"Our Write-To-Write"

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"OUR WRITE-TO-WRITE"

A Poetics of Encounter Across Aboriginal Australia and the Caribbean

Dashiell Moore

A dissertation submitted to fulfil requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences School of Literature, Art and Media The University of Sydney 2020

I certify that to the best of my knowledge, the intellectual content of this dissertation is the product of my own work and all the assistance received in preparing this dissertation has been acknowledged. An earlier version of the fourth chapter of this dissertation is published with the Journal of Commonwealth Literature as "The inter-Indigenous Encounter" (2019). Please note that at present this article has not been placed in an issue with this journal.

Dashiell Moore

Abstract

Encounter narratives are often associated with the accounts of first contact between Europeans and the Indigenous inhabitants of New Worlds. However, they are also the means by which contemporary writers assert their self-determination from the coloniser. Notable examples of this phenomenon can be found in the works of Martinique scholar Edouard Glissant, the late Barbados poet and scholar Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Yoogum and Kudjela poet Lionel Fogarty, and Yankunytjatjara poet Ali Cobby Eckermann. Each poet depicts the encountered figure in opaque terms in order to acknowledge the figure's right to refuse the reader's comprehension, a shared signature that demonstrates each poet's commitment to resist the self-Other tradition of Western metaphysics. This dissertation is the first scholarly effort to examine their works together and one of the first comparative studies of Aboriginal and Caribbean poetry. Aboriginal and Caribbean writings on the encounter are commonly framed by an overarching structural opposition between Caribbean rootlessness and Aboriginal rootedness. More provocatively, I point out that a range of Aboriginal and Caribbean writers themselves affirm this structural opposition by portraying one another in obverse terms. This study draws out the formal and conceptual affinities between these poets' projects by examining historical and literary connections between these literatures. In doing so, I resituate these poets in a host of new theoretical figurations that allow me to challenge the given cultural or political groupings with which their poetic extrapolations of the encounter are read, most notably the rootlessness of Caribbean literature and the rootedness of Aboriginal literature. Having shown that the rootless and rooted binary limits our understanding of the relational complexities of these poets' projects, I upend this opposition by reading these literatures from an inverted theoretical perspective: Brathwaite and Glissant as the forbears of an Indigenous literature, Fogarty and Eckermann as mobile writers in a planetary context.

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge the Elders past and eternal of Cadigal, on whose lands I have worked as a researcher. This dissertation reflects the strength of Yoogum, Kudjela, and Yankunytjatjara knowledge generously expressed by Lionel Fogarty and Ali Cobby Eckermann. I would also like to thank Kalkadoon scholar Philip Morrissey for allowing me to work on Lionel Fogarty's manuscript materials that were gathered for the poetry collection, Lionel Fogarty Selected Poems 1980-2017 (2017). This dissertation could not have taken the form it did without the advice and encouragement of my supervisors. Isabelle Hesse has been a constant source of advice. I am so grateful to her for her encouragement as well as her exacting feedback. Isabelle's commitment to meet and discuss things face to face helped me work through some of the knottier parts of this dissertation. From the moment I began my PhD, Peter Minter has been an extremely generous, thoughtful and supportive supervisor. When I think about the texts and theories that have pushed this dissertation forward, I think of him, and for that, I am ever thankful. To Sarah Gleeson-White, who took on the supervisor role for the last six months, I could not be more grateful. Her incredible generosity, rigorous edits, and thoughtful insight has been invaluable. To a wider network of scholars, in and out of the University of Sydney English Department, I am so very thankful for your scholarly support and collegiality. In particular, I'd like to thank Ben Etherington, Michael Griffith, Paul Giles, Vanessa Smith, Fiona Lee, John Frow, the Australian Association for Caribbean Studies, Katharina Piechocki, David Damrosch, Pheng Cheah, Sean Seeger, Kathleen Gyssels, and Elaine Savory for their inspiration at various points in the writing process. Over the course of my studies, I have leaned on my family a great deal for their loving support and great humour, particularly my mother Catriona, who has been a sounding board, part-time editor, and full-time coffee date from the first day of my undergraduate degree. I owe an immense debt of gratitude to you all. Thanks, also, to the Makryllos family for your kindness and warmth, the constant supply of jumpers, and many a stirring conversation. The final word goes to Jennifer. There are no words to adequately express what your presence has meant to me while writing this dissertation. She inspires me (something that sounds kitsch but with her it's true) to be the person that I want to be. Thank you for your unfailing love, your wondrous spirit, and for the laughter.

List of Figures

Figure 1. Jim Krane. "Arab island resorts are reshaping geography: United Arab Emirates building 'The World' and other enclaves." NBC News. 3rd August 2005. Figure 2. Draft manuscript of "Advance Those Asian an Pacific Writers Poets." These manuscript materials are not housed in a designated archive. As such, full citation details cannot be provided.

