dream. In the rejection of the latest newcomers, Tom glimpsed the past convulsing like a faulty film. It was a confession coded as denial. (208)

The protagonist, who may not be fully aware of the fact that the rejection of his own foreignness amounts to perpetuating the colonial imaginary, still identifies with the refu-gees he sees on TV in 2001 (the novel’s present time – see 23). Although he is personally tempted to repress these images, “willing them to disappear,” he realises that they are “imprinted on his retina” (208) and echo his deep-seated anxieties and persistent sense of exclusion. As Maryam Mirza points out when she comments on Tom’s sudden “fear of being ejected from the country” deriving from “the belief that he does not belong in Australia” (7),

the refugee crises of the year 2001 are deeply reminiscent of and rooted in the exclusionary politics that characterized nation-building in Australia over many preceding decades, in particular the injustices perpetrated against Aboriginal peoples but also the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, which consolidated the “White Australia Policy,” effectively prohibiting non-white immigration until its abolition in 1973. (8; see also Meredith and Dyster 210)

48

In an article devoted to the “role that Sri Lankan Australian fiction assumes in develop-ing intercultural conversations in Australia as a conduit into national harmony” (560), Chandani Lokugé similarly argues that “although Australian public culture is becoming less Anglocentric and more cosmopolitan […] in recent years, monoculturalism contin-ues to flourish, inciting racism leading to hostility and violence” (559). In this essay, Lokugé also highlights “De Kretser’s scepticism with regard to Australia’s well-meant but ineffectual effort to celebrate multiculturalism” (563). In an interview published in the same journal, De Kretser herself – as if in response to Lokugé’s points – has stated that “places like Australia have, traditionally, been repositories of hope for migrants,” adding that while present-day Australia was very different from the country she “came to in 1972, which was still about 98% white and largely Anglo Celtic […;] in certain sec-tors of the community there has been, because of the failure of political leaders, […] a hardening of hearts to people who are really among the wretched of the earth” (575).

In The Lost Dog, not only do the aforementioned refugees remind Tom that “in Aus-tralia he was no longer the child of the house” (227) when it came to migration, but they also fail to divert his attention away from the fact that he equally “feared being labelled waste” (209). This type of abject identification is not exactly a novelty: even before leav-ing the south Indian town of Mangalore, Tom was portrayed as one of “those whose hybrid faces branded them the leftovers of Empire” (18). Yet, not until the Australian migrant crisis does it seem to grow into a source of fear for the protagonist himself. Being, just like these refugees, “instantly identifiable as foreign matter, […] he feared expulsion from the body of the nation” (209). Even his former in-laws, as members of an Australian middle class that merely “tolerated Asian immigration while not expecting to encounter it at the altar,” did not welcome him as an equal into the body of their family, and it can be surmised that their daughter, as a “product of the usual liberal […] upbringing,” had married Tom – at least partly – to “satisf[y] both her need to rebel and her social conscience” (91). As a matter of fact, the author’s emphasis on waste as a way of denouncing a given society’s racist and consumerist tendencies recurs in a text that teems with physiological, even scatological metaphors (see Callil). A striking episode, in which Tom’s ageing mother Iris “los[es] control of her [failing] body” (54; see also 146) and accidentally defecates on her white, waste-disliking sister-in-law Audrey’s carpet, further exemplifies, by literalising it, the novel’s insistent association between the notion of human waste and those of foreignness and racial difference.

While the minor tragedy of his pet’s disappearance deeply unhinges Tom, it should still be viewed as a mere symptom of a broader personal crisis, which possibly started seven months earlier, when he met the enigmatic Nelly Zhang. His eye-/I-opening encounter with this visual artist characterised by her mixed ancestry, her taste for self- invention and her urge to emphasise her oriental self, forces him to confront his own lack of “affiliation” in a country where he has “no continuity” (82) with his ancestors but where – as seen previously – he still feels threatened, by virtue of his foreignness, with the spectre of social alienation. Despite the “ease” and “familiarity” (43) Tom tends to experience when he is with Nelly, hers is an often-uncanny presence (see 85, 132-3) that has the power to destabilise Tom’s existence by casting an indirect light on the hidden fragility of his relationship with Australia. More than once, she proves able to reactivate parts of Tom’s pre-migration past, thereby contributing to the return of his repressed Indian history. For example, she “often uncovered […] souvenirs of the


past,” so that “Tom was transported to India” (71) and “reminded […] of childhood” (73). She also operates as a trigger for memory in that she prompts Tom’s “rediscov-ery of images” (109) when the latter had long felt they lay beyond him. While some parts of Nelly’s own past also remain obscure (she is, for instance, accused of having played a role in the mysterious disappearance of her husband Felix Atwood), its ines-capability is demonstrated by aspects of her current life – Rory, the teenage son she had with Atwood, testifies to the impact of the past on the present. As we will see, her acute awareness of this impact induces her never to shun – either in life or in art – the most violent or unwelcome aspects of the past, knowing only too well that the latter is “not what is over but what we wish to have done with” (264). Like Tom, she is mixed-race and culturally hybrid – a combination of Chinese, English, Scottish and Polish influences and origins – and undergoes racial discrimination on this account, although – as opposed to her future boyfriend Tom – she was born in Australia. Unlike Tom, however, she refuses to allow the whites to define and regulate her “layered” (46) identity. Convinced though she is that those she calls “the Australions,” “the ones who think they own the place,” “won’t let [her]” (44) be one of them, she fiercely resists sub-duing her racial characteristics. While Tom endeavours, at all costs, “not […] to appear typically Asian” (73, author’s emphasis), for example by keeping himself from bargaining with Australian stallholders, she overperforms her Chineseness, at the risk of letting self-fashioning give way to self-caricature (see 45). Although she is only a “third”- or “fourth”-generation Chinese immigrant in Australia and “the cast of her […] features” is, therefore, “only vaguely Asiatic,”

she exploited it to the hilt, exaggerating the slant of her eyes with kohl [… and] powdering her face into an expressionless mask. Stilettos and a slit skirt, and she might have stepped from a Shanghai den. A sashed tunic over wide trousers impersonated a woman warrior. She wore her hair cut blunt across her forehead, and drew attention to what she called her “thick Chinese calves”. […] Sometimes she fastened her hair with chopsticks. (44-5)

Yet, she is also careful to resist all-too-easy categorisation by relying on non-Chinese cultural attributes, such as “a rosary strung with mother-of-pearl” worn “as a necklace” or “a red glass bindi” displayed “on her brow,” which turn her into “a category error” (45).

The racial and cultural in-betweenness of this “native yet foreign” (125) figure inev-itably unsettles Tom, whose own quest for identity has tended – as we have seen – to disregard his Asian inheritance. The “duplicity” (125) of her art, which combines past and present, heritage and modernity, similarly fascinates him for reasons that the nar-rator attempts to verbalise. As a visual artist, especially one that is “open to youth and novelty,” Nelly is said to “inhabit […] the modern age, the age of the image, while Tom was marooned in words” (71). Whereas literature is widely recognised as a time-art (and has tended to be viewed as such since Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoön), images (including Nelly’s) are presented as “present-time” (132) cultural phenomena. What a literary academic like Tom usually “miss[es] in images” is “the passage of time” (132), which – by contrast – is made palpable by the process of story-telling. However, Nelly’s artistic modernity is far from clear (166) or unambiguous: although she almost denies the ghostly dimension of visual art, arguing (in a conversation with Tom) that “fiction’s the spooky thing,” “the thing that’s not there” (132), her own work is deeply concerned with time. Much like the ghost-stories and uncanny tales of Henry James (the novel’s

50

main literary ghost – see infra), its “unsolvable enigma” (176) irresistibly appeals to Tom because it is haunted by absence(s), by a past that has vanished, and by the traces it has left: “There were no people in Nelly’s scenes” but “they suggested dramas from which the actors had fled” and exhibited “shadows thrown by invisible bodies” (155). In more ways than one, i.e. both thematically and formally, absence has become her hallmark, since “from that lack, Nelly had fashioned a style” (155). Not only are Nel-ly’s (most recent) images peopled with ghosts, but they also have the spectral “quality of apparitions” (154) insofar as they are themselves photographic copies of original paintings. As copies of copies from nature, they are in line with what Roland Barthes named secondary mimesis. The temporal, ghost-like, dimension of photography is now – more than that of painting – largely acknowledged. In Camera Lucida, in which Barthes defines the ontology of photography (as opposed to that of cinematography), he argues that the former produces the very essence of the past, its ‘being’ – a “testimony” that “bears not on the object but on time” (89). Accordingly, a photograph is a trace, the ghost or “the ectoplasm of what-had-been” (87): it renders an absence present, making it impossible to “deny that the thing has been there” (76). Although photographic images are, as such, largely beyond language, thereby “exceed[ing] analysis” (132), they can thus be described as profoundly historical narratives predicated on an act of memorialization: for the narrator, photography – in itself “a spectral medium […] tirelessly calling up the past” – is also “a tribute to” and “a memory of painting” (175). What Nelly’s pictures memorialize, in the novel, is a double absence: the original painting’s absent others mir-ror the absence of the paintings themselves, which Nelly claims she has destroyed but is rumoured to have stored in order to “make a killing one day” (49). Predictably, then, her photos, which negate “the market’s lust for the original, offering an endless multiplicity of likenesses instead” (154, author’s emphasis), “tantalised with the promise of something more that was always deferred” (176, author’s emphasis).

In other words, the “past” is allowed “entry” into Nelly’s photographic “now-scapes” (223), which are “infected by” (and inflected with) “historical memory” (223), in the same way as her daily existence encompasses her racial and cultural inheritance. Unlike Tom Loxley, who wrongly assumes, at first, that “history” is “incompatible with modern life” and vainly attempts to break with tradition (and with his Indian legacy in particular) in order to achieve the “continuity” (207) he hopes for, Nelly Zhang-Atwood fully understands “the proximity of history,” namely the fact that “the present makes use of what has gone before, feeding on and transforming” an “odorous, unhy-gienic” past which stubbornly “refus[es] to be disposed of ” (146). Although she has “no aptitude for narrative” (243) or literature (the time-art par excellence), she resolutely acknowledges, as a visual artist, the need to embrace the past and “find […] room for [ghosts]” (250). Her propensity for rescuing and collecting lost objects (a penchant she shares with De Kretser herself – see interview with Greg Bearup) further testifies to “an impulse to salvage what had been marked for oblivion” (111; see also 191). Both these “wild objects” (222, author’s emphasis) and her images can definitely be approached as “memento mori of the endless rage for the new” (223).

In fact, Nelly’s impact on Tom is so powerfully defamiliarizing that she ultimately acts as a catalyst for change. While Tom “was in the habit of proceeding hesitantly” and his book “had been years in the making” (3), it is his “enabling, untragic muse” (136) who makes it possible for him to complete his Meddlesome Ghosts: Henry James and the Un-


canny – leaving him with the “impression that he had nailed it all down at last” and that “he owed this small triumph to Nelly” (3) – not only by making her bush house available for a few days, but also by giving him a decisive insight into James’s work. It can be argued that Tom had been blind to this crucial aspect of James’s writing, which had been eluding him for years, by his very psychological closeness to the well-known author, who can thus be viewed as Tom’s alter ego in this regard. In fact, James’s “ambition to be a modern writer” (68) led him “to distance himself from the literary past, from old forms like gothic,” confining his “fascination with the supernatural” to “ghost stories” (such as The Turn of the Screw) and keeping it “out of the major work” (102). Not until “the end of his long life” did he produce again a gothic tale, entitled “The Jolly Cor-ner,” demonstrating at last that modernity and history – represented here by a literary tradition whose ghosts too often symbolise a supposedly outdated “romantic discourse” (68) – need not be mutually exclusive. It is only when Tom understands, thanks to Nelly, that “setting out to reject the past” can but “guarantee you’ll never be free of it” (103) and, therefore, that the “psychological realism” of some Jamesian texts “did not banish the conventions of gothic fiction” (Ley), that his own book can finally come into being and, more broadly, that he can contemplate the possibility of a fresh start for himself, one that would nonetheless allow for the accommodation of his own historical legacies.

As a character, Nelly thus largely contributes to conveying the idea that Tom Loxley’s allegorical counterpart, namely Australia, should seek to emulate what could be termed an alternative modernity, one that would be irreducible to sheer present-ness since, in Nelly’s own words, “nothing dates quicker than now” (34). As the author of The Lost Dog seems to suggest through her sharp critique of settler culture (whose arguable obsession with modernity may, to some extent, have blinded it to some of Australia’s darkest his-torical chapters), the aptly named ghost-continent – one of those “settler nations where there [is, allegedly,] no past” (101) but where “forests” and other national spaces are still “walked by” countless “strangers and ghosts” (123) – should urgently reconsider its his-tory. In this respect, Crouch perceptively contends that “the anxieties of being haunted by a dark past should not be repressed” (101). In his view, “a search for legitimate non-indigenous belonging should not attempt to put to rest the unpleasant ghosts of the past in favour of more soothing spirits. Rather, their unsettling presence should be seen as structuring an ongoing negotiation” in “a constant movement between possession and dispossession” (101), past and present, tradition and modernity. Only a recognition of the historical obliterations that the bush – this ghost-like “site constructed from narratives of disaster” (21) – appears to metaphorize will allow for the development of cultural paradigms that incorporate otherness instead of discarding it.

Marie herBillon

University of Liège

W orks Cited

Anon. Review of The Lost Dog, by Michelle de Kretser (14 August 2008). <http://mookseandgripes.com/reviews/2008/08/14/michelle-de-kretsers-the-lost-dog/>. Consulted 18 Jan. 2017.

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. 1981. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Vintage, 1993. Trans. of La Chambre claire. 1980.

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callil, Carmen. “When a Dog Goes Walkabout.” Review of The Lost Dog, by Michelle de Kretser. 27 July 2008. <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jul/27/fiction>. Consulted 18 Jan. 2017.

crouch, David. “National Hauntings: The Architecture of Australian Ghost Stories.” Spectres, Screens, Shadows, Mirrors. Spec. issue of JASAL (2007): 94-105.

de kretser, Michelle. The Lost Dog. 2007. London: Vintage, 2009.–. “Interview with Greg Bearup (1 August 2013).” <http://www.theaustralian.com.au/

life/weekend-austral ian-magazine/michelle-de-kretser-the-collector/news-story/d92f43d0602401d7a19ba998e8813448>. Consulted 18 Jan. 2017.

–. “Interview with Alexandra Watkins: Tourists, Travellers, Refugees.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 52.5 (2016): 572-80.

–. Video interview available on YouTube. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X11ATMnAkgo>. Consulted 18 Jan. 2017.

delrez, Marc. “Twisted Ghosts: Settler Envy and Historical Resolution in Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth.” The Splintered Glass: Facets of Trauma in the Post-Colony and Beyond. Ed. Sonia Baelo-Allué and Dolores Herrero. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. 191-204.

–. “Fearful Symmetries: Trauma and ‘Settler Envy’ in Contemporary Australian Culture.” Miscelánea 42 (2010): 51-65.

dickens, Lyn. Intervening in the Racial Imaginary: ‘Mixed Race’ and Resistance in Contemporary Australian Literature. Unpublished PhD. U of Sydney, 2014. <http://hdl.handle.net/2123/11589>. Consulted 12 Dec. 2016.

freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” 1955. The Uncanny. Trans. and ed. David McLintock. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003. 121-62. Trans of “Das Unheimliche.” 1919.

Gelder, Ken, and Jane M. JacoBs. Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1998.

kniGht, Stephen. “Bush Hauntings.” Times Literary Supplement 2 May 2008, 21.lacapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.lessinG, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoön. 1836. London: Dent, 1970. Trans of Laokoon. 1766.ley, James. Review of The Lost Dog, by Michelle de Kretser (3 December 2007). <http://www.theage.

com.au/news/book-reviews/the-lost-dog/2007/12/03/1196530553312.html>. Consulted 18 Jan. 2017.

lloyd, David. “Colonial Trauma / Postcolonial Recovery?” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 2.2. (2000). 212-28.

lokuGé, Chandani. “Mediating Literary Borders: Sri Lankan Writing in Australia.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 52.5 (2016): 559-71.

Mccredden, Lyn. “Haunted Identities and the Possible Futures of ‘Aust. Lit.’” Spectres, Screens, Shadows, Mirrors. Spec. issue of JASAL (2007): 12-24.

Meredith, David, and Barrie dyster. australia in the Global Economy: Continuity and Change. New York: Cambridge UP, 1999.

Merrilees, Margaret. “Circling with Ghosts: The Search for Redemption.” Spectres, Screens, Shadows, Mirrors. Spec. issue of JASAL (2007): 65-76.

Mirza, Maryam. “The Anxiety of Being Australian: Modernity, Consumerism, and Identity Politics in Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. 1 February 2018. <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0021989418755541>.

‘It’s Ok, We’re Safe Here’: The Karrabing Film

Collective and Colonial Histories in Australia

Windjarrameru (The Stealing C*nt$) tells the story of four young Indigenous Australian men who are accused of stealing beer and then chased by police into a marsh that has been contaminated by mining. The film subverts representations of Indigenous Austra-

lians in ethnographic film and makes visible the way these representational tools are part of the same destructive force enacted by colonial structures of power that support the mining industry.

Windjarrameru (The Stealing C*nt$) is the third film by the Karrabing Film Collective from the Northern Territory, Australia. A project of the Karrabing Indigenous Cor-poration, the film collective is made up of about 30 Indigenous Australians as well as their close colleague Elizabeth Povinelli, an American anthropologist. Since establishing themselves in 2007, the collective has made a number of films that have been screened across the globe.1 Povinelli often refers to the first three films as the “Intervention trilogy,” each engaging with different experiences Karrabing members have had while living in the aftermath of the Northern Territory Emergency Response in 2007. This paper focuses on the third of this trilogy, Windjarrameru (The Stealing C*nt$); however, all their films share key characteristics. The plots always reflect everyday issues the collec-tive members face such as living in government housing, youth incarceration, poverty, the imposition of mining on traditional lands, local responsibilities to ancestors, and navigating the bureaucracy of the nation-state.

Although the general plot of each film is written before they begin filming, there is no script. Instead, the actors perform what Povinelli calls “improvisational realism”:

The stories arise from one or another idea of the Collective’s membership and are then shaped into a general narrative arc by other members. But the dialogue and blocking of scenes are improvised while we are shooting. Sometimes the plot shifts too. As a result, when I am asked the genre of our films, I often reply, improvisational realism or improvisational realization. (Geontologies 86)

Among the issues Karrabing members wanted to address in the “narrative arc” of Windjarrameru are youth incarceration, mining, and the role “tradition” has to play amidst the continuing demands of the settler Australian state to conform to construc-ted identities of “Aboriginality.” The film follows a group of young men who have been falsely accused by the police of stealing a carton of beer. Two older men, who are working for a mining company at a sacred site nearby, report the young men to the police. The cops proceed to chase the young men, who eventually find refuge in a marsh that has been marked off as a contaminated area because of nearby mining activity. The police do not follow the young men into the toxic area, but instead wait outside for the outlaws to emerge. Later, we learn that one of the young men is a ranger working for

1. This includes international film festivals, arts exhibitions, and gallery installations including: Berlinale Film Festi-val, Melbourne International Film Festival, Contour Biennale in Mechelen Oslo National Academy of Arts, Institute of Modern Art at Brisbane, Tate Modern, documenta 14, Centre Pompidou, Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 9, to name a few. In 2015 they received the Visible Award for socially engaged contemporary art practice as well as the Nova Award for Best Short Fiction Film.

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the local land council and was in the area to investigate illegal mining activity occurring on the coast. The film ends with a scene depicting how the ancestors, embodied by the Australian landscape, are surviving in the face of the mining industry, just as the young men are finding refuge in the same landscape in order to survive police brutality and racist policies.

Through a complex and multifaceted plot, Karrabing reveals the intersections between youth incarceration, illegal mining, the destruction of sacred sites, and the continuing significance of ancestral power embedded in the landscape. I argue the film makes visible the relationship between these issues and the way Indigenous Australian cultures have been, and continue to be, represented (or misrepresented) in mainstream colonial narratives. For instance, Indigenous lifeways have historically been depicted as degenerate, dangerous, and in need of “modern” improvements. Such depictions were (and continue to be) reinforced through media representations of Indigenous lives, for instance ethnographic films of the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. Through strategic misrepresentation, ethnographic filmmakers since the turn of the century have framed Indigenous Australians as exotic, “savage,” in need of enlightenment, and fun-damentally Other. Through an analysis of specific scenes that confront this representa-tional legacy, I wish to show how Windjarrameru actively resists common colonial tropes and complicates essentialist notions of Indigenous experiences today by making visible the way these representational tools are part of the same destructive force enacted by colonial structures of power that support the mining industry.

The Karrabing Indigenous Corporation emerged out of the turmoil caused by what is commonly referred to as the “Intervention.” In 2007, the Australian parliament passed the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act, which gave the government unprecedented control over Indigenous lives in northern Australia. Under the guise of responding to a report of child sexual abuse, the government increased police presence in rural communities and resumed control of land that had only recently been returned to Indigenous owners through land rights legislation of the 1970s and 1990s. Programs designed to provide income and training for Indigenous workers were replaced with government welfare that in the end decreased already low wages and gave the state absolute control over resource allocation. Indigenous communities were portrayed in the media and in political rhetoric as perverse and degenerate, infected with child abuse, pornography, and alcoholism. What is widely called “the Intervention” was portrayed as a solution to the “backward” ways of Indigenous cultures.2 According to this rhe-toric, “traditional” lifeways, including specific social formations and kinship, hunting, and religious practices, were to blame for increasing levels of poverty and violence. The

2. I am summarizing here some of the main arguments that have emerged since 2007 about the impact of the Intervention on Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory. However, I do not wish to deny the experiences of victims and survivors (primarily women and children) of the sexual abuse that was occurring at the time. I encourage the reader to look at Marcia Langton’s writing on the subject, for example Marcia Langton, “Trapped in the Aboriginal reality TV show,” Griffith Review 19 (2008), https://griffithreview.com/articles/trapped-in-the-aboriginal-reality-show/. For more information on the Intervention, one can check Elisabeth Baehr and Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp, eds., “And there’ll be no dancing”: Perspectives on Policies Impacting Indigenous Australians since 2007 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017); Elizabeth Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham: Duke UP, 2011), 52-61; Jon Altman and Melinda Hinkson, “Very Risky Business: The Quest to Normalise Remote-Living Aboriginal People,” Risk, Welfare, and Work, ed. Greg Marston, John Moss, and John Quiggin (Mel-bourne: Melbourne UP, 2010), 185-211.

‘It’s Ok, We’re Safe Here’: The Karrabing Film Collective and Colonial Histories in Australia55

only way to “improve,” or in other words “modernize,” was to participate fully in the nation-state’s economy.3

For most rural communities along the Top End, the mining economy is the primary source of income and fulfills what the Australian state views as a way for Indigenous Australians to participate in the “modern” world. Gold mining in the region began as early as the 1850s and the country experienced a succession of gold rushes throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. By the mid-twentieth century, mineral depos-its had been discovered across the continent, including uranium in northern Australia. The doctrine of terra nullius – the presumption that Australian land was unoccupied and un-used, rendering it “available” for European settlers – formed a basis for mineral extraction (as it had for European settlement in the nineteenth and twentieth centu-ries). Terra nullius assumes the landscape is empty yet, paradoxically, settlers and mineral prospectors knew of, and interacted with, the Indigenous population. In fact, as Daniel Vachon and Phillip Toyne argue, the relationship between the mining industry and Aus-tralia’s Indigenous population is central to the Indigenous experience of settler colonial-ism: “overshadowing the influence of missions, pastoralists, and government agencies, mineral exploration and extraction have emerged as the major contact point between Aboriginal and European societies in remote Australia” (307). As Benedict Scambary explains in his book My Country, Mine Country (2013), mining operations (in addition to other settler initiatives) created a niche for Indigenous Australians to participate in the growing mineral economy. Scambary recounts how Indigenous laborers worked on farms and in mines early on, while makeshift communities formed on the outskirts of newly developed mining towns. Indigenous Australians have thus engaged with the mining industry from the beginning, albeit this relationship was (and continues to be) fraught with racial prejudice.

Since the 1950s, the tension between mining companies and Indigenous Australians has centered around issues of land rights and the destruction of sites that manifest and maintain ancestral power. In fact, throughout Australia’s mining history, Indigenous communities have resisted the industry’s presence, perhaps most notably through land rights petitions and subsequent legislation. In 1963, for example, the Yolngu community in Yirrkala petitioned for legal rights to their land in the face of mining corporations which were beginning to lease that land from the government. Similar petitions occur-red in the following decades, leading to the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territo-ry) Act in 1973 as well as the landmark court case Mabo vs. Queensland in 1992, which declared the doctrine of terra nullius to be null and void (Mason et. al.). This, in turn, led to the Native Title Act in 1993, which, among other initiatives, required mining corpo-rations to get permission from Indigenous communities who are now legally referred to as “Traditional Owners.” Mining companies must also pay royalties to Traditional Owners, and this money, along with government welfare, is often the only source of income for those communities. However, I believe this “Right to Negotiate” is arguably a neocolonial form of controlling Indigenous lands because these communities are increasingly living at the poverty level and these “negotiations” with mining companies are often the only way for them to pay for living expenses. This “right,” therefore, is

3. For instance, the “Closing the Gap” initiative implemented in 2008 prioritizes “educating” Indigenous Australians according to settler Australian standards and “training” Indigenous Australians in skills that would grant access to em-ployment so they can participate in the capitalist economy (https://www.pmc.gov.au/indigenous-affairs/closing-gap).

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often a farce – Traditional Owners have no choice but to work with mining companies for their economic security.

The fraught relationship between the Australian state, the mining industry, and Indi-genous Australians in the Northern Territory is one of the main plot devices in Wind-jarrameru. In fact, the Karrabing Indigenous Corporation emerged specifically out of a moment when these relationships were at their most volatile. In 2007, the year of the Northern Territory Emergency Response, a number of people who would later establish the Karrabing corporation left the town of Belyuen on the coast of the Nor-thern Territory, Australia, in the face of riots brought on by a contentious land claim at the time. The group left the town, intending to live on traditional lands with the help of government support. However, due to the Intervention a couple of months later, that government support was no longer available.4 Out of these conditions, the group created the Karrabing Indigenous Corporation as an exercise by which members could themselves define what it means to live in Australia during and after the Intervention.

Povinelli, as a founding member of the collective, describes Karrabing as an “ana-lytic of existence” in the face of settler late liberalism (Geontologies 25). Rather than a documentary film, which typically presents a story that has already played out, the Kar-rabing films are mechanisms by which the members can discover and come to terms with their own story as it unfolds. As an “analytic,” it gives Karrabing members the tools with which to discuss and share with others the contemporary experience of living in the settler state. The process of making the films opens up avenues for exploring the histories and present conditions of their real-life experiences. For example, Po-vinelli recounts how, while filming Windjarrameru, they came across a sign that reads “Danger: Asbestos Cancer and Lung Disease Hazard.” This led them to research the history of that location and how it came to be contaminated. This research led them to the Cox Peninsula Remediation Project of December 2014, which states “Asbestos is widespread and pesticides, heavy metals, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) have been detected above safe levels at a number of sites on Cox Peninsula. This presents a potential health risk to site users and the local Indigenous community” (Department of Finance). Learning of this contamination in their own lands, Karrabing according-ly wrote this into their film and made additional signage to include in their “set” in order to make visible this contamination. Thus, Povinelli writes, “What was intended to produce an aesthetic experience transformed an aesthetic activity into an analytic of existence” (Geontologies 89).

In spite of the improvisational script and the narratives based on real-life expe-riences, Karrabing’s films are not “ethnographic” in the sense that they are not anthro-pological documentaries meant to be exposés of “non-Western” cultures. In fact, Wind-jarrameru deliberately subverts modes by which Indigenous cultures have historically been (mis)represented on screen.5 The film begins with black and white footage of two

4. For more on this, see Povinelli, Geontologies 22.5. It is important to note, however, that Karrabing “members have never positioned their work as the empowered

solution to issues of anthropological voice” (Povinelli and Lea 41). The subversion to which I am referring is rather a mode of exploring what it means to “be” Indigenous in the Australian settler state, and engaging with colonial modes of representation is one part of this process. Furthermore, Karrabing never claim to be representing all Indigenous Austra-lians, especially because, as scholars such as Marcia Langton have argued, the notion of one “authentic” representation is a colonial myth (“Well, I heard it on the radio and I saw it on the television…,” 27). Rather, Karrabing’s films are one means by which this group of individuals is navigating their specific circumstances in this specific moment.


men sitting by a rock wall on the water’s edge. One of the men begins to paint on the rock, and as he does so a voice-over explains to the audience what they are witnessing on the screen: “Tonight, we bring you one of the strangest and one of the most drama-tic aspects of life in this wide land of ours.” This voice-over is taken from an Australian television show called Australian Walkabout, a documentary series made for the ABC and BBC in 1958. Karrabing paired this clip with their own video footage, which they present in black and white in order to evoke films of the early twentieth century.

In this opening scene, Karrabing sets the audience up to imagine these two men are participating in a religious ceremony. They position their audience as “outsiders” look-ing into this “exotic” moment. The filmmakers accomplish this by using a set of for-mal conventions from ethnographic films including an authoritative voice-over, usually narrated by a man of European descent, accompanied by distant shots that separate the viewer (who is presumed to be white) from the people on screen. These figures are often involved in an activity that takes their attention away from the camera, creating a sense among the viewers that they have happened across a “natural” and “timeless” moment. These films rarely show signs of a settler colonial culture, but instead portray Indigenous societies as “untouched” by modernity or colonial violence.

However, the black and white footage soon turns to color, and the painter stops what he is doing to ask his companion, “How do you spell ‘blasting?’” What the viewer was supposed to think is a religious ceremony is in fact a potential mining site. This surprising move subverts audience expectations of witnessing “authentic” scenes from Indigenous life by juxtaposing the authoritative voice of the white settler anthropologist with the lived reality of Karrabing’s members. Subversive moves like this turn the film, through an “analytic of existence,” into a critical political project. For this reason, Karra-bing is participating in a long tradition of what visual anthropologist Faye Ginsburg has called Indigenous media. In her essay, “Culture/Media: A (Mild) Polemic,” she argued

the media being produced by indigenous, diaspora, and other media makers challenge a long outdated paradigm of ethnographic film built on notions of culture as a stable and bounded object, documentary representation as restricted to realist illusion, and media technologies as inescapable agents of western imperialism. (14)

In other writings, Ginsburg suggests that Indigenous media can be a form of “cultural activism” that critically engages with the effects of colonization while simultaneously making space for “traditional” culture in the contemporary moment (“Shooting Back” 299). Filmmaking is a particularly effective medium by which to “talk back” to colonial structures of power because it has historically been used as a tool for subjugating Indi-genous populations (“Screen Memories” 51).

In the opening scene of Windjarrameru described above, the two men transform from ethnographic subjects to mining employees. Karrabing members thus “refus[e] to play the part they ha[ve] been assigned. They refus[e] to function as a past-oriented and changeless object, a trace of something before the savage assault of settler colonialism” (Geontologies 82). In the scenes that follow, not only do Karrabing members refuse to fall into the trope of Indigeneity created by settler colonial ideology, but they also depict what is usually left out of the frame: the violence and destruction brought about by the mining industry.

In responding to the way in which the northern coast of Australia is often portrayed by mainstream media, Karrabing makes visible the connections between colonial tools

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of misrepresentation and neocolonial depictions of the Australian landscape. Early depictions of mining operations in North Australia focus on industrial feats rather than the landscape itself. For example, in the same Walkabout series mentioned above, there is an episode about “Rum Jungle” near Darwin, where the original uranium mine was established in 1954. The episode clearly wishes to portray the mining industry in a posi-tive light, saying “most people think of bombs when they think of uranium, but today the accent is on energy and heat and medicine and agriculture” (Chauvel, Australian Walkabout). The camera focuses on the large machine digging into the mountainside, even describing it as a “near-human monster with supernatural power.” The narrator’s reverent tone positions the mine in a positive light, as a feat of industrialization and also as a source of income – for example, the narrator stresses that the man driving the machine is “very highly paid.”

Today, mining is portrayed in a similar way. For instance, in a video produced by the BBC in 2013, a reporter stands above an iron ore mine in Western Australia. With a beam- ing smile, she exclaims “I’m at one of the biggest iron ore mines in the world […]; they dig out 300,000 tons of material every day and they’ve got another 150 meters to go!” (Yueh). Like the Walkabout episode, the news story focuses on the technological feats of the operation. As the camera closes in on a machine loading iron ore onto a truck, the reporter explains how the machine works and even says “It may look like something out of a Star Trek or sci-fi movie.” Here, again, an association is made between mining equipment and an other-worldly, or supernatural power. A settler colonial reverence for “modern” technologies continues from the 1950s television show into the twenty-first century. This industrialization, as a form of “progress,” is framed once again as a source of economic (and, by implication, social) wealth: “this reclaimer is a money generator. It moves the equivalent of 1.3 million US dollars worth of ore every hour.”

By focusing on the technological accomplishments and the economic benefits of the mining industry, these depictions render Indigenous lives invisible and overshadow the destruction of a significant amount of land, the exploitation of Indigenous labor-ers, and the unequal distribution of wealth. Windjarrameru inserts Indigenous expe-riences into this narrative, “talking back” to the positive, awestruck portrayal of mining in Australian media. In Ginsburg’s words, “indigenous people are using screen media not to mask but to recuperate their own collective stories and histories – some of them traumatic – that have been erased in the national narratives of the dominant culture” (“Screen Memories” 40).

After the two men in the opening scene are revealed to be working for a mining company, the viewers learn they are in fact illegally trespassing on Indigenous lands. After they have called the police to chase after the young men who were drinking, the two men meet up with their coworkers and drive to the contaminated marsh to wait for the police to arrive. “And you rang the police, why?” one of the miners asks as they wait. “Those mongrel shit faces were throwing beer at me when I was painting,” an-other replies. “They’re gonna find out we’re mining there,” his colleague says, implying the miners were illegally working on land without the permission of the local land council.

As it turns out, one of the young men who was falsely accused by police of stealing beer is actually working for the local land council. In a later scene, when he is sitting in the back of a police vehicle, another agent comes up to him and says, “I told you to


spy on those miners.” He replies, “I did but those boys [the police] collected me.” “But where did they go? Look, where?” she says as she pulls out a map of the area, asking the young ranger to point out exactly where the miners were writing “blast” on the rock face.

This plotline, while fictional, is based on the reality that Karrabing members face every day on the Cox Peninsula. These land council agents are concerned with illegal mining because sacred sites are under constant threat. There have been a number of instances in which features of the Australian landscape were destroyed by mining com-panies and Indigenous land councils work to prevent this from happening. Additionally, the film addresses contamination caused by mine tailings. This is a significant issue in the Northern Territory, the location of some of Australia’s largest mines. In December 2013, for example, a container with radioactive material burst open at Ranger Uranium Mine, leaking 1.4 million liters of “acidic radioactive slurry” (Norman). This spill was said to be “one of the worst nuclear incidents in Australian history” (“Contaminated Slurry Spills”). Energy Resources of Australia Ltd., one of the major uranium produc-ers in Australia and whose primary shareholder is Rio Tinto, a massive global mining corporation, released a statement that said none of the waste was released into the surrounding environment, but this was before a government-led inquiry was completed (Norman). Six months after the spill, the Ranger mine began operations again and parts of the Northern Territory remain contaminated, as exemplified by the Cox Peninsula Remediation Project mentioned above.

Windjarrameru makes contamination from mining visible when the young men find refuge from the police in a contaminated marsh. As they are being chased, the young men duck under a barbed wire fence and the police come to a halt. The camera zooms onto a makeshift sign that reads “Stop Poison” and one of the police asks his col- leagues, “You two going in there?” “No. Poison country,” another responds, pointing to the sign. The police return to their car and drive around the swamp, waiting for the “outlaws” to emerge. While they wait, one of the officers asks, “You think this is a good fishing area?” The other officer responds, “No, with all this mining around here I don’t trust eating this food. Might come out with two heads!”

While the young men are hiding from the police, their families arrive and some of the younger relatives join the outlaws in their hiding spot. One of them asks, “You boys know this is a poisoned swamp? It’s a radiation area here.” At that moment, one of the young men who had been exploring the area returns holding a flagon of bright green liquid. “Why are you drinking a poison thing?” the friend asks. They begin pass-ing it around, smelling it, sometimes taking a sip. “Supposed to be dark red, that beer,” another friend exclaims. “Not green. It’s supposed to be red. You’re swallowing it to poison yourselves. Marcos, don’t drink that. You’ll get sick.” In a stark departure from mainstream portrayals, Windjarrameru makes the ravages of mining acutely visible. Not only is the mining industry present throughout the film’s narrative, but it is also visual-ized and made manifest by the green grog. This is also a pointed response to predomi-nant representations of Indigenous Australians as alcoholics – another trope that was mobilized by the government during the 2007 Intervention. In a poignant defiance of this stereotype, Karrabing actually makes visible the way alcoholism, like the mining industry, is a violent imposition on Indigenous lifeworlds. The films are an important exercise in making these conditions of Indigenous existence visible. Povinelli describes

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this process using the term “manifestation,” her translation of the Emmiyengal phrase awagami-mari-ntheni:6

an intentional emergence: when something not merely appears to something or someone else but discloses itself as a comment on the coordination, orientation, and obligation of local existents and makes a demand on persons to actively and properly respond. (Geontologies 58)

Manifestations thus serve as pedagogical tools, “sign[s] that demand to be heeded” (59). The flagon of poisonous beer is a “manifestation” of the toxic slurry pervading the swamp where the young men find refuge (91). What is usually invisible in main-stream media is not only made visible in the film, but also demands that the audience heed the poisoning of Indigenous land.