A Note on Translations

My quotations of Edouard Glissant's work derive from a range of translators. These are Betsy Wing (1997), Natalie Stephens (2010), J. Michael Dash (1989), Eric Prieto (2012), and Jeff Humphries (2005). I refer to each translator as I come to their translated works.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1. First Encounter Narratives and a Poetics of Opacity 24 I. The First Encounter: "When the very idea of territory becomes relative" 24 II. To Dance a Laghia: New Readings of Opacity 37

Chapter 2. "The First and Last of the New Worlds": Reading Historical and Literary Meridians Between Australia and the Caribbean 53 I. A History of Caribbean and Australian Encounters 54 II. The Doubling of Caribbean and Aboriginal Literature 65 II. A Caribbean Discourse on Australia 79

Chapter 3. Reading for Roots in Edward Kamau Brathwaite's Tidalectics and Edouard Glissant's Relation 88 I. Imagined Islands, Indigeneity, and a Global Caribbean 89 II. "ebb&flow": Kamau Brathwaite's Tidalectic Encounters 99 III. 'Rooted and open': Glissant and the Encounter 108 IV. Brathwaite, Glissant, and Alcheringa: Ethnopoetics 117

Chapter 4. Inter-Indigenous Encounters in the Poetry of Lionel Fogarty and Ali Cobby Eckermann 126 I. Global Aboriginality and Inter-Indigenous Approaches 126 II. "The waves of our humanity is the same": Lionel Fogarty's Transnational Poetics 133 III. Simple Form and Poetic Paths: Ali Cobby Eckermann and Celtic Ireland 149

Conclusion: A Favour for The Western Mariner 161

Works Cited 168

Introduction

The favour to grant you, western mariner, is indeed to read your oeuvre diagonally, to apply other seas to you, other shores, other darknesses. Edouard Glissant. Poetic Intention. 208.

Yet Dreamtime multiple declare all mistakes be a past tears for those unfriendly warpaths Familiar our write-to-write together now Pacifica Asian's narrow and bigger… Lionel Fogarty. Eelahro (Long Ago) Nyah (Looking) Möbö-Möbö (Future). 72.

Encounter narratives are often associated with the accounts of first contact between Europeans and the Indigenous inhabitants of New Worlds.1 However, they are also the means by which contemporary writers assert their self-determination from the coloniser, two examples of which can be found in the epigraphs that open this dissertation. Martinique poet and theorist Edouard Glissant asks us to read our histories "diagonally," that is, to think beyond a dyadic relationship between the European explorer and the New World, and envisage intercultural connections with "other seas, other shores, other darknesses" (2010, 208). Yoogum and Kudjela poet Lionel Fogarty advocates for inter-Indigenous encounters across the Pacific Ocean: "Familiar our write-to-write together now Pacifica Asian's narrow and bigger" (2014, 72). Fogarty and Glissant unsettle the mythos of the First Encounter between explorers and Indigenous peoples in different ways.2 Glissant gestures to the multi- directional nature of colonialism in order to relativise and thereby interrogate the exceptionalism that often characterises a colonial history. By contrast, Fogarty suggests that "Dreamtime" is "multiple," in that the spiritual and philosophical practices of the Indigenous

1 A range of Aboriginal writers choose not to use 'postcolonial' for obscuring the complex dynamics of settler- colonialism. For an overview of Aboriginal literature's disassociation with that field, see Anita Heiss. Dhuuluu- Yala = To Talk Straight: Publishing Indigenous Literature. Aboriginal Studies Press, 2003. Similarly, to use the term in Caribbean literature also invites controversy, see Shalini Puri. The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. In this dissertation, I use 'postcolonial' to denote the fields in which these literatures are studied, rather than equate their languages, cultures, and identities to a colonial sphere of reference.

2 Across this dissertation, I use terms such as European, Euro-centric, Western, Caribbean, Australian, and Aboriginal Australian to efficiently outline my argument. These terms should not be taken as a literal indication of the peoples living in these geographies. As Glissant writes in Caribbean Discourse, the "west is a project, not a place" (2).

communities in the Asia-Pacific region share a common spatiotemporal field of reference that exceeds the explorer's European metaphysical and historical frame of reference. As they cross vast expanses of space and time, Glissant's and Fogarty's literary projects unfurl together and challenge the notion that we exist in a monolithic world that can be grasped from a universal, singular perspective.

As they look to other shores in order to leave the coloniser behind, Fogarty and Glissant face the difficult task of establishing forms of solidarity across radically different cultures and colonial histories. As Fogarty finds, establishing connections between colonised peoples is by no means a simple task. When he declares "all mistakes [...] a past tears," he suggests that the actions of one colonised people inform the structures of power that sustain colonialism elsewhere. The implication is that the self-determination of a writer like Glissant may well be linked to Fogarty's oppression, and vice versa. Both poets attempt to shed light on "other darknesses" as a means of working through such a complication. While at a distance from one another in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, Glissant and Fogarty attempt to illuminate an often under-examined historical and literary kinship between, or rather across, colonised cultures; we may imagine them colliding as they each lead a local colonial history on its path elsewhere. What occurs at these points of contact between Caribbean and Aboriginal Australian literatures? How do they understand one another? More broadly, how does Indigeneity intersect with discourses of creolisation?

To provide an answer to these questions and draw out the significance of Fogarty's and Glissant's shared commitment to the inter-colonial encounter, I engage in the first sustained, comparative study of Aboriginal Australian and Caribbean literature by examining the works of Glissant, Fogarty, the late Barbados poet and scholar Kamau Brathwaite, and Yankunytjatjara poet Ali Cobby Eckermann. 3 I argue that there are significant connections between these writers in their portrayal of intercultural encounters. Each of these poets acknowledge the encountered figure's right to refuse the reader's comprehension, a shared signature that demonstrates each poet's commitment to resist the self-Other tradition of

3 My analysis of Fogarty's poetry is informed by my archival research on his unpublished draft manuscripts. These materials were gathered in partnership with Fogarty and are included in Chapter Four with permission from the editors of Lionel Fogarty Selected Poems 1980-2017.