By rendering the effects of mining visible in the face of a history of erasure, Karra-bing intertwines Indigenous survival in the face of government pressure – in this case, unfair policing of Indigenous youth – with the ravages of mining, both legal and illegal. In this scene, mining is made manifest in the flagon of what was once beer, and which has now become toxic from the radiation emitted by uranium mining. The film effec-tively shows how these two colonial legacies, misrepresentation and resource extraction, are both at work in contemporary Indigenous lives. And it is the effort to make tangible, to manifest, the effects of mining that makes Windjarrameru different from what could have been a documentary film. Instead, the fictional plot, the improvised script, and the manifestations of how mining impacts Indigenous experiences all combine to form a tool through which Karrabing members navigate their relationship to the Australian state.

In the scenes discussed above, Karrabing subverts ethnographic representations of Indigenous Australians and brings to light the effects of mining on Indigenous lives today. In the final scene, Karrabing also addresses how the mining industry affects “traditional” Indigenous cosmologies. They give form to the ancestors that inhabit and are embodied by the Australian landscape. These manifestations depict a disorienting, radioactive ancestral presence that is also struggling to survive in the same toxic marsh where the young men hide. Thus, it is not simply the young men and the members of Karrabing who must cope with the mining industry, but also their ancestors, the living beings embodied in the marsh.

While different Indigenous communities across the continent have their own unique belief systems, they all share a fundamental view of what is sometimes referred to as the “Dreamtime.” This is an imperfect translation for the place and time before human existence where (and when) ancestors emerged from the ground and journeyed through space. By interacting with each other and by moving through this space, ancestors formed the earth’s topography and made manifest peoples’ relationship to the physical landscape. As Lynne Hume explains, “Where ancestors bled, ochre deposits were cre-ated; where they dug in the ground, water flowed and springs formed; where they cut down trees, valleys were formed” (Ancestral Power 25). Individuals today are responsible for each “Dreaming” – the pathways and physical traces of individual ancestors – and

6. Emmiyengal is a language group of northern Australia, and the collective itself is named after the Emmiyengal word “karrabing,” meaning “tide-out.” However, Povinelli says Karrabing members are specifically not bound to each other by language or kinship. Rather, they are operating beyond or outside the parameters of how the settler state defines them (Povinelli and Lea 37).


maintain the landscape by recreating these Dreamings through dance, visual represen-tations, and oral narratives.

Karrabing portrays the power of ancestral presence in Windjarrameru, but it is inter-twined with contemporary Indigenous lives in the face of Australia’s mining boom. Towards the end of the film, as the stakeout ensues, the sun lowers and the young men fall asleep. The camera pans over one of the sleeping bodies, then the scene changes to a group of figures who appear to be sitting along the water, covered in white face paint that glows. The cinematography becomes disorienting as the camera spins around the figures, going upside down and side to side. The colors are blinding and overlap with infrared-like images of other figures, while a slowed-down, disembodied voice becomes indistinguishable from eerie noises in the background. The colors, face paint, disorienting camera-work, and unnatural colors signal a shift to the “Dreamtime.” The figures are ancestral spirits also seeking refuge in the swamp.

Unlike ethnographic documentaries, this scene is not meant to make the Dreaming/Dreamtime legible to the audience. “The Karrabing did not form themselves to be a translation machine or as a solution to the representational dilemmas of ethnographic description under continuing occupation” (Povinelli and Lea 44). Instead, this scene – and the film as a whole – is a means by which Karrabing members figure out what ancestral power in this contaminated land means for them and their modes of existence in the mining industry. The dream scene addresses the questions Povinelli asks when she discusses manifestation:

What effect were these new forms of existence – settlers, cattle, pig, influenza, barbed wire – having on the given arrangement of their world? And how were other modes of existence in the landscape and the landscape itself reacting to these new modes and relations of existence? What were the manifestations that signaled these views and which ones should be heeded? (Geontologies 77)

The dream scene imagines how the neocolonial form of existence that is the mining industry is affecting ancestral modes of existence. The disorienting camera move-ments, the eerie voice-over, the infrared images are all ways of manifesting the toxicity confronting the ancestors who are embodied in the marsh where the young men find themselves.

Like the dream scene or the flagon of toxic beer, Windjarrameru is itself a “manifes-tation” because it is a tool with which to heed the threat of mining on Indigenous lives. Povinelli suggests that “perhaps the central purpose of Karrabing’s films is to discover what we never knew we knew by hearing what we say in moments of improvisation” (“Windjarrameru”). For instance, she recounts a moment during filming when one young man hiding in the toxic swamp, Kelvin, reassures his friend, Reggie, who is wor-ried about the police following them. Kelvin says, “It’s ok, we’re safe here. We’re inside this radiation area. Police won’t come in here, we’re safe.” In this one statement, impro-vised on the spot, Kelvin summarizes the current reality Indigenous Australians face while living amidst the mining boom in northern Australia: they are “safe” from being unjustly arrested by a corrupt police force, while at the same time this “safety” is found amidst the toxic waste produced by that same corrupt system of settler colonialism. The process of filming enables Karrabing to identify this reality – it is a manifestation of how Indigenous Australians can navigate both the laws of the settler state and the destruction of the landscape at the hands of mining companies. And during this pro-

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cess, as I have shown in an analysis of a few specific scenes, part of this reality includes the way Indigenous Australians have been (mis)represented by mainstream media in the past. By incorporating this history in their exploration of the mining industry, Kar-rabing makes manifest the way colonial modes of representation are part of the same destructive force as the mining industry.

Maggie Wander

University of California Santa Cruz

W orks Cited

chauVel, Charles, Dir. Australian Walkabout. BBC. 1958.“Contaminated Slurry Spills from Uranium Mine Tank.” ABC News. Australian Broadcasting

Corporation, 7 Dec. 2013. <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-12-07/spill-at-nt-uranium-mine-near-kakadu/5142148>.

Department of Finance. “Cox Peninsula Remediation Project.” Canberra: Australian Capital Territory Publishing, 2014.

GinsBurG, Faye. “Culture/Media: A (Mild) Polemic.” Anthropology Today 10.2 (1994): 5-15.—. “‘From Little Things, Big Things Grow’: Indigenous Media and Cultural Activism.” Between

Resistance and Revolution: Cultural Politics and Social Protest. Ed. Richard G. Fox and Orin Starn. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1997. 118-44.

—. “Shooting Back: From Ethnographic Film to Indigenous Production/Ethnography of Media.” A Companion to Film Theory. Ed. Toby Miller and Robert Stam. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999. 295-313.

—. “Screen Memories: Resignifying the Traditional in Indigenous Media.” Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. Ed. Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002. 39-57.

huMe, Lynne. Ancestral Power: The Dreaming, Consciousness, and Aboriginal Australians. Carlton South, Vic.: Melbourne UP, 2002.

Karrabing Film Collective, Dir. Windjarrameru (The Stealing C*nt$). Karrabing Indigenous Corporation, 2015.

lanGton, Marcia. Well, I heard it on the radio and I saw it on the television. Woolloomooloo, New South Wales: Australian Film Commission, 1993.

Mason, C.J., et. al. “Mabo v Queensland (No 2).” Canberra: High Court of Australia, 1992.norMan, James. “Rio Tinto’s Stance on Kakadu Cleanup Alarms Indigenous Owners.” The Guardian

24 April 2014. <http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/apr/24/rio-tintos-stance-on-kakadu-cleanup-alarms-indigenous-owners>.

poVinelli, Elizabeth. “Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nts.” E-Flux Supercommunity. 21 May 2015. <http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/windjarrameru-the-stealing-c-nts/>.

—. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke UP, 2016.poVinelli, Elizabeth A., and Tess lea. “Karrabing: An Essay in Keywords.” Visual Anthropology Review

34.1 (2018): 36-46.scaMBary, Benedict. My Country, Mine Country: Indigenous People, Mining and Development Contestation in

Remote Australia. Canberra: Australian UP, 2013.Vahon, Daniel, and Phillip toyne. “Mining and the Challenge of Land Rights.” Aborigines, Land and

Land Rights. Ed. Nicolas Peterson and Marcia Langton. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1983. 307-26.

yueh, Linda. “Mining on a Massive Scale in Australia.” BBC News. BBC. 2 July 2013. <http://www.bbc.com/news/business-23143585>.

Haunted Histories, Animate Futures:

Recovering Noongar Knowledge

through Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance

In That Deadman Dance, Kim Scott draws on Noongar vocabulary and ontology to im-merse readers in a world where rain cries and chuckles as it structures the land according to its own designs. This essay positions Scott’s novel as one manifestation of his ongoing

commitment to the recovery of repressed Noongar knowledge, and it formulates a framework of ecospectrality to focus attention on the recovery of repressed knowledge of the nonhuman. It contends that Scott adapts the form of the novel to circulate this knowledge to local and global readers, offering it as a resource to shape the future rather than resolve the past.

That was my concern, researching a novel: not what was, but what might have been, and even what might yet be…

Kim Scott, “A Noongar Voice” (ellipsis in original)

To be haunted in the name of a will to heal is to allow the ghost to help you imagine what was lost that never even existed […] to long for the insight of that moment in which we recognise, as in Benjamin’s profane illumination, that it could have been and can be otherwise.

Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

Kim Scott’s author biography announces that he is “proud to be one among those who call themselves Noongar,” communicating his identity “as a descendant of those who first created human society” in south-west Australia (PanMacmillan). However, Scott explains that he grew up knowing little of the language and culture that constituted his heritage: “there was no traditional upbringing of stories around the campfire, no earnest transmission of cultural values” (Scott and Brown 14). Instead, he found his Noongar ancestry surrounded by silences that he has sought to remedy, in part through his conversations with Hazel Brown, a Noongar Elder with vast knowledge of Noongar language, stories and genealogies. In the collaborative work he produced with Hazel Brown, Kayang and Me (2005), Scott reflects on the role of writing in coming to terms with his cultural inheritance: “with Aunty Hazel I stood on the sandy shore of my Indigenous heritage, and sensed something substantial and sustaining waiting for me to grasp, and yet the only means I had to do so was this laying out of words upon a page” (29). Scott’s language characterizes his writing as a response to a personal haun-ting: he senses something substantial, he feels its presence at the edge of his awareness, waiting for him in a way that he distinguishes from his previous research in archives that only allowed him access to “fossilized phrases” (28). Scott acknowledges his desire to take hold of the past by giving it a material shape, by transforming incorporeal subs-tance into words on paper, but he also recognizes that writing itself remains a haunted medium that leaves unexpressed remainders. Scott confronts this aspect of writing as he translates Hazel Brown’s oral stories into written form in Kayang and Me, and he also uses his fiction to imaginatively probe the limits and possibilities of the written word, for instance, as a central character of the novel That Deadman Dance, Bobby Wabalan-giny, remarks that “some sounds had a shape on the page too… The alphabet might be tracks, trails and traces of what we said” (147). While Scott does not directly categorize

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his writing process as spectral, he does consciously reflect on the intersections among the kinds of literary work that he undertakes, ranging from community language reco-very projects to novels in English, and I propose that each site of Scott’s work manifests hauntings that Scott engages in order to bring repressed Noongar language and stories into contact with audiences so that this knowledge can participate in shaping alternative futures.

Scott’s literary publications, including the novels True Country (1993) and Benang (1999) and his collaborative recovery work with Hazel Brown, Kayang and Me, demon-strate his consistent engagement with Indigenous histories and languages. This essay concentrates on his third novel, That Deadman Dance (2010),1 in which Scott explores his heritage by imaginatively reconstructing a pivotal moment in Noongar history: the early encounter between Western Australia’s Noongar people, British settlers, and whal-ing crews from various other nations. As Scott discusses the composing process for this novel, a vocabulary of haunting emerges again in relation to writing: “that’s what language can do. The idea of one being linguistically displaced and dispossessed, even in one’s own country; and then language comes back and one makes oneself an instru-ment for it and for the spirit of place” (Brewster, Interview with Kim Scott 230). In this instance, Scott describes language as a kind of revenant, returning to those who have been dispossessed of their heritage, and he identifies himself as a conduit; his storytel-ling becomes an instrument through which ghosts return language and histories to local communities and hail wider audiences beyond, all the while revealing power dynamics of settler-colonialism that consigned Noongar language and culture to a position on the margins of Western discourse in the first place.

A model of haunting that builds from the work of sociologist Avery Gordon helps to elucidate Scott’s formulation of his writing as a process of listening to the voices of others. Gordon extends the foundational work of Sigmund Freud on the uncanny and the work of Jacques Derrida in hauntology, as she builds her own conception of how haunting characterizes the contemporary world and its marginalized populations and discredited knowledges. Gordon defines haunting as “an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known,” describing not only a movement across boundaries of past and present, but also an imperative to reconsi-der associations of vision with presence and knowledge (xVi). As Radway clarifies, the model of haunting that Gordon develops constitutes an alternative way of knowing “that is more a listening than a seeing, a practice of being attuned to the echoes and murmurs of that which has been lost but which is still present among us” (x). This theory conceptualizes the endurance of people and knowledge that have been denied mainstream visibility, and while it registers that erasure as a form of social violence, it suggests a recourse other than a return to visibility. Instead, Gordon’s formulation encourages attention to ways that presence can announce itself beyond vision, surfac-ing through an epistemology of listening in which the knower cultivates receptivity to traces and refuses the reduction of knowledge to visual evidence.

Listening serves to bring suppressed knowledge to presence so that it can inform the actions of those who inherit it. However, the goal of conversing with ghosts differs

1. That Deadman Dance was first published in Australia in 2010. Among numerous awards, it was recognized for the 2011 Miles Franklin Award, the Victorian Prize for Literature, a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal.

Haunted Histories, Animate Futures: Recovering Noongar Knowledge65

among theorists of spectrality. For instance, Abraham and Torok develop a psychoan-alytic approach to transgenerational haunting that focuses on secrets inherited from ancestors. In their framework, the secret is unspeakable because it is associated with shame or prohibitions, and the goal of speaking to the phantom becomes naming the secret to create closure and put the phantom to rest (Abraham 188; Davis 55-6). In the psychological model, individuals seek to resolve their haunting through narration that makes the past knowable and prevents its return as traumatic memory, whereas in Gordon’s sociological model, haunting is conceptualized as a collective phenomenon, and the goal of speaking with ghosts is not to quiet them, but to learn to live alongside them, allowing unspeakable traces to remain to help imagine alternatives to current conditions (xVi). In accordance with Derrida’s imperative to learn to live with ghosts because “no justice [is] possible without this relation of fidelity or promise, as it were, to what is no longer living or not living yet, to what is not simply present,” Gordon argues that haunting activates “a potent imagination of what has been done and what is to be done otherwise” (Derrida 42; Gordon 18). In the context of Australian literary texts, Crouch similarly notes the productive potential of maintaining “haunted anxieties” and allowing the “unsettling presence” of ghosts to “structure an ongoing negotiation, a constant movement between possession and dispossession” (102, 101). Such formu-lations of haunting encourage dwelling with ghosts rather than exorcising them, an approach that coincides with Scott’s stated desire to use his novel to explore possibilities in the past encounter not in an effort to provide comforting resolution to past conflicts, but to activate resonances that invite critical thinking about dominant historical narra-tives and inspire innovative thinking about the future that refuses to be “trapped in the paradigm that is being set up for us” (Brewster, Interview with Kim Scott 235).

The framework provided by Gordon illuminates haunting as an alternative way of knowing that uses previously silenced voices to guide future action; however, this framework fails to adequately address the full range of voices that become audible as a result of the Noongar language and ontology that Scott shares. In addition to mobilizing voices of ancestral others, Scott’s novel circulates the voices of nonhuman others: ani-mals, wind, rain, land and sea that are all interconnected with human kin in Noongar understandings of country. Gordon’s figuration of ghosts as manifesting past violence and social erasure could be extended to build a concept of ecospectrality which attends to the return of nonhuman voices and repressed epistemologies that register these voices; such a framework would enable investigation into ways in which these voices can inspire social justice that includes accountability to human and nonhuman others. An ecospectral approach would not diminish the violence done to human populations; rather, it would expand understandings of the scope of that violence by demanding awareness of how it also carries consequences for nonhumans. As Scott demonstrates how the voices of nonhuman others haunt historical discourses of first encounter and how the novel form can be adapted to facilitate their return, That Deadman Dance reveals the intellectual and affective work ecospectrality can perform. It facilitates recognition that the repression of nonhuman voices and the Noongar knowledge that values them was not an incidental impact of colonization, but a constitutive factor; settler inhabit-ance required a denial of the land’s vitality in order to institute a regime of property and ownership, and the novel demands that readers acknowledge this violence and confront its ongoing impacts.

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While multiple scholars foreground human cross-cultural exchange in their analysis of That Deadman Dance (Brewster, “Whiteness and Indigenous Sovereignty”; Kossew; Colomba), few include attention to the voices of nonhuman matter. Jane Gleeson-White begins to extend consideration to nonhuman subjects using an ecocritical framework; however, she argues that the novel “rewrite[s] Australia in the voice of the regional” without fully addressing the movement of knowledge across temporal or spatial scales (1). Rosanne Kennedy’s essay, “Orbits, Mobilities, Scales: Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance as Transcultural Remembrance,” innovatively tackles movement across scales, observing that the novel incorporates varied temporal scales “from the ‘social history’ of the maritime frontier to the ‘deep time’ of the continent and the sea”; it also devotes sustained analysis to spatial scales through the instructive metaphor of orbits, which expresses how Indigenous rootedness in place co-exists with Indigenous routes that include travel, cultural exchange, and return to community (116). In another essay that develops her attention to remembrance, Kennedy analyzes intersections between oppression of humans and nonhuman animals. I share Kennedy’s interest in Scott’s narration of the nonhuman, and my essay attends to nonhuman matter more broadly, recognizing forces like rain and wind alongside humans and animals as members of the land community that constitutes country. Additionally, the lens of ecospectrality shifts the focus from practices of memorializing the past to the persistence of Noongar knowledge across temporal divides, despite efforts to repress it. Finally, by identifying the novel as a site of haunting, the ecospectral approach enhances attention to connec-tions between Noongar knowledge and narrative forms, concentrating on ways Scott adapts the novel to house repressed voices and activate haunting as an affective way of knowing that challenges readers to imagine futures that include accountability to the nonhuman.

Circles of Movement, Scales of Haunting

Scott insists on the primacy of the local community, so it seems appropriate to begin tra-cing his engagement with ghosts by turning to that community and his language recov- ery2 work. Scott founded the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project to re-connect historical archives, community elders, and descendants in order to return sto-ries to local communities. This work operates in the mode of haunting as it confronts the past and the ways that Noongar became an endangered ancestral language not as a neutral result of change over time, but as a result of settler- colonialism which deval-ued Indigenous languages and knowledges while valorizing English. Scott stresses that language recovery is about returning knowledge and respect that was buried through imperialism, and he asserts that restoring language and stories can provide contempo-rary communities with access to precolonial narratives that inspire trust, creativity, and commitment to community in ways that dominant narratives of colonial oppression cannot. In “From Drill to Dance,” Scott explains:

the consolidation of language and story in home communities in ways that strengthen and create opportunities for community members to profitably share revitalized, ancestral

2. Sue Kossew discusses the terminology of recovery, exploring the resonances of the word recovery in relationship to language work, and in relationship to Scott’s fiction, since “recovery narrative” is the terminology he chooses to des-cribe his novel That Deadman Dance, rejecting other labels such as “post-reconciliation novel” (170).


knowledge with increasingly wider, concentric circles of people can be an important part of community development, and importantly, build something other than drawing upon the experience of oppression. (12-3)

Scott uses the image of widening circles to convey his vision that stories move through expanding circuits as they travel through community meetings, oral performance, illus-trated texts, and audio and video recordings; as the circles slowly spread, repressed knowledge returns to active presence in the life of the community (and beyond). Scott’s description of the movement of stories emphasizes community involvement in recal-ling and negotiating with the past, as members debate pronunciations and meanings, a process that also distinguishes this language recovery work from essentializing efforts to return to a pure, precolonial past of Indigenous harmony, a stereotype that Scott critiques. Rather, the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project illustrates how putting ghosts of the past into conversation with contemporary residents can empower communities to imagine futures that grow from knowledge and confidence in their heritage.

Scott offers the model of expanding circles to conceptualize his sharing of Indigenous knowledge through novels in English as an extension of his language work. Novels expand the circle to include audiences that are not part of the Noongar commu-nity, but the circle keeps the Noongar community at the center of awareness, as Scott affirms that language recovery

merely as a source of ‘insight’ for literature in English or indeed of perspectives unknown to wider society is of very limited value unless it also contributes in some way to the revival and continued survival of the language itself and – most especially – the well-being of the community descended from its speakers. (Scott, “From Drill to Dance” 11)

Scott expresses his version of “the ‘postcolonial angst’ of those who, displaced linguis-tically, if not geographically, write in the colonizer’s tongue, for an audience of which their own people are a tiny minority,” acknowledging his fraught position in relation to the genre of the novel (3). He uses the novel to pose questions about “what might yet be,” and he does not shy away from the challenge: what are the consequences of using the novel form to articulate these questions? Scott’s reflections about the precarious position of his novel’s central character Bobby Wabalanginy, who is a performer, sto-ryteller, and conveyor of Noongar culture, provide insight about his own position as a postcolonial novelist. Scott acknowledges that his novel comments on “the dangers of commodification versus the great power of sharing your heritage, and helping people through sharing that heritage” (Brewster, Interview with Kim Scott 240), which also reflects on his position of narrating Noongar culture through the novel, a form of storytelling that, as Edward Said has argued in Culture and Imperialism, developed not only in historical proximity to Western imperialism, but also in ideological accord with it by deploying formal features such as regulatory plot structures and patterns of nar-rative authority that reinforce imperial ideologies (69-71). Postcolonial writers such as Ngugi wa Thiongo have highlighted the colonial legacy of the novel and its continuing impact on Indigenous languages and cultures, while scholarship such as Graham Hug-gan’s The Postcolonial Exotic encourages attention to the ways that publishing companies and metropolitan audiences impose expectations and commodify postcolonial writing and writers. Scott clearly recognizes this range of dangers that accompany the choice to compose a novel in English, but instead of disclaiming the novel as a colonial artifact,

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he validates his own position of strength to be able to write a novel that places Noongar people and culture at the narrative center (Brewster, Interview with Kim Scott 232). As he adapts a colonially inherited form and remakes it through interaction with Noongar knowledge, Scott’s process as novelist echoes that of his character Bobby Wabalanginy, who adapts a British military drill and transforms it through his own performance.

The Novel as the Haunted House of Matter

Instead of narrating a return of knowledge to characters in a contemporary setting, Scott transports readers to the scene of the repression of Noongar knowledge. Setting the novel in the past, he recreates a world where Noongar is a vital, living language that holds a position of power, rather than presenting readers with a contemporary scene of loss or absence. He crafts a non-linear novel that moves readers back and forth across the years 1826-1844 so that they become attuned to ways in which the repression of Noongar knowledge constitutes an aspect of settler-colonial violence that is less recognizable as violence because it unfolds unevenly over time, similar to the dynamics that Rob Nixon describes as “slow violence” in the context of environmental damage. Rather than a military battle over land that occurs on specific dates, the repression of knowledge proceeds in various increments and at multiple levels from individual inter-actions to organized policy, and because of its accretive nature, its elements may pass unmarked as forms of violence. By opening his novel with Bobby Wabalanginy writ-ing the Noongar word “Kaya” on a slate, Scott commences his narrative with cultural exchange already underway (1). The sections that follow move readers back and forth in time so that they witness Dr. Cross’s openness to human difference as he recognizes Menak as “a very different man, of course, but a man for all that” (83), and he builds a friendship with Wunyeran which is so close that he asks to be buried in the same grave, illustrating potential for sharing and mutual respect as each adopts ideas and practices of the other. However, moments of potential are interspersed with failures and rejec-tions such as the settler Skelly expressing disdain for the “savages […] with their par-rots and jabber and nakedness” (85), using animal association as a way to degrade the Noongar, discredit their language, and deny their humanity. Readers encounter the new governor instituting legal regulations that require Western dress and English language communication in the growing town, and eventually the dis-interment of Cross from the grave he shares with Wunyeran to enforce a clear dividing line between Noongar and settler, erasing Wunyeran from the town’s origin story and discursively constructing the settlement over the bones of Dr. Cross: “1781-1833, Surgeon, Pioneer and Land Owner, 1826-1833, King George Town, Western Australia” (312). The novel sequences the reader’s encounter with the past, and the non-linear structure complicates a typical narrative of unidirectional colonial progress or Indigenous decline, allowing the reader to inhabit moments of sharing along with moments of degradation and to comprehend changes to relationships over time. This strategy prevents any oversimplified demon-ization of settlers or victimization of Noongar, who appear as complex and varied characters with a range of perspectives and experiences. It offers readers the kind of opportunity Gordon theorizes to recognize repression as violence, but also to imagine how it could have been and might yet be otherwise.

The novel transports readers to the past to make the dynamics of repression tan-gible, and it allows readers to experience the return of repressed knowledge in the


present. Incorporating Noongar language and ontology into a novel in English per-forms the kind of haunting that Gordon describes as alerting readers “that what’s been concealed is very much alive and present” (xVi). The novel conjures expressions that reflect affinities between human and nonhuman matter, returning this knowledge to the local community and sharing this way of understanding materiality with global readers. For instance, the narrator includes the Noongar term “mitjal” which he defines as “a rain like tears” (313). The Noongar word conveys a sensitivity to diverse types of rain, and rather than choosing an English term such as drizzle or downpour, Scott translates the term using a comparison to tears, suggesting that the name for the type of rain expresses more than a measure of the rain’s intensity; it carries the Noongar conceptu-alization of qualities that water and humans share. However, Scott simultaneously char-acterizes water in terms that extend beyond human likeness, suggesting that the water deserves respect for its own traits, not only for the ways that it resembles the human. The narrator records:

Deeper in the night the wind lifted and rain began to drum the earth. It fell and fell and fell; it gathered in the hearts of trees, in the forks of branches and cups of leaves, in clefts and cavities of rock and small indentations in the earth. Fell, overflowed, and began to move together again. (313)

This passage exhibits a grammar and vocabulary of agency that provides an alterna-tive to Western constructions of inert matter; the rain and wind are subjects and they are paired with active verbs: they lift and drum, fall and gather for their own reasons, without reference to human agents or intentions. The movement of the water gener-ates effects, shaping the landscape and leaving a record of its past. This description is communicated through human writing that cannot escape a human perspective or give direct access to water’s voice, yet the language conveys an ontological orientation to a dynamic world in which various forms of matter share communicative abilities and agency, understood as an ability to create effects. It reveals how language can transmit a way of understanding human immersion in relationships with a living land community and how language can encourage attention to and respect for the voices and stories of nonhuman matter, for instance registering the water etching paths into the land as a story without attempting to fill all the gaps or claim total knowledge of that story.

Scott encourages readers to recognize a diversity of voices of water, wind, animal and human, refusing to subordinate nonhuman matter to the human but also refusing to collapse difference. While Scott credits both water and humans with communica-tive abilities, he simultaneously preserves difference and acknowledges singularity. For example, he narrates different kinds of rain, including mitjal but also the rain that spits and makes “sharp silver thorns” (3). Additionally, he distinguishes different kinds of impacts created by water. The narration “rain fell in great bodies, slamming the earth, then recovered, collected its many selves and flowed, chuckling, past flimsy houses” (314) identifies a particular, but collective body of water that chuckles at a particular group of humans: as it swirls around human construction projects and carries away a footbridge, the water laughs at the vanity displayed by some of the settlers who lack attentiveness to the water’s agency and who define the ability to alter the landscape as a mark of their superior humanity (314). With these depictions, Scott revises the novel’s familiar focus on individual human characters and its relegation of nonhuman matter to the role of inert background, showing how human habitation depends on sensitivity

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to and relationship with nonhuman matter and recording the consequences of ignor-ing these dependencies, as settler construction is destroyed by the force of the water. Crafting such narration, Scott gives readers an opportunity to learn to perceive different voices of water, while he also documents consequences of failing to listen.

Scott’s attention to failures to listen coincides with accounts of Australia’s ecological history and illustrates how orientation to matter influences sensory perception, and in turn, materially shapes the land in ways that continue to exert impacts. In the novel, the narrator reports that “Sometimes Wooral addressed the bush as if he were walking through a crowd of diverse personalities, his tone variously playful, scolding, reveren-tial, affectionate,” which causes his settler companions to reflect, “It was most confus-ing. Did he see something else?” (43). The narration implies that Wooral does indeed see something else, and his knowledge goes beyond vision: he listens to an animate land that he also engages through conversation. Beyond the novel, as Val Plumwood and William Lines separately discuss, early settlers were deaf to the sounds of unfamiliar birds, which led them to assume that Australia was lacking in bird life and to import “real” birds from home. Lines provides examples from colonial diaries that describe the “silence and tranquility,” the “stillness” of the empty land (28). Plumwood uses this example to demonstrate how a Eurocentric mentality could influence the settlers’ perception of the land, causing them to understand it as empty and deficient, and to act accordingly to shape it to their European ideals (65). Scott forces the reader to consider how colonizing processes operated in parallel as he presents settlers who are deaf to the communication of both human and nonhuman inhabitants, and he demonstrates the results of this deafness: a denial of their status as inhabitants that provides a justi-fication for colonial occupation, as the settlers fence off lands and displace Indigenous peoples with the challenge, “to what use do they put this ownership as against what we have achieved in so short a time?” (Scott, That Deadman Dance 25). While Noongar language transmits conceptions of animate land, the settler construction of ownership denies the vitality and interdependency of the land community, participating in a dis-possession of Indigenous inhabitants that continues to haunt modern Australia.

Scott chooses the space of the novel to recover the conflict between Noongar and settler understandings of nonhuman matter, confronting audiences with a haunting that might provide a foundation for a radical re-examination of relationships among Indigenous Australians, non-Indigenous Australians, and the nonhuman others on which their habitation depends, while it also challenges expectations about how a novel can figure Australia as haunted territory. Unlike his most recent novel Taboo (2017) and other more conventional ghost stories in which a geographic location becomes the site for resurfacing past violence in the lives of characters, in That Deadman Dance, the novel itself serves as the site for returning repressed knowledge to readers, so that instead of being absolved of the colonial past through the resolution of the plot, readers become haunted by their newly attained knowledge. This approach differs, for instance, from Tim Winton’s spectral narration in Cloudstreet. Examining Winton’s novel, David Crouch and Michael Griffiths respectively invoke a model of haunting and concur that Winton’s use of the haunted house to figure the haunted nation runs the risk of resolving settler anxiety to allow continued inhabitance in ways that reaffirm settler-colonial ideologies. Read against what Griffiths articulates as the failure of Cloudstreet, “the recognition of dispossession as exculpation from a more radical political addressing of, and to, settler-


colonial history and Indigenous possession” (91), That Deadman Dance complicates the haunted house trope. Scott reveals the novel itself as haunted space, exposing how the realist novel and its conventions have been complicit in silencing the voices of non-human matter and relegating the continuing impacts of settler colonial violence to a past that is severed from the present and the future. At the same time, he reshapes the novel so that it becomes a space where repressed knowledge can return to presence. Noongar language and ontology re-emerge within this space, unsettling settler colonial notions of home and possession by highlighting the agency of the nonhuman and the dependence of human habitation on nonhuman members of the land community. Through this ecospectral encounter, Scott not only reckons with the complexities of narrating home in postcolonial contexts; he expands notions of home as an exclusively human space, the “intimate shelter” and “private comfort” that notions of the uncanny and the haunted house typically take as their starting point (Vidler 17). Encouraging readers to reconceive rather than reconcile the violence of the repression of Noongar knowledge, Scott activates potential to imagine alternative models of inhabitance that reflect intimate connection to and responsibility for land as kin.

The Future Beckons: Dwelling with Ghosts

Scott puts ghosts into motion, and unlike novelists who seek to impose resolution by exorcising ghosts, Scott strives to create an ending for the novel that allows ghosts to remain and help design the future. Returning to distinctions between trauma and haunt-ing illuminates Scott’s narrative tactics. Cathy Caruth clarifies that traumatic memories return “insistent and unchanged” because they have never “been fully integrated into understanding” or into “a completed story of the past” and as a result, “trauma thus re-quires integration, both for the sake of testimony and the sake of cure” (153). Contrary to trauma theory’s focus on integration, Gordon’s theory of spectrality seeks to disrupt existing paradigms; instead of closing the door on the past and confining the specter within existing domains of knowledge, she urges thought to follow the ghost across constructions of past and future so that haunting enables alternative possibilities; in her words “haunting, unlike trauma is distinctive for producing a something-to-be-done” (xVi). In the case of the novel, narrating repressed Noongar knowledge does not serve to complete the story of the past; it illuminates a something-to-be-done. Anne Brewster invites Scott to discuss the novel’s ending, which she admits to reading “as tragic, as filled with despair” (Brewster, Interview with Kim Scott 231). Scott returns repeatedly to this point, attempting to elucidate his hopes for creating an ending, and a novel, that neither conforms to the traditional historical script of defeat and victimization nor sim-ply inverts that trajectory by supplying an upbeat closure. Instead, he acknowledges a desire to “set up all sorts of resonances to do with possibility and loss” and to challenge readers to take up these echoes in a way that makes “the end, the last page […] not the end. There are possibilities still” (232). Following Scott’s encouragement to embrace the possibilities, the novel can be read not as an effort to resolve the past but as an invitation to venture forward in the company of ghosts.

The closing of the novel recounts the settlers turning their faces away from Bobby’s performance through which he is trying to communicate his understanding of land and his conviction that “you need to be inside the sound and spirit of it to live here prop-erly” (349). With this closing, Scott implores readers to imagine and mourn what could

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have been if settlers had cultivated a practice of listening and had accepted the message Bobby offered through his performance. However, this scene is not the end in multiple senses. Although it appears as the final image, the novel refuses strict chronology and an older version of Bobby appears throughout the novel, continuing to tell stories to Noongar friends and to tourists. Scott indicates that Old Bobby’s appearance as a sto-ryteller throughout the non-linear novel holds out important hope for the possibility of counter-narrative (Brewster, Interview with Kim Scott 233). For example, Old Bobby continues to recount the story of the friendship of Dr. Cross and Wunyeran, refusing to let Wunyeran be erased and imagining a day when he will be memorialized alongside Dr. Cross (71), prompting readers to join him in keeping stories in motion and using them to imagine change in ways that extend beyond the pages of the novel.

Instead of leaving readers with an ending that neatly compartmentalizes the past and absolves us of the need to act, that makes recognition of past dispossession “the end,” Scott’s novel delivers a challenge: if we can feel the tragic failure of the past in the present, can that serve as a starting point and an inspiration to act in our world to make it otherwise? Scott’s imperative to follow resonances rather than seek resolution suggests that there are many possible directions, and it would be a mistake to insist on a single path. At this stage, I will take the opportunity to trace one possible direction: the way the novel resonates with discourses of land reform. Scott grants the importance of “land, giving back land” that has been a central focus in healing relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians (Romei), but he also implies that models of social justice that stop at the return of land miss an opportunity for a more radical engagement with the past and overlook the advantages of a more comprehensive re-evaluation of conceptions of land as property. In other words, current practice operates in the mode of trauma, incorporating Noongar knowledge into existing epistemologies and listening to the voices of ghosts in an effort to resolve the violent past. The 1992 Mabo decision and 1993 Native Title Act provide the legal framework for the return of land; while Indigenous knowledge does influence legal decisions – for example, a justice in a recent mining case cited Yindjibarndi custom of requiring strangers to request per-mission of elders to enter and engage in activity on land as a determining factor in his decision (Gray) – the legal framework preserves paradigms of property. On the other hand, the ecospectral approach that Scott develops transforms the terrain of the novel, and in doing so, reveals ways that haunting could impact other discourses; national legal frameworks could be reshaped to reflect Noongar understandings of country and imag-ine modes of inhabitance that respect human dependencies on and responsibilities to nonhuman matter.

At the same time that legal frameworks continue to rely on Western conceptions of inert matter, international academic discourses such as ecocriticism, environmental philosophy, and new materialisms are developing radical engagements with nonhuman matter. Some scholars such as Val Plumwood and Deborah Bird Rose have pointed to ways that Indigenous Australian knowledge might travel beyond local communities to provide models of social and environmental justice based on mutual caring. Rose argues that Indigenous conceptions of country might support such an ethic: “Multispecies kin groups are the result of creation […]. Within these country-based multispecies families, there is a moral proposition that is not so much a rule as a statement of how life works: a country and its living beings take care of their own” (18). Scott’s novel resonates with


such discourses, sharing Noongar knowledge with readers beyond the local community and inviting those readers to become attuned to the nonhuman voices of country which could enable alternative modes of inhabitance. However, Scott’s work and his model of expanding circles also carries the reminder that such discourses must be wary of reinscribing the centrality of Western languages and knowledges by presenting Indigenous knowledge as supplement or by appropriating knowledge in ways that erase Indigenous communities as keepers of stories. Scott’s strategy of prioritizing possibilities rather than creating closure confirms his commitment to stories and knowledge as growing, living things and supports his conception of the writer as a conduit that can reach across spatial and temporal divides; operating from this orientation, Scott relinquishes the authority to impose the end and beckons readers to join him in listening to recov-ered voices and working in concert with them to compose more equitable futures.

Laura A. White

Middle Tennessee State University

W orks Cited

aBrahaM, Nicolas, and Maria torok. The Shell and the Kernel. Trans. Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.BreWster, Anne. “Whiteness and Indigenous Sovereignty in Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance.” Journal of the European Association of Studies on Australia 2.2 (2011): 60-71.

—. “Can You Anchor a Shimmering Nation State via Regional Indigenous Roots?” Interview with Kim Scott. Cultural Studies Review 18.1 (2012): 228-46.

caruth, Cathy. Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.coloMBa, Caterina. “History as Sharing Stories: Crossing the Cultural Divide through Kim Scott’s

Fiction.” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 17.2 (2011): 39-56.crouch, David. “National Hauntings: The Architecture of Australian Ghost Stories.” Journal of the

Association for the Study of Australian Literature (2007): 94-105.daVis, Colin. “État Présent: Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms.” The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and

Haunting in Contemporary Critical Theory. Ed. Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. 53-60.

derrida, Jacques, and Bernard stieGler. “Spectrographies.” The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Critical Theory. Ed. Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. 37-51.

Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008.

Gray, Darren. “Traditional Owners Win Native Title Fight with Fortescue.” Sydney Morning Herald. 20 July 2017. <https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/native-title-win-for-wa-fortescue-land-20170720-gxf78m.html>. Consulted 20 June 2018.

Griffiths, Michael R. “Winton’s Spectralities or What Haunts Cloudstreet?” Tim Winton: Critical Essays. Ed. Lyn McCredden and Nathanael O’Reilly. Perth: U of Western Australia Publishing, 2014. 75-95.

huGGan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. New York: Routledge, 2001.kennedy, Rosanne. “Orbits, Mobilities, Scales: Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance as Transcultural

Remembrance.” Australian Humanities Review 59 (2016): 114-35.—. “Multidirectional Eco-memory in an Era of Extinction.” The Routledge Companion to the Environmental

Humanities. Ed. Ursula Heise, Jon Christensen and Michelle Niemann. New York: Routledge, 2017. 268-77.

kosseW, Sue. “Recovering the Past: Entangled Histories in Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance.” Decolonizing the Landscape: Indigenous Cultures in Australia. Ed. Beate Neumeier and Kay Schaffer. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014. 169-82.

lines, William J. Taming the Great South Land: A History of the Conquest of Nature in Australia. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1999.

nGuGi wa Thiongo. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1986.

nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011.

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Pan Macmillan Australia. “Kim Scott.” <https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/author/kim-scott/>. Consulted 20 June 2018.

pluMWood, Val. “Decolonizing Relationships with Nature.” Decolonizing Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Post-colonial Era. Ed. William M. Adams and Martin Mulligan. New York: Earthscan, 2003. 51-78.

radWay, Janice. “Foreword.” Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Avery Gordon. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. Vii-xiii.

roMei, Stephen. “Forever Beginning.” The Australian 22 July 2017. <https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/aboriginal-identity-in-the-here-and-now-in-kim-scotts-novel-taboo/news-story/ef04673ac974460c91ecffd41f874290>. Consulted 20 June 2018.

rose, Deborah Bird. Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2011.said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994.scott, Kim. “A Noongar Voice, An Anomalous History.” Westerly 53 (2008): 93-106.—. That Deadman Dance. 2010. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.—. “From Drill to Dance.” Decolonizing the Landscape: Indigenous Cultures in Australia. Ed. Beate Neumeier

and Kay Schaffer. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014. 3-22.scott, Kim, and Hazel BroWn. Kayang and Me. Fremantle Arts Centre P, 2005.Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1992.

Unsettling Oceania, 250 Years Later

Introduction

This issue is timed for the 250th anniversary of Captain James Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific in search of terra australis incognita in 1768. Several events have been organised to mark this anniversary, including the “Oceania” exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, which addresses the question of how the Pacific has been perceived over time. This major exhibition is worth reflecting on to see what bearings it can offer us as we navigate the history and concepts linked to Oceania. The “Oceania” exhibition opened in September 2018, displaying varied art works from the Pacific. (As it happens the Royal Academy was founded the same year as that first voyage, making it a particularly relevant site for the exhibition.) The display will open in March 2019 at the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, a Paris museum dedicated to Indigenous arts and cultures of Africa, Oceania, Asia, and the Americas. This is a timely exhibition, long in preparation,1 that foregrounds the culture and arts of Indigenous peoples from the Pacific, giving them prime location in two European capital cities of nations that are former colonisers. On 24 September, an official opening ceremony took place in Lon-don, with a ceremonial welcome by Ngāti Rānana (the “London tribe,” Rānana being the Māori transliteration for London) representing the Royal Academy. Other countries of Oceania also performed outside the building. A private blessing of the items on dis-play, many of which are considered taonga (treasures) by the people they come from, was conducted in the exhibition galleries.2

Earlier in the year, the British Library put on an exhibition devoted to Captain Cook’s voyages. The editors of the catalogue recall Cook’s long-lasting status as a hero of Empire, before pointing out that “As the narrative of Europe’s ‘discovery’ became increasingly challenged, greater interest was taken in the original human settlement of the Pacific” (Frame and Walker 12). A similar dynamic of reassessment characterises the Oceania exhibition: in a context in which the “project of ‘decolonisation’ […] defines and challenges our present epoch,” the exhibition was an occasion for renewed dis-cussions about “the complex modernities of Indigenous people’s encounters with the West” (Brunt and Thomas 27, 23). The exhibition sheds a nuanced light on the notion of decolonisation.3 The Pacific culture of gift-giving, in particular, complicates the pres-ence of Indigenous objects in Western collections and shows that they are the sign of

1. The Oceania project that took place in Wellington in 2011 simultaneously at the City Gallery and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa may be seen as a precursor to the London 2018 Oceania exhibition. See the catalogue, Oceania: Imagining the Pacific.

2. See the coverage of the event in the Guardian <https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/sep/07/royal-academy-arts-oceania-exhibition-south-pacific>, in the New Zealand Herald <https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12130951>, and the page on the Royal Academy of Arts website <https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/oceania>.

3. In contrast to a balanced approach of the complex notion of decolonisation, a manifesto signed by 80 French intellectuals and published on 28 November 2018 in Le Point denounces decolonisation as a “hegemonic strategy” that reactivates the divisive notion of race in the name of emancipation and whose proponents refuse to engage in contradictory debate. This “manifesto” can only be seen as the expression of another conspiracy theory, as Jean-Marc Moura pointed out during a seminar on Walter Mignolo’s works held at University Paris Nanterre on 10 December 2018. See the manifesto at <https://www.lepoint.fr/politique/le-decolonialisme-une-strategie-hegemonique-l-appel-

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elaborate exchanges. In this vein, the multi-media installation artist Lisa Reihana, in In Pursuit of Venus, a major work that is part of the Oceania exhibition, revisits “Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique,” an 1804-05 decorative wallpaper by Josef Dufour and Jean-Gabriel Charvet, that represents a number of idealised, exotic scenes of encoun-ter between Europeans and Oceanian peoples. Her work, a video that unrolls on a wide screen and mixes set backdrops and cinematic animation, explores the complexity of viewpoint, as Reihana explains: “Well aware of the slippery nature of viewpoints and truth, I deliberately included scenes that show the risks of encounter and cultural conflicts” (16). It is through such historical objects as those presented in the Oceania exhibition, or revisited in Reihana’s video installation, the knowledge of their history, and a critical perspective on them, that a way into the future can be more clearly traced. As Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy write in their report on the restitution of art ob-jects to Benin by the French government, thinking through the process of restitution, as an act of decolonisation, implies much more than an exploration of the past; it is first and foremost about building bridges towards more equal relations in future, a gesture guided by dialogue, polyphony and exchange.4

On the occasion of the official opening of the Oceania exhibition, Hon. Carmel Sepuloni, New Zealand’s Associate Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage, and for Pacific Peoples, observed that “The themes of the exhibition include journeying and encounters as well as contemporary issues for Pacific nations such as climate change, regional security and sustainable development.”5 Considering Oceanian culture is in-deed an opportunity to reflect on journeys and encounter, movement and migration, in the past and in our times, a reflection that is inseparable from one on our relation to the ocean and, more at large, to the natural environment. When a beluga whale, an Arctic species, was spotted in the Thames near Gravesend, east of London, the day of the opening ceremony of the Oceania exhibition, Sepuloni interpreted the coincidence as “a blessing.”6 This unprecedented event certainly acts as a reminder of the power of the whale as an animal that challenges our perception (see Huggan 2018), and more broadly, of the need to rethink our relationship with nature and with other species. The beluga whale had to be led out of the Thames estuary, as it was too disoriented to find its way, just as we humans are largely at a loss about our current environmental situation.

Earlier in the year, in July, a southern right whale spent a week in Wellington harbour, less than a kilometre as the crow flies from Parliament House. A Guardian article ob-ser-ved that such whales, known as tohora in New Zealand, used to be a common sight in Wellington harbour but were brought to the brink of extinction after 150 years of wha-

de-80-intellectuels-28-11-2018-2275104_20.php?fbclid=IwAR33knJqQJT331l-oUqLW9Bt2KoAYTorG-4wgu0KcjzE-jEBkteBUEPxcGnA>.

4. “Penser les restitutions implique pourtant bien davantage qu’une seule exploration du passé : il s’agit avant tout de batir des ponts vers des relations futures plus équitables. Guidé par le dialogue, la polyphonie et l’échange, le geste de la restitution ne saurait en outre etre considéré comme un acte dangereux d’assignation identitaire ou de cloisonnement territorial des biens culturels. Il invite tout au contraire a ouvrir la signification des objets, et a offrir a « l’universel » auquel ils sont si souvent associés en Europe la possibilité d’etre éprouvé ailleurs.”

See Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, Restituer le patrimoine africain : vers une nouvelle éthique relationnelle, a government-ordered report that was officially handed in to President Macron on 23 November 2018.

5. New Zealand Herald 24 September 2018, <https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid= 12130951>.

6. Hon. Carmel Sepuloni commented on the event at a reception in her honor at the residence of the New Zealand Ambassador to France in Paris on 26 September 2018. Warmest thanks to H.E. Jane Coombs for inviting me to join the reception.

Unsettling Oceania, 250 Years Later. Introduction77

ling.7 Like the Beluga whale in the Thames, the southern right whale that strayed into Wellington harbour was disoriented, yet stayed there for a week, “charming the locals,” until it swam away again. Straying or endangered whales remind us that the ocean, as part of our environment, binds all living species. As Lana Lopesi and Emma Ng point out, Te Moana Nui a Kiwa, “the great ocean of Kiwa, the legendary Polynesian explo-rer and guardian of the sea” in Māori (Keown 11), is traditionally a connector and an ancestor. Imperialism in the Moana, the ocean continent, however, created false divides between islands and separated peoples. But Moana peoples now play a part in drawing our attention to the unifying role of the ocean.8 And in the global age, the ocean conti-nent’s influence spreads well beyond Oceania.

***

Preparing a journal issue on Oceania is like casting a wide net and waiting to see what it brings in – the journal issue can accommodate a small sample, given the het-erogeneity of Oceanic cultures, but hopefully one that is evocative of the lively crea-tivity that is to be found out there. The term Oceania as it is used here needs further clarification, as it may encompass various elements. Overall it is more broadly used in French and other European languages than in English where “Pacific Islands” is the preferred contemporary appellation. Yet the term Oceania in English was reas-sessed and given a new turn in two landmark essays, “Towards a New Oceania” (1976) by the Samoan writer Albert Wendt, and “The Ocean in Us” (1997) by the Tongan anthropologist and writer Epeli Hau‘ofa. Wendt argued for “a quest […] for a new Oceania,” “a quest not for the revival of our past cultures but for the creation of new cultures which are free of the taint of colonialism and based firmly on our own pasts” (53). For Hau‘ofa, the appellation is meaningful as “‘Oceania’ denotes a sea of islands with their inhabitants” (32), thus drawing attention to the sea and its role as an ele-ment that binds, more than it separates, the various peoples that live there. The word is charged with a spirit of decolonisation through reassessment.

Oceania sometimes includes the island-continent of Australia, and such is the case in this issue. Oceania in this sense offers two seemingly opposed directions; one that draws attention to the centrality of the sea for Pacific Islanders, and emphasises the relations among them, looking outwards, and the other, in Australia, where the pull is inwards, towards the centre and the desert. Yet, due in particular to the historical links that bind them, the two directions are complementary.

In terms of cultural dynamics, mapping out the cultural life of Oceania implies deal-ing with both remarkable fluidity, but also the presence of a number of active centres, as Michelle Keown observes. She distinguishes between “relatively affluent metropolitan centres in the Pacific (such as Aotearoa New Zealand and Hawai‘i)” – and although her study does not include it, one could add Australia – that “have spawned a rich diversity of writers from various ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds,” and countries that “generally possess more fragile economies with far fewer resources for writing and pu-

7. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/06/frolicking-southern-right-whale-charms-new-zealand-ca-pital>.

8. See Lana Lopesi and Emma Ng, “The Pacific – Divider or Connector?” <https://www.bwb.co.nz/news/events/winter-series-pacific-%E2%80%93-divider-or-connector-lana-lopesi-and-emma-ng-conversation>.

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blishing.” She points out how the University of the South Pacific (USP), established in 1968 in Fiji, now with a dozen locations in Pacific Island countries, “has brought toge-ther Indigenous peoples from eleven former British colonies in the South Pacific” and has “served as an important locus of creativity for writers from these nations, fostering many key authors, publications, and writers’ collectives over the decades” (6). Wendt and Hau‘ofa were both involved in the activities of the USP. The University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG), which was founded in 1965 when the country was still under Australian administration, has played a similar role. These cultural centres generate a dynamic that shapes what Oceanic culture is about.

It has been argued that when people talk of Pacific Islands, they often actually refer essentially to Polynesia. The term refers to one of the three areas into which the Pacific was divided by the French explorer Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d’Urville in 1832, based on two different racial types: one found in Polynesia (“many islands”) and Mi-cronesia (“small islands”), and the other in Melanesia (“black islands”; see Keown 13-4). As Nicholas Thomas points out in Oceania: Imagining the Pacific, in recent years, Aotearoa New Zealand has played a key role as a cultural centre for the Pacific, but “Pacific” in this context often means essentially Polynesia, rather than Micronesia and Melanesia. Thomas quotes Hau‘ofa’s comment that one of the advantages of the Oceania Centre at the USP in Fiji is that it succeeded in bringing together Melanesians and Polynesians. Similarly, Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea acted “as a kind of counter-weight to Auckland” (51). Reuben Friend in the same book remarks: “In Aotearoa New Zealand we often refer to ‘the Pacific’ when really we mean Polynesia. In doing so, we privilege this most central region of Oceania of which we are the most southern constituents” (69). Six articles in this issue deal with the literature and culture of Australia; two of them consider Aotearoa New Zealand, and three others, some of the Pacific Islands that were historically integrated into their sphere of influence, whether in Polynesia (Sa-moa) or Melanesia (Fiji), as well as others beyond that, in Micronesia (Marshall Islands, Guam). This opening onto the Pacific that is not Australia or New Zealand and parts of Polynesia is an essential decentering of our perspective on “Oceania.”

In the introduction to The Novel in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific since 1950, Coral Ann Howells, Paul Sharrad and Gerry Turcotte adopt a more restric-tive definition of the term. They consider “the region loosely defined as Oceania” as the zone encompassing “at least three major distinct ethnic-linguistic groups (termed, in Eurocentric language, Melanesian, Polynesian, and Micronesian)” and observe that:

The South Pacific islands were never white settler colonies and some retained effective self-control throughout, while others still remained colonies long after their neighbours achieved independence. […] The emergence of fiction in English in this multilingual multiracial environment is largely tied to decolonization and, unlike earlier writing from other nations considered in this volume [Canada, New Zealand and Australia], dates mostly from the 1960s. (8)

In this context, they argue, “the transnational takes over from the national and colonial as a space of two-way interaction,” as “literary circuits spread into Oceania” (8, 10). The transnational dimension of the literatures of Pacific Islands (including New Zealand) is one of the key aspects of the second part of this issue on “Unsettling Oceania.” Eva-Marie Kröller, in the same book, concludes that the South Pacific Islands, in their utter diversity, may be seen as “a paradigm for the kind of plurality that the national histories


considered here [i.e. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacific] have strug-gled to accommodate” (559). Kröller’s proposal may be especially relevant to the space that is considered in this issue as Oceania.

More broadly, the issue addresses the multifaceted process of re-imagining Oceania in the contemporary period of decolonisation. The works studied here look simulta-neously towards the future and back in time towards the colonial period and the mythical times before that. Australian literature is thus “recurrently afflicted [...] by some deep-seated sense of ontological dis-ease,” as it continues to free itself from residual colonial ideologies, to reimagine “a nation of self-mythologized ‘unsettled settlers’” (Huggan Viii, xi). In contemporary New Zealand literature, “writers go back to the colonial past for their subject matter but as a way of reinventing literature or unsettling history, not as a homage or a record but as a source of something new and often disquieting” (Stafford and Williams 941). Indigenous Pacific literatures in English emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in a period of worldwide decolonisation and civil rights protest. While many Pacific writers draw on Indigenous traditions, much contemporary Pacific writing is still engaged with colonialism and its legacies (Keown 7).

The phrase “Unsettling Oceania,” playing on the words settling and unsettling, embraces a contemporary movement in postcolonial studies that consists in question-ing assumptions that are part of settler societies and cultures. The pun is particularly apt in former settler colonies such as Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Australia.9 The focus shifts always more closely towards Indigenous concerns while the notion of decolonisation underlies the image of unsettlement to various degrees. In this view the theoretical concept of “delinking” formulated by Walter Mignolo is quite useful here. It argues that a decolonisation of culture and epistemology is a necessary condi-tion to a non-Eurocentered worldview, which itself is the accepted basis of modern rationality. Mignolo’s thesis is that the emergence of a body-politic (to do with race, gender and sexuality) and a geo-politic body of knowledge (to do with subjectivity and knowledge) “introduced a fracture in the hegemony of the theo- and the ego-politics of knowledge, the two standard frames of the colonization of the souls and the minds since the Renaissance […]” (484). According to Mignolo, geo-politics of knowledge “is affirmed as the re-emergence of the reason that has been denied a reason […] by the rhetoric of Christianization, civilization, progress, development, marker democracy” that was imposed during Western imperial and capitalist expansion (462, 463). Geo- and body-politics of knowledge are thus seen as “alternatives to the hegemony and domi-nance of the theo- and ego-politics organizing the modern / colonial world (that is, […] Europe and the US in their relations of conflict and domination framed by colonial and imperial differences)” (499). Mignolo’s ideas tie in with Michelle Keown’s comment that

9. To quote a few examples: Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic, a collection of essays edited by Cynthia Sugars and Gerry Turcotte, puns on the word “settle” to allude to settlers’ guilt in Canada. Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-Up Call, by Arthur Manuel and Grand Chief Ronald M. Derrickson, two First Nations lead-ers, calls for action to support Indigenous sovereignty, contesting the claim of settlers to the land. In Violence Against Indigenous Women: Literature, Activism, Resistance, Allison Hargreaves, who calls herself “an allied settler scholar,” proposes to study Canadian Indigenous women’s literature and “its capacity to unsettle commonplace settler assumptions about violence and resistance” as well as its role in “sustaining Indigenous communities, readerships, and futures” (x, 19). Rebecca Rice, in Unsettling: Art and the New Zealand Wars, “revisit[s] institutional practices of collecting and exhibiting, past and present, to reflect upon the histories of remembering and forgetting embodied by art from the time of the New Zealand War” (publisher’s description online). The theme of the December 2018 conference of the International Australian Studies Association (InASA) in Brisbane is “Unsettling Australia.” And so on.

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the “imaginative literature of the Pacific transforms and contests existing narratives of history and culture, particularly those produced by the West” (10). Whether the essays presented here deal with economic and political decolonisation (following military colo-nisation or the conducting of nuclear experiments for instance) or the decolonisation of cultural representations, all of the authors studied at some stage also put the ques-tion of decolonisation in terms of knowledge and epistemology and point out the need to uphold a perception situated through geo-politics and the racialised body.

The five essays in the second part deal with the Pacific Islands (including Aotearoa New Zealand), where the ocean plays a central role in the definition of a changing identity, both local and global.10 It is also the case that, as Melissa Kennedy rightly observes, “As a site significantly shaped by migration, indigenous rights, finance, trade and debt, global warming, resource extraction, and nuclear testing, the Pacific registers and reflects with great sensitivity the force of free-market neoliberal globalization, as well as its malcontents” (908).

Kara Hisatake, in “Revising the Settler Colonial Story in Albert Wendt’s Black Rain-bow,” argues that Wendt’s dystopian novel is about storytelling and emphasises read-ing as a decolonial method. The novel revisits the links between nation and narra-tion, addressing the violence of New Zealand’s settler colonialism, in contrast with the constructivism of social realist settler novels. It is part of a process of decolonising (his)stories through settler colonial critique and a reassertion of the value of whakapapa, or indigenous genealogy, as a way to incorporate different epistemologies. Mixed identity is thus reframed as contemporary Indigenous Pacific identity.

In “The Nuclear Uncanny in Oceania: James George’s Ocean Road,” Jessica Hur-ley considers that indigenous epistemologies are not at odds with the nuclear age but embrace it in their worldview. She thus analyses Māori author James George’s 2006 novel Ocean Roads to show how the nuclear uncanny is integrated into the Māori heimlich whakapapa model of genealogy and kinship. This participates in a process of resistance to colonialism in which history is fully integrated, rather than rejected, from a Māori standpoint for decolonisation.

Valérie Baisnée, in “‘I’m Niu Voices’: Selina Tusitala Marsh’s Re-Imagining of a Pan Pacific Space,” analyses how the poet Selina Tusitala Marsh, in her 2009 collection Fast Talking PI, reconsiders Pacific Island identity in terms of diversity and hybridity, going against stereotypes and celebrating multiplicity. Baisnée’s article illustrates aspects of what Michelle Keown identifies as “strong filial connections between Indigenous Pacif-ic peoples from various ethnic backgrounds” in Aotearoa New Zealand, and also how “many of the ‘second generation’ Pacific writers who have emerged since the 1990s have drawn inspiration from – and in some cases reacted against – the work of first-generation writers such as […] Albert Wendt […]” (Keown 9). It further illustrates how the “Pacific” identity Marsh describes means essentially Polynesian and New Zealand.

Marlo Starr, in “Paradise and Apocalypse: Critiques of Nuclear Imperialism in Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s Iep Jaltok,” focuses on Marshallese poet-activist Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s first collection, Iep Jaltok (2017), to address the United States’ militarisation of the Pacific Islands. Starr illuminates how the poet evokes the material and psychic impacts of the militarisation of the Pacific, a space that the US wrongly perceives as

10. The other six articles of the issue, on Australian literature, are introduced separately in the first part.


vacant, reveal-ing from an intimate, personal viewpoint a structure of environmental violence that is part of a global whole.

Otto Heim’s “How (not) to Globalize Oceania: Ecology and Politics in Contem-porary Pacific Island Performance Arts” also considers slow violence by looking at a range of performance arts (that include performance poetry). Heim starts by retracing the impact of colonisation on the ecology of Oceania, focusing on selected key events, and replacing it in the broader frame of global ecological changes. He then studies two geo-cultural areas and two cases of how artists respond to ecological colonisation, first by looking at Guam and the place of performance of songs and dances, mainly Craig Santos Perez’s experimental poetry of protest against US military expansion in the several volumes of the long poem from unincorporated territory. The second case study comes out of Fiji, where concern about sustainable development is manifest and has shaped a number of artistic projects and festivals. Heim also points out the role of the Oceania Centre for Arts, Culture and Pacific Studies and of the University of the South Pacific. He focuses on Moana: The Rising of the Sea, a 2013 show written and directed by Vilsoni Hereniko in which Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s poetry figures prominently. Heim concludes that such activist art is part of democratic politics at both the local and the global levels, and foregrounds Indigenous Pacific values and practices.

Christine lorre-Johnston11

University Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, THALIM

W orks Cited

Brunt, Peter, and Nicholas thoMas, ed. Oceania. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2018.fraMe, William, with Laura Walker. James Cook: The Voyages. London: British Library, 2018.hoWells, Coral Ann, Paul sharrad, and Gerry turcotte. Introduction. The Novel in Australia, Canada,

New Zealand, and the South Pacific since 1950. Ed. Coral Ann Howells, Paul Sharrad, and Gerry Turcotte. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017. 1-10.

huGGan, Graham. Australian Literature: Postcolonialism, Racism, Transnationalism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.

—. Colonialism, Culture, Whales: The Cetacean Quartet. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.harGreaVes, Allison. Violence Against Indigenous Women: Literature, Activism, Resistance. Waterloo: Wilfrid

Laurier UP, 2017.hau‘ofa, Epeli. We Are the Ocean: Selected Works. Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P, 2008.kennedy, Melissa. Introduction. All that Glitters Is Not Gold: Pacific Critiques of Globalization. Ed. Melissa

Kennedy and Janet Wilson. Spec. issue of Interventions. 19:7 (2017): 907-13. keoWn, Michele. Pacific Islands Writing: The Postcolonial Literatures of Aotearoa/New Zealand and Oceania.

Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.kröller, Eva-Marie. “Literary Histories.” The Novel in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South

Pacific since 1950. Ed. Coral Ann Howells, Paul Sharrad, and Gerry Turcotte. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017. p. 544-59.

Manuel, Arthur, and Grand Chief Ronald M. derrickson. Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-Up Call. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2015.

MiGnolo, Walter. “DELINKING: The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality.” Cultural Studies 21:2 (2007): 449-514.

Oceania: Imagining the Pacific. Wellington: City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi, 2011.reihana, Lisa. In Pursuit of Venus. Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2015.rice, Rebecca. Unsettling: Art and the New Zealand Wars. Gordon H. Brown lecture, 14. Wellington: Art

History, Victoria U, 2015.

11. I am grateful to Paul Sharrad for his feedback on this text.

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sarr, Felwine, and Bénédicte saVoy. Restituer le patrimoine africain : vers une nouvelle éthique relationnelle. November 2018. <https://bj.ambafrance.org/Telecharger-l-integralite-du-Rapport-Sarr-Savoy-sur-la-restitution-du>.

suGars, Cynthia, and Gerry turcotte, eds. Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2009.

stafford, Jane, and Mark WilliaMs. The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature. Auckland: Auckland UP, 2012.

Wendt, Albert. “Towards a New Oceania.” Mana Review 1.1 (1976): 49-60.

Revising the Settler Colonial Story

in Albert Wendt’s Black Rainbow

Albert Wendt’s Black Rainbow (1992) has been read as an example of a postcolonial and postmodern novel by most literary scholars, as it is a narrative influenced by decons-tructionist thinkers and located in New Zealand’s colonial history. However, I argue that

the novel must also be understood as settler colonial critique, which interrupts the settler story of conquest, settlement, and Indigenous erasure. Intervening in the stories of successful white settlement that deny a national history of colonial violence, Black Rainbow shatters the teleological presumption of a settler future. Wendt’s novel offers a decolonizing method of reading, which emphasizes re-readings, revisions, and choice, as well as Māori, Pacific Islander, and Pākehā solidarity.

Albert Wendt’s Black Rainbow (1992) imagines a dystopian Aotearoa New Zealand with a totalitarian government called the Tribunal. The Tribunal, Elizabeth DeLoughrey highlights, is a reflection of the Waitangi Tribunal hearings process, which investigates Crown inconsistencies in honoring the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi with its Māori Treaty partners, especially over land claims (204).1 The Tribunal in the novel attempts to erase New Zealand’s history of colonial violence and the presence of Māori people, espous- ing a sanitized national narrative that does not recognize indigeneity. However, the middle-aged protagonist, unnamed for most of the novel, reveals a method for count-ering this dystopian version of history. In a journey that takes him through the New Zealand landscape and literature, he offers a re-reading that foregrounds Māori and Pacific Islander presence on the land and within literature and history. The novel, I argue, disrupts the story of settler colonialism to show that reading is one method of decolonization. Reading against the grain, often in resistant and rebellious ways, unsettles the grip of the settler colonial present and the past the Tribunal attempts so hard to deny. As part of this unsettling, Wendt also demonstrates that there is no “pure” indigeneity or Indigenous forms, but as both protagonist and reader engage in reading and revising, we come to understand that indigeneity is open to mixture and adaptation. In doing so, Black Rainbow remembers the multiple literatures and histories that make up New Zealand to envision a decolonized Aotearoa.

Declaring that “[h]istory is a curse” from which “[they] must be free” (21), the Tribunal calls upon the protagonist to confess his personal history. Through “Dehistorying,” a process in which the government is described to “assum[e] total responsibility for his history and the crimes and sins of the past,” the protagonist becomes an “ideal citizen” (33). He is given a piece of paper known as a “Reference,” and in it the Tribunal declares that “[n]othing is to be denied to him,” for “he is now of [the State], forever” (33). Yet the Tribunal cannot escape the past that they try to erase in the Dehistorying process.

1. The Treaty of Waitangi (1840) was a contract between British settlers and many Māori tribes that established British annexation, but which often rendered void Māori rights. The Tribunal was established in 1975 to process land alienation claims as the government began to privatize national resources. Māori claims brought to the Tribunal often utilized whakapapa, a performative genealogy that is an Indigenous epistemology, to counter settler land claims (see DeLoughrey 164-6).

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The protagonist becomes a full citizen through being, in the Tribunal’s words, “free of our past, our guilt” (33). This can be understood by the way in which Wendt points to the violence of New Zealand’s settler colonialism, a violence that haunts the national past. In the novel’s vision of the Tribunal, Māori are notably absent from the land and Tribunal arbiters declare that citizens are absolved of a shameful national past and must live in “the present, the eternal instant” (28). For all those affected by settler violence, this vision dangerously suggests that forgetting the past solves the problems of the past.

Black Rainbow, at its core, is about storytelling. Much scholarly attention focuses on the novel as postmodern or on how it takes postmodernism into a postcolonial context. A story about other stories, the novel’s intertextuality ends up emphasizing how stories are constructed. Storytelling and its techniques have been Wendt’s preoccupation and in Black Rainbow he specifically notes that his focus is the construction of history in New Zealand by colonizers (Ellis, “The Techniques” 79-80). The Tribunal’s Dehistorying process deploys a narration of the nation to erase past violence, and the Tribunal’s total narrative control means that the protagonist is limited in his attempts at subversive or revisionist storytelling. The supposedly ordinary and harmless bank clerk, sent on a government-sanctioned Quest to search for and reunite with his wife and children, is directed in a Tribunal story, contained, controlled, and televised as a national heroic journey. Stressing the performance of power, Wendt’s capitalization of Tribunal, Quest, Dehistorying, and Reference indicate the extent of the Tribunal’s narrative control.2 Wendt brings to life a version of the nation that refuses to wrestle with an essential aspect of the history of its founding: settler colonialism and its contemporary ongoing effects. The narrative of the settler colonial nation denies not only Indigenous history but also the violence of settlement through Indigenous containment and elimination. The novel, as I will show, stresses the importance of reading, interpretation, and the revision process for decolonizing (his)stories.

Disrupting the Settler Story

Black Rainbow is often designated as postcolonial for its attention to the colonization of Aotearoa New Zealand, and postmodern for its self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and pastiche. Although the postcolonial and postmodern lenses are useful in understanding the novel, settler colonial critique may be more apt.3 Wendt himself debunks postmod-ernism, claiming that many of its concepts can be traced to Indigenous Pacific oral and philosophical traditions and that, as Juniper Ellis points out, “Polynesian practices anti-cipate postmodernism” (“A Postmodernism” 104). Techniques he deploys in the novel, such as calling attention to the constructive nature of narrative, reflect fagogo, Samoan storytelling with a set form that includes a flexibility allowing the storyteller to weave in tangents and subplots (Ellis, “The Techniques” 83). A break from the social realism associated with white settler nationalism, Black Rainbow demonstrates a commitment to

2. I retain Wendt’s capitalization throughout.3. For more on Black Rainbow as postmodern or resonating with poststructuralist theories, see Juniper Ellis’s “A

Postmodernism of Resistance” (1994), Paul Sharrad’s Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature (2003), Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s Routes and Roots (2007). Most critics do not dispute Wendt’s use of postmodernism and often add that he brings a postco-lonial perspective; DeLoughrey differs in that she claims that he “ultimately affirms a localized and corporeal definition of place in the wake of globalized, postmodern, and corporate hegemonies” (201).

Revising the Settler Colonial Story in Albert Wendt’s Black Rainbow85

settler colonial critique and the endurance of Indigenous epistemologies of genealogi-cal continuity.4

Wendt enables a counter-reading of nation, literature, and Indigenous identity through the protagonist’s globalized and urbanized Indigenous identity. As critics like Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Paul Sharrad have noted, mixed heritage can undermine Indigenous claims to land from the perspective of postmodernism and social construc-tivism.5 Heritage, through the lens of settler colonial blood quantum policies, becomes one way of determining what counts as authentically Indigenous, and therefore restricts land claims. The novel’s protagonist might be mixed, but Wendt suggests that this iden-tity, rather than undermining Indigenous claims, must also be understood as a reframing of contemporary Indigenous Pacific identity. To think otherwise would mean falling into the settler logic of blood quantum, in which the only “true” Indigenous are those with undiluted, pure blood; anyone else becomes assimilated into white culture. Such settler notions do not account for the capaciousness of Indigenous genealogies.

Settler colonialism, after all, is premised on displacing or replacing Indigenous peoples from the land and making settlers “native”; Patrick Wolfe famously emphasized that this definition is the logic of Indigenous elimination, according to which “coloni-zers come to stay – invasion is a structure not an event.” (2) This points to how set-tler colonialism is ongoing, as settlers continue to dispossess and maintain Indigenous territory. There is no voyage home for settlers. The logic of elimination and exclusion frames the structure of settler colonialism and its everyday effects. Reading Patrick Wolfe, Iyko Day writes that the logic of exclusion includes practices of segregation, police brutality, and detention – maintaining control over an Indigenous population through exclusionary measures. The logic of elimination is genocide, whether through killing or assimilation. As Day argues, “[e]xclusion and elimination are not discrete logics but operate on a moving spectrum of biological violence” (25). Storytelling is central to settler colonial logic of elimination, and according to Lorenzo Veracini, the story the settler tells helps to bury the history of violence. The story of settler colonialism is a tel-eological linear narrative of “travel penetration into the interior, settlement, endurance, and success” (98). An “irreversible transformation” from travel to settler success (98), the settler colonial story conveys the settler’s aim to live in the triumphant present that denies Indigenous peoples’ struggles for sovereignty, since recognizing their struggles would be equivalent to going back to a time before settler success. The settler narrative is a pervasive form of science fiction, in which “the future [i]s an extension of a settler colonial past” (102).6 Black Rainbow, however, resists this science fiction trope.

4. See Ellis’s “A Postmodernism of Resistance” on examining Wendt’s “social realist” works in the light of the post-modernism of Black Rainbow. DeLoughrey also notes that “[t]he realist novel in Aotearoa / New Zealand has a particular relationship to white-settler nation-building. As the first Samoan writer to rescript native literary and national identity in Aotearoa / New Zealand, Wendt cannot afford to uphold the realist novel if he is simultaneously to situate native agency outside the boundaries of the homogenizing nation-state” (225). See Michelle Keown’s Pacific Islands Writing (2007) for more on settler literary nationalism.

5. DeLoughrey writes that “in some parts of Oceania, claiming multicultural antecedents may undermine Indigenous claims to ancestral land. Since most settler nation-states require some type of blood quantum to authenticate identity, destabilizing native ancestry has significant material consequences” (198); Sharrad points to the postmodern dilemma of constructs – “if everything is a construct of textual surfaces, then identity politics and minority claims to authority are undermined” (206).

6. See John Rieder’s Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (2008) for more on colonialism as foundational to science fiction.

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The novel questions the legitimacy of settler colonialism for New Zealand’s present, challenging settlers’ temporality. While on the surface Black Rainbow projects itself into a science fictional future that is an extension of the settler colonial past, the novel does not allow this past to determine its plot. The Tribunal’s restrictions on history mean that there is no direct settler colonial story of conquest told; however, there are many indirect signs of this story. Seeing Polynesian street kids, the protagonist’s companion is frightened, saying that they “refus[e] to be like us, be law-abiding citizens” (Wendt, Black Rainbow 27). In her perspective, because “[n]o one can reform them” they are put into “reordinarination centres but come right back to the streets. Must be in their blood” (27). Reordinarination suggests reeducation as well as making citizens “ordinary” – a gloss for inhabiting a white settler worldview with appropriately white ways of behav-ing. Later in the novel when the protagonist attacks hunters who try to kill him during his Quest, they cry out “you’re still a savage” (98, emphasis mine). In another scene, the members of the Tribunal insist that the “savages who once lived” at Maungakiekie (the Māori name for One Tree Hill, as Wendt reminds readers) “were meateaters too” who “were eaten by other meateaters” (16). These many allusions to savage behavior mean that history is still present; this settler story places indigeneity temporally behind – Māori and other Pacific Islanders are seen as uncivilized, while white settlers progress into modernity. As Wendt makes clear, reordinarination helps white settlers believe they have brought Polynesians into modernity, yet it is the white settlers who cannot forget the latent tropes of savagery and cannibalism. The Dehistorying of the nation only temporarily keeps settler anxieties at bay before the settler story, which traps the Indigenous in an earlier time and is rife with stereotypes, returns to the fore.

The protagonist is told a more complete version of national history during the Quest for his family, when he meets three young urban Tangata Māori or Indigenous Māori on the streets and they reveal to him that they are the Tangata Moni, the “True Ones”: “Over the long stretch of otherworlder oppression and arrogance, the Tangata Māori, our pre-otherworlder ancestors, were nearly all erased, physically and culturally […] further erased through intermarriage and reordinarination [they] merged with our sisters and brothers from the Islands who were being reordinarinised, and became the Tangata Moni, the True People” (157-8).7 Tangata Moni also include “Pakeha / palagi, who saw the injustice in reordinarination” (158). The name Tangata Moni, therefore, designates the descendants of Māori, Pacific Islanders, and Pākehā who survived the onslaught from the otherworlders, their word for settlers. The name “otherworlders” points to foreign invasion and settlement, while the “True Ones” remind readers that solidarity with Māori self-determination is possible. The young men tell the protag-onist that multinational corporations, Tribunals, and reordinarination all represented methods of elimination directed at anyone “who challenged the system” (158). In this history of resistance, Wendt refuses to create binaries of Māori or Pākehā (or native / settler), and this political unification against the Tribunal results in the mixing of their Tangata Moni descendants. Their mixed ancestry highlights “the contingency of indig-eneity as well as its regional and global histories” (DeLoughrey 217). Although critics

7. DeLoughrey notes that “moni” means “truth” in Samoan and a transliteration of “money” in Māori, leading her to conclude that “Wendt seems to be invoking not only the ways in which native subjects are falsely interpellated by the subjugations of transnational capital, but he is also gesturing to how the treaty claims process has instituted a legal exchange of history for capital” (221).


like DeLoughrey, Ellis, Sharrad, and Michelle Keown understand this mixed heritage as a form of survival for the urbanized, globalized indigenous peoples subject to colonial assimilation, they consider it a condition of postcolonialism rather than one of settler colonialism. Understanding the mixed heritage of the Tangata Moni points to a form of Indigenous survival under settler colonialism and recognizes the logic of elimination. In Black Rainbow, displacing and replacing Indigenous peoples takes the form of outright elimination – genocide – alongside assimilation. Contrary to the blank national history told by the Tribunal, New Zealand history unfolds from the narrative told by the three youths who describe it from the Tangata Moni perspective rather than from that of the successful settler. It is not a story of reform and cleansing but one of resistance and survival. As such, this revision of the settler story is a form of political activism, which Wendt sees as a writerly political commitment to an “exploration of colonialism and its effects” (Ellis, “The Techniques” 85), or as Julia Boyd says of Wendt’s novel, an “inter-vention into SF [a]s a significant form of literary activism” (675).