Western thought.4 As Glissant writes in Poetics of Relation, "Agree not merely to the right to difference, but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity" (190). This study draws out the formal and conceptual affinities between these poets' projects by examining historical and literary connections between these literatures. In doing so, I posit that Aboriginal and Caribbean writings on the encounter are commonly framed by an overarching structural opposition between Caribbean rootlessness and Aboriginal rootedness.5 More provocatively, I point out that a range of Aboriginal and Caribbean writers themselves affirm this structural opposition by portraying one another in obverse terms. Having escaped a diametrical opposition with the coloniser, the colonised subject engages the inter-colonial Other as a foil by which to consolidate a local project of self-determination. This dissertation argues that the rootless-rooted binary limits our understanding of the relational complexities of these poets' projects, and thus, I upend this opposition by reading these literatures from an inverted theoretical perspective: Brathwaite and Glissant as the forbears of an Indigenous literature, Fogarty and Eckermann as relationally-minded writers in a planetary context.

Developing previous scholarly representations of Aboriginal Australian and Caribbean poets ‘writing back to the coloniser,' such as The Empire Writes Back (1989), I analyse each poet's use of poetry as a vehicle to work through the historical and metaphysical baggage informing our ideas of the relationship between self and Other. Each poet uses the medium to make "with their/rhythms some-/thing torn/and new," to paraphrase Brathwaite's poem "Jo'vertso" (1973, 268). As such, I define their projects as a poetics of encounter, a phrase that reflects Glissant's belief that the act of writing poetry enables the poet to engage another without forcing them into a narrow cultural politics or theoretical framework.6 In this regard, Glissant suggests that poetry has the capacity to accomplish what philosophical discourse cannot: "This work, which is that of poetry alone: to unify without denaturing, order without taxidermising, unveil without destroying; to know at last each thing and this space between

4 The philosophical term "the Other" refers to the opposite of the self. See Georg Willhelm Friedrich Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Franz Fanon revisits the structural opposition in Black Skin, White Masks, see Franz Fanon. "The Negro and Language." Black Skin, White Masks. Grove Press, 1967, pp. 17-40. 5 Elizabeth DeLoughrey also observes this bifurcation in Routes and Roots (2007), a comparison of Caribbean and Pacific literatures. The phrase 'roots and routes' is also drawn from James Clifford (1988), Glissant (1990), and Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic (1993). 6 The first use of the term, 'poetics of the encounter,' is given by Peter Nicholls in response to George Oppen: "A poetics of encounter will assume that the domain of the ethical is also the domain of the ordinary and the everyday, of relationships expressing proximity rather than contemplative or legislative distance." (168).

one thing and another, these saps, these countries" (2010, 206). Glissant holds that poetry does 'work' in allowing the poet to dwell in the interstice "between one thing and another."7

The commitment among Aboriginal and Caribbean poets to rethink the relationship "between one thing and another" reflects, in part, their shared desire to topple and replace a history of encounters between European explorers and Indigenous inhabitants. Christopher Columbus' records indicate that the Italian explorer first landed on Guanahani Island, renamed by the explorer as San Salvador, in 1492, whereas Australian colonial history records Captain James Cook making landfall land at Ka-may, renamed Botany Bay, in 1770. In both cases, the point of contact between Europeans and Natives was entirely premeditated. Before his first visit to the Pacific, the British admiralty give Cook secret instructions to "endeavour by all proper means to cultivate a friendship with the Natives" yet "with the Consent of the Natives to take possession of Convenient Situations in the Country in the Name of the King of Great Britain" (Cook cclxxxiii). To Vanessa Smith, the dual invocations to friendship and conquest "mark the boundaries of a European desire for amicable relations that it is both fantastic and territorial, only dreamed of and yet already subject to contract" (5). In Cook's First Encounter with the Gweagal men of Botany Bay, these contradictions are most clear; an attempt to make landfall quickly leads to violence as Cook orders gunshots to be fired. In her analysis of this event, Smith suggests that the ambiguity of the dual invocations serves the purpose of alleviating the explorer's conscience from complicity in any wrongdoing.8 I add here that these instructions also foreclose the interpretative ways of thinking of the Indigenous Other. Homi K. Bhabha makes the point that historical representations of First Encounters render Indigenous peoples transparent under a Western gaze: These outlaws, these peoples without a history, are frequently delivered to history by being marched through the defiles of a secular modernity. When they arrive at the signposts of progress, they are shorn of their stories and traditions; they are no longer hidden from history, but they have turned into spectral figures, transparent testimonies to the world triumph of a secular capitalist modernity. (2002, xi) Bhabha suggests that “spectral” encountered figures convey their “transparent testimonies” to confirm and validate the singular-universal worldview of Europe, the paranoia of a collective

7 Studies of poetry as a line of philosophical inquiry in the Western tradition are comparatively more well- known. As Lyn Hejinian states, poetry is "as much a philosophical realm as a literary one" (2000, 2). 8 Numerous scholars have challenged the idea of a one-way discourse between coloniser and colonised, see Edward W. Said. Orientalism. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. Homi K. Bhabha. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.