Divulging their full history, the Tangata Māori youth – Manu, Fantail, and Aeto – help the protagonist on his path to rebelling against the Tribunal.8 With them, he finds a different kind of family than the reordinarinized family for whom he was originally searching, and comes to reject the fatherly President and the Tribunal-as-family-who-knows-best that the government desires for their subjects. He finds ‘aiga, the Samoan word meaning family, which encompasses extended kinship ties, unlike the Western notion of a nuclear family. The youths are quick to call him out as a white-washed Pacific Islander, telling him “[the Tribunal] fucked you up good” because he is “brown on the outside and filled […] full of white, otherworlder bullshit” (123). Part of the protagonist’s journey involves recognizing and accepting himself as brown. Despite being absolved of his own history, from the beginning the protagonist is marked as Polynesian, a mark the Tribunal cannot erase. He compares Polynesian street kids to his own children, and experiences discrimination – something the Tribunal has failed to reordinaranize away. During his Quest, he waits to speak to the receptionist at a hotel but when he sees her face he thinks “my past was here again” (49). Since she refuses to look at him and ignores him outright, he becomes angry and complains to the manager about this rudeness, thinking “[i]t was all back: my life, my family – our history of being discriminated against, a history the self-sacrificing Tribunal had assumed the guilt and responsibility for but which the hunters, the receptionist […] had brought back” (50-1). Although the Tribunal’s national anthem suggests a state of utopia that outlaws war, hunger, poverty, disease, crime, and even “intolerance” (73), touting equality for all, it cannot dispose of either the guilt or the consequences of settler colonialism, including the logics of elimination and exclusion, which undermines Indigenous presence and espouses racialized prejudice and hate. Nor can this utopia seem to rid itself of the “deviant” existence of the Tangata Moni. Tangata Moni history cannot be contained by the settler story.

At first that history is one of pain, discrimination, and willful ignorance on the part of the protagonist. At the beginning of the novel, his wife speaks about the original people of Maungakiekie, noting that “[t]he Pakeha have changed the vegetation but they’re still here” and the protagonist responds by pretending he “didn’t know who she

8. Fantail’s real name is Piwakawaka, “Maui’s cheeky bird” (Wendt, Black Rainbow 142), a bird which comes from the tales of Maui’s adventures and tends to be a bit of a trickster itself.

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was referring to” (12). But after his meeting with the Tangata Moni, who alert the pro-tagonist to the Tribunal’s tricks, this history becomes meaningful no matter how frag-mented. The Tangata Moni narration of their origins, moreover, refuses the assimilative logic of blood quantum – they proudly recite the genealogy they know. For her and Manu, Fantail says, “Dad was part-Samoan, part-Maori, part-Pakeha” and “Mum was mainly Maori, with a dash of Scotch, a little bit of Tongan, and a lemonslice of Pakeha” (143). Even though they were never able to meet their parents because, she explains, Dad “disappeared into the Tribunal’s reordinarination centers” and “Mum took up with other guys, who abused and used her, and she was dead of an overdose before I was one” (143), they can recall from whom they are descended. Aeto, who was born in the Tangata Moni sanctuary Wanganui-a-Tara but has survived countless reordinarinations, knows his family as well – he says his father “Kuki Patrick Malama, was Tangata Maori-Niuean-Samoan-Pakeha-Irish, and his mother, Merimeri, Maori-Tokelauan-Cook Islander-German” (158). They recite these genealogies and what they know of their own history and where they come from despite the Tribunal’s prohibition on history. Cultural tradition may be fragmented, but “occasionally they invoke familial practices of tangi (mourning), oral storytelling, and the remnants of their native languages” (DeLoughrey 217), such as the language the protagonist overhears – “English bits and a few Polynesian pieces, the rest was street pidgin, their coinage” (Wendt, Black Rainbow 123).

Such whakapapa, or genealogy, forms the basis of their urban Polynesian identities and includes stories of where they come from, who raised them, and their cultural contexts. Fantail and Manu talk about their Aunt Hena who raised them “slog[ing] her guts out in a factory during the day and a cleaning job at night” (143), like “most Tangata Maori mothers” (143). In Aeto’s whanau, otherworlders had sterilized the women (158). These common stories of the Tangata Moni lead Fantail to conclude that reordinarina-tion “domesticate[s]” them from so-called savagery (144). In these stories, Wendt forms a version of the Indigenous urban subject, who is specifically transpacific, and roots resistance, as DeLoughrey claims, in a “globalized series of material and cultural rela-tions” because he “suggests Indigenous peoples must incorporate other epistemologies into local whakapapa to articulate the layering of a multiethnic subjectivity” (222). Since Māori whakapapa trace ancestry to Papatūānuku, the founding mother deity, they func-tion as counter-narratives to “colonial accounts of linearity and progress” by “encoding European colonialism as both unnatural and ahistorical” and foregrounding historical, communal, and familial memory (166). As much as possible, the Tangata Moni pres-ent whakapapa that locates their resistance to settler culture and connects their roots to Aotearoa, no matter how mixed their blood. Their culture exists, contrary to the accusations of the jury member Cantos, who contends that “Tangata Maori culture no longer exists, or, if it does, it does so only in bastardised criminal form” (Wendt, Black Rainbow 254).9 Drawing on DeLoughrey’s analysis of Black Rainbow’s “global indigeneity based on a politics of resistance” (222), I read the Tangata Moni as a form of endurance under settler colonial structures, for they provide a legitimation of mixed-race indige-neity regardless of blood percentage and displays Wendt’s contention that authentic

9. Cantos is a reference to Karl Stead, a former professor at the University of Auckland. Stead held opinions similar to those of Cantos, something for which Wendt criticizes Stead in his essay “Pacific Maps and Fiction(s).” The figure Cantos embodies attitudes that ignore Māori culture or indigeneity and further white settler nationalism.


indigeneity means one that is alive in the present.10 From his early essay, “Towards a New Oceania,” Wendt emphasizes that “usage determines authenticity” (52), for in his view “[o]ur quest should not be for a revival of our past cultures but for the creation of new cultures which are free of the taint of colonialism and based firmly on our own pasts” (53). In Black Rainbow, Wendt is able to reawaken the protagonist to the larger contexts and meaning of history; he is able to see history as something which connects him to a family, culture, and place that the Tribunal is attempting to destroy: the novel pits such Indigenous survival against the settler story.

Finally recognizing himself as brown, the protagonist embraces the history he can remember, and finds records of his past. Needing to reconcile himself to the fact that his family is reordinarinized by the Tribunal, he thinks, “[t]hough the Tribunal has banned history, we are what we remember, the precious rope stretching across the abyss of all that we have forgotten” (178). Through learning his own past, the protagonist discovers he has had three different lives: the first as Patimaori Jones, the illiterate young Tangata Māori; the second as Supremo Jones, a superb hunter for the Tribunal whom the President considers a son; and the third as Eric Mailei Foster, the ordinary bank clerk. Made aware of his own identity and its construction, he further builds it through a whakapapa reading of the work of Tangata Moni writers that gives him a world, iden-tity, and genealogy he could not find in his own fragmented history, a history which had been structured by the settler story. Wendt even quotes from Donna Awatere’s Maori Sovereignty in his novel:

Who I am and my relationship to everyone depends on my whakapapa, on my lineage, on those from whom I am descended. One needs one’s ancestors therefore to define one’s present. Relationships with one’s tipuna are thus intimate and causal. It is easy to feel the humiliation, anger and sense of loss which our tipuna felt. And to take up the kaupapa they had. (qtd. in Wendt, Black Rainbow 244)

A call to action, Awatere’s words affirm the protagonist’s connection to the land and ancestors beyond his immediate family and relate him to Pacific stories and histories.

Far from a settler story, Black Rainbow is a narrative of whakapapa reconnection, or learning about and from one’s history, including a national past that acknowledges Māori history alongside the colonial violence of the settler nation-state. The novel disrupts a smooth settler colonial story of Aotearoa New Zealand as a land of tamed Māori and Pacific Islanders, or a land from which they are entirely absent. In a science fiction thriller that critiques the settler story or the narration of national (and personal) history, Wendt imagines a future in which the settler colonial past can never be forgotten and becomes part of the story of Indigenous resistance, and the story located in whakapapa takes center stage. Moreover, this story embraces an Indigenous sense of belonging, not that of blood quantum, which Wendt calls “an old racist trick” that “claim[s] that because we’re part-Pakeha we’re all Pakeha and no longer Maori or Samoan” (“Pacific Maps” 19). Indigeneity and identity are presented as mixed, a “politically invested prac-tice” (Sharrad 217). Black Rainbow’s whakapapa practices show Wendt’s notion of an authenticity that is grounded in its present usability and not stuck in the past. His “usage

10. DeLoughrey makes an important point about blood quantum and the separation of urban and iwi Māori in the 1992 Treaty of Waitangi (Fisheries Claim) Settlement Act. This act designated all Māori as treaty partners, but a series of rulings made it so that only Māori affiliated with iwi received financial compensation, leaving a number of Auckland Māori who could not establish tribal affiliations without compensation (221).

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determines authenticity” becomes useful for recognizing mixed identities and histories as Indigenous when they might be seen as assimilated or “impure” in settler logics.

Decolonizing Reading, Enacting Agency

The acts of reading and interpretation are key to the protagonist’s resistance to the Tri-bunal and his awakening to his own history and genealogy. The protagonist has already started reading to search for a sense of connection to his whakapapa. In “Towards a New Oceania,” Wendt argues, “[t]here are no true interpreters or sacred guardians of any culture. We are all entitled to our truths, insights, and intuitions into and interpretations of our cultures” (54). In this novel, too, Wendt stresses the importance of the act of interpretation through re-telling or re-reading. The protagonist’s active reading allows him to awaken to the truth of his own culture and the repressive nature of the Tribunal. This reading, which invokes Indigenous agency, goes against the inevitable settler story.

At first, reading constitutes a way for the President to “tame” Patimaori. As the protagonist learns, Patimaori is illiterate and so the President teaches him how to read and write because from the President’s perspective, the “magic of the printed word will tame him, convert him to civilisation, make him thirst for our cargo, like primitives in the past” (226). He loves reading so much that when Patimaori becomes Eric Mailei Foster, the President programs “a wide and deep knowledge of modern fiction and poetry, especially that of [New Zealand]” into his personality (228). Reading in itself gives the protagonist Pākehā knowledge. But interpretation is what galvanizes the pro-tagonist into resistance, particularly through the mysteries of the Puzzle Palace, the place he must infiltrate to find his family. The Puzzle Palace is the popular name for the “Government Insurance Corporation” (136), what Fantail calls “just another fucking ugly office building” holding the civil servants of settler colonialism (136).11 Combing over the Puzzle Palace but unable to find any of its secrets, the protagonist wonders: “Could it be that we’re reading it wrongly?” (138). The Palace, he senses, is “scrutinising me, challenging me, saying: ‘I can read you but you can’t read me’” (142), as if reading is the necessary tool for success in his endeavor. Armed with research from the City Library and knowing he must re-read the building, the protagonist lays out multiple readings of the Puzzle Palace: Government Insurance Corporation, a surveillance centre and a secret training facility for elite hunters. To carry out their operation, they must “[a]gree on one reading of Palace as surveillance centre and prison” (149), and only then are they able to break in and find the protagonist’s family. Their success is attributed to multiple readings beyond a first glance, and the active decision to see the Palace as more than an office building.

Auckland, the country’s landscape, and literature itself are subject to re-interpreta-tion in the novel, beginning with the Ralph Hotere Black Rainbow / Moruroa lithograph, from which Wendt takes the novel’s title. The lithograph is from a series of works that Hotere produced as a way of protesting the French testing of nuclear bombs in the Pacific. The protagonist’s wife uses the lithograph, as he describes, “to bless the earth and protect it from the clock of doom that ticks in our pulses” (31). Although he likes the print, the protagonist cannot understand his wife’s actions nor the lithograph’s

11. It also refers to the James Bamford book The Puzzle Palace (1982) on the history and workings of the National Security Agency, a US intelligence organization.


meanings – he questions why it is a black rainbow and what the countdown means – yet as his journey goes on he sees the lithograph as a lifeline to his whakapapa. As one of his last acts of rebellion, the protagonist goes to One Tree Hill, a place he re-reads and re-names with its Māori name, Maungakiekie, to await the sun and “turn [his] flesh and history into sinews of light that bound with everything with its unbreakable genealogy” (242). He buries the lithograph there, but not before “read[ing] the Hotere clock once more” (243). As Wendt notes in an interview, “there is always a double meaning: in Maori and Polynesian cultures, pouliuli or the colour black is a fertile colour, a fecund darkness. So by calling it ‘Black Rainbow’ there is still an element of hope” (Ellis, “The Techniques” 87). This fertile darkness explains why Wendt quotes Hone Tuwhare’s poem “We, Who Live in Darkness” in his novel, for with darkness comes light (196-7). In the scene on Maungakiekie, the protagonist is renewed by the sun and life around him, including the remembrance of the Māori dead buried at Maungakiekie, and is satis-fied that although the Hotere clock might be ticking towards doomsday, it still “ticked vigorously” (243). Reading the Hotere clock is a reminder of the destruction of the past and of survival, while serving at the same time as a point of connection to his blood and the earth, his wife, Hotere and Tuwhare’s resistance, and the fertile possibilities to come out of dystopia.

What gives the lithograph and the Puzzle Palace their importance is the way the pro-tagonist reads them. Active reading gives the protagonist agency to revise the Tribunal’s total Dehistorying of Aotearoa in landscape and literature. Learning to read the Puzzle Palace, the protagonist re-learns Auckland from the perspective of the Tangata Moni street kids:

Using the maps, they took me block by block, street by street, through the inner city. Names of businesses, buildings, places, gossip about those, recent happenings, some history, stories of crimes and daring deeds they’d committed against those people and places. They even filled in what wasn’t in the maps, especially when we descended into the labyrinth below the inner city, into a world I knew nothing about. […] ‘A city is layers of maps and geographies, layers of them, centuries of it. We were the first, our ancestors, no matter what lies the Tribunal says. So our maps are at the bottom of the bloody heap. They’re still there though the otherworlders have tried to fucking well erase them. As long as we survive…’ Manu said. (134)

Reading maps is a political and rebellious act. Learning these other ways of reading, of seeing the inner city, is a method of decolonization and resists the concretized settler story. Wendt describes his own work as “restor[ing] to the landscape of Auckland the original Maori maps” (Ellis, “The Techniques” 85), and explains that his novels try to “decolonize” what has been erased and written over (86). Furthermore, through the stories of the Tangata Moni youth, the Tribunal is “a palimpsest over native presence” (DeLoughrey 217), which comes to form the very foundations of the state itself. Learn-ing from the Tangata Moni, the protagonist is able to re-read the Puzzle Palace and his own tangled history, an act which then creates opportunities for him to rebel against the Tribunal’s pre-determined plans for him.

Wendt includes fiction and literature in his definition of maps. In the essay “Pacific Maps and Other Fiction(s),” he writes that “[n]ovels are about other novels” (28), a line oft repeated in Black Rainbow as “a story is about other stories” (72). In his essay he refers to “stereotyped maps and fictions” that EuroAmerican novels such as Robinson Crusoe create about the Pacific, and his own frustration at seeing islands “through those

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clichéd maps” (28). Echoing this sentiment, the novel’s protagonist muses, “we see reality through art and the other cultural baggage we carry” (65). In the essay, Wendt’s solution to these stereotyped maps is to write in order to break free. But as the novel demonstrates, the act of reading is just as important. The Tangata Moni kids’ makeshift whare includes a revision of canonical texts: “Hone Tuwhare’s Mihi; Donna Awatere’s Maori Sovereignty; Ranginui Walker’s Nga Tau Tohetohe and Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou: Struggle Without End; Bill Pearson’s Fretful Sleepers; Jim Baxter’s Collected Poems; Patricia Grace’s Potiki; Dick Scott’s Ask That Mountain; Witi Ihimaera’s The Matriarch; Albert Wendt’s Ola” (157). A gathering of foundational Pacific literature, the whare’s literature provides a counterpoint to white settler New Zealand writing or the references to canonical world literary texts scattered throughout the novel. In many ways a new nationalist literature, this collection is capacious, for not only does it list writing by prominent Māori and Pacific Islanders, it also includes Bill Pearson, James Baxter, and Dick Scott, white set-tlers who significantly contributed to Māori and Pacific Islander history and representa-tion.12 This decolonizing national literature embodies the Tangata Moni themselves – a mixture of resistant Māori, Pacific Islanders, and Pākehā who ground themselves in the often forgotten history of Aotearoa New Zealand.

Active reading and interpretation thus make resistance possible. While the prota-gonist’s family has been reprogrammed and he is unable to truly “rescue” them, he re-interprets his own history to figure out what he should do next. He understands the construction of stories and identities, finally seeing “connections I’d not been aware of before, between my characters, until the walls were crisscrossed, bridged, connected with arrows, talk balloons, crossings-out and insertions, analogies, metaphors, similes, speculations, curses of frustration” (189). Embodying the writerly and readerly process of revision, the protagonist comes to peace with his history, for he concludes that “[his family’s] love for one another had not been a fabrication, a pre-programmed feature. [His] memories of them were real, a history that helped give [him] meaning. A history [he] now wanted to stop the Tribunal from taking away from [him]” (192). Although he no longer has his family, the protagonist refuses to lose his memories of them, for to lose his history is to forget who he is. Analogous to the loss of family and ‘aiga created by settler colonialism, the protagonist’s new goal is to find justice where it is possible within a system built against him and remember his own history without being erased.

In the end, how the protagonist lives or dies is a choice given to the reader. The protagonist suggests “[w]e are, in the final instance, allegories that are read the way the reader chooses” (265), and the very last sentence reads: “Readers are free to improvise whatever other endings / beginnings they prefer” (267). As Sharrad notes, “[c]hoice (and thus politics) is always implicit in interpretation” (220), which puts true agency for the future – of Aotearoa, Māori sovereignty, history, literature, and all that Wendt includes in Black Rainbow – in the hands of the reader. In a novel that leads the protago-nist through a decolonizing process, one of the most important choices here is whether the reader will take responsibility for a painful history structured by settler colonialism, or deny responsibility altogether. For those who make that choice, reading can become a mode of decolonization, thus actively unsettling settler colonialism.

12. Bill Pearson mentored future Māori leaders at the University of Auckland and wrote about the depiction of Māori in New Zealand literature. James Baxter worked as an activist to preserve Māori culture. Dick Scott recounted the history of Māori resistance to European occupation.


Although the novel was written in the 1990s, it is still significant to the present and is especially relevant to how the New Zealand landscape has come to be viewed in the state-led tourism post-Lord of the Rings as “a global fantasy of whiteness” with imagery that revisits the colonial era (Werry 207). In contrast to the alternate world in Lord of the Rings, Black Rainbow’s alternative reality leads away from white settler fantasy and into questions of history, identity, and memory firmly tied to the present. Black Rainbow anticipates a critique of the settler story of the nation. Wendt attempts to gesture to-ward Māori sovereignty as a migrant himself – perhaps as someone Jodi Byrd might term an “arrivant,” a word from Kamau Brathwaite that “signif[ies] those people forced into the Americas through the violence of European and Anglo-American colonial-ism and imperialism around the globe” (xix). As a Samoan in Aotearoa, Wendt argues that “though I’m a new migrant here, and my ancestors were not responsible for the injustices committed against the Tangata Maori, I am benefitting like everyone else (including fifth-generation migrants), from the fruits of those injustices and a system which has institutionalised racism against the Tangata Maori” (“Pacific Maps” 40). He outlines the problem of many settlers and migrants who realize that they are on unced-ed Indigenous territory. His solution is to help support the work for Māori sovereignty even as a migrant Pacific Islander (“Pacific Maps” 40). In Black Rainbow, he approaches the sovereignty struggle through the Tangata Moni, a people who embody a politics of resistance from across the native / settler / migrant divide. Wendt articulates a process of decolonization that is located in the act of reading and interpretation.

Kara hisatake

University of California, Santa Cruz

W orks Cited

Boyd, Julia. “Black Rainbow, Blood-Earth: Speaking the Nuclearized Pacific in Albert Wendt’s Black Rainbow.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 52.6 (2016): 672-86.

Byrd, Jodi. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011.

day, Iyko. Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 2016.

delouGhrey, Elizabeth. Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures. Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 2007.

ellis, Juniper. “A Postmodernism of Resistance: Albert Wendt’s ‘Black Rainbow’.” Ariel 25.4 (1994): 101-14.

—. “‘The Techniques of Storytelling’: An Interview with Albert Wendt.” Ariel 28.3 (1997): 79-94. keoWn, Michelle. Postcolonial Pacific Writing. New York: Routledge, 2005.sharrad, Paul. Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature: Circling the Void. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003.Veracini, Lorenzo. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.Wendt, Albert. Black Rainbow. Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 1995. —. “Pacific Maps and Fiction(s): A Personal Journey.” Meridian, “Asian and Pacific Inscriptions:

Identities, Ethnicities, Nationalities” 14.2 (1995): 13-44. —. “Towards a New Oceania.” Mana 1.1 (1976): 49-60.Werry, Margaret. The Tourist State: Performing Leisure, Liberalism, and Race in New Zealand. Minneapolis:

U of Minnesota P, 2011.Wolfe, Patrick. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an

Ethnographic Event. London: Cassell, 1999.

The Nuclear Uncanny in Oceania

This article analyses the unsettling effects of the nuclear age in contemporary Ocean-ia. Through a reading of James George’s Ocean Roads (2006), a novel that incorporates nuclear legacies into the Māori kinship system of whakapapa, I show how Māori episte-

mologies become a vital resource for the Indigenous Pacific as it faces the long-term legacies of nuclear colonialism.

Literary criticism defines the nuclear uncanny as the experience of traumatic anxiety produced by the anticipation of a future nuclear apocalypse (Saint-Amour). In Ocean-ia, however, the nuclear age manifests itself in a way that is very different from the anticipatory trauma that Paul Saint-Amour describes as the pre-August 1945 reality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki residents and the Cold War condition of city-dwellers living in what they know to be atomic targets (59-69). From the wartime atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the 315 nuclear weapons detonated by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France across Oceania between 1946 and 1996, to the infra-structures of the US nuclear-military-industrial complex that continue to structure Paci-fic Islander life in the present, the nuclear condition in Oceania has been one of nuclear violence in the present rather than in the future: of action rather than anticipation, of structure rather than dreaded event.1 In one of the most canonical poems to come out of Oceania’s reckoning with its particular experience of nuclearization, Māori poet Hone Tuwhare’s “No Ordinary Sun,” Tuwhare locates the apocalyptic impact of the nuclear age not in a future atomic war but in the environments of the devastated pres-ent: “O tree,” he writes, “in the shadowless mountains / the white plains and / the drab sea floor / your end at last is written” (17). Addressing the irradiated environments that index the Pacific experience as the West’s nuclear laboratory and battleground, where the “monstrous sun” is both the sun and the weapon that seeks to mimic it, where the tree is both itself and its own ghost, Tuwhare’s speaker is not experiencing a nuclear uncanny based on waiting for a missile that may or may not be on its way. Instead, the nuclear uncanny that appears in “No Ordinary Sun” is an experience of the forced defamiliarization of the everyday world by the colonial and neo-colonial nuclear infra-structures that produce unevenly distributed harm in the present.2

Echoing Tuwhare, anthropologist Joseph Masco offers a useful development of the nuclear uncanny in The Nuclear Borderlands (2006) by redefining it as the defamiliarizing experience of “inhabiting an environmental space threatened by military-industrial ra-diation” (28) in the present rather than of waiting for potential bombings in the future. For Masco, radiation is uncanny in that it ruptures two of the West’s most profound epistemological premises about time and space: the linear, cause-and-effect logic of ac-tion in time, and the separability of the individual body from its environment in space.

1. For the history of nuclear bombings in the Pacific, see Maclellan. For the militarization of Oceania, see the essays collected in Camacho and Shigematsu (eds.). Tuwhare witnessed the devastated environment of Hiroshima firsthand in 1946 as a member of the New Zealand forces allocated to the occupying British Commonwealth Occupation Force.

2. For a survey of Pacific Islands literature that responds to nuclear bombings in the Pacific, see Keown (89-99).

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“One psychosocial effect of nuclear materials,” Masco writes, “is to render everyday life strange, to shift how individuals experience a tactile relationship to their immediate environment. This gets at the root definition of the uncanny as Unheimliche [sic], or the unhomely, for the invisibility of radiation can make any space seem otherworldly, strange, and even dangerous. Indeed, what could be more ‘unhomely’ than the intro-duction of nuclear materials into one’s everyday environment or body?” (33-4). Within Masco’s research area in the United States, radiation becomes uncanny as it disrupts the linear temporalities and clear body-environment distinctions that make peoples raised with Western epistemological assumptions feel at home in the world. Yet, this then poses a further question about the nuclear uncanny in Oceania: what does the uncanny, which is based on epistemic rupture, look like within non-Western epistemologies?

Following Houston Wood’s call for a “cultural studies for Oceania” that moves beyond incorporating Native Pacific experiences into Western theoretical frameworks, this article seeks to analyse a specifically Indigenous, Oceanic form of the nuclear uncanny – one that emerges within, rather than attempting to smooth over, “the mani-fold incompatibilities that exist between Euro-American and Native Pacific Islander epistemologies” (340). An approach to the nuclear uncanny in Indigenous Oceania must begin by acknowledging that the uncanny itself emerges from a specific Western relationship to Indigenous epistemologies, peoples, and histories. Freud’s 1919 essay “The Uncanny” defines the uncanny experience as a colonial one: “An uncanny expe-rience,” he writes, “occurs either when repressed infantile complexes have been revived by some impression, or when the primitive beliefs we have surmounted seem once more to be confirmed” (226). For Freud, the characteristics that define the uncanny – animism and magical thinking about cause and effect – are the return of an Indigenous repressed, as Freud writes into time (“we in the West have evolved from the ‘primitive’ beliefs of our forefathers”) the colonial operations that are actually happening in space (“we in the West are currently involved in colonial and settler-colonial operations aiming to wipe out Indigenous epistemologies wherever we find them”). Thus, as Renée Ber-gland has argued, “the uncanny is the unsettled, the not-yet-colonized, the unsuccess-fully colonized, or the decolonized” (11); in the context of colonialism, the uncanny is the encounter with an Indigenous epistemology – informed specifically by Freud’s reading about Aboriginals in the Pacific (McCann 43) – that the colonial West has failed to eradicate.3

Freud’s uncanny predates the arrival of the nuclear age by several decades. Yet the relationship between uncanniness and indigeneity is not lost in the transition from the aesthetic uncanny that Freud analyses in his essay to the nuclear uncanny that marks its more contemporary iteration. The unsettling qualities that Masco describes as central to the nuclear uncanny – the uncanny agency of nuclear materials and their non-linear temporalities – bear a striking resemblance to the animism and the troubling re-emer-

3. Building on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of “worlding,” Avril Bell argues that all settler-colonial pro-jects are designed to transform the unheimlich into the heimlich: “The new and alien world had to be made homely by the transplantation of plants and animals […] as well as an entire social world of political, economic, legal and social institutions and practices” (14). Bell’s analysis of the difference between the theory of the uncanny that emerges from within postcolonial studies, which figures the uncanniness of the Native as the return of the past repressed, and that which is important to contemporary Indigenous philosophy and politics, which insists that the Native has always been coeval with but “unencompassable within the worldview of western modernity” (114, author’s emphasis), is important; this article is operating within the latter model.

The Nuclear Uncanny in Oceania97

gence of that which should have disappeared which Freud locates at the heart of the uncanny experience, and which he marks as Indigenous. Indeed, the West’s emergence into the nuclear age has been defined since its beginning by a turn to the supernatural that indicates the extent to which nuclear physics and technologies have challenged the epistemologies of Western rationalism; think of Oppenheimer’s interpellation of himself as Krishna, an avatar of Vishnu, at the moment of the first nuclear detonation (“I am become death, destroyer of worlds”), or of the Christian mysteries invoked by the naming of the site at which that test would take place (Trinity), or of the profound ways in which nuclear physicists were challenged by their encounters with quantum physics throughout the twentieth century (Einstein’s descriptions of “spooky action at a distance” and “voodoo forces,” for example).4

Nuclear materials are, moreover, more aligned with Indigenous epistemologies than they are with the cosmology of Western science. They are agential in a way that fits more neatly into an animist worldview than an anthropocentric one, and their unpredic-table temporalities are closer to those of Indigenous spiral time than they are to Euro-American linear time.5 The compulsion to name nuclear laboratories and technologies after Native American nations, practices, and spaces that Masco notes at Los Alamos (119-22) marks the irruption of supposedly repressed Indigenous epistemologies into the heart of colonial science. Every research “kiva” and Blackfoot, Navajo, or Zuni test detonation in the Pacific is a symptom of the profound yet disavowed affiliation between nuclear and Native epistemologies even as the bulk of nuclear violence is visited upon Native peoples. In events like Operation Redwing (1956), the West subli-mates its own discomfort with the overlap between nuclear and Native epistemologies by naming bombs after Native nations in the Americas and then using them to oblite-rate contemporary Native Pacific Islander spaces at Enewetak and Bikini atolls, in tests designed to move the nuclear from the realm of the Indigenous uncanny into the realm of Western data.6 Freud, one has to think, would be impressed by the extent to which incomplete repressions of the Indigenous uncanny have structured nuclear science from the very beginning of the nuclear age.

Like any uncanny object, then, the nuclear is uncanny not because of its novelty but because it marks the continued existence of that which has been incompletely repressed, suppressed, or oppressed: indigeneity. And while the Freudian uncanny functions as “a repository for what, in European enlightenment discourses, was placed outside the epis-teme and constructed as ‘pre-’ or ‘non-’ scientific in order to dismiss the existence of different epistemological claims” (Emberley 26), the nuclear uncanny flips the hierarchy of knowledge upon which the uncanny itself is based: while the uncanny places Indige-nous epistemologies outside of the boundaries of what constitutes knowledge as such, nuclear science – supposedly the ultimate achievement of Western rationalism – finds itself likewise positioned outside of Enlightenment norms and assumptions, alongside the repressed forms of Native knowledge with which it more closely aligns. We might

4. Keller shows how nuclear and quantum physics trouble the most foundational epistemological certainties of Western science, and describes the consequent “crisis of faith” among physicists that would define the field for half a century.

5. For more on the temporal affiliations between Native and nuclear epistemologies, see Hurley (774-80).6. While not addressing indigeneity, Russell Meeuf has analyzed film noir’s abusive detectives as an exemplar of

the inherent violence of the “attempt to ‘know’ what’s coming next and make sense of a chaotic world” that the US, at minimum, performs in the face of the nuclear uncanny (285).

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think here of the coat of arms designed by Ernest Rutherford, the Aotearoa New Zealand physicist who first split the atom, upon his elevation to the peerage: a Renais-sance alchemist and a Māori warrior are positioned symmetrically on either side of the crest, two figures of the occult and Indigenous knowledges against which Enlightened rationalism has defined itself transformed into metonyms for the mysteries of nuclear science. In Rutherford’s crest as elsewhere, the nuclear uncanny is always already the Indigenous uncanny.

This realignment of Indigenous epistemologies as affiliated with, rather than op-posed to, the nuclear age is central to one of the most unusual nuclear texts to emerge from Oceania in the twenty-first century, Māori author James George’s 2006 novel Ocean Roads. Where Tuwhare represents the nuclear uncanny mimetically, by representing the defamiliarizing of the everyday world through nuclear violence, George’s novel takes a more interventionist approach by redefining the nuclear uncanny itself from a Māori perspective. Ocean Roads is an intergenerational family saga within which characters from key points in nuclear history are incorporated into the family of a Māori woman, Etta Henare. While the story is told in a non-linear fashion, through interleaved episodes narrated in the present tense, the chronological accretion of Etta’s kinship relations begins when she meets and has a love affair with Joaquin Alvarez, an American soldier stationed in Aotearoa New Zealand. Originally from New Mexico (a territory marked as specifically nuclear), Joaquin goes on to die in the taking of Tinian, the island from which the planes that bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be launched. Etta has a son by Joaquin named Troy; after the war, she meets and marries Isaac, a British nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos and visited Nagasaki shortly after the bombing, and has a second son, Caleb. Troy grows up to become an army sniper in the “hot” Cold Wars in Malaya and Vietnam while Caleb becomes a math student and anti-war activist; they both have a sexual relationship with Akiko, a Japanese dancer and hibakusha who was born in Nagasaki on the day of the bombing, and one of the brothers is the father of Akiko’s daughter Rai. Caleb develops leukaemia, strongly suggested to be related to his father’s exposure to nuclear materials during and after the war; after being treated with radiotherapy, he commits suicide during an anti- Vietnam War protest at which Troy, attempting to save his brother while also under-going a PTSD flashback, also dies.

The novel thus brings together nuclear histories (the Manhattan Project, the bomb-ing of Nagasaki, the intergenerational cancers resulting from radiation exposure, the medical use of radiation) and nuclear geographies (New Mexico, Tinian, Nagasaki, the Antarctic, Aotearoa New Zealand) into a single Māori social form: the whānau, or extended (and not necessarily biological) family. Critical commentary on the novel has described this formal conceit in Western terms, in which the heimlich (or homely) family is ruptured or rendered unheimlich (uncanny, unhomely) through its encoun-ter with nuclear histories. Elizabeth DeLoughrey, for instance, argues that the three younger characters (Troy, Caleb, and Akiko) are “carrying the metaphysical and corpo-real legacies of militarized radiation” (480) and that Caleb’s leukaemia signifies “a rup-ture in the family ecology arising from the legacy of militarized radiation” (481). Such a reading would align Ocean Roads with “No Ordinary Sun,” representing the nuclear uncanny as something that enters the heimlich space of the family and blows it apart. Yet, the novel itself stages two different responses to the uncanny unknowability of the


nuclear, suggesting a more complex intersection of the nuclear uncanny with specifi-cally Māori conceptions of family and kinship.

The nuclear uncanny appears in several aspects of the novel. Caleb’s leukaemia is dislocated in time and space from Isaac’s exposure to radiation in New Mexico and Japan, while Akiko, herself exposed to radiation at Nagasaki, lives her life with un-knowable levels of damage that may or may not kill her in the end. The nuclear age is marked, here as elsewhere, by an encounter with the radically unknown, a world outside of Western science that seems to challenge the functionality of that science itself. In narrating the response of Western science to that challenge, however, George underscores its continuities with colonial violence against racialized and Indigenous bodies and spaces. When Akiko describes her childhood to Caleb, for example, it is as a ritualized encounter with scientific whiteness: “‘Every two years,’ she says, ‘the week of my birthday, I had to go for medical tests. I had to take all my clothes off and get into a white robe… They tested my heart rate, the oxygenation of my blood, made me exercise in a room with white walls to match my white robe. The white of my bones in the X-rays. They did everything but treat me. Treat us’” (52). The West responds to the unknown consequences of its own nuclear violence with a repetition compulsion straight out of Freud, an act of repeated scientific violence whose goal is not to heal but to know.

Similarly, when Isaac visits Nagasaki shortly after the end of World War II as part of a mission to transform the unknown consequences of the nuclear bombing into scientific data, the mission is described in language that underscores the continuation of militarized violence in the supposedly peacetime scientific excursion: “A month after the war ended, the Manhattan Project Atomic Bomb Investigation Group flew into Japan in a converted B-29 bomber, much as the bombs themselves had” (249). In the age of scientific militarism, George suggests, the scientific urge to know what the bomb did is as violent an act as the scientific urge to know which led to its creation, the scien-tists rendered equivalent here to the bombs that they dreamed up and produced. Both Western science and Western colonialism respond to the uncanny, whether the nuclear or the Indigenous uncanny, by trying to transform the unknown into the known, the unheimlich into the heimlich. George underscores the violence that subtends such desires in the settler-colonial setting that seeks to transform unheimlich Indigenous lands into the home-space of colonists through practices of extermination and forced assimilation. He also highlights the continuation of such eliminationist violence in the nuclear setting that, under Western rule, turns Indigenous people and hibakusha into lab rats, as when Merril Eisenbud, the head of the US Atomic Energy Commission, says in 1956 that Native Uterik Islanders should be experimented on after nuclear tests because they are “more like us than mice” (Johnston 25).

Within the novel, the Euro-American response to the nuclear uncanny results in a temporal stuckness, a flattening of historical time into a permanent present with no past or future. When Isaac arrives in Nagasaki, the urban environment that had accreted over hundreds of years of human history has been wiped away: “the map more resem-bled a city than the city did. There was a desert sense to it. Centuries of human works had been swept up and sucked back into sand” (249). Describing the results of the bombing to Caleb from within the mental asylum in which Isaac himself has been stuck for years, Isaac again evokes the permanent present of the nuclear uncanny: “‘How

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many died?’ asks Caleb. ‘I don’t know,’ says Isaac. ‘But we shouldn’t use the past tense. With the effects of radiation, they’ll still be dying’” (252). When Caleb is diagnosed with the leukaemia that is his own manifestation of the nuclear uncanny, the language used by the doctor to explain the disease represents his cancer as a kind of bone-deep stuttering stuckness: “When they are mature enough to leave the bone marrow, the white blood cells are released into the bloodstream to circulate around the body. Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia is when there are too many immature lymphocytes, lympho-blasts, sometimes called blast cells. They fill up the bone marrow, prevent it making the replacement mature cells that the blood and the body needs” (268). The treatment for Caleb’s cancer is also an instance of uncanny repetition or stuckness: radiotherapy, pi-ling radioactive exposure onto radioactive exposure and calling this repetition progress. No wonder that Caleb, too, becomes stuck in the repetitive temporalities of Western nuclear science; when Akiko opens his notebook expecting to find the usual equations and drawings, she finds instead “a single word written over and over. Radiation” (277, author’s emphasis).

George thus stages the Euro-American response to the nuclear uncanny as a violent attempt, continuous with older forms of colonial violence, to transform the unknown into the known that can do nothing but perpetuate more acts of violence and foreclose the possibility of radical change (critiquing British detonations in the nuclear-colonial Pacific, Isaac connects nuclear science to perpetual war: “another testing program, for another war that had been searched for and sighted just over the horizon, like a landfall [255]). However, Ocean Roads also offers an alternative vision of what it might look like to encounter the nuclear uncanny from within a specifically Māori cosmology. In a suggestive turn of phrase, Anthony Carrigan describes how the novel “domesticates” (265) transnational histories of violence and processes of recovery into the form of the family saga. Chris Prentice goes a step further to define the form of this family within Māori kinship systems, arguing that “indications of the novel’s Māori concerns invoke place in ways that link geography with whakapapa, the generative and iterative network of interrelations that constitute genealogical, historical and spiritual subjec-tivities” (1006). Whakapapa is a Māori model of kinship that positions the individual within an inclusive web of relations across time and space. Importantly, as Avril Bell describes it, whakapapa differs from Western logics of descent that focus on the purity of the “bloodline” because it “works according to an opposite, inclusive rather than divisive, logic. It is used continually in everyday life in Māori society as people work to establish relationships and points of connection with others they meet, searching for a common ancestor or close points of connection. Thus, if you share one ancestor, no matter how many generations ago, your whakapapa connects you” (62-3). Whaka-papa is therefore able to incorporate non-biologically related characters such as Isaac and Akiko into Etta’s kinship group, integrating Los Alamos and Nagasaki into Māori space. The “domestication” of nuclear events and spaces within the novel’s form, then, is more than a plot device for conceiving of planetary-scale events on the scale of the family or a way to show how nuclear legacies tear families in Oceania apart (as Prentice, Carrigan, and DeLoughrey argue); rather, it is an incorporation of the nuclear uncanny into the Māori system of whakapapa, a making-Māori of the nuclear age.

Nuclear whakapapa is a theme that runs throughout the novel. When Troy visits the Trinity site, for example, he experiences it through the lens of kinship relations between


human and non-human nuclear objects: “The only things he knows about his father is that he was born in the deserts of New Mexico and died on a Pacific atoll. An atoll where they built the airfield that launched the B-29s that dropped the atomic bombs on Japan to end World War Two. His father’s blood was in that coral runway. And that bomb was in his stepfather’s blood” (121). A section of the novel told from a more external narrative perspective similarly interleaves the story of Etta’s expanding kinship network with the mid-century developments of nuclear history:

One morning Isaac sits at the table on the grass outside their bach, reading a newspaper […]. The first sentence stills him, the second closes his eyes. The Soviet Union has exploded its first atomic bomb. He stands, drops the paper on the table and bashes the edge of his hand against the bach’s wall.Nineteen-fifty offers an apex in the century. More armies gather, more letters and phone calls and ultimatums are sent to open dialogue and close borders.Away from it all a man and a woman pitch a tent by a fence, then disassemble an old bach and build something larger, something they hope will be more permanent, set against the safety of the hillside. A pole house, its back to the hillside, its face to the sea wind. The three then become a four when another boy is born. They name him Caleb. (176-7)

Later, Isaac describes his own role in developing the atom bomb in equally paternal terms: by the time he became morally horrified by his own actions, he tells Caleb, “I’d already spoonfed the monster, fed and clothed it and pushed it out in a little red wagon, out into the world” (342). Operating under the sign of whakapapa, the nuclear becomes contiguous with the whānau, a part of the cosmological and kinship relations that de-fine the world of the novel. The nuclear is still horrifying here, but rather than rupturing the family ecology, as DeLoughrey concludes, the nuclear uncanny as monstrous child is able to be incorporated into the heimlich home space of whakapapa.

Whakapapa also structures Ocean Roads on a larger scale, becoming something like a principle of literary form (indeed, since whakapapa is both the genealogy and the act of reciting the genealogy, Ocean Roads could be defined as a novelization of whakapapa itself). Susan Najita writes that “Māori notions of genealogy presuppose an intimate connection with the past […]. The term whakapapa literally means ‘to lay one thing upon another’ or to lay one generation upon another (Barlow 173). The past coexists with the embodied present, constituting a person’s location and being” (100). From this perspective, George’s use of the present tense across different periods of time starts to make a different kind of sense. While the novel is profoundly historical, weaving together a militarized history of the twentieth century, its model of history is distinctly non-linear; not only are the events narrated out of chronological order, they are also all narrated in the present tense. Across the novel as a whole, therefore, each of the historical events being described comes to “coexist with the embodied present” of the text itself. Compared to the rigidly linear temporalities of Western science that produce the experience of the nuclear uncanny for Masco, the co-existence of different times in the lived present makes a heimlich kind of sense within the multitemporal ‘home’ that whakapapa composes. When Akiko learns of Caleb’s cancer, she has no difficulty in conceptualizing the experience within a larger set of kinship relations across time and space: “‘You think I don’t recognise you?’ she says. ‘You think I haven’t seen you before? Hundreds of you, stumbling to death?’” (328). As kin to the hibakusha of Nagasaki, Caleb’s experience is laid upon theirs like a transparency or palimpsest; their past is his present, their experience his own.

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Akiko’s conflation of Caleb with the hibakusha through the doubly-inflected pro-noun “you” also indicates the second formal aspect of whakapapa in the novel: the “kinship I.” As Marshall Sahlins explains it, “the Maori pronoun ‘I’ is also used to refer to one’s entire kinship group (hapuu, usually), past or present, collectively or in regard to famous members” (21). Sahlins notes how, using the kinship I, Māori speak of the actions of members of their whakapapa using the first-person pronoun: my ancestor’s actions are my actions; what happened to them has happened (is happening) to me; their promises are my promises and their responsibilities are my responsibilities. In Ocean Roads, we see the kinship I at work when, for example, Etta (a famous photo-grapher) is hired to photograph the Trinity site for a news magazine; while Isaac is the atomic physicist with the connection to Los Alamos, due to their connection through whakapapa, “she knows they asked her to do the shoot at the Trinity site not just be-cause of her reputation as a photographer, but because of her personal history. Her stake in that ground” (143). And since “for Maori, kinship is cosmological inasmuch as all things – including plants, animals, and ‘the very elements’ – descend from the same Sky Father (Rangi) and Earth Mother (Papa)” (Sahlins 30), the kinship I can include not only the hibakusha that are a part of Caleb’s whakapapa or the shared responsibility of Etta and Isaac, but also the atom bomb that injured them, the uranium that produced it, the ground at Trinity in which both Etta and Isaac have “stakes.” In the same way that whakapapa allows for a heimlich experience of the non-linear temporalities that makes the nuclear seem unheimlich in a Western cosmology, then, it also takes as heimlich the porosity of the self and the agency of non-human materials that is a key aspect of the nuclear uncanny.

To understand the nuclear uncanny as part of a whakapapa model of genealogy is to radically reframe the experience of the nuclear age in Oceania through a Māori lens. In Ocean Roads, such a reframing produces potentially different outcomes for individuals and communities than does understanding the nuclear age solely through a Western cosmology. In contrast to the Western experience of both the nuclear and the Indige-nous uncanny, which seeks to render the unheimlich knowable through acts of violence, Māori whakapapa incorporates the unheimlich into the heimlich through acts of responsi-bility and care. At the end of the novel, the violent stuckness that George presents as the Western nuclear condition is released into two different forms of loving movement. In the penultimate episode, Etta and Isaac, reconciled after a long estrangement, finally ride Isaac’s motorcycle north to Te Rerenga Wairua, the leaping-place of the spirits, where human roads end and the ocean roads of Māori spirits begin. Their narrative is suspended at the moment where the end of the book coincides with the entrance into the spirit ways, with “the pages of the immense book of ocean waves leafing down onto the sand” (383), with relations of care re-established between Etta and Isaac and the human and spirit worlds re-joined.

In the novel’s final episode, Akiko, too, manages to transfigure what had been an experience of loss and harm into an experience of care. Recalling the kinship I’s porous selfhood, “in her mind her mother’s face appears. A face built cell by cell every day Akiko has woken to the dawn” (382). Under the aegis of whakapapa, Akiko’s nuclear injuries are experienced and understood differently: “Today I had another pain, this time in my heart. Maybe that’s where they were all along. I asked it what it wanted to be, but it didn’t answer. Today I realised you never left me. That you were the pains I felt. My reminder” (382, author’s


emphasis). Just as the novel itself tells stories of nuclear violence in the present tense such that its victims are never lost, are always with us, so Akiko realizes that the injuries that she shared with her parents also tie her into a web of relations that keeps them with her in the present. In the novel’s final lines, Akiko’s experience of whakapapa is what allows her to live with her traumatic nuclear experience creatively and honestly, hiding nothing: “Akiko stands from her work table, watching the vinyl disc circle. She waits a few bars then begins to dance […]. She stops and takes off her clothes until she is naked. Lets her scars feel the air, the scars she has carried since the day she was born. Scars she has hidden from almost everyone. Baring them to the music” (383). No longer uncanny, hidden, unheimlich, the nuclear is now what can be lived with, shared, and collectively faced.

George’s use of whakapapa as a literary form for nuclear storytelling thus exem-plifies how, for Māori as well as other Indigenous peoples, “storytelling becomes a technique of ‘resistance,’ but resistance defined as a mode of incorporation, a way of taking in the violence of colonization as a vital part of the Indigenous experience and working through its material, spiritual, and representational effects” (Emberley 290). As Emberley argues, “by this process of incorporation-as-resistance the meaning of history is reconfigured as a process and not a fixed event in which effects, and futures, cannot be altered” (290-1). Ocean Roads certainly does this, incorporating the supposedly unassimilable nuclear uncanny into a Māori recitation of whakapapa in order to create different interpretations of the past and future of the nuclear Pacific. Yet the use of an incorporative model based specifically on kinship also suggests a more extensive inter-vention into the colonial realities of the nuclear age in contemporary Oceania.

Considering contemporary Indigenous sovereignty movements across the globe, Jeffrey Sissons argues that kinship cosmologies provide an alternate mode of political, social, and cultural organization that is the basis for Indigenous resistance to colo-nialism (33). In the nuclear context, reframing the nuclear through the lens of Māori kinship cosmologies makes a specific kind of claim about the political possibilities of relating to the nuclear age. In Aotearoa New Zealand, as elsewhere, the sovereign power to make decisions about nuclear matters is reserved to the state – in this case, a settler-colonial state caught up in a fraught legal and historical struggle over the nature and scale of Māori sovereignty.7 The assertion that Māori are able to relate to the nuclear age through their own sovereign kinship practices, practices that provide a model for social organization that stand fully outside of the settler-colonial nation state, is thus a profound claim for Indigenous self-determination in the nuclear age. Indeed, decolonized sovereignty in Oceania has long been bound up with the capacity to have a decolonized, sovereign relationship to the nuclear (such as having the power to make deci-sions about exposure, remediation, reparation, and so on), as suggested by the region’s major pan-Pacific Indigenous political organization, the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement. By writing nuclear history into the recitation of Māori whakapapa, then, George claims a decolonized relationship to the nuclear for Māori within a broa-der context of anticolonial struggle in Oceania. Eschewing the idea that the nuclear can only be reckoned with in relation to the colonial state, George models a sovereign

7. For a full history and analysis of Māori sovereignty claims stemming from the Treaty of Waitangi, and especially their intensification since the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal in 1975, see Sorrenson (217-72).

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relation to nuclear materials in which Māori are at the centre, not the periphery, of the nuclear age.

In his 2001 poem “Whakapapa,” Apirana Taylor invokes the relationality that is described in and created through whakapapa: “this is your inheritance / the sky and earth and all that lies between.” In the nuclear age, the sky and the earth and all that lies between them are no longer a pastoral inheritance, as Taylor, with his descriptions of dole queues and drinking problems, well knows. Yet to inherit an irradiated world is still to have a sovereign place within it, a heimlich place that disrupts the political workings of the nuclear as well as the colonial uncanny. Nuclear colonialism has threatened to estrange Indigenous Oceanic peoples from their lands in perpetuity, inscribing the (neo)colonial violence of the nuclear age onto water and rock, body and bird and fish. And yet, as Ocean Roads shows, even the most colonial of weapons can be incorporated into a Māori worldview, a sovereign mode of relation that insists on the continuing presence of Indigenous peoples and their capacity to determine their own relationship to nuclear things. In this rewriting of the nuclear uncanny for Oceania, what haunts the West becomes kin for Māori: a monstrous child, perhaps, but one with which the people will reckon in their own way, on their own terms, between the earth and sky.

Jessica hurley

University of Chicago

W orks Cited

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(2009): 468-98.eMBerley, Julia. The Testimonial Uncanny: Indigenous Storytelling, Knowledge, and Reparative Practices. Albany:

State U of New York P, 2014.freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” 1919. Writings on Art and Literature. Ed. Neil Hertz. Stanford:

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(2017): 761-90.Johnston, Barbara Rose. “‘More like Us than Mice’: Radiation Experiments with Indigenous Peoples.”

Half-Lives and Half-Truths: Confronting the Radioactive Legacies of the Cold War. Ed. Barbara Rose Johnston. Santa Fe, N.M.: School for Advanced Research P, 2007. 25-54.

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April 2018.Wood, Houston. “Cultural Studies for Oceania.” Contemporary Pacific 15.2 (2003): 340-74.

“I’m Niu Voices”: Selina Tusitala Marsh’s

Poetic Re-Imagining of Pacific LiteratureThis article analyzes Selina Tusitala Marsh’s collection of poetry, Fast Talking PI (2009) in the context of the poet’s call for the “Pasifikisation” of New Zealand literature. It focuses on three poetic acts: the naming and unnaming of the Pacific self, the recovering

of past and present Pacific female voices, and the remythologizing of figures and places. These acts locate Marsh’s poetry within the decolonizing paradigm of postcolonial literature and exem-plify the postcolonial categories of hybridity, syncretism and transnationalism.

In her chapter in Mark Williams’ A History of New Zealand Literature (2016), titled “‘Nafanua and the New World’: Pasifika’s Writing of Niu Zealand,” the poet and critic Selina Tusitala Marsh calls for the “Pasifikising” of space and place through the re-imagining of Pacific and Western culture. To her mind, “Pasifikising” involves literary acts ranging from the “renaming, reclaiming, and rewriting of literary territories to the remythologizing of cultural figures” (360). The programme she maps out belongs to the “decolonizing” paradigm of postcolonial literature and thus continues the struggle of Pacific literature for recognition and “literary decolonisation” that started with Albert Wendt in the 1970s.

Marsh’s collection of poetry, Fast Talking PI, released in 2009, had already fulfilled part of that programme. Its very structure reveals a poetics and politics of reinventing a Pacific self. The book brings together thirty-two poems divided into three sections: the first, “Tusitala,” explores how the personal may be political in a Pacific context; the next one, “Talkback,” is the poet’s version of writing back to the empire, and finally, “Fast Talking PIs,” in which the acronym PI stands for Pacific Islander, creates a gendered and racial counter discourse in the present.

Gender and racial identity politics are at the heart of Marsh’s reimagining of the Pacific, but although such politics is still relevant today, it has become outdated as a term since its heyday in the 1970s, and needs to be reinvented to account for the complexities of group belongings. In particular, identity politics entails such pitfalls as the reification of identities, as it is premised on categories that exclude “others.” Thus, it leaves aside hybrid people: they become lost between two cultures, like Marsh herself who has been accused of being “not brown enough” by members of the Samoan community.1 Like Albert Wendt in his seminal essay, “Toward a New Oceania,” Marsh emphasizes diaspora against the purity of the race, that is the heterogeneity and diversity of Pacific Islands people and cultures.

Reimagining the Pacific through poetry brings further challenges. Like African- American poetry, Pacific Islands poetry exists within cultures of stories, where storytel-ling is part of every social encounter. The PI artist is a storyteller rather than a poet, ful-filling a certain role within a community. Marsh, whose middle name is “Tusitala,” that

1. In an article paying tribute to the legacy of Albert Wendt, Selina Marsh explains that she nearly abandoned her doctoral thesis on five Pacific Women Poets at the University of Auckland after being challenged by members of the Samoan community over her right to conduct such research. Albert Wendt gave her the support she needed at the time. See Teaiwa and Marsh.

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is “teller of tales,” reconnects the poet and the storyteller in one single figure, “the cala-bash breaker”: “They sail the notes of our songs / stroke the lines of our stories” (Fast Talking PI 19). 2 Inspired by black feminist poetry (Alice Walker) and the Māori movement Mana Wahine, Marsh tells her story and that of Pacific Islands women through poetic forms that engage with both popular and abstract poetry, drawing from slam and militant poetry as well as metapoetry.

My aim in this article is to show how Fast Talking PI carries out the pasifikation of poetry without reifying identities and harking back to a mythical Samoan past. This entails celebrating cross-cultural mixedness and multiple identities as well as adapting the tone of militant poetry. Thus, the use of “voice” and “authority” implied by the necessity of breaking through gender and racial stereotypes is toned down by the pres-ence of a highly self-reflexive “I.” Marsh decentres the “I” by multiplying the imaginary locations of its enunciation and its figures, displacing the centrality of the English lan-guage by inscribing alterity in it to avoid mimicking the Western “I.” Thus, her trans-national, syncretized poetics also fits in the other paradigm of postcolonial literature: hybridity. Finally, abstract, modern poetry, with images paralleling and reinforcing the aural component, creates a sense of Gestalt, both visually and aurally; rather than fagogo itself (storytelling), it is the “the colour of fagogo” (41) that the poet intends to convey. In this article, I will analyse three acts of poetry in Selina Marsh’s collection: naming, rewriting the past, and remythologizing, arguing that decolonizing and celebrating hy-bridity can be critically conjoined.

The Poet as “Calabash Breaker”: Breaking Stereotypes and Renaming

Selina Marsh’s poems are grounded in a specific sociocultural context: the economic and symbolic domination of Pacific Islanders in New Zealand. The Polynesian com-munity is the third most important ethnic group in New Zealand. In a society that is officially bi-cultural, this community has suffered from negative stereotyping by the dominant group and is viewed as a “problem population.” People from the Pacific islands, especially Samoa and Tonga, came to Aotearoa in the 1960s to fill low-skilled jobs. In the 1980s, with the recession, they were no longer needed, and the National go-vernment launched a campaign to stem immigration. Polynesians became a socially and economically disadvantaged group with a marginalized status. Unlike the Māori who are positioned as “indigenous” in the national discourse, people from the Pacific islands are constructed as a “migrant” minority group, for whom the preservation of identities and languages is considered a lower priority, whereas Te Reo Māori is an official language. In this section, I analyze how Selina Marsh uses her own name as a starting point for a poetics / politics of naming, unnaming and renaming the Pacific self.

In an essay on Pacific Islands woman poets, Marsh wrote: “In poetry the personal has political possibilities as oppression is exposed and critiqued” (“Theory ‘Versus’ Pa-cific Islands Writing” 351). The essay is preceded by a poem entitled “Naming Myself: Reflections on Multiple Identities” in which the poet tries to “word the spirit of brown” in “theory” and “creativity.” This poetic and political act recalls Black American femi-nism, and in particular Audre Lorde’s practice. In Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, the African-American poet and feminist mixes autobiography, history, myth, and poetry to

2. All subsequent quotes will be given in parentheses in the text.

“I’m Niu Voices”: Selina Tusitala Marsh’s Poetic Re-Imagining of Pacific Literature109

reinvent herself. The name Zami becomes a renaming of the self as “Black lesbian.” Like Audre Lorde, Marsh sees the relationship between names and identity as a way to shape the self, and an act of self-empowerment. She brings the world, through lan-guage, into an alignment with the new self and locates this practice in the gap between theory and creativity.

“Tusitala,” Selina Marsh’s maternal name, thus occupies a central position in the poet’s identity and discourse, reflecting its core position in her family name. “Tusitala” means “teller of tales” in Samoan and thus reconnects the poet with Samoa, which she calls her “sacred self ” in “Naming Myself.” But a name cannot be reduced to one single signification. The first poem of the collection, “Googling Tusitala” (13), makes use of the metaphor of the search engine to explore the scattered, manifold and multiple denotations of “Tusitala” and “bring” them into a unique space. The poem is based on the anaphora of the verb “bring” which stands alone on a line; this device shapes the whole poem and underlines the act of “coming to a place.” The ability of the search engine to draw links with other people is explored, and can be also linked with Pacific Islands cultures where genealogy is paramount, and an individual only exists as part of a group.3 Thus, the ritualistic act of reciting the Whakapapa serves as a framework for a poem in which she names the first settlers’ ships that arrive in New Zealand in the first half of the nineteenth century, starting with a question that the Māori asked when the ships arrived: “Has The Whole Tribe Come Out From England?” (54). In the endnotes of the collection, she specifies that her great-great-grandfather was on board one of those ships, the Aurora. The question and the reciting of names are also used to indige-nize the English: “ask Charlotte Jane, Randolph, Sir George Seymour” (54).

Naming is a highly symbolic and political act, for as Bourdieu notes, “There is no social agent who does not aspire, as far as his circumstances permit, to have the power to name and to create the world through naming” (105). Since the Greek classics, lyric poetry has played on and reinforced the power of naming. In his essay “Approaching the Lyric” Northrop Frye claims that when we read lyric, “we are psychologically close to magic, an invoking of names of specific and trusted power. [...] Verbal magic of this kind has a curious power of summoning, like the proverbial Sirens’ song” (“Approach-ing the Lyric” 35). Selina Marsh’s poetry often taps into this power of invoking names. In “Circles of Stone” she calls upon the major poets of her generation – Sia Figiel, Karlo Mila, Tusiata Avia, Alice Te Punga Somerville, or Teresia Teaiwa – in a ceremony of fertilization and growth. The performance of these ritualistic acts enables the poet to metaphorically throw seeds to grow a new literature. The trope of the “calabash” (gourd) is used as a symbol of fertility.

For all the selves with stigmatized identities, renaming begins with unnaming as the poet singles out the false or other-defined selves at the source of symbolic domination. In New Zealand, Pacific Islanders have stigmatized identities: they are sometimes given derogatory names, such as “coconuts,” “brownies,” “PI,” and so on. Pacific Island-ers are also treated as one homogeneous category, although the poet is careful not to single out specific communities (Samoan or Tongan) so as not to stress national identity, which is a source of racism. Pacific Islanders themselves treat the “half castes” (afakasi) as “outcasts,” and it is the poem “Outcast” that concludes the collection (76).

3. Sia Figiel’s novel Where We Once Belong (1996) features an episode in which the teenage characters recite names and origins of family members as a game and a social ritual.

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The longest and eponymous poem of the collection, “Fast Talking PI” (67-73), spectacularly performs the renaming of Pacific Islanders and half-caste people. Like the poets of the Beat generation or the negritude movement, Marsh is devoted to the spoken and performed aspects of her poems. “Fast Talking PI” evokes slam poetry in its construction, rhythm and theme, even though slam is not its only cultural reference. First, the poem was modified after its performance as a slam poem. The line “I’m a slamming poetry PI” (72) was added. Second, it is supported by sound and music: the whole collection was first published in a hybrid format since it was accompanied by an audio CD. Most importantly, “Fast Talking PI” has a highly politicized content, drawing upon racial, economic, and gender discrimination as well as current social trends for subject matter, as is often the case with slam poetry.

Like the staple slam poem, “Fast Talking PI” consists in a declaration of margina-lized identity through the anaphora of a formula: “I am a … PI.” “Fast Talking PI” is a list poem, chanting and asserting multiple Pacific Island identities. The opening lines reveal a mixture of derogatory and positive assertions:

I’m a fast talkin’ PII’m a power walking PII’m a demographic, hieroglyphic fact-sheetin’ PI

Although this declaration of marginalized identity may be read autobiographically at times, through the references to academia for example, it also denotes a wider engage-ment with the world. “I am” is an assertion of identity that is meant to represent the diasporic Pasifika community. In an essay titled “Pasifika Poetry on the Move: Staging Polynation,” Marsh wrote that the poem “counters the limitations of homogeneity implied by ‘nation’ by being ‘every person,’ existing simultaneously within and beyond it, and celebrating it” (207-8). Through the multiplicity of utterances, the performed poem creates a space where dominated identities are embodied and made visible. Thus, the celebration of a wide array of Pasifika identities produces a community during the performance and gives birth to a counter public sphere, that is, in political scientist Nancy Fraser’s formulation, “parallel discursive arenas where members of a subordi-nated social group invent and circulate counter discourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (81).

To achieve this, the poem confronts the stereotypes of racial and hybrid identities. For the poet, the acronym PI is still “tainted with colonial derogatory undertones” (Marsh, “Pasifika Poetry” 198), whereas Pasifika is a transnational term adopted to convey a sense of Pacific-centred perspective. Therefore, the negative stereotypes attached to Pacific Islander need to be counteracted, with a rhetoric of incantation and excess that breaks through its negative connotations. The anaphoric repetition of PI, along with the use of racist and sexist terms, creates multiple word play and rhymes which neutralize the negative effects of these words and destroy the fixity of identity stereotypes. The abundance of terms prevents the reader from pinning down a specific identity for Paci-fic Islanders, and the anaphora conveys the idea that the characterization can never be exhausted. This is further underlined when the poem is actually performed: in perfor-mance-oriented poetry, dancing, moving and chanting help emphasize meaning.

In the poem, Marsh also addresses the issue of being half-caste: she uses contradic-tion, mixing antonyms, negative and positive terms to emphasize a happy multiplicity rather than a conflicted duality. She is both one and its opposite:


I’m a melting pot PIan homogenous PII’m a skim milk, green top, fat free heterogeneous PI

I’m a bit of both PIA chameleon PIA hybrid, mongrelized, self-satisfied PI

This celebration of multiple / hybrid identities reflects social trends. New Zealand social science research has shown that “it currently seems more acceptable to acknowledge being ‘afakasi Pasifika than to acknowledge being of Pakeha-Maori heritage [...]. In addi-tion, while ‘afakasi identity in the islands is overlaid with ambiguity, in New Zealand, particularly with younger participants, a multi-ethnic identity now tends to be more readily acknowledged and affirmed” (Agee and Culbertson 62). Being Pasifika is a source of pride, while dual ethnic identity is viewed suspiciously.

For its effect, “Fast Talking PI” relies on performative speech acts, according to Austin’s linguistic theory. By repeating “I am,” you become that identity. But the poet also recognizes the limits of performative acts: the following poem “Acronym” (74-5) is a response to someone who does not know what PI stands for. The poet invents other meanings for PI, ironically mocking her own self by calling the speaker an “aretologist” (a praiser of the gods), thus emphasizing the fundamentally playful and fictive nature of her poetic acts.

Selina Marsh also considers renaming as a transgressive (and aggressive) practice which involves strong, fearless and outspoken personalities. Thus, the poem “Calabash Breakers” (19) has a direct and simple form, with three- or two-word lines: an anaphoric listing of mythical heroes and literary figures “with rebellious blood” (19). The ultimate Pacific Island artist is a “calabash breaker,” someone who transgresses “boundaries” to “catch bigger suns” (19). The following poem, “Hone Said” (20), alludes to another “calabash breaker,” the Māori poet Hone Tuwhare and the conflict of interpretation surrounding one single but crucial line from one of his poems: “the only land I am / is that between my toes” (20). “Hone Said” is a metapoem about the right to reimagine a poem. The speaker chooses to read “am” rather than “have,” thus stressing identity over possession. The poem also reasserts the importance of the dispute over land in postcolonial New Zealand, which is ironically overshadowed by a metaphysical discus-sion (as between academics).

Renaming is all about repossessing language, so that the self and language correspond with identity. As Bhabha writes, “the question of identification is never the affirmation of a pre-given identity, never a self-fulfilling prophecy – it is always the production of an image of identity and the transformation of the subject in assuming that image” (45). Acknowledging multiple identities is essential to avoid reifying and fixing categories in the act of renaming. To be truly effective, however, naming and renaming must also address the source of symbolic domination: the legacy of colonization in the present.

Gender Politics: Reclaiming HerStory and Her Body

Pasifikizsing literature implies reclaiming the past, that is uncovering lost names and histories, but also offering an alternative to white history by debunking the myths sur-rounding colonial discovery and settlement. Rewriting the past is a paradigmatic post-

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colonial tale and one of the main strategies permitting colonized people to create their own counter discourse. In the second section of the collection, entitled “Talk Back,” Selina Marsh offers a poetic variation on the “write back” paradigm: she strategically shifts the emphasis from written to oral, as an acknowledgement of traditional cultures but also as a gesture of gender and racial politics. The trope of “voice” becomes central in the formulation of a powerful counter discourse, while the poet also addresses the sexualization of the Pacific female in popular and high art. In this section I will show how Marsh uses “voice” as a fiction and trope to deconstruct colonial and postcolonial discourses and deploys figures of speech to ventriloquize voices. There is a contrast between the silencing and invisibility of Pacific Island women in history and the ubiqui-tous images of Pacific Island women which are used to objectify their bodies.

The need for Pacific Islanders to write their own histories and question the Euro-pean construction of their past has been acknowledged by writers, especially Albert Wendt. Marsh’s poem “The Curator” alludes to Wendt as “The poet from Pasifika” / “blurring black white history often” (59). Rewriting the past is an empowering / eman-cipatory political practice through which the subject can retrieve her autonomy and agency for the representation and construction of new identities, and make “dissonant, even dissident histories and voices” heard, as Bhabha puts it (6).

But the role of native women in colonization and decolonization tends to be ignored by anti-colonial historians, creating a new exclusion and leaving women voiceless. In her seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has argued that the subaltern woman under imperialism is allowed no discursive posi-tion from which to speak. She notes that “one never encounters the testimony of the women’s voice-consciousness” (297), concluding, “There is no space from where the subaltern (sexed) subject can speak” (307). At first glance, Selina Marsh seems to echo this position with the collection’s epigraph: “All the dark women of history have lost their tongues.” Moreover, Marsh stresses the double subjection of colonized women by the colonial power and by patriarchal power in the domestic sphere and in society. For Marsh, the recovery of the female voice, a key issue in identity and feminist politics, is linked to the breaking up of images surrounding the Pacific Islands female body.

Thus, “Two Nudes on a Tahitian Beach, 1894” (49), a poem which conjures up Paul Gauguin’s famous painting, offers a carnivalesque reversal of roles of the painter and the “object” of the painting. Marsh plays on the double meaning of the verb “draw,” thus combining attraction and visuality in one single notion. The poet denounces the colonial gaze on the indigenous female body, using imagery suggesting rape: “strip me bare / assed,” “turn me on,” “shove a fan.” The violence of the language is a response to the violence of the act. But here the bodies offered for visual inspection are given a voice. Through the poetic device of prosopopoeia, the lending of a voice to what would ordinarily remain voiceless, the poet “talks back” to the centre, giving a voice to the silenced women, passive objects of the painter’s gaze, and briefly becomes “the other.” Opening with the line “Gauguin, you piss me off,” the speaker mimics an authoritative voice which contrasts with the passive bodies represented in the painting.

Reinscribing women as agents in colonial history strategically counters the passivity attached to the figures of Pacific women during colonization. The poem “Nails for Sex” (47), for example, is an allusion to an episode in the colonization of Tahiti, when the survey ship Dolphin called at an island in Tahiti in 1751. The local women met the sail-


ors and exchanged nails from the boat for sex. Here, the poet challenges the romantic myth about Tahiti and women being accommodating for sex by showing that women acted subversively, causing the ship, as the vehicle and symbol of colonisation, to almost collapse. Another poem, “Mutiny on Pitcairn” (48), is a response to the better-known mutiny of the Bounty, and refers to the story of Jenny, who tried to escape from the rule of men. It is constructed on the anaphora of “I will build a boat” as the main rhetorical device. “Mutiny on Pitcairn” highlights the resistance to the colonization of female bodies through the figure of Jenny. “Realpolitik” (51) evokes the sexual poli-tics of colonization and mentions ironically the spread of venereal disease by sailors, debunking the romance surrounding the representation of the encounter. The poem is double-voiced as it quotes the explorer James Cook’s diary. The extracts are interlaced with the speaker’s comments, producing internal dialogization.

Unlike what some militant poets do, the poet does not equate voice with truth; rath-er, she emphasizes the fictional aspect of diverse discourses as a way of undermining their power. Voices are masks. Similarly, the power of images is deconstructed. Western representations of the Polynesian body are addressed through past and contemporary culture, in particular Hollywood films and iconography. Selina Marsh attacks the stereo-type of the “dusky maiden,” the PI woman as an object of Western desire, which start-ed with the colonial encounter and continues with advertizing. The poem “What’s Sa-rong with This” (55-8) deconstructs the fascination for the Pacific female body through images of the Pineapple Pin-up of the 1950s and Hollywood South Seas films, showing how body parts become commodities used to sell food and drink. The fetishization of body parts, which in Freudian terms is a perversion since it shifts interest away from the person, is also the cover for the fetishization of commodities in the Marxist sense. Women’s bodies have acquired the status of signs and values in the postcolonial context that inscribes sexual desire within the discourse of economic power. The dislocation of the syntax, with the listing of body parts and passive verbs, reflects the dislocation and objectification of body parts: “clitt butt boobs plumped cupped and dished on palms” (55). Thus, Marsh continues the work of Sia Figiel in debunking past and pre-sent myths about the Polynesian female body and unmasking the voyeuristic activity of Palagis (white people) in relation to the female body.4 In a line from the poem “Fast Talking PI” the speaker intertextually references Figiel’s novel, Where We Once Belong (1996), among other Pacific Islands works, by asserting: “I’m where we once belonged” (72).

Remythologizing

“Demythologizing” and “remythologizing” complete the decolonizing of Pacific is-lands literature in Marsh’s view. Remythologizing, however, is not a politically neutral act as it can lead to the reifying of the past or a culture. Myths can be empowering, but they can be repressive as well. For example, myths of motherland can be reactionary. Marsh’s poetry keeps the function of the myth alive by mapping out new linguistic territories and reaching out to other worlds in a syncretic way. The poet uses myth to reimagine the past and assess the present differently, abandoning the insistence on the pain of the

4. See Michelle Keown’s essay, “ ‘Gauguin is Dead’: Sia Figiel and the Representation of the Polynesian Female Body.”

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past. The poems “Afakasi” and “Not Another Nafunua Poem” are very representative of this reimagining, and fully demonstrate the possibilities for poetry to bring different worlds together.

“Afakasi” (16-8) belongs to the first section of the collection, “Tusitala.” The word Afakasi is the Samoan translation of half-one. These two terms form the basis of the poet’s identity, but Afakasi also refers to the whole Pacific community, as the mobility of the labour force throughout the region has contributed to making the population thoroughly hybridized. Afakasi and Tusitala are mentioned several times in the collection and foregrounded in the titles of respectively a poem and a section, revealing the neces-sity for the hybrid to explain who s/he is by telling tales about other times and places. In the poem “Afakasi,” hybrid identity is evoked in terms of dislocation which, as the authors of The Empire Writes Back note, is where “the special post-colonial crisis of identity comes into being; the concern with the development or recovery of an effective identifying relationship between self and place” (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 8-9).

“Afakasi” explores various ways of finding a place for the South Pacific people who left their islands for Aotearoa New Zealand. As such, it is an allegory of migration; each stanza represents a way of negotiating multiple identities in a new land. The poem alludes to the ambivalence of being half-caste in New Zealand, and the pain and joy of relocation through visually and psychologically split spaces. Spaces are physical (visual) as well as semiotic. Visually, each stanza is separated from the others like an island in the ocean while the overall rhetorical construction reveals the moral and emotional ambivalence of relocation: there are sharp contrasts between stanzas, with oppositions between movement / stillness, fullness / emptiness, darkness / light. These contrasts suggest all the ambivalence of mobility from success – “spaces filled with va” – to loss, represented by empty spaces with no light. Throughout the poem, techniques of creoli-zation of English, mainly lexical, are used as metaphors for cultural contact, translation, transformation, and hybridity. Thus, the joy and pain of relocation are transmuted into hybrid language.

The poem’s opening lines have an epic quality – “Half moons ago” – and announce the telling of a narrative and a grand gesture. The speaker assumes her role as “Tusi-tala,” the teller of tales, the one who interweaves past and present in myths and perfor-mance. The second stanza evokes myth – “great deeds done” – but locates the major mythical events in the margins, outside the spatial boundaries of the poem: the greater deeds may be found in “marginalia,” the place where everything can be rewritten or commented upon freely. Myths, therefore, can be reinvented from the margins.

“Afakasi” is a chronotopic poem, with space taking precedence over time; simi-larly, the narrative is replaced by a movement of forms in an abstract space: the poem finishes with an image that may represent the Pacific Ocean or a painting: “Some spaces are brown / some are blue.” Thus, the poem composes a visual as well as an aural representation in the manner of William Carlos William. The dynamics of space are emphasized by visual images used to paint multiple ways of being in space, including “bodymind-maps movements” as migration can be traced on a tattooed face: “a moko mapping where they had been / and they were to go” (17).

Aggrandized hybrid identities are placed within the larger frame of Samoan and Māori myths, which become the framework for thinking through migration, but in a loose way. The poem is associated with the art of Fagogo, the telling of legendary tales


in Samoa, which are often accompanied by dances and songs; hence the reference to theatre in the poem, and to performance in the whole collection. In terms of Polyne-sian metaphysics, the poem is strongly predicated on the Samoan concept of va, which Marsh defines in her endnotes as “an interrelational space between people; between people and the environment” (80). Va is a key metaphysical concept for Pacific artists. For Albert Wendt, va is “the space between, the between-ness, not space that separates but space that relates, that holds entities and things together in the unity-in-all, the space that is context, giving meaning to things” (“Afterword” 402). Va is a way of thinking about self, identity and place which is central to the Samoan view of the world. With va, spaces can draw closer to one another and form relationships that enable the crea-tion of identities. Consequently, spaces with no va are not spaces at all: the speaker also evokes the loss of the intergenerational identity, marked by emptiness and silence. A different spatiality emerges: the urge to affirm one’s place (belonging), which can lead to a certain fixity of place and thought is replaced by acknowledgement of multiple related spaces through the concept of va.