European imaginary. As Bhabha indicates, these "transparent testimonies" are then projected out to a wider world. These violent histories of first contact not only shape popular understandings of Indigenous cultures but are often emphasised as the bookends of world history: the Caribbean and Australia are the 'First and Last of the New Worlds,' as Paul Sharrad calls them (1993). I interrogate these First Encounters and their literary representations in Chapter One in order to contextualise the poet’s commitment to transcend a diametrical relationship with the coloniser.

Writing encounter narratives in a postcolonial context is complicated, as Fogarty acknowledges in the epigraph opening this Introduction. The relationship between the self and the Other that so often structures encounter narratives has historically reinforced the normativity and hegemony of the European self in opposition to a racialised Other. In Black Skin, White Masks, Franz Fanon states that for the racialised subject, "every position of one's own, every effort at security, is based on relations of dependence, with the diminution of the other. It is the wreckage of what surrounds me that provides the foundation for my virility" (211). As I demonstrate, these "relations of dependence" are difficult to escape. Brathwaite, Glissant, Fogarty and Eckermann express a series of diametrical oppositions in their writings on the encounter. Brathwaite suggests that the self-Other frame positions European values and cultures as the positive to the "out-print negative" of the Caribbean Other: "To look into our mirror then & there was to see the face – or what we think was the face – of Charles Dickens or John Keats [...] We being the opposite, the out-print negatives of the ve-ry foreign ikons we hold dear" (1999, 46-47). He posits that the Caribbean subject acts and thinks in structural opposition to the European coloniser, a line of thought that intersects with Glissant's statement in Poetics of Relation that "thought of the Other cannot escape its own dualism until the time when differences become acknowledged" (17). Fogarty makes a similar assessment as he writes that he "was born into ashamed blackness / with Europeans" (1980, 23). I suggest that these examples mark the limits of 'writing back to the coloniser' and reflect the need to re-centre the cultures, languages, and relational worldviews of colonised writers themselves. 9

9 For early examples of Indigenous and Creole writers who make the case for reading 'postcolonial' works on their own terms, one can turn to Brathwaite's History of the Voice (1983) and Cherokee-Creek scholar Craig Womack's Red on Red (1999).

To renegotiate the terms of their relationship with the wider world, Brathwaite, Glissant, Fogarty and Eckermann withhold the encounter from view. In this way, each poet explores what Glissant names opacité [opacity], an alterity that exceeds our ability to identify the Caribbean or Aboriginal subject. In literary terms, opacity manifests in a veil that limits the reader's capacity to perceive the subject of a poem in order to protect that subject from becoming overly simplified. In this way, these poets have reversed Bhabha’s formulation. These are figures who relinquish their place in history, an account that is indicative of settler- colonial values, in order to give opaque testimonies. For instance, Eckermann withholds a spiritual event from the reader in her poem, "Lake Eyre": "you will not know / you do not see our religion" (2015, 44).10 Glissant describes the complications of this literary strategy in Poetics of Relation: Agree not merely to the right to difference, but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity. […] Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components. For the time being, perhaps, give up on this old obsession with discovering what lies at the bottom of natures. (190) Glissant suggests that recognitions of difference can lead to essentialism, just as he indicates that transparency can privilege the ‘universal’ paradigms of the coloniser. To overcome this predicament, Glissant acknowledges and validates the Other's right to refuse our gaze. In this dissertation, I deploy opacity to analyse each poet's challenge to the Western tradition of self- Other ontology. While Glissant develops opacity in the historical and cultural specificities of the Francophone Caribbean, he advocates for a wider sense of the term when he argues "for the right to opacity for everyone" (194). John Drabinski makes sense of this claim in the following way: "The right to opacity is a right to be, even if that Being is saturated with the unknowable and characterised by its withdrawal from economies of visibility" (2019, 13). Drabinski's account of opacity can be applied across colonial fault-lines to make sense of, for example, Fogarty's resistance to racist representation. In his poem, "First Off his Tribe Castrated," Fogarty writes: "We ant's your modern Aborigines / We ant's your code to heaven / We ant's your talking without a face" (2017, 206). Through a striking use of anaphora, Fogarty withdraws the figure of the Aboriginal person from the view of the reader at the same time as he recasts Aboriginal subjectivity in infinite potentiality. Put simply, he suggests what

10 Vanessa Smith also comes to this line of thought in Intimate Strangers as she rejects a panoptic, objective view of the First Encounter in favour of "the reciprocal, the dialectical and the partial" (294).

they "ant" to say what they are. This use of opacity is highly productive, it does not limit our perception of the encountered figure nor open them up to interpretative view.