The poet explores the Samoan and Māori conceptual spaces without reifying them, or fixing moral or religious values on them. The reference to Pouliuli, which is also the title of one of Albert Wendt’s novels, exemplifies the flexible use of these concepts. Whereas Polynesian and Samoan missionaries cast Malamalam (Christian Enlightenment and knowledge) in opposition to the Pouliuli of ancestral Samoa (heathen, pagan, sin-ful or evil), in this poem, Pouliuli becomes the void to be explored and is reconnected with the Māori myth of creation: Te Kore. Above all, migration is not considered only in terms of loss. Even though there are unsuccessful displacements, there is no loss of culture. In Samoan, migration is Malaga, which refers both to travelling and the spiritual journey of being on earth: it has metaphysical attributes which extend beyond geogra-phical displacement.

Thus, “Afakasi” expands on Wendt’s vision of a new Oceania metaphysically and linguistically. The poem exemplifies what the authors of The Empire Writes Back call “hybridity in the present,” that is, to “free itself from a past which stressed ancestry, and which valued the ‘pure’ over its threatening opposite, the ‘composite’” and “replace[s] a temporal linearity with a spatial plurality” (35-6). “Afakasi” is an illustration of Marsh’s cultural revitalizing, as she writes in her 2016 essay “‘Nafanua and the New World’: Pasifika’s Writing of Niu Zealand”: “through reimagining, writers activate the space of cultural memory, creating contemporary parallels with archaic initiatory elements, demonstrating that culture is dynamic and open, rather than closed and static – vital for Pasifikising space and place” (368-9).

Similarly, Marsh’s treatment of Nafuana, the Samoan warrior goddess, does not necessarily entail unquestionably celebrating the famous figure. For Marsh, Nafuana is a key figure in the remythologizing of Pacific writing, because, as she argues in the essay quoted earlier, it gives a central role to women, and it is a resisting figure with a traditional backbone. But in “Not Another Nafuana Poem” (15), the speaker adopts a more reflexive, even ironic stance towards the “Nafuana” self. In this prose poem made out of a single unpunctuated sentence, the poet evokes the Samoan economy and the transfer of culture / economy involved in migration, resulting in a cultural tension. The new “re-imagined” liberated Samoan subject, Nafuana, who “rides the current of her culture in the new millennium with her electric va’a” (15), is contrasted with her

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traditional sister who stays on the Island and performs the traditional female role of looking after parents, feeding and selling fruit in the market in a male dominated culture. The migrant is the one who “steals” from the culture. In this poem, Nafuana straddles two identities, the traditional and the new, “millennium” model which involves a form of transgression and rebellion against the community. If asserting oneself as an indi-vidual means differentiating the singular from the collective, this may be problematic in traditional Samoan society where “we” exists before “I.” Sia Figiel explores a similar question in her novel Where We Once Belong (1996).

In Fast Talking PI, Selina Marsh re-visits practices of identity politics by multiplying poetic acts that enlarge, reach out, and engage in a non-essentialist way. She renames by breaking stereotypes and using them as counter-discourse, but also turns names into a celebration of multiplicity, and a way of finding her place in a “circle” of writers. Talk-ing back to the centre means reassessing the role of Pacific women in colonial encoun-ters, giving them a more heroic role. Finally, she reimagines territory and identity togeth-er in a hybrid space, where various forms of tradition and modernity are continuously at play, creating cross-cultural poetic rituals. The hybridity and decolonizing paradigms of post-colonial literature complete each other, and hybridity, which is often too broad and vague a term to characterize a specific voice, is recontextualized by the decoloniz-ing perspective. As an academic and artist, Marsh also practises a way of rethinking the relationship between theory and art. For the poet, theory becomes a dialogue, while the aesthetics of straddling borderlands allows the academic to explore new linguistic territories and concepts. This way, she can indigenize theory and avoid the danger of theorizing PI women voices.

Valérie Baisnée

University of Paris Sud

W orks Cited

aGee, Margaret Nelson, and Philip culBertson. “Sowing the Seeds: Parents’ and Grandparents’ Influences in the Identity Development of Afakasi Young People.” Pacific Identities and Well-Being: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Ed. Margaret Nelson Agee, Tracey McIntosh, Philip Culbertson, Cabrini ’Ofa Makasiale. New York: Routledge, 2013. 46-65.

ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen tiffin. The Empire Writes Back. New York: Routledge, 1989.

BhaBha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Ed. J.B. Thompson. Trans. G. Raymond and M.

Adamson. Cambridge: Polity P, 1991.fiGiel, Sia. Where We Once Belonged. Auckland: Pasifika P, 1996.fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing

Democracy.” Justice Interruptus. New York: Routledge, 1997. 68-98.frye, Northrop, “Approaching the Lyric.” Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism. Ed. Chaviva Hošek and Patricia

Parker. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985. 31-7.keoWn, Michelle. “‘Gauguin is dead’: Sia Figiel and the Polynesian Female Body.” Postcolonial Pacific

Writing: Representations of the Body. New York: Routledge, 2005. 38-60.lorde, Audrey. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Watertown, MA: Persephone P, 1982. Marsh, Selina Tusitala. “Theory ‘Versus’ Pacific Islands Writing”: Toward a Tama’ita’i Criticism in the

Works of Three Pacific Islands Woman Poets.” Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific. Ed. Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. 337-56.

—. Fast Talking PI. 2009. Todmorden, UK: Arc, 2012.


—. “Pasifika Poetry on the Move: Staging Polynation.” Cultural Crossings: Negotiating Identities in Francophone and Anglophone Pacific Literatures. Ed. Raylene L. Ramsay. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2010. 197-216.

—. “‘Nafanua and the New World’: Pasifika’s Writing of Niu Zealand.” A History of New Zealand Literature. Ed. Mark Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016. 359-73.

teaiWa, Teresia, and Selina Tusitala Marsh. “Albert Wendt’s Critical and Creative Legacy in Oceania.” The Contemporary Pacific 22.2 (Fall 2010): 233-48.

spiVak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. 271-314.

Wendt, Albert. “Afterword: Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body.” Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific. Ed. Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. 399-413.

—. “Towards a New Oceania.” Mana Review 1.1 (1976): 49-60.

Paradise and Apocalypse:

Critiques of Nuclear Imperialism

in Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s Iep Jaltok

This article considers both the material and the psychic impact of the militarization of the Pacific, focusing primarily on Marshallese poet-activist Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s first print collection, Iep Jaltok (2017). Interrogating the spatial mythologies that have made

the Pacific Islands a key site for the US to test weapons and launch foreign wars, Jetnil-Kijiner exposes the racist and gendered logic that justifies colonial violence in the Pacific.

On the morning of January 13, 2018, people throughout Hawai‘i scrambled to take shelter after an emergency alert announced that a North Korean ballistic missile was headed for the islands. Given its proximity to the Korean peninsula in comparison to the continental US, Hawai‘i was the first state to prepare for nuclear attack when Pyongyang bolstered its arsenal in 2017 (Persio). For nearly forty minutes, panicked and confused civilians awaited destruction before government officials announced that the alert was a mistake (Wong). The false alarm carries both irony and threat for Indigenous peoples because of the United States’ militarization of the Pacific Islands. Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez, who lives and teaches in Hawai‘i, commented that the Indigenous people of both Guam and Hawai‘i daily witness the way in which their sacred lands are dese-crated and polluted by military activity: “Our islands are not only basis [sic.] of war but they’re also targets of other foreign militaries – so in a sense we’re both a weapon and a target” (qtd. in Wong). Despite the fact that the Pacific has “been a ‘strategic’ site of American Empire,” Santos Perez notes that it has also been “strategically invisible to the popular and scholarly American imaginary” (622, 623).

Following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the sacred Hawaiian grounds of Kaho‘olawe were seized for weapons testing, and though activists were eventually able to reclaim the site in the 1990s, the Hawaiian archipelago continues to function as a key US military site for training, testing, and launching foreign wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (El Dessouky 260). After the world’s first atomic testing in the New Mexico desert and subsequent bomb droppings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the US selected the Bikini and Enewetak atolls in the Marshall Islands as ideal “proving grounds” for its weapons testing program and tested over 65 nuclear weapons over the course of the Cold War. Though US weapons testing ended in 1980, Bikini Atoll remains unin-habitable, and the lasting impacts of displacement and irradiation of land, water, and peoples are yet to be remediated by the US government (“Bikini Atoll Nuclear Test”).1

Interrogating the spatial mythologies that have made the Pacific Islands an impor-tant site for US weapons testing and launching of foreign wars, this article investi-gates a spectrum of enduring violence impacting Indigenous people and their environ-ments.2 Borrowing Santos Perez’s phrase, I consider the gendered views that contribute to the “strategic invisibility” of militarization in the Pacific Islands in both American

1. In 2001, a nuclear claims tribunal determined that over $2 billion in property and health damages was owed to the Republic of the Marshall Islands, but “there was no mechanism to force the United States to pay it” (Zak).

2. For other Pacific literatures that deal with nuclear imperialism, see Chantal Spitz’s 1991 novel L’Ile des rêves écrasés (Island of Shattered Dreams), which depicts the aftermath of French nuclear testing in Tahiti.

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and transpacific consciousness. As discussed in more depth below, colonial views femi-nize the Pacific and its small island nations as empty, passive, and ahistorical, which preconditions and justifies exploitation. As Pacific scholar Paul Sharrad has observed, gendered descriptions of the Pacific Basin suggest a “passive receptacle” or “something more akin to a sink than a bowl; a container, a vessel that exists to be filled or emptied” (597, 599).3 For Sharrad, the term “basin” turns the Pacific into a void and “natu-ralizes” various forms of environmental destruction, including dumping nuclear and toxic waste (599). In her first print collection, Iep Jaltok (2017), Marshallese poet-activist Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner traces the history of US nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands and exposes the racist and gendered logic that sees the Pacific as an empty basin. Jetnil-Kijiner, a spoken word artist who gained international visibility during her performance at the 2014 Opening Ceremony of the United Nations Secretary-General’s Climate Summit, attaches the global crisis of climate change to colonial legacies of nuclear tes-ting in the Marshall Islands and wider Pacific region. Through her depictions of incre-mental and accumulative forms of violence, Jetnil-Kijiner depicts both the material and psychic impacts of the militarization of the Pacific.

When viewed in isolation, the experiences of Bikinians and other small populations of the Pacific may appear insignificant on the world stage. However, by connecting the destruction of island homes and Indigenous ways of life to larger threats to the planet, such as climate change, Jetnil-Kijiner shows how the militarization of the islands is not isolated but part of larger global processes. Beyond exposing linkages between different colonial structures, the poet also imagines alternative networks of solidarity. Through Indigenous approaches and aesthetics, Jetnil-Kijiner creates a vision of survival based on communal senses of belonging and interrelationship with the environment.

The Missing Pacific in “Pacific Rim” DiscoursesTranspacific scholars have observed how usages of “Pacific,” “Pacific Rim,” and “Asia-Pacific” work to discursively obscure the Pacific Islands. Pacific Islander groups are often subsumed into Asian or Asian American designations, which obfuscates the spe-cific political statuses and investments of Indigenous populations. As Rob Wilson and Arif Dirlik have observed, Pacific Rim discourses routinely ignore the island nations of the “Pacific Basin,” and a number of Pacific Island scholars have discussed the tendency in Asian American studies to “exclude, elide, or appropriate Pacific Island histories and perspectives” (Suzuki 356-7). Commenting on postcolonial scholarship, Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho make a similar point in their introduction to Militarized Currents: “The Asia-Pacific label is known more for its designation of countries on the Pacific Rim than for countries in the Pacific itself. In this geographical configu-ration, attention is paid to Pacific Rim countries like Chile, Hong Kong, and Singapore, whereas an examination of countries in the Pacific like Nauru, Fiji, and Samoa is often lacking” (xxxi). Whereas the Pacific “Rim” is foregrounded through economic currents and exchange, the Pacific Ocean and its islands recede into a basin of negative space.

3. For more see Jose Rabasa’s “Allegories of the Atlas” in Inventing A-M-E-R-I-C-A (1993), which draws out gende-red binary oppositions encoded in the Mercator Atlas, presenting the “New World” as soft and feminine in contrast to “Old World” masculinity (188). Sharrad’s analysis extends critical discussions of land as feminized by considering land-sea dichotomies and the ways in which water is represented as a void within colonial discourses.

Paradise and Apocalypse: Critiques of Nuclear Imperialism in Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s Iep Jaltok121

In interrogating the spatial mythology of “rim” and “basin,” I look to three in-terrelated sets of optics: geographic scale; aerial perspectives; and the dichotomy of “spectacle and secrecy.” The first refers to the privileging of continents over islands, where countries on continents are assumed to be more important, more “worldly,” than island nations (Archipelagic American Studies 18). In his 1993 essay, “Our Sea of Islands,” Tongan writer Epeli Hau’ofa contests belittling notions of islands by proposing a vision of inter-island connection through the power of the ocean. The dismissive views of “smallness” addressed by Hau’ofa have also translated into perceptions of island popu-lations and their human value. US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s 1969 comment in regard to the future of the US Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands perhaps best exemplifies this sentiment: “There are only 90,000 of them out there. Who gives a damn?” (qtd. in Teaiwa, “Bikinis” 101).

My second lens deals with “air-age globalism,” the rise of aerial technologies during the World Wars and subsequent re-mappings of the globe viewed from above (Taketani 113). Etsuko Taketani argues that the 1940s saw a spatial paradigm shift in which the Mercator projection lost its utility. The Eurocentric maritime map depicts Japan and Hawai‘i at opposite ends of the Earth; however, following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, post-Mercator aerial maps closed the distance between the two archipelagoes and also “closed up the strategic value of Pacific islands and thus shaped the conduct of the war” (114). The United States used these maps “for the military tactics of island hopping or leapfrogging, building airstrips and integrating the network of military oper-ations with aircraft” (114). While the spatial reordering created through aerial perspec-tives blurs hemispheric boundaries – calling into question illusory divisions between East and West – Elizabeth DeLoughrey also observes that the aerial view generates a panoptical perspective. In “The Myth of Isolates: Ecosystem Ecologies in the Nuclear Pacific,” DeLoughrey refers to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) films used to “introduce US viewers to the newly acquired island territories in the Pacific Islands” (168). The views of the islands from military planes re-inscribed ideas of islands as remote and bounded, closed systems isolated from the rest of the world. This myth of “biological and geographical” self-containment helped the AEC to justify “human radiation experiments on Marshall Islanders for 40 [years]” and also obscured the tests’ contamination of the globe (168). DeLoughrey concludes that, because the irradiation of the Pacific Islands was circulated through ocean currents, “we all carry a small piece of that island world in our bones” (179).4 Jetnil-Kijiner counters these aerial views of removal and detachment by presenting the view from the ground or sometimes the water line, exposing the bodily impacts of radiation poisoning and climate change in the Marshall Islands.

At the same time, some of these atrocities are common knowledge and yet fail to arouse outrage or action. My third lens, the dichotomy of “spectacle” and “secrecy,” is adapted and extended from i-Kiribati poet-scholar Teresia Teaiwa’s concept of “mili-tourism.” Teaiwa’s neologism, which combines militarism with tourism, describes how “military or paramilitary force ensures the smooth running of a tourist industry, and

4. DeLoughrey explains: “Due to these thermonuclear weapons, the entire planet is permeated with militarized radiation [...]. Radioactive elements produced by these weapons were spread through the atmosphere, deposited into water supplies and soils, absorbed by plants and thus into the bone tissue of humans all over the globe [...]. At very conservative estimates, these nuclear weapons tests have produced 400,000 cancer deaths worldwide” (179).

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that same tourist industry masks the military force behind it” (“Reading Paul Gauguin’s Noa Noa” 251). Hawai‘i, for example, is known for its beauty and is perceived primarily as a tourist destination, which belies the fact that the archipelago houses one of the largest military arsenals in the world (Ireland). Through the simultaneity of spectacle and secrecy, I consider how the horror of the atom bomb’s mushroom cloud, well-documented by the AEC, both depicts extreme violence and deflects public attention away from its human impact. Though the figure of the blooming mushroom cloud is no secret, the myriad public health and environmental impacts remain relatively unseen. Similar to the way that militourism deflects attention, the simultaneity of spectacle and secrecy is an important descriptor for US military activity in the Pacific: though not outright invisible to international publics, it operates through a kind of slippage. An American viewer might even be overexposed to images of hyper-violence and fail to witness them. Through these three optics of diminishment, detachment, and deflection, I examine how the US rationalized its nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands and contin-ues to downplay the impacts of its military presence in the wider Pacific.

Gender and Geography: Jetnil-Kijiner’s Interrogations of the Pacific “Rim” and “Basin”Jetnil-Kijiner’s first print collection Iep Jaltok (2017), published by the University of Arizona Press, appears as part of the Sun Tracks American Indian Literary Series, im-plicitly connecting the US colonization of Indigenous Pacific Islanders with Native Americans in the continental US. Organized in four parts, the book begins with an-cient Marshallese navigator history and mythology in “Iep Jāltok,” and the following three sections expose different dimensions of colonial history in the Pacific. “History Project” focuses on the legacy of US nuclear testing in the region, followed by “Lessons from Hawai‘i,” which narrates the experiences of Micronesian migrants in the United States. The final section, “Tell Them,” focuses on the birth of the poet’s daughter and features a number of poems dedicated to global climate change and its particular repercussions on the islands of the Pacific. An introductory note explains that “Iep jaltok (yiyip jalteq)” refers to, “‘A basket whose opening is facing the speaker.’ Said of female children. She represents a basket whose contents are made available to her relatives. Also refers to matrilineal society of the Marshallese.” Throughout the collection, the titular basket serves as a thematic connector. The feminine coding of the basket takes on multiple meanings as the collection progresses, alternating from a site of contestation to one of hope for Marshallese survival.

The collection is framed by two sets of baskets through which the poet interro-gates relationships of inner and outer, basin and rim. The opening poem, “Basket,” is shaped in two crescent stanza formations, resembling two baskets facing away from each other. The words in the first stanza arc into a bowl that opens to the right side of the page. The speaker addresses “woman” and invites her to tip the “lid” of her basket so that her offering will spill across the table. The poem progresses as the line of words curves inward with, “you / offer / offer,” and then reaches its base as it dives back into ancestry: “earth / of your / mother” and “roots / of your / father.” The poem de-scribes woman as the conduit connecting past and future, simultaneously acting as the vehicle carrying ancestral history and the producer of the next generation. Through her offering, she generates future history in the form of the next basket “waiting / to be /


woven” (4). The first stanza reads like a prayer of supplication, the repetition of “you / offer / offer” both beckoning and honoring women’s role as cultural producer, confla-ting the labor of basket weaving with bearing children. The lack of punctuation in the first line, especially the absence of a comma following “woman,” affectively collapses the distance between the poetic speaker and the woman addressed. The presumably woman speaker (given the turn at the end of the poem discussed in the next paragraph) addresses a collective “woman” – speaking both to herself and to the larger communal body of “woman.”

The next stanza which begins on the following page reverses direction, with the opening facing the left side of the page. It begins in the same way, asking the woman to tip her basket to the table, but as her offering descends, it “scrapes / [her] floor” and is interrupted by the question: “bare / vessel?” In the inverse of the previous stanza, the deepest point of the basket is not a reservoir of history but instead a receptacle “with scraps / tossed by / others” (5). As the bowl curves up to the outer rim, the speaker’s address shifts from the collective voice to a first-person point of view. The lowercase lyric “i” closes out the poem with:

i fell asleepdreamt

my smile was merely

a rimwoven

into myface

The introduction of “i” here marks two shifts in the poem: the intersubjective voice morphs into an individual speaker, and the basket metaphor turns from its association with women’s labor to a false smile. She feels the smile as a rim woven into her face, where outer expression does not reflect interior feeling. The poem gestures at social pressures on women to suppress complaint and appear happy even for strangers.

Jetnil-Kijiner’s examination of the gendered meanings attached to the Marshallese basket uncannily mirrors analyses of Asia-Pacific Rim and Basin discourse. On the one hand, the feminization or emptying of the Pacific, as pointed out by Sharrad, is the language of erasure, collapsing the Pacific into an undifferentiated Asia; on the other, it serves as justification for making use of the space for colonial purposes, be it dumping nuclear waste, testing weapons, or launching foreign wars. In “Basket,” Jetnil-Kijiner plays with these reversals through her performance and re-performance of the bas-ket shape itself. The basket’s duality intersects with gendered discourses of the Pacific along multiple axes: Basin and Rim, secrecy and spectacle, interior and exterior, pas-sive receptacle and sovereign vessel. The dichotomy also speaks to differences between Eurocentric and Polynesian cultural frameworks. In Polynesian traditions, as explained by Sharrad, the void is not seen as a space of “sterile absence and vacancy, but as a source of creative, living potential” (603). In Jetnil-Kijiner’s depiction, the basket’s rim marks a separation between public and private spheres and between different cultural perspectives on the Pacific “void.” At the poem’s conclusion, the rim, embodied as a woman’s pained smile, mystifies and makes her labor disappear from the public space of cultural production. For Jetnil-Kijiner, the basket’s shape becomes the site to explore

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women’s social role: the same basket that bears an ancestral offering can be hollowed to a container, and her act of offering can be reduced to mere servitude.

Though Jetnil-Kijiner is primarily a spoken word performer, the print page allows her to dramatize the basket’s relationship to the female body through her play with tex-tual lineation, which resonates with the visual nature of her work and the emphasis on visual expression in Pacific Island cultures. As Teaiwa explains, Pacific literary histories that emphasize the introduction of writing as a new technology obscure “a sophisti-cated Indigenous understanding of the visual” (“What Remains” 731). Though these histories often refer to the deep tradition of orature in the Pacific, hierarchical views that frame oral culture as outmoded and print as modern often undergird narratives of postcolonial Pacific literature. Instead, Teaiwa asks us to consider the visual roots of Pacific cultures and ancient technologies analogous to writing, such as the lalava bindings found throughout Pacific architecture and canoes. The various patterns of lalava lashings that were used to bind beams can also be broken down into symbols “equivalent of linguistic morphemes” (735). Teaiwa’s interventions trouble notions that the Pacific Islands have belatedly entered “modernity” through the advent of print literature in English, but they also claim Indigenous practices of binding or weaving as a form of writing. Jetnil-Kijiner’s iep jaltok gathers together these various strands: without an understanding of Pacific cultural history, the communal values embedded in the basket’s interlaced fibers are lost. Representing both lineage and ancient practices of weaving passed down across generations, the basket is the site of both individual embodiment and communal subjectivity.

“Most Marshallese / can say they’ve mastered the language of cancer”: Slow Violence in Bikini Atoll (40)

Over the course of the Cold War, the US launched over 65 atomic tests, but as scientific studies show, the 1954 detonation of the Bravo hydrogen bomb is responsible for the bulk of enduring radiation in the region and, consequently, lasting public health risks. In fact, the single event marks the highest dose of nuclear fallout in the history of worldwide nuclear testing: over fifty years after Bravo’s explosion, scientists project last-ing health implications, with “increased cancer risk as the primary late health effect of exposure” (Simon et al. 48). Bravo’s blast, which, unlike previous tests, fused rather than split atoms, “eviscerated three islands in the Bikini Atoll” and is thought to have been nearly one thousand times more powerful than the US bombing in Hiroshima (Keown 936). Islanders inhabiting the islands of Rongelap and Rongerik, who were not informed of the detonation, were exposed to the fallout when wind carried the radioactive dust that descended like snow over isles (Niedenthal). Twenty-three Japanese fishermen aboard the Lucky Dragon were also exposed to fallout (Simon et al. 52). The catastrophe created an international media scandal; however, reports focused on the men aboard the Lucky Dragon, ignoring the Marshallese exposed in the immediate aftermath of the detonation and then through contaminated soil, water, and vegetation in the years that followed (Keown 936; Simon et al. 50).

In her analysis of Iep Jaltok’s critique of US imperialism, Pacific literary scholar Michelle Keown reads the Lucky Dragon incident through eco-critic Rob Nixon’s theory of “slow violence.” Nixon describes “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attrition-


al violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2). Slow violence includes radiation poisoning and radioactive fallout, deforestation, climate change, and other environmental catastrophes that unevenly impact the environments of the “poor” and are often discounted by Western nuclear powers. Keown sees the invisibility of the disastrous trans-generation effects of nuclear testing on the Marshallese people as a key illustration of slow violence. While the Lucky Dragon incident created international ou-trage, the decades of radiation-related epidemics in the Marshall Islands remain “largely ignored and suppressed by the United States” (938). Keown writes, “There was a flurry of international media attention at the time of the BRAVO bomb due to the radiation exposure of the Japanese fishing crew, but the long-term effects of radiation and dis-placement upon the Marshallese have barely been registered outside the Indigenous community” (938). In terms of US narrative, Hiroshima represents a singular event, justified as a once and necessary act, while more chronic and structural nuclear events in the Marshall Islands are conveniently left unremembered.

By considering the spectacle / secrecy dichotomy evoked by Jetnil-Kijiner’s basket trope, I extend Keown’s analysis by further investigating the dilemma of representation raised by Nixon. Like Sharrad’s interrogation of the basin / rim binary, Nixon’s descrip-tions of slow violence ring with gendered language. Nixon observes that global media tend to privilege the visual (“If it bleeds, it leads”), which creates a representational bias against violence that is not bound by an explosive event or action (16). In addi-tion, stories told by “people whose witnessing authority is culturally discounted” remain unheard or, as I argue in regard to Jetnil-Kijiner, constitute an open secret, a form of structural violence that becomes normalized as inevitable. While slow violence in its various manifestations may be too diffuse or incremental to raise alarms when viewed in isolation, Jetnil-Kijiner forces her audience to bear witness by connecting structures of slow violence. Events in isolation might not register in the public eye or can be disregarded, but when viewed constellationally, their impacts cannot be ignored. Jetnil-Kijiner connects the bodily horrors of radiation poisoning and cancer experienced by the Marshallese with events of nuclear disaster, global climate change, and the reality of sinking islands in the Pacific.

In the eight-part poem “Fishbone Hair,” Jetnil-Kijiner narrates her niece Bianca’s chronic illness and eventual death from leukemia. Each of the eight short sections offers a glimpse into Bianca’s life at various stages of illness, and throughout the poem, the grieving speaker is left to consider the physical facts of the child’s disembodied hair and bones. These recurring references to “rootless hair” and “bones” creates a resonance of trauma that speaks to multiple senses of loss. The first section begins with the discovery of “two ziplocks / stuffed / with rolls and rolls of hair” inside Bianca’s old room (24). The speaker considers the plastic bags with a rush of undifferentiated similes: “dead as a doornail black as a tunnel hair thin / as strands of tumbling seaweed.” The lack of punctuation or syntactical separation between the metaphors adds a propulsive quality, as though the speaker is trying to make sense of the contents of the bags before she settles on “strands of tumbling seaweed.” She wonders whether her sister stashed the bags in an attempt “to save that / rootless hair / that hair without a home” (24). Keown reads this reference to homelessness as evoking the experience of “exile of the nuclear nomads of the northern atolls” (943). In this way, the rolls of hair represent both the individual experience of child cancer as well as the wider experience of nuclear refugees

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in the Marshall Islands. As the poem progresses, the connections between Bianca’s ill-ness and the legacy of military colonialism in the region become more evident.

In the next section, the speaker explains that a war had been “raging” in her niece’s six-year-old bones. She describes the white cells as colonizers who “staked their flag” and “conquered the territory of her tiny body” (25). The white cells double for Amer-ican invaders, who see their takeover as a reflection of destiny. Bianca’s body is the ter-ritory through which the ideology of Manifest Destiny reaches its culmination, and the final phrase drifts down the page like the loose strands of hair it references:

Itall

fellout (25)

In a later section, after shifting in time to moments before and after Bianca’s death, the poem alludes to Bravo’s detonation as experienced by the Lucky Dragon fishermen. After watching the explosion splitting the sky, the speaker explains, the fishermen were quiet, and perhaps most tellingly, “they were neat.” After dusting the fallout from their hair, they “turned around their motorboat and speeded home” (29). In contrast to Bianca’s rootless hair, the Japanese fishermen are able to return home and leave the incident behind them. In reality, the fishermen suffered from radiation poisoning, but the de-scription of neatness and “dusting off ” emphasizes that the event was isolated for the fishermen, whereas the Marshallese people have been displaced in their own home.

In the final two sections, the poem turns its grief into a potential for solidarity. The coils of hair become the material for nets. The speaker recalls a Chamorro legend in which the women of Guåhan (Guam) weave their long hair into nets to save their island from a monstrous fish. In the closing section, the words are scattered across the page, but this time, they do not evoke falling strands of hair but, instead, a woven net. The arrangement of “fishbone hair” among the nodes of words, “catch,” “ash,” “catch,” “moon,” “catch,” “star,” also resembles an astral constellation, thus calling back to the Indigenous navigator poems at the start of the collection and the ancient sailors who used the stars as guide. The shape also simultaneously suggests a network of islands: the references to Guåhan, another island under US military occupation, creates a trans-oceanic cultural link, and the net suggests Indigenous collaboration and resistance against a common oppressor. The net of words, the poem concludes, is “for you Bianca / for you” (31).

“For the good of humankind”: Universalizing Discourses in the Face of Ecological Catastrophe

In the poem “History Project,” Jetnil-Kijiner describes a school project she conducted at the age of fifteen to research the history of nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands. The poem layers discourses of political and military jargon (including Kissinger’s dis-missal: “90,000 people out there. Who / gives a damn?”) with the lived horrors of the nuclear aftermath, including accounts of pervasive miscarriages and infant death as a result of radiation: “jelly babies / tiny beings with no bones / skin – red as tomatoes” (20). Recounting the initial 1946 removal of Bikini Islanders from their atoll, the speaker remembers her “islander ancestors, cross-legged / before a general listening / to his


fairy tale” (21). The general here refers to Commodore Ben Wyatt, who convinced the Bikinians to temporarily evacuate their home so that the US could begin nuclear testing “for the good of mankind” (Niedenthal). The Bikinians were resettled in the nearby Rongerik Atoll, where they found an insufficient food and water supply and suffered from starvation. They were never able to return home as Bikini remains uninhabitable today, and the displaced Bikinians, who dispersed to Kili and other Marshall Islands, continue to struggle with limited food and resources. Because of irradiation, traditional practices of fishing are no longer viable, which has forced dependency on imported industrialized foods (Niedenthal). Highlighting the irony of Wyatt’s statement, the fif-teen-year-old speaker of the poem titles her history project, “FOR THE GOOD OF MANKIND” (23). She submits it to a district-wide competition, but the three white judges miss the bitter joke.

As the collection progresses, Jetnil-Kijiner begins connecting these narratives of radiation-related displacement to those of climate change refugees in the Pacific. In “Tell Them,” the speaker urges her friends in the US to tell others about the Marshall Islands. She describes flooding cemeteries and water crashing over sea walls (66). “Tell them,” she demands, “what it’s like / to see the entire ocean__level___with the land” (66). The underscores around “level” visually invoke the surface of water enveloping the land. Those in the US who are not immediately impacted by the reality of rising sea levels have the luxury of complacency, while Marshall Islanders witness the difference that a matter of inches can make. In the poem, “Two Degrees,” in particular, the poet weighs these perceptions of scale as she links two forms of slow violence: radiation poisoning and global warming. She begins by describing her one-year-old daughter sick with fever. She thinks about the difference only a few degrees can make, the differ-ence between life and death, and she extends this thought to scientists’ warning that two degrees’ difference in the Earth’s temperature will mean global catastrophe: “at 2 degrees my islands / will already be under water” (77). She considers minimizing views of the Marshall Islands, which from an outside perspective must look like “just crumbs you / dust off the table” (78), which recalls French president Charles de Gaulle’s sweep-ing description of the Caribbean Islands as crumbs: “Between Europe and America I see only specks of dust” (qtd. in Glissant n.p.). The poem describes patients in a clinic on Kili island, “with a nuclear history threaded / into their bloodlines,” who awake to a rushing tide flooding the hospital (78). A “sewage of syringes and gauze” floats in the sea water (78). In the midst of the wreckage, the poet explains the aim of her poetic project, that she writes to put faces on the numbers and statistics, to dramatize the human toll of climate change so often obscured by political discourse. “There are faces . . .” she reminds us, “not yet / under water” (79).

Jetnil-Kijiner’s depiction of shrinking islands and the unequal experience and witnes-sing of climate change’s impact speaks to recent debates about the future of postcolonial study in a warming world. As scientists take stock of the human impact on the global climate and designate the current era as the Anthropocene, human beings have been re-figured as a geological force with the power to control geologic history. In “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change” (2012), Dipesh Chakrabarty argues for a new conception of the human subject in the face of potential apocalypse. He contends, “The fact that the crisis of climate change will be routed through all our ‘anthropo-logical differences’” – meaning differences of class, race, sexuality, gender, and so on

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– “can only mean that, however anthropogenic the current global warming may be in its origins, there is no corresponding ‘humanity’ that in its oneness can act as a political agent” (14). While Chakrabarty’s vision proposes a united human community mobilized to save the species, Benita Parry’s withering critique points out that responsibility for massing greenhouse gasses and its effects are not evenly distributed across humanity. Instead, Parry observes, Chakrabarty’s transcendent view displaces discussions of the intersecting roles of global capitalism and imperialism in climate change. By ignoring “the logic of capitalist accumulation on a world scale producing environmental crises,” she writes, Chakrabarty positions global warming as a “transcendental force outside an actually existing world order” (347). In other words, the climate crisis is staged as sepa-rate from rather than imbricated in global socioeconomic disparity.

A reductive take on this debate might frame “anthropological differences,” class struggle, and identity politics as irrelevant in the face of impending global threat. Perhaps unexpectedly (and in sharp contrast to Chakrabarty’s transcendent vision), medieval-ist scholar Jeffrey Jerome Cohen suggests that a deeper engagement with “unequally distributed suffering” is needed to mobilize against global warming. Cohen connects current fears of a submerged world to another apocalypse story, the biblical myth of Noah’s ark. He attributes complacent attitudes about climate change to a western cultural fantasy that allows us to retreat from responsibility – we return, Cohen argues, to the promise of an “ark” that will inevitably save some but not all, a presentist view that ignores the complex history of the Noah myth. Images of a drowned Earth that emerge with the term “Anthropocene” deploy the “god trick,” an aerial view that has the “effect of objectivity” as it gazes down at the Earth from a distance (Rabasa 186). Meanwhile, the “arkive” of medieval illustrations and numerous retellings of Noah’s flood across centuries offer a more complicated picture: a view from below that shows the faces of those who have been lost, corpses of human and nonhuman life mingling together in the waters. This change of perspective – from a transcendent, totalizing view to an engagement with the material impacts of climate change – works against fatalism. Instead, the possibility for a human community emerges through a reckoning with uneven suffering rather than an escape from it.

Countering Commodore Wyatt’s “fairy tale” vision of a united humanity, Jetnil-Kijiner presents concerns for the good of mankind as inseparable from the life of the planet in “Dear Matafele Peinam.” The poem, which was originally performed at the 2014 Opening Ceremony of the United Nations Secretary-General’s Climate Summit, is dedicated to the poet’s daughter at the age of seven months and wonders what future world awaits her, one where she “will wander / rootless”? (70) The speaker pledges to her daughter that she will not allow her to become a “climate change refu-gee” (71). She pledges to fight, even though there are those who like to “pretend / that we don’t exist” (72). As identified by the invocation of “we,” she begins in the Pacific Islands but ripples out to wider geographies: “the Philippines” and “Pakistan, Algeria, Colombia,” impacted by floods, typhoons, and earthquakes (72). Like the net at the end of “Fishbone Hair,” which suggests Indigenous Pacific solidarity, Jetnil-Kijiner’s geographies here also create a trans-ethnic and trans-cultural collaborative network, but this time, one that encompasses other Global Souths beyond the Pacific region. She issues a call to resist and reassures her daughter that there are already “canoes blocking coal ships,” referring to Indigenous protests against resource exploitation (72). Also


significant is the poet’s emphasis on feminine lineage, as she considers her daughter, her granddaughter, and her great granddaughter, reinforcing the book’s epigraph, “Girls continue the lineage,” and culminating in the collection’s final poem (70).

The last poem is a mirror image of the first; also titled “Basket,” it presents two curving stanza formations identical to the opening poem. In the first stanza, however, when the woman tips her basket, her offering finds:

a seabed to scrape

a receptacle to dump

with scraps

your body

is a country we conquer

and devour (80)

Her body, like Bianca’s, is a country or territory to conquer and an empty vessel in which to dump waste. Yet, though “we / take,” she continues to give. The following stanza of the next page is an inverse of the first, and the two curving baskets face each other to form a circle. This time, when the woman tips her basket, she creates “a lineage / of sand” and “a reef / of memory” (81). The speaker affirms that her “womb” is “the sus-tainer / of life,” and when the lyric “I” appears, capitalized in contrast to the lowercase “i” of the first poem, the speaker dreams that her words flow out “to greet you” (81).

Reversing the colonial view that evacuates Pacific history, Jetnil-Kijiner presents the basin as a vessel to carry and sustain life, connecting past memory with future lineage. Co-extensive with the environment, the human body is entangled with both sand and reef. In contrast to the image of both the body and the environment as territory to “conquer / and devour,” the poet concludes the collection by imagining the basket as open and overflowing with offering, not a mere receptacle but a vessel to carry future history.

Marlo starr

Johns Hopkins University

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How (not) to Globalize Oceania:

Ecology and Politics

in Contemporary Pacific Island Performance ArtsAnswering the call for a new ecological democracy, representational and performative initiatives by Oceanian writers and spoken-word artists, dancers, choreographers, and filmmakers render the conditions of life in the contemporary Pacific visible globally and

counter the threat of disappearance posed by both global warming and a global economy. Acting in concert and insisting on the indivisibility of people and the land, their performative actions exemplify an “ecology of practices.”