Building on Michael Griffith's complex theorisation of the way Aboriginal fiction writers "refuse the legacy of appropriation and visibility" (2018, 168), this dissertation examines the way in which Aboriginal poets draw on opacity to challenge to the self-Other ontological tradition. To date, the majority of studies of Aboriginal literature equate opacity with opposition. The most notable and relevant example of this reading is novelist and critic Mudrooroo's (formerly Colin Johnston) description of Fogarty as "a poet guerrilla using the language of the invader in an effort to smash open its shell and spill it open for poetic expression" (1986, 49).11 Mudrooroo suggests that Fogarty's complex experimentation with language underscores his resistance to a white Australian reader. However, I argue that this analytical frame limits studies of Fogarty's work to its more didactic political demands and forecloses its literary contributions. Moreover, I contend that to equate opacity with resistance or opposition privileges a settler-colonial literary standard. Read simply as a guerrilla poet, Fogarty finds a niche in what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call minor literature; that is, a literature defined by its emergence from a 'minor language,' where, by virtue of its minority, "every individual matter is immediately plugged into the political" (16). Although writing in response to parochial literary criticism on Franz Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari's minor literature helpfully underscores the way in which Aboriginal and Caribbean writers are often framed around a cultural or ideological position to the detriment of their individual genius, the most salient example being the rooted, essentialist politics of the Aboriginal writer and the rootless outlook of the Caribbean writer.

This dissertation challenges this dichotomy in order to examine the future of Aboriginal and Caribbean writing; the intercultural encounters that follow self-determination. In this, I build upon Elizabeth DeLoughrey's ground-breaking work, Routes and Roots (2007), which disrupts the dichotomy between the diasporic routes and Indigenous roots that shape our structurally opposed perception of Pacific and Caribbean literature. DeLoughrey argues that Indigenous and Creole poetics of encounter can be read on dialectical terms to break up this binary. She writes that the "valorisation of 'routes' is constituted by a dichotomous rendering

11 I use Colin Johnston's chosen name Mudrooroo in this dissertation to indicate the name by which he was published. For a more complex discussion of identity politics and representation in Aboriginal literature, see Anita Heiss. Dhuuluu-Yala = To Talk Straight. Aboriginal Studies Press, 2003.

of native 'roots'" (45). Similarly, I argue that Fogarty's and Eckermann's claim to Indigeneity informs their planetary mobility, as Brathwaite's and Glissant's account of trans-oceanic routes foregrounds a claim to place. My study of encounters draws on DeLoughrey's argument by exploring the way in which representations of Aboriginal Australia and the Caribbean as rooted/routed structural opposites inform and inhibit their literary and political solidarities. At the heart of the difference between DeLoughrey’s work and this dissertation is the question of materialism. DeLoughrey critiques the bifurcation of routes and roots as "a poetic corrective to materialist approaches to Caribbean historiography" (47). By contrast, this dissertation unsettles the route-root binary by studying the ways these poets appropriate and reimagine the materialist frame of intercultural engagement.

I do not wish to imply that Aboriginal and Caribbean literatures are in any way equivalent. Rather, I wish to test and affirm the affinities between these poets as they move beyond a local frame of reference. In so doing, my research represents a timely intervention for scholars attempting to connect the fields of postcolonial and Indigenous Studies. For example, in the 2020 special issue of ariel, Cree-Métis scholar Deanna Reder and Sophie McCall argue that It is an inconvenient but incontestable fact that Indigenous decolonization does not meaningfully draw from (or even feel the need to respond to) postcolonial studies. However, postcolonial studies now has the powerful opportunity to refresh its historically complex and difficult relationship with anti- or decolonial thought by engaging critically with contemporary Indigenous thought and writing. (5) Reder and McCall draw attention to the way Indigenous writers' multifaceted projects of decolonisation have irrevocably shifted the field of postcolonial literary studies, and go on to examine these intersections themselves, a critical aspect that dovetails with my intention to analyse literary engagements and face-to-face encounters between Caribbean and Aboriginal writers across this dissertation. Their larger argument concerns an examination of the benefits of comparative literary studies, "the questions of how and for whose benefit scholars build comparative frameworks " (10). If there is indeed a challenging gap between Indigenous and postcolonial studies, there may be a chasm between Caribbean and Aboriginal literatures. The literary affinities and historical continuities between the two regions are typically overlooked in favour of local referents. For example, when comparing Australian and Caribbean nationalisms, Sharrad states,

While there are similar problems of authenticity for the national construction of cultural identity in the Caribbean, in that to assert a naturalised local presence against British colonialism the original Amerindian population is papered over (blacked out rather than whited out), there are more pressing problems because of conflicting racial, cultural and historical determinants behind that black presence. (1999, 61) Hesitant to liken the two regions, Sharrad draws our attention to the more familiar Caribbean history of Christopher Columbus' discovery of the New World and the trans-generational trauma of enslavement and plantation labour. Again, I do not wish to contradict this statement, nor make a reductive comparison of Australian and Caribbean histories. It would be impossible to understand literary approaches like Brathwaite's nation language (1984), a mode of writing built from the syntax, rhythm, and feeling of Creole speech, without attending to the specificities of Caribbean history, just as it would be extremely difficult to read what Fogarty describes in interview as "double-standard English" (Fogarty and Moore, n.p.), a term referring to the way the poet opens the English language up to reflects its negation of Aboriginal subjectivity, without understanding the historical complexities of Britain's invasion of Aboriginal land.12

I bring these poets together using a relational methodology that orients literary analysis on face-to-face encounters, literary collaborations, intertextual references, and shared historical experiences. That is, I take Glissant's concept of Relation, a notion that encompasses sensitivity to ever-changing and constantly fluctuating interactions and relations between the world’s peoples, to examine literary and historical continuities between the Caribbean and Australia. Shu-mei Shih has outlined a similar methodology of "relational comparison" that examines literary texts from "world history's view of the world as a field of interconnections across time and space" (434). Relation illuminates a series of histories of contact that underlie this dissertation, for example, the forced transportation of enslaved Africans to the Caribbean archipelago described in Brathwaite's and Glissant's work, the migrations of Indigenous populations across the Pacific that Fogarty records in his poem, "The Slaves Are Her People" (2017, 232), and the inter-migrations that have yoked Australia and the Caribbean together through imperial, penal, and mercantile economies. Here I draw on the work of English

12 For an exemplary history of the Caribbean slave trade, see Kenneth Morgan. Enslavement and the British Empire: from Africa to America. Oxford University Press, 2007. For a historical and literary analysis of Australian colonialism, see Paul Carter. The Road to Botany Bay An Exploration of Landscape and History. University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

historian Ian Duffield (1986), and Australian scholars Cassandra Pybus (2006) and Elizabeth McMahon (2016), all of whom uncover multi-directional flows in immigration, economic networks, as well as cultural continuities that connect Australia and the Caribbean.13 By doing so, I present direct points of contact between different experiences of colonialism, and illuminate the pathways by which Australia and the Caribbean come together in what McMahon characterises as a 'search for ground': "The literature of Anglophone Australia and the Caribbean [...] records and rehearses the misrecognitions, identifications, overlays and reconstructions in the search for ground on which self and world can be placed in meaningful and sustaining relation" (2016, 129). McMahon helpfully locates a shared need across both literatures to create new terms by which the literary subject project themselves forward into new worlds, examples of which can be found in Glissant's 'diagonal' pathways that opens this dissertation.

Where previous studies of the Caribbean-Australian relationship, such as those of Sharrad (1993) and McMahon (2016), reference Aboriginal contributions in passing, I build upon and expand these studies by analysing a consistent Aboriginal presence in inter-colonial ethnology, Black Consciousness Movements, and postcolonial networks. These points of contact, and their sustained ramifications on Caribbean and Aboriginal literature, fundamentally disrupt the bifurcation of the Caribbean and Aboriginal Australia as rooted and rootless counterparts. While Aboriginal and Caribbean writers often refer to one another as a structural opposite in a way that reflects Fanon's idea that "every position of one's own [...] is based on relations of dependence" (211), I point out that each has influenced the emerging relational outlook of the other. Aboriginal writers turn to Caribbean literature as a source of relational thought assisting them to come to terms with the effects of Australia's settler- colonial history. For example, Fogarty's engagement with the political rhetoric of Fanon, Narungga poet Natalie Harkin's readings of Jamaica Kincaid, Waanyi novelist and essayist Alexis Wright's references to Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, and Peter Minter's reflection on Glissant's Poetics of Relation, are but a few examples of Aboriginal literary encounters with Caribbean writers. For Wright and Minter, the Caribbean archipelago

13 In addition, Russell McDougall's 2002 edition of Australian Cultural History, entitled To The Islands is a crucial point of departure for studying Caribbean-Australian interconnections from a multi-disciplinary perspective. For an indication of future literary engagements between the two regions, note that a quick search of the Australian Research Council Data Portal reveals that of all the projects given national funding from 2001 to the present, two mention the Caribbean. The first project examines a transnational history of enslavement and abolition that concluded in 2012, the other exploring the common effects of Christianity in Caribbean enslavement and Australia's settler-colonialism that concludes in 2020.

becomes a transportive figure that allows them to see an Australian environment in infinitely scalable and fractally complex dimensions. Their deployment of Glissant's archipelagic thought to connect disparate outcrops in the Australian landscape, and thereby disrupt monolithic conceptions of the Australian continent, suggests that the Caribbean archipelago is an inversion of the spatiotemporal tropes of Australian settler-colonialism. Wright and Minter deploy Australia (a nation-state alienated from the world) and the Caribbean (a rootless model of connectivity) in structural opposition, and, by disrupting these frames, hold to a far more expansive relational horizon than Aboriginal literature is credited with.

A similar structural opposition is made by Brathwaite and Glissant as they engage with Australian geographies and cultures. In ConVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey, Brathwaite describes Australia's "boomerang/wave" as a totemic counterpart to the Caribbean tides that inspire his concept of tidalectics (115). In doing so, he is able to align tidalectics with the "boomerang" in a common ancestral continuum. The opposition between the two colonies takes a darker turn in Glissant's Caribbean Discourse, where the poet repeats the colonial myth that Aboriginal Australians are doomed to a "slow death" in a footnote (18). I account for Glissant's troubling suggestion that Aboriginal Australians will face immanent extinction in greater depth in Chapter Three, but suffice to say here that he projects a local understanding of Indigeneity onto Australia, likening Australia’s First Nations to the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean who are said to have been eradicated in the early years of colonisation. In both cases, the erasure of an Indigenous people foregrounds Glissant's commitment to move beyond what he describes in Poetics of Relation as "the absolute ontological possession regarded as sacred" towards "the complicity of relation" (147). For Brathwaite and Glissant, Australia and its Indigenous inhabitants have a deep connection to place that Creole Caribbeans do not share: a pre-colonial longue durée that exceeds the European history to which the Caribbean is tied. It is for this reason that Brathwaite equates Australia with the "boomerang," a place of unfolding temporal returns and cycles. As Brathwaite and Glissant repeat the familiar structural opposition, however, they begin to emulate and re-write the values of rootedness which they associate Australia with, a literary engagement allowing me to re-situate their writings on aquatic roots in a trans-oceanic context.