The theme “Unsettling Oceania” brings to mind the forced relocations and the de-struction of island homes imposed on Pacific Island societies in the name of advan-cing global modernity. But to isolate the predicament of small island nations threate-ned by global warming would be misleading. As Heather Lazrus points out, “Climate refugees and sinking islands have become popular tropes in climate discourse”; yet, “[w]hile highlighting the plights of islanders, such metaphors do more harm by remov-ing agency from these people” (294). In order to properly engage the challenge posed to island societies by climate change, we must see it in connection, and in continuity, with earlier acts of violence committed on them by colonial powers in the name of universal peace and prosperity. After expanding on this context of acts of ecological violence and looking at future ecological prospects, I will discuss two examples of grassroots movements of ecological democracy that have successfully engaged global powers, highlighting the role that performance arts and literary creativity, especially poetry, played in their effective amplification. The first example comes from the Amer-ican territory of Guåhan (Guam), where the concerted action of various community organizations, led by scholars and writers, successfully stalled plans by the US Depart-ment of Defense for a massive military build-up and saved an ancient Chamorro village and its natural environment from being converted into a live firing range. The second example stems from Fiji and shows ecological democracy unfolding in the form of an expanding movement of creative and performative actions responding to the impact of global warming on Pacific Island societies and environments, identified as a lasting effect of colonial violence.

Denial of Colonial Violence and Prospects for Rejuvenating Ecological Democracy

The threat of inundation, submergence and forced migration resulting from fos-sil fuel-driven global warming is but an escalation of other forms of destruction wrought on Pacific Islands throughout the twentieth century.1 The devastation of the Micronesian island of Banaba, for instance, which was “essentially eaten away by [phosphate] mining” (Teaiwa, Consuming 5, 148) as twenty-two million tons of the land

1. This is not to say that other forms of colonial violence did not impact the Pacific Islands prior to the twentieth century. While at bottom always driven by economic opportunity and speculation, colonial ventures in the Pacific in the nineteenth century in particular aimed to bring native lands under foreign control and to transform indigenous cultural identities in ways compatible with capitalist and racist divisions of labour.

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of this 6.5km2 island were used to feed the agriculture of New Zealand and Austra-lia, by 1945 already required the forced relocation of the Banabans to the island of Rabi in Fiji. The relatively slower violence of such excessive mining (from 1900 to 1980) in turn found an escalation in the instantaneous, prolonged, and longer lasting devastation of island worlds by the atomic bomb tests that the US, UK, and France carried out in multiple sites across Oceania: 325 detonations from 1946 to 1996, of which 173 were atmospheric explosions with a combined yield of 176.9 megatons (Ruff 780-1). The worst hit were the Marshall Islanders who endured sixty-seven test explosions, “the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima bombs each day over the twelve years of the tests (1946-58)” (794), resulting in long-term displacement and contamination, with the “US National Cancer Institute estimate[ing] in 2004 that about half the extra cancers that would occur as a result of fallout in the Marshall Islands were still to come” (797).

Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence, referring to developmental interventions resulting in slowly enacted destruction and long-lasting harm, “whereby violence is decoupled from its original causes by the workings of time” (11), helps us see the continuity between such apparently disparate events as excessive mining, nuclear tes-ting and the impacts of climate change, and to recognize the logic that sustains their occurrence. For those who have to live through them, these events form a series of calamities converging on the destruction of island homes, forced migration and lasting damage to physical and spiritual health. Yet those chiefly responsible for inflicting the harm may fail to see it or readily deny its seriousness in the name of some greater good. As Katerina Teaiwa reports in Consuming Ocean Island, for instance, in 1912 the Sydney Morning Herald, while noting the resistance of Banaban landowners to the alienation of their land for the extraction of phosphate, argued that it was “inconceivable that less than 500 Ocean Island-born natives can be allowed to prevent the mining and export of a produc[t] of such immense value to all the rest of mankind” (17). The Bikinians too, when they were asked to leave their island in 1946, were told “that the atomic tests were ‘for the good of mankind and to end all world wars’” (Firth 27; Ruff 793-4). Henry Kissinger’s notorious remark in 1969, regarding the Marshall Islanders who would have to make way for US military bases, “There are only 90,000 people out there. Who gives a damn?” (Hickel 208), stands out for its crudeness. Yet a similar lack of concern about the destruction and harm caused, in this case, by a fossil fuel-driven way of life was expressed by American physicist William Nierenberg, who as chairman of the Carbon Dioxide Assessment Committee in 1983 advised inaction regarding CO2 emissions and painted a rosy picture of the likelihood of forced migration from areas rendered unin-habitable by climate change:

“Not only have people moved,” Nierenberg noted, “but they have taken with them their horses, dogs, children, technologies, crops, livestock, and hobbies. It is extraordinary how adaptable people can be.” (Oreskes and Conway 180-1)

The denial of harm expressed by such claims serves to veil another denial: the denial to the people directly affected of the peace and prosperity in the name of which envi-ronments and livelihoods are destroyed. Instead, as Rob Nixon notes with regard to the comparable situation of people displaced by megadam projects in India, so-called “Pro-ject-Affected People” are typically declared to be too few to count and become “virtual

How (not) to Globalize Oceania: Ecology and Politics in Contemporary Pacific Island Performance Arts133

uninhabitants,” as their lands are turned into submergence zones or sacrifice zones by advancing development (154).

The denial that characterized the development of western consumer democracy, as Timothy Mitchell has shown in his study of the shift from a coal to an oil economy in the twentieth century, has been built into the postcolonial world order and global econ-omy as systemic inequality. As such, it now troubles the politics of the Anthro-pocene, in which the struggle for decolonization meets up with the fight to preserve liveable environments around the world. This is a challenge that “requires rejuvenating ecological democracy,” as Rob Nixon, quoting Vandana Shiva, emphasizes (172). Com-ing at a time when growing elites in formerly colonized countries are catching up and becoming accustomed to western-style modes, if not levels, of consumption, this call recognizes the historical truth that, as Amitav Ghosh puts it in The Great Derangement, “the universalist premise of industrial civilization was a hoax; that a consumerist mode of existence, if adopted by a sufficient number of people, would quickly become unsus-tainable and would lead, literally, to the devouring of the planet” (111-2). Referring to the “Anglosphere” (135), Ghosh points out the apparent paradox that the military and defence establishments of the countries where denial of climate change is politically most vociferous explicitly identify climate change as their top security priority (138-40). Yet the “politics of the armed lifeboat” (143), as he notes, is consistent with the strate-gies of empire that continue to underpin the global distribution of power:

[T]he climate crisis holds the potential of drastically reordering the global distribution of power as well as wealth. This is because the nature of the carbon economy is such that power, no less than wealth, is largely dependent on the consumption of fossil fuels. (142)

For Ghosh, therefore, “global inaction on climate change is by no means the result of confusion or denialism or a lack of planning: to the contrary, the maintenance of the status quo is the plan” (145).2

The unequivocal investment in securing the power and wealth supported by the carbon economy complicates the political response to denialism because it is accompa-nied by an erosion of democratic politics, to the point that it undermines a significant dissent from the status quo. As Ghosh himself acknowledges, the “Anglosphere” is also home to “some of the most vigorous environmental movements in the world” (136) and “American intelligence services [for instance] have already made the surveillance of environmentalists and climate activists a top priority” (140). From this point of view, the strategic objective seems to be to make denial inescapable in practice, regardless of individual convictions. As Timothy Clark points out in Ecocriticism on the Edge, therefore, in many cases,

“denial” is less the assumed property of a personality than of the encompassing condition in which it finds itself. Most modern infrastructure in the developed world is, so to speak,

2. Ghosh’s claim is supported by research on the environmental impacts of militarization conducted by Andrew K. Jorgenson, Brett Clark and Jennifer E. Givens, which shows a strong correlation between carbon dioxide emissions per capita and military expenditures per soldier. Significantly, the military not only protects, but drives, fossil-fuel based economies by its own economic development. As Jorgenson et al. point out: “During regular operations, including peacetime activities, the armed forces consume large amounts of fossil fuels, adding to the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere” (327). Referring to a study by Vaclav Smil, they note “that the three branches of the US military consumed approximately 25 million tons of fuel per year in the 1990s, excluding energy consumed in both the Gulf War and the bombing of Kosovo […], ‘more than the total commercial energy consumption of nearly two thirds of the world’s countries’.” (ibid.)

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denial in concrete, for the distribution of buildings, work places, shopping areas and roads encourages or even enforces certain ways of life, such as private vehicle use, and makes (only temporary) sense in a period of cheap fossil fuel use. (159)

The effect is that almost any individual stance is compromised while attempts to organize action at a collective level are undermined, preventing the recognition of what Ghosh rightly points out is obvious: “that the scale of climate change is such that indi-vidual choices will make little difference unless certain collective decisions are taken and acted upon” (133). Clark identifies this as the effect of a pernicious form of “scale framing” (71-96), in which the insistence on individual choice serves to occlude the need, and the possibility, to organize action collectively, that is, politically, an observa-tion that is consistent with Jacques Rancière’s “notion of postdemocracy,” in which the bureaucratization and commercialization of technologies of representation, through permanent surveillance and surveying, eliminate the possibility of an effective appear-ance of any dissenting public (Disagreement 101-3).

Ghosh’s conclusion, in view of this impasse, “that the formal political structures of our time are incapable of confronting this crisis on their own” (159), echoes calls to “rejuvenat[e] ecological democracy” (Nixon 172) and urges the question of how this could be effected. “The critical question remains the question of strategy,” Nixon writes in the epilogue of Slow Violence (277), and in the conclusion of Carbon Democracy, Mitchell notes that the transition from the era of cheap oil to that of tough oil, in which the profits of extraction come at ever greater social and environmental costs, calls “for a new kind of politics of nature to replace the old, in which the relationship of politics to nature was governed only by economic calculation” (252). Such calls resonate in the contemporary Pacific, where ongoing efforts of decolonization are accentuated by demands for environmental justice in the face of continuing militarization and wors-ening impacts of global warming.

Guåhan: Performance and Poetry in the Resistance against Military Expansion

The political and economic situation of Guåhan exemplifies Amitav Ghosh’s observa-tion that the strategies of empire persist in the twenty-first century to secure the status quo of a fossil-fuel based global distribution of wealth and power as a legacy of colon-ialism. Formally established under Spanish control 350 years ago, the oldest colony in the Pacific has been an American possession since the Spanish-American war 120 years ago. As such, its political status and economic development continue to be determined by the military priorities of the United States and despite the establishment of a civilian government through the Organic Act of 1950, the people of Guåhan continue to be denied the full rights of US citizenship and self-determination under official administra-tion by the Department of Interior. Protests and petitions against “the contradiction of American rule without American democracy” (Herman 636) can be dated back to 1901 and have been thwarted to this day, with a draft Commonwealth Act “providing for a greater measure of internal self-government […] and the right of the Chamorro people to self-determination” (United Nations 17), endorsed by Guamanian voters in 1987, awaiting congressional action since negotiations with the federal government ended in 1997. In the meantime, the US Supreme Court’s assertion that “The Government


of Guam is in essence an instrumentality of the federal government” (Herman 637) continues to apply.3

Massive land appropriations by the US military after the Second World War, amoun-ting to “nearly two thirds of the private property on Guam” (Camacho and Monnig 158), devastated the local economy and contributed to the imposition of a wasteful and unsustainable economic development with militarization and tourism as its two pillars. Today, “the U.S. military continues to occupy a third of the island” (ibid.) and to sup-port an economy that keeps Guåhan dependent – with “nearly 90 percent of [its] food [being] imported” (Natividad and Kirk) as well as all of its energy derived from “petro-leum products that are shipped in by tanker” (US Energy Information Agency) – and a quarter of its population of approximately 167,000 people living in poverty.4 As Keith Camacho and Laurel Monnig note:

The weak economy due to the security closure compounded the alienation of family lands. This loss of land combined with intense in-migration altered Chamorro traditional forms of agricultural development and sustainability, casting them into only a few realistic options for work, namely military service or civil government work. (158)

This situation has resulted in “disproportionately high numbers of Chamorro enlistees” in the US military:

Chamorros, both men and women, enlist in greater numbers than any other American ethnic group in the United States or its territories. And Chamorro casualty rates have been considerably higher in every U.S. war since the Korean War, including the most recent war in Iraq. (Camacho and Monnig 162-3)

What Michael Lujan Bevacqua has called Guåhan’s “banal coloniality” (33), its seemin-gly unalterable subordination to US military priorities, has thus entrenched a political order based on precarity, as Judith Butler has defined it:

Precarity designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death. Such populations are at heightened risk of disease, poverty, starvation, displacement, and of exposure to violence without protection. Precarity also characterizes that politically induced condition of maximized precariousness for populations exposed to arbitrary state violence who often have no other option than to appeal to the very state from which they need protection. (Frames 25-6)

As such, the political situation of Guåhan also calls for “a consideration of precarity as an existing and promising site for coalitional exchange” (28) and “the basis for an alliance focused on opposition to state violence and its capacity to produce, exploit, and distribute precarity for the purposes of profit and territorial defense” (32). Indeed, the recent activist and popular resistance to a massive military build-up on Guåhan has demonstrated the potential of such a coalitional politics, arising from conditions of precarity. The movement to preserve and protect Pågat, organizing itself in opposi-

3. For a summary of Guamanian efforts toward self-determination dating back to 1901 and their denial, see Herman 634-7.

4. According to Natividad and Kirk, “[p]overty rates on Guam are high, with 25% of the population defined as poor. Between 38% and 41% of the island’s population qualifies for Food Stamps. Wage rates are low; schools are under-funded; and there are few opportunities for technical training on the island.” Although the island has a large potential for renewable energy, almost all of its energy continues to be derived from fossil fuels, with about 40% being used as jet fuel, 30% in unleaded gasoline, and 20% in diesel oil to generate electricity, “the military [with some 12,000 personnel] account[ing] for more than one-fifth of Guam’s energy consumption” (US Energy Information Agency).

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tion to the frame of military domination at the moment of its reproduction, which, as Butler notes, must also be its momentary “self-breaking,” successfully exposed “both the frame’s efficacy and its vulnerability to reversal, to subversion, even to critical in-strumentalization” (10). In doing so, the movement offered an example of the kind of performative politics that Butler has more recently discussed in Notes Toward a Perform-ative Theory of Assembly, enacting a form of democracy where a “space of appearance” in Hannah Arendt’s sense (199), as a condition of political action, remains elusive or denied. Importantly, the movement thus demonstrated the role of performance arts and literary creativity in the constitution of such forms of democracy, unsettling what Jacques Rancière has called the “distribution [or partition] of the sensible” (Dissensus 36), the order of representation that determines and breaks down what counts, as what, and how much.

In 2006 the US and Japan agreed on a plan to move as many as 8,000 US marines and their families from Okinawa to Guam, in response to opposition to the military base there. This Realignment Roadmap entailed a massive build-up of military instal-lations on Guam, involving a huge increase in both military and civilian population, as detailed in the Environmental Impact Statement issued by the US Navy in July 2010:

The total military population on Guam would increase by 30,190 (including 9,182 permanent military personnel, 9,950 dependents, 9,220 transient military personnel, and 1,836 civilian workers). In addition, construction workers and others could mean a total increase in population of about 79,000 at the peak in 2014. (Kan 12)5

The plan also involved the conversion of the ancient Chamorro village of Pågat and its environment into a live firing range. The implementation of this plan met with strong local opposition, mobilized through various community organizations. Led by scholars and writers, the resistance to the build-up turned into a sustained movement, distin-guished by its tactical resourcefulness and its creative use of diverse means and forms of representation. This allowed the movement to give rise to a politically empowered public and a network of support that instilled confidence in the capability of Chamorro values to prevail in the face of seemingly unstoppable militarization.

The movement’s tactics unfolded as a series of responses to the procedure of the US Department of Defense (DoD), which exposed and undermined the department’s strategy of giving the implementation of the build-up an appearance of democratic approval. When the DoD sought to demonstrate broad consensus on the build-up in November 2009 by giving the public a mere three months to review and comment on the 11,000-page Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) detailing the plans, volunteers from We Are Guåhan coordinated the reading of the document in sections and organized public meetings to solicit people’s views and comments, gathering over ten thousand comments that were submitted to the DoD (Leon-Guerrero; We Are Guåhan) and later published as a separate volume of the final EIS in July 2010. When a representative of the DoD then visited Pågat to inspect the site of the proposed firing range, he was met by hundreds of protesters, urging the preservation of the village and the protection of its environment, while also expressing opposition to the military occupation and calling for the decolonization of Guåhan. When the DoD subsequently

5. For a detailed account of the unfolding and modifications of the plan from 2006 to 2014, see Kan. The local resistance to the military build-up is discussed in detail by Na‘puti and Bevacqua and by Nogues.


nevertheless affirmed its plans, “a coalition of Guåhan groups [in November 2010] filed a lawsuit argu[ing] that the US military violated federal historical preservation and environmental laws when selecting Pågat as the location for a new live firing range” (Na’puti and Bevacqua 850). Concurrently, a series of Heritage Hikes were organized, featuring talks that focused on the history of the military’s claims and control of land and its impact on Chamorro community and culture. Eventually, in 2013 the DoD selected an alternative site for the firing range and by 2014, the department announced a scaled back version of the planned build-up, to be implemented over a longer period of time with a correspondingly lower impact on the local population and the environ-ment (Kan 13).

Two things stand out in these concerted efforts to resist the US military’s plans to take more land and intensify its use of an island of which it already occupies more than one third. One is the mobilization and enactment of Chamorro values, emphasizing affirmation rather than opposition. A video of the rally to “Save Pågat,” uploaded to YouTube, shows a predominance of signs calling for the protection of the old village and its natural environment and t-shirts printed for the occasion use the slogan “pre-serve and protect Pågat Village,” echoing the Chamorro “Pledge,” the inifresi, which promises “to protect and defend the beliefs, culture, language, air, water, and the land of the Chamoru” (Na’puti and Bevacqua 849). This affirmation of Chamorro values was further underlined by the participation of the dance group Taotao Tano’, performing Chamorro songs and dances and lending the protest a celebratory mood. In a similar vein, the lawsuit focused on the obligation to preserve and protect a place that “has been registered as an archaeological site in the Guam National Register of Historic Places” since 1974 (Na’puti and Bevacqua 846) and the Heritage Hikes, according to Tiara Na’puti and Michael Bevacqua, “offered a way to take value in ‘our history, and our culture, and our land’ by helping ‘educate ourselves on our true history’” (852). The mobilization of Chamorro values thus also involved an activation of cultural memory, as Na’puti and Bevacqua suggest, “position[ing] movement actions within the broader cultural framework of inafa’ maolek” (847), a principle that literally translates as “to make things good for each other” (ibid.) and emphasizes the importance of reciprocity and interdependence.

The other outstanding aspect of this event is the linking of diverse performative appearances of people at and across different stages into a powerful public space. By themselves, any of these actions might have proved ineffectual. Even ten thousand individual comments on the DEIS are readily absorbed by what Rancière calls “a struc-ture of the visible” (Disagreement 103), the substitution of an uninterrupted polling and tracking of “public opinion” for the collective appearance of people as political sub-jects, which effectively rules out dissent. This was evident in the DoD’s publication of the comments in volume ten of the final EIS, where they were itemized and numbered on 4,556 pages and each comment was addressed individually by a standardized reply (US Department of the Navy). The many individual actions became politically effective only by being gathered, repeatedly, into an emergent public space, in which people, as dissenting subjects, could continue to voice and manifest their opposition to the way the military framed their lives. This was not so much a question of strategy as a mat-ter of acting in concert between diverse groups and individuals, both on Guåhan and off-island, in different forums and media, creating an assemblage of practices that also

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revealed a network of support capable of transforming a condition of isolation and vulnerability into one of interdependence and confidence.

Chamorro writer Craig Santos Perez has participated in this political movement and through his poetry extended and given visual shape to the public space that it sustains. Already in the first instalment of his open-ended long poem from unincorporated territory, published in 2008 and entitled hacha, he announced his hope

that these poems provide a strategic position for “Guam” to emerge from imperial “redúccion(s)” into further uprisings of meaning. Moreover, I hope “Guam” (the word itself) becomes a strategic site for my own voice (and other voices) to resist the reductive tendencies of what Whitman called the “deformed democracy” of America. (11)

In an excerpt from the sequence “Lisiensan Ga‘lago,” Perez figuratively evokes the impact of the relocation of 8,000 marines to Guåhan and aligns his poetry with the resistance to the build-up:

(83)

Similarly, in the second volume of from unincorporated territory, entitled saina, he repro-duced his testimony before the UN Special Political and Decolonization Committee in 2008, as part of the sequence “from tidelands,” with the text printed under erasure, suggesting obliteration as well as sedimentation into collective memory.

Perez’s poetry is a metaphorical practice of composition, dedicated to nurturing a decolonial future in the present by continually drawing on and extending the past from which it stems.6 The two concerns that have characterized the movement resisting the military build-up on Guåhan are also at work in this experimental poetry: an orienta-tion on Chamorro values, such as inafa’ maolek, that calls for active remembrance, and

6. For a detailed analysis of Perez’s metaphorical poetic practice and its political significance, see my “Locating Guam: The Cartography of the Pacific and Craig Santos Perez’s Remapping of Unincorporated Territory.”


a transformative recollection, continuously renewing the web of relations from which voices, words and images keep appearing in from unincorporated territory. Perez dedicates the third installment of his long poem, entitled guma’, “to the group We Are Guåhan and to all those at home and in the diaspora who spoke out against the military buildup” (91) and offers the book to the reader as chenchule’ (92), a gift inviting reciprocation. In a sequence of guma’, entitled “ginen ta(la)ya,” he recalls the story of the resistance to the build-up (35, 60, 75) and links it with the memory of his grandfather’s war-time experiences under Japanese occupation and his later work for the National Park Service War Memorial, where his “job was to preserve things that [he] wasn’t willing to build in the first place” (74). Also included in this sequence are Perez’s own memories of being approached by army recruiters as a teenager in California and lists of Micronesian sol-diers killed in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, taken from the website of the Office of Insular Affairs, with all but their names put under erasure. In another sequence of guma’, entitled “ginen fatal impact statements,” Perez assembles selected comments from the Final Environmental Impact Statement on the build-up, which he had posted on his Facebook page, inviting further comments, as he explains:

—I read Volume Ten of the Final Environmental Impact Statement, which contains nearly all the 10,000 comments that people submitted in response to the DEIS during the official 90-day comment period—I copy and paste phrases, sentences, words, passages from the comments of the people—I post these comments as my Facebook status—Sometimes others comment on the comment—Sometimes I (45)

Extending the comment period via Facebook into the writing and reading of his poem, Perez creates what Collier Nogues calls a “gathering space” that bridges the boundary between online and offline worlds, virtual and physical places, “becoming a space that gathers far-flung stakeholders who already consider themselves part of an effective real-world political community, and that also gathers new potential stakeholders, inviting them to join that offline community” (28).

Throughout Perez’s work, the struggle of remembrance – of fighting forgetfulness and facing the responsibility to remember what one would rather not – is transformed into a living memory that continually assembles and recomposes fragments of history drawn from diverse archives, written and oral, official and personal, commercial and shared. Readers of from unincorporated territory must make connections within poems, between poems, and between poems and the discursive archives from which they are composed. This mental and material movement could be seen figuratively to perform the negotiation of boundaries that characterizes life in the postcolonial Pacific, exem-plified by Guåhan, where alliances must be forged within kinship groups, across ethnic divisions, and between Guamanians at home and abroad as well as an interested public more generally. In guma’, this enactment of democratic politics is also given an explicitly ecological dimension, in a sequence entitled “ginen the micronesian kingfisher [i sihek],” which tells the story of the native bird, who as a result of the introduction of predators like the brown tree snake has become extinct in Guåhan and only survives in zoos on the US mainland. Suggesting a kinship with the endangered species, Perez’s inclusion of the kingfisher in his remembrance evokes an analogy with the condition of Chamorro both on- and off-island, living on US terms:

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—of trespass—[i sihek]

when land iscaged [we]

—of theft—[i sihek]

are caged within[our] disappearance (71)

Dedicated to an ecological democracy, Perez’s metaphorical practice of composition cuts through the cage of the military frame and by inventively disturbing the partition of the sensible, persistently works to reopen and renew a world of thriving reappearance.

Fiji: Literary Creativity and Performance in the Advocacy for Global Climate Action

Perez’s poetry, which he characterizes as “oceania compositions” (saina 63), arises from and responds to conditions of militarized precarity and works toward their political transformation. As such, it joins and amplifies what Judith Butler describes as a “poli-tics of performativity,” which “insists upon the interdependency of living creatures as well as the ethical and political obligations that follow from any policy that deprives, or seeks to deprive, a population of a livable life” (Notes 208). Such a politics at once enacts ecological values and makes manifest a web of relations that sustains a life in common. As Butler notes, “when [this] works, there is a performative enactment of radical demo-cracy in such movements that alone can articulate what it might mean to lead a good life in the sense of a livable life” (218). In its inclusive sense, this corresponds to what Bruno Latour has identified as “the crucial political task” of an ecological democracy, which is “to distribute agency as far and in as differentiated a way as possible” (15). As Latour notes, this task distinguishes a new kind of cosmopolitics, one dedicated to the progressive composition of a common world (14). In her book, Cosmopolitics, Isabelle Stengers defines such a view of politics as an “ecology of practices” (79-80, 37), in dis-tinction from the traditional, Kantian, cosmopolitan ideal of a perpetual peace result-ing from a war-driven conversion to the spirit of free trade, which continues to drive imperialist strategies:

The “ecological” perspective invites us not to mistake a consensus situation, where the population of our practices finds itself subjected to criteria that transcend their diversity in the name of a shared intent, a superior good, for an ideal peace. Ecology doesn’t provide any examples of such submission. (35)

A second example of an enactment of ecological democracy in the Pacific that effec-tively transforms precaritized conditions of life unfolds from Fiji and reveals an ecol-ogy of practices in the form of an expanding movement of creative and performative actions responding to the impact of global warming on Pacific Island societies and environments. The two concerns that have guided the movement resisting the military build-up in Guåhan have also guided these initiatives to mobilize creative and perform-ance arts to address the threat posed by climate change. There was, first, an active reawakening of cultural values and attitudes attuned to the fragility of the oceanic envi-ronment, reviving a cultural memory that is potentially transformative. And second, this was then amplified by way of expanding and upscaling practices, from local initiatives


to productions that gain attention regionally and globally. As with the movement to protect Guåhan, this was not so much the implementation of a unified strategy as an effect of diverse groups acting in concert, ecologically, which gave rise to a network of support that turned a condition of vulnerability in isolation into confidence in in-terdependence. This movement could be described as an open-ended spiral, amplifying agency as it unfurls, and through which people and their island worlds keep appearing, or returning, in new ways with the past always firmly in front.

In a paper presented at the Oceanic Conference on Creativity and Climate Change held at the University of the South Pacific in 2010, Cresantia Frances Koya has empha-sized the importance of art and culture in challenging and overcoming a mentality in the postcolonial Pacific that associates national independence with western-style devel-opment, an unsustainable and destructive path:

The outcome of this is societies that are constantly in transition trying to keep up with the rest of the world; societies of people struggling between the reality of small economies and fragile environments and their desire for the luxuries of the developed world, which are marketed as easier, faster and better. (52)

Koya describes a vibrant scene of artistic initiatives and projects that aim to change values and attitudes and to shape communities within a framework of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), in which

the arts are seen as a means by which to develop and re-awaken notions of living in balance within the wider context of a highly commercialised, “selfish” and “convenience first” lifestyle of the globalised user-pay society we live in and the economic and political power […] structures that support this. (57, italics removed)

Among such initiatives Koya points out recent Pacific arts festivals such as the Kava Kuo Heka Festival in Tonga, the King Tide Festival in Tuvalu and the Wasawasa Festi-val in Fiji, which, under thematic titles like “Au Mei Moana (Returning Tide),” “Tuvalu E! The Tide is High,” and “Festival of the Oceans,” were dedicated to “advocacy and awareness” (58-59). Other projects Koya cites include art communities in various island nations and art initiatives, many of which were incubated and launched at the University of the South Pacific. These include a three-volume ESD anthology that “features aca-demic work […], story-telling, photography, visual arts, poetry, music and dance [as well as] an annotated bibliography on ESD works” (65-6) and youth leadership workshops, collaborative events and stage productions realized by the Oceania Centre for Arts, Culture and Pacific Studies.

It is in the context of this burgeoning creativity that the Oceania Centre’s ambitious stage production, Moana: The Rising of the Sea, took shape in 2013. A collaboration between the University of the South Pacific and the European Consortium for Pacific Studies (an EU-funded research project headed by Edvard Hviding of the University of Bergen), Moana dramatizes the threat of forced migration faced by Pacific Island societies in a multimedia spectacle combining dance, theatre, song and documentary film. The show, which features traditional dances from Samoa, Kiribati and Fiji, as well as original compositions and poetry, was written and directed by Vilsoni Hereniko with musical director Igelese Ete, choreography by Peter Rockford Espiritu, and memorably performed by Allan Alo as lead actor, the Oceania Dance Theatre, and the Pasifika Voices Ensemble. In a fictional story of a Pacific Island community who decide to build a voyaging canoe to take them to safety, it conveys the dangers and harm to lives and

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homes inflicted by increasing storms and floods, expresses the pain at the loss of ances-tral lands, and emphasizes the people’s abiding bond with the land as the source of their identity, most explicitly in a speech by the chief Telematua addressing the United Na-tions. The show was first performed at the University of the South Pacific in 2013 and toured Europe in May and June 2015, including a performance at the EU Parliament in Brussels and one at the Bergen International Festival, which was recorded and has since been released online and on DVD under the title Moana Rua: The Rising of the Sea.

In a recent article, Diane Looser argues that Moana uses the voyaging canoe as “a powerful symbol of purposeful mobility and explorative agency in Oceania,” although “the choice to depict migration as an adaptive strategy may appear surprising – even controversial – in light of the predominant attitude expressed by ambassadors for Paci-fic nations [preferring mitigation over migration]” (46-7):

Through the vaka, history and culture, tradition and innovation are enmeshed, foregrounding a metaphor for movement that puts heritage at the centre and is figured less as a deracination than as an extension, whereby the past is carried into the future rather than irretrievably lost. (48)

This interpretation is consistent with Vilsoni Hereniko’s explanation, in the program notes, of the choice of the double-hulled canoe as the show’s symbol of hope: “Maybe, like a double-hulled canoe, western science and indigenous knowledge will safely navi-gate us out of these dangerous waters?” (5)

The idea of empowering mobility, metaphorically associated with the canoe, is rendered metamorphic, or transformative, through its enactment in dance, a shape- changing appearance that celebrates survival and continuance. Moana shows this by sta-ging the beauty of the choreographed movement against a background of documentary footage of island homes and landscapes battered by floods and storms. Mobilizing its dance theatre thus against calamity, the show at the same time acknowledges its place in a tradition that also recalls the “adaptation” of Banaban dance theatre in response to the people’s forced relocation to Rabi in Fiji in 1945. Moana’s narrative structure, articulated in a series of scenes presided over by a chief, has parallels with Banaban dance theatre in Rabi as analyzed by Wolfgang Kempf and Elfriede Hermann. And the show’s incorporation of dances of different traditions alongside compositions in western musical fashions echoes the innovations of Banaban dance, which, according to Katerina Teaiwa, both affirms a continuity with “Kiribati dance beyond the shores of its thirty-three islands […] as extensions of that land and emplaced identity” (“Choreo-graphing” 75) and over time has innovatively incorporated “the popular Western twist, the Samoan taupati (a body percussion dance), the Tahitian tamure, and later, when the community had gained access to film and video, karate- and kung fu-inspired male styles” (82). Like these Banaban choreographic adaptations, the dance theatre of Moana uses the moving bodies as vehicles of cultural memory and continued reappearance through which the story of surviving is turned into a celebration of flourishing.

Moana in turn expanded this web of cultural connections further by also featuring a poem by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, entitled “Tell Them,” which counters the invisibility of the Pacific Islands among global concerns by a kaleidoscopic portrait of the Marshall Islands appearing in myriad guises and shapes and which ends with a plea to

[…] tell themwe don’t want to leave


we’ve never wanted to leaveand that weare nothingwithout our islands (66-7)

Like Moana’s dance theatre, the meaning of Jetnil-Kijiner’s poem is enriched by its re-membrance of generations of Marshall Islanders who made similar pleas before, ad-dressing the UN Trusteeship Council shortly after the Bravo test in 1954, for instance:

[L]and means a great deal to the Marshallese. It means more than just a place where you can plant your food crops and build your houses or a place where you can bury your dead. It is the very life of the people. Take away their land and their spirits go also. (Ruff 796)

Or, in 1972, resisting US plans to bomb the islands again as part of their Pacific Cra-tering Experiments (PACE): “You live with gold and money and we have to depend on land and whatever life we can find on land and in the water. Without these we are nothing” (Firth 35).

Moana honored this active remembrance by closing its European tour in 2015 with another poem by Jetnil-Kijiner, “Dear Matafele Peinam,” made famous by the poet’s performance at the UN Climate Summit in New York in September 2014. Addressing the poet’s daughter, “Dear Matafele Peinam” mirrors “Tell Them” as a declaration of confidence, beginning by acknowledging the threat of rising waters and disappearance as what “they say”:

They say you, your daughter and your granddaughter, too will wander rootless with only a passport to call home (70)

But she goes on to promise the child that she will not lose her home: “Because baby we are going to fight / your mommy daddy / bubu jimma your country and your pres-ident too / we will fight” (71). And then the poem launches into a chant that brings the people, islanders and their allies, back into view line by line, until

[…] there are thousands out on the street marching with signs hand in hand chanting for change NOW (72)

As this emphasis shows, there is an explicit kinship between Oceanian movements to protect and defend their island world and grassroots social movements elsewhere in the world, which seek to realize what Isabell Lorey calls “presentist democracy” (59), meaning that they question both a teleological orientation toward a hoped-for future and the representational frameworks of institutionalized politics. When they work, such movements effectively unsettle the dominant “distribution of the sensible” (Rancière, Dissensus 36) and blur the lines separating activist and official politics. In so doing, they demonstrate a capacity to transform (global) democracy by enabling enactments of ecologically based values and practices to gain political agency and recognition. This could be witnessed in Paris in December 2015, where Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner led a group

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of Pacific Islander spoken-word poets sponsored by the Global Call for Climate Action to perform at the United Nations conference on climate change (Goodman). It could be witnessed too in Guåhan in December 2016, when the activists who successfully op-posed the destruction of Pågat and the implementation of the Realignment Roadmap organized a series of events under the title “Lina‘la, i Hanom (water is life),” in solida-rity with the water protectors at Standing Rock opposing the Dakota Access pipeline. Including a prayer ceremony and music and art performances, the demonstration hi-ghlighted the connection of the water protectors’ cause to the protection of ancestral Chamorro land and water in Guåhan (Herrera). And the unsettling of the separation of grassroots and official politics could also be witnessed during Fiji’s presidency of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP23) in 2017-2018, which not only saw a push for more ambitious international climate action and increased funding for adaptation and resilience building, but also the launch of the Talanoa Dialogues, democratic forums inspired by Pacific concepts of decision making through storytelling that are inclusive, participatory and respectful (Talanoa Dialogue). All of these initiatives and activities enact democratic politics in the form of an ecology of practices, globally acting in concert with others without submit-ting to a single rule, based on indigenous Pacific values and practices.7

Otto heiM

University of Hong Kong

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Militarization of Desire in Guam, USA.” Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific. Ed. Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010. 33-61.

Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2010.—. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2015.caMacho, Keith L., and Laurel A. MonniG. “Uncomfortable Fatigues: Chamorro Soldiers, Gendered

Identities, and the Question of Decolonization in Guam.” Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific. Ed. Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010. 147-79.

clark, Timothy. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.

firth, Stewart. Nuclear Playground. Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 1987.Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: U of Chicago P,

2016.GoodMan, Amy. “Marshall Islands Poet to the U.N. Climate Summit: ‘Tell Them We Are Nothing

Without Our Islands’.” Democracy Now! 2 Dec. 2015. Web. 16 March 2017.heiM, Otto. “Locating Guam: The Cartography of the Pacific and Craig Santos Perez’s Remapping

of Unincorporated Territory.” New Directions in Travel Writing Studies. Ed. Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 180-98.

hereniko, Vilsoni. “The Deep, Beautiful but Dangerous Sea.” Moana: The Rising of the Sea. Programme. Suva, Fiji: U of the South Pacific, 2013. 5.

herMan, R.D.K. “Inscribing Empire: Guam and the War in the Pacific National Historical Park.” Political Geography 27 (2008): 630-51.

7. I would like to thank the two reviewers as well as my colleague, Rashna Nicholson, for their helpful critical com-ments on a draft version of this article.


herrera, Ursula. “Guåhan Stands with Standing Rock.” Guam.Stripes.com 8 Dec. 2016. Web. 16 Dec. 2016.

hickel, Walter J. Who Owns America? Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971.Jetnil-kiJiner, Kathy. Iep Jaltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2017.JorGenson, Andrew K., Brett clark, and Jennifer E. GiVens. “The Environmental Impacts of

Militarization in Comparative Perspective: An Overlooked Relationship.” Nature and Culture. 7.3 (Winter 2012): 314-37.

kan, Shirley A. “Guam: U.S. Defense Deployments.” Congressional Research Service 26 Nov. 2014. Web. 13 June 2015.

keMpf, Wolfgang, and Elfriede herMann. “Reconfigurations of Place and Ethnicity: Positionings, Performances and Politics of Relocated Banabans in Fiji.” Oceania 75.4 (Sep.-Dec. 2005): 368-86.

koya, Cresantia Frances. “In the Absence of Land, All We Have Is Each Other: Art, Culture and Climate Change in the Pacific – Global Movements / Local Initiatives.” Oceans, Islands and Skies. Ed. Mohit Prasad. Spec. issue of Dreadlocks 6/7 (2010-2011): 49-74.

latour, Bruno. “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene.” New Literary History 45 (2014): 1-18.lazrus, Heather. “Sea Change: Island Communities and Climate Change.” Annual Review of Anthropology

41 (2012): 285-301.leon Guerrero, Victoria-Lola. “Pågat: How a Community United to Save an Ancient Village.” Paper

presented at the 22nd Pacific History Association Conference, Guam, 19-21 May 2016. looser, Diane. “Symbolic Vaka, Sustainable Futures: Climate-induced Migration and Oceanic

Performance.” Performance Research 21.2 (2016): 46-9.lorey, Isabell. “The 2011 Occupy Movements: Rancière and the Crisis of Democracy.” Theory, Culture

& Society 31.7/8 (2014): 43-65.Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso, 2013.na’puti, Tiara R., and Michael Lujan BeVacqua. “Militarization and Resistance from Guåhan:

Protecting and Defending Pågat.” American Quarterly 67.3 (Sep. 2015): 837-58.natiVidad, Lisa Linda, and Gwyn kirk. “Fortress Guam: Resistance to Military Mega-Buildup.” The

Asia-Pacific Journal 8.19.1 (10 May 2010). Web. 6 June 2015.nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2011.noGues, Collier. “‘WITH [OUR] ENTIRE BREATH’: The US Military Buildup on Guåhan (Guam)

and Craig Santos Perez’s Literature of Resistance.” Shima 12.1 (2018): 21-34.oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. conWay. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth

on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. New York: Bloomsbury, 2010.perez, Craig Santos. from unincorporated territory [hacha]. Kāne‘ohe: Tinfish, 2008.—. from unincorporated territory [saina]. Richmond, CA: Omnidawn, 2010.—. from unincorporated territory [guma’]. Richmond, CA: Omnidawn, 2014.rancière, Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota

P, 1999.—. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.ruff, Tilman A. “The Humanitarian Impact and Implications of Nuclear Test Explosions in the

Pacific Region.” International Review of the Red Cross 97 (2015): 775-813.stenGers, Isabelle. Cosmopolitics I. Trans. Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.“The Talanoa Dialogue Builds Momentum Around the Globe.” COP23 Fiji. 6 Sep. 2018. Web. 9 Dec.

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Reviews

Fighting Words: Fifteen Books that Shaped the Postcolonial World. Edited by Dominic Davies, Erica Lombard and Benjamin Mountford. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017. 279 p. ISBN: 978-1-906165-55-0. €69.95.

Reviewed by Claire Gallien

Fighting Words constitutes the inaugural volume of the series “Race and Resistance Across Borders in the Long Twentieth Century” published by Peter Lang. The series borrows its name from one of the flagship networks of The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) and pursues, in print format, the objectives of the network in studying, from a transdisciplinary perspective, “anti-racist, anti-colonial, transnational or internationalist movements in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, Latin America, and the United States” (ix). Just as the activists, writers, artists, intellectuals, and poli-ticians under study in the volume forged their works of resistance in intercultural and internationalist milieus, the series editors, editorial advisory board, and contributors of this inaugural volume come from African, American, Asian, European, Oceanian backgrounds and seek to develop a form of scholarship which is also by nature interna-tionalist, transcultural, and cross-disciplinary.

The volume sets itself the task of analysing the power of books, understood as both cultural forms and material objects, to resist imperial global orders in their cir-culation and translation across times, cultures, and regions. The editors recognise the role of books in supporting the construction and disposition of Empires and position themselves in the continuation of a long line of critical and historiographical stud-ies, including Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993), quoted somewhat belatedly in the introduction, Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr’s Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire (2014), Rimi B. Chatterjee’s Empires of the Mind (2006), and Harish Trivedi’s “The ‘Book’ in India” in Books without Borders (2008). Yet they turn their attention and give critical precedence to the “resistant books” (1) that have initiated and pursued, from within the structures of Empire, destabilising moves, changes, and revolutions.

In doing so, they pitch Fighting Words at the intersection between the material, histori-cal, and sociological history of books, global studies, and postcolonial literary criticism. The contributors focus on the “viral” (7, 13) migration of ideas, “literary replications” (11) and reorientations, through the circulation of books and the multiplicity of their locations in time and space. They also showcase questions related to forms and genres, which, at least in part, account for differentiated, uneven, and chronologically disjunc-tive patterns of reception. A woman’s diary does not sell in the same way as an essay such as Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto; a book may go unnoticed by its contem-poraries and be picked up only generations later and for a purpose unpredicted by its author. This attention to the specifics of forms and contexts of production, circulation, and reception allows for a fine-grained analysis of what books have done and can do “to change the world” (1).

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Fighting Words is less a volume of contributions than a reading list. It consists of fifteen chapters, each dedicated to a specific book selected for its long-lasting impact on anti-colonial, anti-racist, decolonial and resistance movements. As such, the volume constitutes a fighting corpus that interrogates power relationships in the construction of literary history. It does not purport to be final and the editors recognize the neces-sarily limited and arbitrary nature of the list. Yet it remains open-ended, with a recog-nition that additions on other cultural forms of resistance, such as drama and films, would be welcome.

The volume brings together popular resistance books by writers such as Engels and Marx, Du Bois, Nehru, Fanon, and Mandela with less well-known or quasi unknown texts in the West, such as Cooper’s A Voice from the South (1892), Danqah’s The Akan Doctrine of God (1944), Asturias’s Men of Maize (1949) and Neogy’s journal Transitions (1961-1968). It is particularly strong in the chapters dedicated to books which have failed to attract the attention of postcolonial critics so far. The more famous publi-cations by Du Bois, Fanon, Mandela and others do not appear to be analysed under new critical light except that they offer important discussions about recuperations and transformations of these “classics” across time and space. Formal coherence is given to the whole by applying a pattern which is flexible but which ensures that each chapter has a section on the context of publication of the books, as well as their circulation and resonance in the postcolonial present.

In revisiting and expanding the corpus of resistance, editors emphasise the peda-gogical aspect of the Fighting Word project and its aim to transform the curriculum. It places academia in the wake of social and political movements such as Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall and therefore reasserts a ground-up approach as well as a need to define theory in praxis, as Burton and Hofmeyr intimate in their afterword entitled “Plotting a Postcolonial Course in Fifteen Chapters”.

However, I would be cautious concerning the transformative function of this inau-gural volume and its preconception concerning the power of books to “crystallize the ideological tensions and power dynamics at play in a given geo-historical moment” (8). Editors acknowledge that other cultural forms influenced anticolonial resistance but still give the printed word pride of place. For instance, books could be read in conversation with other cultural forms of resistance, such as the chapatis used during the 1857 Indian Uprising to circulate secret information, or the amulets containing passages from the Qur’an and the long white robes worn by the Muslim slaves of Bahia (Brazil) for the first time in public to signal the beginning of the revolt in 1835. What is perhaps needed is the support of a decolonial push to include more indigenous fighting words which were not necessarily, and actually most often not at all, caught in print. Finally, the chronology chosen for the volume, which mirrors that of the series, may also appear problematic in the sense that fighting words predate by far decolonisation and internationalist movements. It may sound banal to say that a volume cannot address everything, but the acknowledgement of such tensions could have been given more space in the introduction for instance.

Despite these objections, which are related more to what the collection does not do than to what it actually achieves, the volume remains an excellent source of inspiration for the classroom and for a form of academic research that builds on praxis and aims for social change.

Reviews149

Displacement, Memory, and Travel in Contemporary Migrant Writing. Textet: Studies in Comparative Literature 83. By Jopi Nyman. Leiden: Brill, 2017. 260 p. ISBN: 978-90-04-34206-4. €90.

Reviewed by Helga raMsey-kurz

There has been a growing need in migrant studies in recent years for new approaches to the plight of forcibly displaced persons. Typically concerned with human mobility, postcolonial critique has helped meet this need through such formidable studies as Postcolonial Asylum (2011) by David Farrier, Contemporary Asylum Narratives (2014) by Agnes Woolley, or Performing Noncitizenship (2015) by Emma Cox. All three advance powerful critiques of the nation state which, despite repeated assertions of its obsoles-cence in the age of globalisation (e.g. in the Guardian article “The Demise of the Nation State” by novelist Rana Dasgupta [April 2018]), is thriving in the wake of current mass migrations and the new nationalisms to which they have given rise.

Displacement, Memory, and Travel in Contemporary Migrant Writing by Jopi Nyman also takes on the nation state, albeit only as effectively as can be expected of a collection of essays that reworks publications predating the 2015 refugee crisis by up to six years. Grouped in three parts titled “Refugees and Displaced Migrants,” “Memories and Migration,” and “Migration, Travel, and Postcolonial Europe,” these essays are meant to contest “such forms of postcolonial discourse that celebrate [migration and hybridity] as unproblematic ways of countering hierarchies and hegemonies” (1). For Nyman, re-problematising migration in the face of routine claims of its universality seems to mean comprehending displaced subjects as persons struggling to “(re)construct” (4), “shape” (94), “fix” and “pin down” (166) their broken or lost identities in what he calls “trans-national spaces” (n.p.). Accordingly, he begins his book with a discussion of poems and short stories that emerged from a writing project with refugees in Wales. The texts combine recollections of famine, censorship, human rights violations and rebel wars in Africa with experiences of racist aggression in Europe, and, as Nyman shows, system-atically eclipse Britain as a new homeland or overwrite it with celebrations of sites of joint literary production. At such sites, Nyman explains, quoting Marc Augé (Non-Places, 1995), “the nonplace becomes a place, ‘relational, historical and concerned with iden-tity’” (29). Drawing on Upstone’s concept of post-space (Spatial Politics in the Postcolonial Novel, 2009), Nyman proceeds to elaborate on narration as “an alternative kind of jour-neying” unrestrained by “the nation-state and its practices of exclusion” (41), doing so in three essays on Going Home (2005) by Simão Kikamba, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007) by Ishmael Beah, and the short story “Last Thoughts on the Medusa” (2008) by Jamal Mahjoub.

Remembrance provides a thematic link between the essays in Part 2, which begins with a chapter on the cultural significance of food and its representation in culinary memoirs Climbing the Mango Trees (2005) by Madhur Jaffrey and The Language of Baklava (2005) by Diana Abu-Jaber. The transition to Adulrazak Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way (1988) and Caryl Phillips’ Dancing in the Dark (2005) appears abrupt and insufficiently accounted for by “the affective register” (92) of which, Nyman claims, all four writers make comparable use. Reading Pilgrims Way against Freudian and post-Freudian theories of mourning and melancholia, Nyman suggests comprehending the racist violence

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Gurnah’s protagonist faces in contemporary Britain as a prolongation of the trauma he suffered in Zanzibar and which is eventually transformed, through the act of narra-tion, into collective experience. By stark contrast, Nyman interprets Dancing in the Dark (2005) as an unconditionally pessimistic appraisal of the vaudeville artist Bert Williams’ professional entrapment in the tradition of blackface. For Nyman, Williams performs a self-betrayal so complete that “it can only lead to despair and loneliness” (151). Unlike any of the other texts discussed, Nyman further argues, Phillips’ novel grants no trans-national space where the artist’s self-debasement can be undone. This is in somewhat puzzling contradiction to Nyman’s assertion, earlier in his book, that narration itself ought to be seen as constituting just such a space. One should think that, by inference, Phillips’ reconstruction of Williams’ life ought to be comprehended as a particularly powerful claim to a space beyond national fantasies of belonging. Yet Nyman’s col-lection is not designed to develop the ideas formulated in its individual chapters into a cohesive theoretical framework. The elaboration of his notion of transnational space remains a desideratum, leaving unexplained how it compares to Bhabha’s Third Space – a “site of the formation of hybrid identity, ‘where it is possible to feel the estran-ging sense of the relocation of the home and the world – the unhomeliness – that is the condition of extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiations’” (The Location of Culture, 1994, 9). Is “extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiation” not precisely what Nyman claims that transnational spaces afford? Do the transnational spaces he posits not bring forth exactly the same “sense of relocation of the home” Bhabha writes about? Is it not in such relocations that Nyman too envisages the (trans)formation of migrant identities into hybrid forms?

Such questions remain unanswered also in the final part of Nyman’s book, which examines Europe as a space of transnational encounters in The Drift Latitudes (2006) and Travelling with Djinns (2003) by Jamal Mahjoub, and Alentejo Blue (2006) and In the Kitchen (2009) by Monica Ali. Nyman recalls Sandra Ponzanesi and Daniela Merolla suggesting, back in 2005, that “the European borderline is now being redefined by voices which once were excluded or marginalized from its main body,” thereby reinforcing his own claim that the border “does not only separate but also brings together various actors, and creates new modes and spaces of interaction, new borderscapes where identities, belonging, and citizenship are negotiated and reconstructed” (6). Reading this in 2018, one cannot help thinking of the Mediterranean, Europe’s most deadly border, and won-dering how Nyman could have overlooked the chilling datedness of his optimism and made no attempt to curb it. Without such correction, his collection conveys the rather unfortunate impression that it seeks to capitalize on the sad topicality of the theme of migration without confronting it.

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Inhabiting Memory in Canadian Literature / Habiter la mémoire dans la littérature canadienne. Edited by Benjamin Authers, Maïté Snauwaert and Daniel Laforest. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 2017. 264 p. ISBN: 978-1-77212-270-1. CA$ 49.95.

Reviewed by Corinne BiGot

This volume gathers twelve essays, in French and English, that examine nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts by Anglophone and Francophone writers – Moodie, Beaugrand, Fréchette, Martin, Kroetsch, Wiebe, Chong, Kulyk-Keefer, Brand, Hage, Murakami, Quatermain, Chicoine, and Gale. The essays analyze representations of specific spaces such as Francophone Canada, the Prairie, the North, Vancouver, Montreal and Quebec City. Various genres, from life writing – including travel writ-ing and autofiction – to novels and poetry, are examined. The bilingual introduction explains that the volume intends to articulate space and memory, investigating Canada within its regional, national, continental, global and cosmopolitan contexts. Referring to Cynthia Sugars and Eleanor Ty’s 2014 collection, Canadian Literature and Cultural Memory, which drew attention to undervalued facets of Canadian cultural memory, this volume purports to expand the comprehension of memory “as articulated to an effec-tive Canadian landscape” (xii).

The opening piece, by Sherry Simon, is a very brief contribution evoking Montreal’s Yiddish culture and the different ways it was transmitted, from the 1940s to the 1980s. The second essay, “The Archive and the Alleyway,” is a compelling and well-argued examination of The Invisibility Exhibit (2008) by Sachiko Murakami and Vancouver Walking (2005) by Meredith Quatermain. Erin Wunker shows that as they look at the alleyways of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, the poets/walkers, who see the city of Vancouver as a living archive, draw attention to what is usually overlooked, or hidden. The essay ends with close readings of their works, showing that Quatermain revisits the tradition of the Canadian documentary poem, layering lost or erased memories (for instance Chinese casualties when the railway was constructed) with present visions, and that Murakami evokes Vancouver’s missing women – 69 women living in the margin of society who disappeared in the 1980s –, reorienting the reader’s eye from the streets of the city to its alleyways.

The second part opens with Smaro Kamboureli’s challenging reading of Rawi Hage’s Cockroach (2008). Kamboureli uses Heidegger’s notion of unforgetting to analyze the protagonist’s condition of “unbelonging.” Kamboureli argues that unforgetting and unbelonging enable the character to find agency and resist institutions. Focusing on the trope of therapy in the novel, she points out that Hage warns us against fetishizing memory. The third contribution, by Jennifer Bowering-Delisle, is devoted to Canadian family memoirs by Michael Ondaatje (Running in the Family, 1993), Janice Kulyk-Keefer (Honey and Ashes, 1998), Denise Chong (The Concubine’s Children, 1994) and Judy Fong-Bates (The Year of Finding Memory, 2010), and the “genealogical nostalgia” they fore-ground. Bowering-Delisle uses Eaton’s concept of “the story of the story” to show that in these memoirs, the research project is a crucial aspect of the narrative. “Diaspora, Loss, and Melancholic Agency: Mapping the Fields between Susanna Moodie and Dionne Brand,” by L. Camille van der Marel, is a well-argued, in-depth analysis of two texts that have already received a lot of critical attention – Moodie’s Roughing It in the

Bush (1852) and Brand’s A Map of No Return (2001). Drawing attention to their ambigui-ties, the author proposes to read Moodie’s settler colonial narrative and Brand’s trans-national narrative together. In so doing, she demonstrates that we should not cleave Canada’s colonial past from its transnational present. Van der Marel sees the possibility of drawing a “transhistorical community” between these two women. Arguing that loss “roots” the author in the land, she reads them with Butler’s concept of melancholic agency, contending that it is what enables Moodie and Brand to locate themselves with-in and against the state, and to finally reterritorialize space.

The third part is devoted to Francophone writers. Samantha Cook examines the critical reception of Claire Martin’s autobiography, Dans un gant de fer (1965). Louise Gaboury-Diallo’s essay analyzes Jean Chicoine’s Les galaxies nos voisines (2007) and La forêt du langage (2010), suggesting that through language, Chicoine revisits common places to defamiliarize them so that they too become symbols of his otherness. Pamela Sing compares Beaugrand’s 1892 folktale, “Le loup-garou,” with its translation by Beaugrand himself, six years later. In her reading, she sees each version as having a different goal, as the representation of French Canada in these two versions varies according to the expected readership.

The fourth section, “Towards a New Memory,” opens with a stimulating essay by André Lamontagne. Analyzing Originaux et détraqués (1892), a collection of portraits of marginal characters by Louis Fréchette, Lamontagne debunks the idea that Quebec and its inhabitants are often merely represented as “pure laine” (the idea that Quebec’s inhabitants are white, francophone and Catholic). He further demonstrates that Quebec city, and not only Montreal, has played an important role in the conception of Quebec’s literary history and the celebration of cultural memory. Janne Korkka examines fiction-al and non-fictional works by Robert Kroetsch (Completed Field Notes, 2000; A Likely Story, 1995; The Lovely Treachery of Words, 1989) and Rudy Wiebe (Playing Dead, 2003; Sweeter than all the World, 2001) exploring the Prairie and the North. He shows that Kroetsch and Wiebe approach the issue of knowing about space through the presence and absence of animals, and not only of human beings. The final essay by Albert Braz is concerned with how Canada’s historical memory deals with slavery through a reading of Lorena Gale’s 1998 play, Angélique. Kratz points out that Angélique does not only aim to reinsert people of African descent into Canadian history, but also intends to problematize Canadian history by debunking the myth that Canada was a safe haven at the end of the Underground Railroad. The play and the essay thus challenge one of Canada’s most popular myths, drawing attention to gaps and silences in dominant discourse.

Most chapters, therefore, invite us to consider fractures in national history and memory. However, although the volume is neatly divided into four sections, the over-arching construction of the volume is rather unclear, in particular regarding the choice of authors and regions/spaces. The essays are uneven in length and depth. While sev-eral essays (Van der Marel’s, Korkka’s, Wunker’s, Lamontagne’s, and Braz’s) convincingly articulate the interplay between memory and space, not all the essays in the volume manage to do so.

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“No Other World”: Essays on the Life-Work of Don Maclennan. Edited by Dan Wylie and Craig MacKenzie. Noordhoek: Print Matters Heritage, 2012. 264 p. ISBN: 978-0-9870-095-24. US$41.74

Reviewed by Fiona Mccann

This collection brings together intimate reflections and academic articles on a les-ser-known and, the contributors argue, to date underrated South African academic, playwright, fiction writer, and poet, Don Maclennan (1929-2009). Born in England, Maclennan moved to South Africa when he was still a boy, and although he subsequent-ly studied for a short while at Edinburgh University, and lived and taught for a couple of years in the United States, his home became South Africa. He held temporary lec-tureship posts at both the University of Witswatersrand and the University of Cape Town before finally taking up a post at Rhodes University in 1966, where he taught until well after he officially retired in 1994. Right up until his death from Motor Neuron Disease in 2009, Don Maclennan continued to produce new poetry, publishing ten books between 1971 and 1998, thirteen collections from 2001 on, and his final collec-tion, Dress Rehearsal, was published posthumously in 2010. Some of these works were self-published, while others were published by various South African poetry presses, but there is no doubting the prolific output of this poet.

As Craig MacKenzie points out in his article, Maclennan “cannot be made to stand for any single idea, literary movement, or ideological position” (95), and the protean nature of his work is very much reflected in this homage to him. “No Other World” is divided into four different parts which reflect the multiple approaches to Maclennan’s life and work and the editors’ evident wish to reconcile a homage to the intimate friend-ships the poet developed over a lifetime, as well as his influence on younger poets and scholars, with a more academic appraisal of his work, in particular his poetry. While Part One consists of a piece by Maclennan’s wife, Shirley, and an interview with Maclennan himself, Part two contains a series of moving tributes to the man, the playwright, and the poet. These first two parts devote particular attention to love and friendship and, perhaps inevitably, do not entirely avoid the pitfall of, as Harry Owen puts it in his piece, “beginning to sound disturbingly devotional” (42). These contributions sketch a picture of the multiple roles fulfilled by Maclennan during his lifetime, as a husband and father (Shirley Maclennan), as a friend (John Forbis), as a mentor for younger, aspiring poets (Harry Owen), as an amateur climber (Gavin Stewart), and as an actor and playwright who collaborated with Athol Fugard (André Lemmer and Peter Vale). Given the politi-cal tensions of the period, one might regret, however, that in these more personal pieces there is so little mention of any development or expression of modes of resistance to apartheid.

Part three is the longest and most “academic” part of the collection, proposing eight articles which engage critically with Maclennan’s non-academic publications. Craig MacKenzie contextualizes “the (non-) reception” of Maclennan’s poetry (89), painstak-ingly showing how various important poetry anthologies ranging from Stephen Gray’s 1976 A World of Their Own: Southern African Poets of the Seventies to Michael Chapman’s 2002 A New Century of South African Poetry have in some cases completely ignored it, and in others simply underrepresented it. Malvern van Wyk Smith provides an interes-

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ting overview of themes and moods in Maclennan’s poetry, while Christine Lucia and Michael Blake present a fascinating exploration of the interplay between the poet’s work and music, weaving critical analysis with concrete examples of collaborations resulting in intermediality. It is in this article that there is perhaps the most sustained engagement with the form and aesthetics of Maclennan’s poetry and the difficulty of displacing these when putting the poetry to music. Laurence Wright analyzes the rather opaque Notes from a Rhenish Mission suggesting that it represents “history as metaphor” (151), and in a close reading of the poem, reveals its “metaphysical-poetic programme” (156). Mariss Everitt investigates Maclennan’s 2003 Letter to William Blake and traces the in-fluences of both Blake and Dante as well as the tension between spirituality and reason in the South African poet’s work where his “preoccupation with death” looms large (183). Nimi Hoffmann presents an analysis of the difficulties of translating Maclennan’s poetry, particularly The Necessary Salt (2006), into German, while Brendon Robinson, author of an MA thesis on Maclennan’s poetry observes and explains the ways in which the poet’s engagement with Western philosophy emerges in his work. The final essay in this section, by Dan Wylie, explores the presence of a “fascination with the prehistoric or precolonial cultures” of South Africa in Maclennan’s prose and poetry (219), and is one of the more original contributions to this unusual collection.

Part four consists of a very useful detailed bibliography of Maclennan’s works, com-piled in conjunction with the National English Literary Museum in Grahamstown, and ends with a call for further study of Maclennan’s work. For anyone wishing to heed this call, “No Other World” will now be a mandatory point of departure. As a whole, the collection has tried to balance a homage to a charismatic university teacher and friend with a more academic approach to his poetic work, and at times the emphasis is perhaps placed too much on the man and not enough on the actual poetry as aesthetic acts. However, although it generally concentrates much more on unpacking the many layers of meaning in Maclennan’s poetry than on its actual stylistics, it provides interesting insight into the writer himself, his interests, and his major preoccupations and as such, will be of interest to scholars working on South African poetry generally and this poet in particular.

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The Postcolonial Epic: From Melville to Walcott and Ghosh. By Sneharika Roy. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. 208 p. ISBN: 978-1-138-06363-1. £115.

Reviewed by Delphine Munos

By calling for a reassessment of the epic’s role in postcolonial literatures and theory, The Postcolonial Epic challenges postcolonial scholarship’s traditional overemphasis on the novel genre and offers a fascinating contribution to current discussions highlighting the relevance of generic issues in the literatures of the Global South. In her book, Sneharika Roy traces new affiliations between Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), Derek Walcott’s book-length poem Omeros (1990), and Amitav Gosh’s South Asian saga, the Ibis trilogy (Sea of Poppies, 2008; River of Smoke, 2011; Flood of Fire, 2015), with a view to identifying Melville’s “notoriously polysemic” classic as a “foundational text for post-colonial epic” (3). Roy is committed to showing how the epic genre, far from restricting itself to being a “genre of place and nation” (24), is uniquely suited to expressing the entanglement between localism and cosmopolitanism in subaltern trajectories negotiat-ing tensions “between place and displacement, nation and migration, roots and routes” (23).

Problematizing Bakhtin’s taken-for-granted argument that the epic style is “mono-logic,” that is, “centralising and intolerant of contestation” (6), the introduction to The Postcolonial Epic returns to Virgil’s Aeneid (29-19 BCE) and reads against a critical consensus “tak[ing] Homeric epic as the implicit or explicit generic gold standard” (14). Indeed, Roy is mindful of the ways in which much of the Romantic scholarship on the epic has favoured Homeric over Virgilian epic, resulting in the fact that the genre is perceived to be “a literary fossil incapable of evolving” (7). Turning to Virgilian epic allows Roy to gesture toward a genealogy of the genre thriving on innovation and intertextuality – one that goes from Virgil through Dante, to John Milton, Melville, and Walt Whitman. Equally importantly, for Roy, The Aeneid as “national epic” is also a precursor of what she calls “political epic,” in that its intertextual features and “national temporality” participate in creating a tension between “national politics and extrana-tional poetics” (18), or between “the centripetal politics of rootedness of epic and the centrifugal forces of uprooted, migratory traditions that produce it” (26). Drawing both on Bhabha’s understanding of the nation as a discursive construct and on Glissant’s distinction between “excluding” and “participatory” epics, Roy defines the political epic as a “kind of epic typified by enunciative tensions between its political genealogy […] and its poetics of emulative intertextuality” (16). More precisely, the political epic is perceived by Roy as a genre of “enunciative ambivalence wherein an avowed national politics coexists uneasily with a disavowed migratory poetics” (19). The tensions at play in the political epic allow Roy to envisage the postcolonial epic as a genre similarly innerved by “ambivalence and enunciative splits,” yet one that recognizes and embraces, instead of disavowing, “the intertextual temporality of cultural difference” (20). The paradox is that the postcolonial epic is not immune to the fiction of fixity and unity that is expressed through the political epic, thus making it all the more pertinent to envisage the “criss-crossing filigree-work” (19) of the political epic in postcolonial texts.

The Postcolonial Epic identifies three aspects of epic – namely epic imagery, genealogy, and ekphrasis – along which the book’s three chapters are organized. The first chapter,

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“Rallying the tropes: the language of violence and the violence of language,” explores the ways in which the postcolonial epic problematizes the “differential” realities of co-lonialism through “multi-directional ‘heterotropes’ as well as self-knotting and negative and hypothetical similes” (27). Drawing on work by Susanne Wofford, Jahan Ramazani and Fredric Jameson, this chapter also focuses on how the postcolonial epic reworks and revises the hegemonic systems of representation at play in classical epic. Entitled “‘History in the Future Sense’: Genealogy as Prophecy,” chapter 2 compares the ways in which Melville’s Moby Dick, Walcott’s Omeros, and Gosh’s Sea of Poppies parody the “Virgilian innovation of presenting a genealogical past as prophetic future” (88), with a view to highlighting how the postcolonial epic redeploys “imperial prophecy” to disrupt political and epistemological hierarchies. Roy concludes that more than just giving new momentum to W.H. Auden’s suggestion that Virgil “get his tenses right” (135), the post-colonial epic self-reflexively uses reversible times and genealogies to resist “forms of imperial or social determinisms” as well as gesture toward “post-imperial programmes of political and cultural change” (135). The last chapter, “The Artifice of Eternity: Ekphrasis as ‘An-other’ Epic,” departs from postcolonial scholarship’s traditional read-ing of the relationship between image and word. Indeed Roy reminds us that most postcolonial critics have relied on the critical consensus that “the ekphrastic description of a visual object” boils down to “the ‘generic Other’ of the epic’s verbal narrative” (28), which has led them to reformulate the conflict between image and word in terms of a political and discursive binary struggle between colonizer and colonized. Drawing on the Virgilian use of ekphrasis as “an allegory of history for the winners […] but also for the vanquished,” Roy shows that the postcolonial epic deploys ekphrasis to both “critiqu[e] European art as a marker of hegemony” and “undercut nativist conceptions of a national art ‘emancipated’ from Europe’s yoke” (28). Still, in contrast with the ways in which Virgilian ekphrasis “parades the past as the future” (179), postcolonial ekphra-sis is shown to enact a form of “resistant nostalgia,” in that it “masquerades a vanishing, if not already vanished, past as still containing recoverable fragments of a desirable and realisable future” (179). In the conclusion to her impressive book, Roy returns to the contemporary moment and to Moby Dick as a precursor of the postcolonial epic, aptly contending that by way of its engagement with “political epic’s strategies of rootedness and conjunction” (184), the postcolonial epic does not only keep in check Moby Dick’s nihilism; the genre also backtracks away from poststructuralism’s emphasis on the “flat-ness” of “commodity culture” and from the postcolonial lure of nativism.

Roy’s argument is dense and sophisticated, the clarity of her prose is commendable and her range of references – from the different versions of the Ramayana, through Hegel, through the Lusiads, to poststructuralism – is absolutely breathtaking. The conclusion to The Postcolonial Epic is perhaps a little cursory, as Roy’s contention that the postcolonial epic expresses a form of “resistant nostalgia” could have been elaborated further (for instance by taking on board Svetlana Boym’s distinction between “restor-ative” and “reflective” forms of nostalgia). This very minor reservation aside, Roy’s book will highly appeal not only to scholars working from within the field of post-colonial studies and literatures, but also to academics with an interest in classical epic, comparative literature, and diaspora studies.

Contributors

Valérie Baisnée is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Paris Sud, France. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her research interests re-volve around the personal writings and poetry of twentieth-century women, with a particular focus on French and New Zealand writers. She co-edited the collection Women’s Life Writing and the Practice of Reading (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and authored Gendered Resistance: The Autobiographies of Simone de Beauvoir, Maya Angelou, Janet Frame and Marguerite Duras (Rodopi, 1997) and In the Long Corridor of Distance: Space and Place in New Zealand Women’s Autobiographies (Rodopi, 2014).

John Clement Ball is Professor and Chair of English at the University of New Brunswick. He is the author of two scholarly books, including Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis (U of Toronto P, 2004), and 25 articles or book chapters, the most recent of which, in ARIEL, also looks at matters of risk and the environment (in Will Fer-guson’s novel 419). He edited or co-edited the journal Studies in Canadian Literature for 17 years and is editor of the World Fiction volume of The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).

Salhia Ben-Messahel is Professor of Postcolonial literature at the University of Toulon. Her main research interest revolves around Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. Her publica-tions include articles in books and journals, and two monographs: Mind the Country, Tim Winton’s Fiction (U of Australia P, 2006) and Globaletics and Radicant Aesthetics in Australian Fiction (Cambridge Scholars, 2017). She has also edited Des frontières de l’interculturalité (Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2009) and co-edited Colonial Extensions, Postcolonial Decentrings (Peter Lang, 2017).

Corinne Bigot is a Senior Lecturer in Commonwealth Literature at University Toulouse 2 – Jean Jaurès, France. Her main research interests are Canadian literature and diasporic fiction and life writing by women. Many of her publications (books, edited volumes and essays) are devoted to Alice Munro’s work, including a guest-edited issue of Commonwealth Essays and Studies 37.2 (2015). Recently, she co-edited Women’s Life Writing and the Practice of Reading (Pal-grave Macmillan, 2018), and a special issue of Wagadu 19 (2018) on Jamaica Kincaid’s work. She belongs to a new international network of academics from France, the UK and Australia working on diasporic memory.

Nicholas Birns is Associate Professor of Humanities at the School of Professional Studies, New York University. He is the author of Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead (Sydney UP, 2015) and many other books and articles.

Claire gallien teaches in the English Department at University Paul Valéry – Montpellier 3 and is affiliated to the CNRS. Her research interests are anchored in the critical study of orientalist discourse, postcolonial, comparative, and world literatures and theories, transla-tion studies and decoloniality. She published L’Orient anglais (Voltaire Foundation, 2011) and edited “Anglo-Arab Literatures,” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 39.2 (2017) and “Refugee Literatures,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 54.6 (2018). Her current projects include a book, From Corpus to Canon: Eastern Literary Traditions and Orientalist Reconfigurations in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain, and a co-edited volume, A Critical Muse: The World Imaginaries of Islam.

Paul giffard-foret earned his PhD from Monash University’s Centre for Postcolonial and Australian Writing on the topic of Southeast Asian Australian women’s fiction. His research has been concerned with postcolonial critical theory, Asian Australian studies, diasporic and

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multicultural literatures. More recently, he has also developed an interest in Indian literatures and social movements, and indigenous Australian cultural politics. He is currently working on a manuscript dealing with the question of aesthetics in postcolonial literature. He is a copy editor for the refereed open access journal Postcolonial Text and a regular contributor to the Australian journal Mascara Literary Review.

Otto heiM is an Associate Professor in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. His main research interests are Pacific Island writing, specifically poetry and theatre, as well as island studies. His recent publications include “Locating Guam: The Cartography of the Pacific and Craig Santos Perez’s Remapping of Unincorporated Territory” in New Directions in Travel Writing Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), “Island Logic and the Decolonization of the Pacific,” Interventions 19.7 (2017), and “Samoan Ghost Stories: John Kneubuhl and Oral History,” Shima 12.1 (2018).

Marie herBillon lectures in the English Department of the University of Liège. A member of the Centre d’Enseignement et de Recherche en Études Postcoloniales (CEREP), she has completed a PhD entitled “Beyond the Line: Murray Bail’s Spatial Poetics” and published several articles in international journals such as Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian/New Zealand Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing and The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. She is also the guest editor of “Australia-South Asia: Contestations and Remonstrances,” a spe-cial issue of the Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia (JEASA 8.2, 2018). Her current research project addresses the themes of history and migration in J.M. Coetzee’s late fiction.

Kara hisatake is a PhD candidate in Literature at the University of California Santa Cruz and writes about settler colonialism, language politics, decolonization, race, and gender in Hawai’i and the broader Pacific. Her work appears in Archiving Settler Colonialism: Culture, Space, and Race (Routledge, 2018) and is also forthcoming in Amerasia. She serves as managing editor of the journal Critical Ethnic Studies.

Jessica hurley is a Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows and Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. She is currently completing a book manuscript titled Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex and working on a second, Nuclear Decolonizations. Her research focuses on the liberatory strategies that minoritized writers have developed to resist the American nuclear complex both within the United States and across the Global South. Her work has appeared in ASAP/Journal, American Literature, Extrapolation, Frame, and the edited collection The Silence of Fallout: Nuclear Criticism in a Post-Cold War World.

Christine lorre-Johnston is a Senior Lecturer in English at the Sorbonne Nouvelle. Her re-search focuses on Canadian and New Zealand literature, with an interest in women’s writing and cultural transfers. Publications include, co-authored with Ailsa Cox, The Mind’s Eye: Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades (Fahrenheit, 2015), and co-edited, “Janet Frame: Short Fic-tion,” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 33.2 (2011), Space and Place in Alice Munro’s Short Fiction: “A Book with Maps in It” (Camden House, 2018), and “Afterlives of the Bible,” Journal of New Zealand Literature 36.2 (2018). She is editor of Commonwealth Essays and Studies.

Fiona McCann is Professor of Postcolonial literature at the University of Lille and a junior fellow at the Institut Universitaire de France. She has published widely on contemporary South African, Zimbabwean, and Irish writing, and has a particular interest in the overlap of politics and aesthetics. Her current research projects focus on writing by political prisoners in the postcolonial world and on border poetics in ultra-contemporary literature. She is Pre-sident of the French society of anglophone postcolonial studies (SEPC).

Contributors159

Delphine Munos is currently a Humboldt Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for English and American Studies, Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany. She is the author of a mono-graph on Jhumpa Lahiri entitled After Melancholia (Brill/Rodopi, 2013) and the guest-editor of special issues for South Asian Diaspora – with Mala Pandurang, “Mapping Diasporic Sub-jectivities” 6.1 (2014), and “Race Relations and the South Asian Diasporic Imaginary” 10.2 (2018). She is also the guest editor (with Bénédicte Ledent) of a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing focusing on “‘Minor’ Genres in Postcolonial Literatures” 54.1 (2018).

Helga raMsey-kurz is Professor of English literature at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. She has published widely on postcolonial literatures and edited two volumes on migrant writ-ing together with Geetha Ganapathy-Doré: Projections of Paradise: Ideal Elsewheres in Postcolonial Migrant Literature (Rodopi, 2011) and On the Move: The Journey of Refugees in New Literatures in English (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012). Her most recent book is Uncommon Wealths in Postcolonial Fiction (Brill, 2017), a collection of essays edited with Melissa Kennedy. She has initiated the international writing project ARENA (Archive of REfugee NArratives) in which students collaborate with forcibly displaced persons across Europe.

Marlo starr is an MFA candidate in Poetry in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins. In 2018, she earned a PhD in English from Emory University, where her comparative dissertation examined women’s poetry and publishing circulations in the Caribbean and Pacific Islands. Her research interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry and Indigenous feminisms. Her articles have appeared in Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism and Textual Practice. A short piece, “Slow Writing: Archival Research in the Digital Age,” was recently published in PMLA.

Maggie Wander is a Ph.D. student in Visual Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on contemporary visual cultures of Oceania and its diaspora, particu-larly those projects that engage with the intersections of environmental issues and colonial histories.

Laura A. White is Associate Professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University, where she is also affiliate faculty with the Women’s and Gender Studies Program. She continues exploring ways that hauntings can manifest environmental threats and return environmental knowledge in Ecospectrality: Haunting and Environmental Justice in Contemporary Anglophone Novels (forthcoming in Bloomsbury’s Environmental Cultures Series).