The kinetic, ‘live’ aspects of the poetic encounters studied here reshape and redetermine the historical, ideological and cultural groupings of postcolonial literatures. My analysis accords

with Pheng Cheah's radical rethinking of the field of world literature as a world-making literature, "an active power in the making of worlds, that is, both a site of processes of worlding and an agent that participates and intervenes in these processes" (2). Cheah challenges the view that literature is in a "reactive position" (5), where literary texts are acted-on by a world-system that is beyond question. Instead, he suggests that literary works open new ethicopolitical horizons, prompting their readers "to the coming of other worlds" (193-194). These poetics of encounter serve similar ontological purposes, reflecting that any one encounter cannot be grasped from a singular perspective or ascribed to one purpose. To think otherwise would be to universalise a singular history or mode of knowledge production as an unchangeable norm.14 These ramifications necessitate that we familiarise ourselves with other ways of thinking about the relationship between the self and Other—or perhaps do away with these terms entirely given the metaphysical baggage they bear.15 The encounter once delineated an opposition between the European explorer and the Indigenous peoples in distant lands. In this dissertation, its appropriation represents the foundation for intertwined discourses of self-determination that lead us to alternative worlds. As I demonstrate, Brathwaite, Glissant, Fogarty and Eckermann create a collective discourse of worlding counter to the mechanisms of empire. Their works trace tidal shifts, trans-oceanic frameworks, and an underwater commons with which to re-establish our bonds to one another and re-determine the spatiality of the world itself. As Fogarty puts it, "Make our books be the beach to lay on" (2014, 72).

Aboriginal Literature and the World

Differently to the Caribbean, which, as Jan Rupp argues, has always appeared to be entangled in global flows (140), Aboriginal Australia is often associated with a level of cultural specificity that makes it inimical to worldliness. Ben Etherington points out that Aboriginal literature is a "literary micro-climate […] which the prevailing winds of postcolonial and world literature often sweep past" (2016, 1). In his recent study of the circulation of Indigenous authors in the North American literary marketplace, David Carter argues that the

14 A similar line of thought informs Hamid Dabashi's work, Can Non-Europeans Think? (2015), which contests the universalisation of Euro-centric traditions and creates epistemological pathways for future scholarship. In a foreword introducing the book, Walter Mignolo suggests that Dabashi breaks from the esoteric interpretation of philosophy as "a universal standard by which to judge and classify" (2015, 13). 15 The phrase, 'a change in the terms of the conversation' borrows from Mignolo's work, The Darker Side of Western Modernity (2011).

paucity of Aboriginal writers published overseas is indicative of a discrepancy between the material evidence of Aboriginal transnationalism and scholarship on that transnationalism (2019). He suggests that Aboriginal Australians may be the subject of transnational theories, but they have not gained a sustained foothold in a global literary marketplace. However, Carter’s findings may be the subject of ongoing debate. For instance, Estelle Castro-Koshy has recently presented a compelling case for Waanyi novelist and essayist Alexis Wright's successful negotiation of Francophone literary markets (2018). Alongside Carter’s and Castro-Koshy’s turn to material evidence, this dissertation examines Aboriginal literature as a field of interactions in space and time. These cross-cultural interactions are often inhibited by global and national circuits of exchange. When Emily Apter, a leading scholar in the field of world literature, compares Fogarty to white Australian poet John Kinsella, she makes the case that neither of the poets circulate beyond a local literary market. Kinsella is "not exotic enough" whereas Fogarty "fails to cross over because his writing remains too exotic for mainstream taste" (2). This is despite Fogarty's and Kinsella's mutual interest in international readerships (Fogarty and Mead; Kinsella 2013). While Apter's later work, Against World Literature (2013), attests to the value of untranslatability, I am interested in her initial positioning of Kinsella and Fogarty, of all writers, against one another. The opposition suggests that Aboriginal and non-Indigenous Australian writers may be direct competitors for attention in a world literary marketplace. The Australian nation state has historically managed and restricted the mobility and agency of Australia's First Nations in order to substantiate the myth of perfect settlement.16 Bundjalung scholar Evelyn Araluen Corr argues in her 2017 essay, "Shame and Contemporary Australian Poetics" that white Australian scholars and critics tend to appropriate, dismiss, and underplay the contributions of Aboriginal writers. She posits that Australia is founded and defined by "an exquisitely curated erasure of Aboriginal presence" (124). Tony Birch, of Indigenous, Irish, and West Indian descent, describes this negative treatment of Aboriginal literature as the "disloyalty effect," "whereby critics, commentators, and readers respond to what they feel is an implicit critique of betrayal of the national story: an act of ingratitude" (n.p.).

16 Australia’s past continues to be erased in the so-called 'History Wars' between a range of Indigenous and non-Indigenous commentators. This is despite Penny Van Toorn's Writing Never Arrives Naked (2006) and the Macquarie Pen Anthology of Aboriginal Literature (2008), which unearth a rich and diverse history of Aboriginal literary agency. For further insight into the Australian History Wars , see Bruce Pascoe. "Andrew Bolt's disappointment." Griffith Review, vol. 36, April 2012, n.p.

There has been an extensive amount of theorisation in this area, which this thesis will speak to, before returning to key voices in Aboriginal literature. As many writers, theorists, and commentators have argued, the ‘exquisitely curated erasure’ of Aboriginal identity and culture is tied to the myth of terra nullius, the shaky premise that Australia was uninhabited, vacant land. In her touchstone work on Australian insularity, Suvendrini Perera defines the island-continent of Australia in the following way: “Against the unknowable vastnesses within and without, the island is a shape that defines and secures” (2).17 What is so relentlessly defined and secured, in this case, is the false premise that Australia’s settlement was justified. Perera indicates that the consolidation of Australia’s borders reiterates the violence of the colonial project, and that this ritual must be performed repetitively in order to substantiate this historical myth. In his discussion of the Antipodean parameters of American literature, Paul Giles also makes the point that Australian literature is marked by a carefully sustained image of interiority (2014). Noting the Australian Research Council's declaration that "safeguarding Australia" is one of its "national research priorities," he likens Australian literature’s cultural infrastructures to the dialled-up protectionism of the television program, Border Security: Australia's Front Line (492). Australia's literary infrastructures continue to enclose and appropriate internal domains such as the history and culture of Aboriginal Australia, even as Australia's politicians project an idea of Aboriginality outward to attract international tourism. This argument was recently advanced by McMahon in Islands, Identity, and the Literary Imagination (2016). McMahon draws upon Martin Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, translated to ‘there to be’ or ‘being there,’ to note a relation between the interconnection of the individual self and the external world in which they exist, and the interconnection of islands and continents (88). To McMahon, the conflation between self- Other and island-continent not only demarcates a critical space in which Australian and West Indian literary identities are formed but mark a position in which interiority and relationality itself comes under question. For the purposes of this dissertation, McMahon and Perera indicate that the definition of Australia’s interior and seawater borders are powerfully ontological and discursive acts, attempts to reconstruct or redefine the relationship between self and world, and yet, an attempt that is contingent upon the presumption of the non- presence of Indigenous Australians.

17 Another foundational text in this area is Historian Libby Robin’s study, How a Continent Created a Nation (2007), which maps the physical and imaginative incursion of non-Indigenous industry and government into the Australian interior.

Writing in response to a national ontology of interiority, Aboriginal writers have consistently made the case that their work exceeds Australia's geopolitical parameters and cultural imagination. According to Wiradjuri author and playwright Kevin Gilbert, white Australian critics have always struggled to find "comparisons and parallels" to Aboriginal writing: To us it is like seeing a saga of these British Boat People returning to the wreck to salvage a plank and holding it aloft, try to make comparisons with the indigenous tree and twist it to the semblance of the 'tree back home'. [...] Black poets sing, not in odes to Euripides or Dionysus, not Keats, nor Browning, nor Shakespeare; neither do they sing a pastoral lay to a 'sunburnt country' for they know that that russet stain that Dorothea Mackellar spoke of is actually the stain of blood, our blood, covering the surface of our land so the white man could steal our land. (1988, xviii-xxiv) Gilbert points out that settler-colonial violence is sustained and perpetuated by imported cultural infrastructures. As an alternative, he describes Aboriginal writing as a marker of self- determination. As Fogarty puts it in his poem, "Australiana Crap," "remember European, we not the corpses or the living / But virgin aboriginalised Earth" (2012, 139). Fogarty evokes the interplay between ancestral and future times in order to exceed what Ali Alizadeh calls "the facile, sentimental evocation of place and landscape that conservative aesthetes expect of Indigenous artists" (2012, 13).

More recently, Bundjalung-Yugambeh novelist Melissa Lucashenko posits that "Aboriginal literature is flourishing," having achieved "aesthetic and political autonomy" (qtd. in Kilner and Minter 2). Wright builds on Lucashenko's point when she argues that Aboriginal literature is a "self-governing" literature that thinks and acts on a planetary scope (2019, n.p.). Wright argues that Aboriginal literature holds idiosyncratic cultural practices, worldviews, literary thematics, and environs, reflecting what Geonpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls "a different understanding of the human subject" than European metaphysical traditions (85). For the purposes of my examination of Fogarty and Eckermann, that difference manifests in what Griffith calls a refusal of being restricted to "either praxis or poesis" in order to challenge the "age-old binary itself" (2013, 18). Put simply, we cannot remove the poet's original intentions from a literary text’s meanings, as Fogarty and Eckermann are neither among "the corpses or the living" (Fogarty 2012, 139).

However, despite Wright's account of the planetary reach of Aboriginal literature, very few scholars have examined the mobility of Aboriginal writers as an extension of their

relationship to Country.18 This dissertation is the first scholarly response to Fogarty's and Eckermann's writings on the encounter and, with the exception of Araluen Corr's work on the subject (2017), one of the first attempts to tie Aboriginal literature with the field of Global Indigenous Studies. The dearth of scholarship in this area is indicative of the ways in which comparative literary scholarship has privileged methodologies and approaches that limit the agency of Indigenous writers. In his landmark work, Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies (2012), Chickasaw scholar Chadwick Allen argues that comparative literary methodologies restrict rather than reward readings of texts authored by Indigenous peoples. Questioning the point of a comparative study that obscures the differences between Indigenous nations, he instead advocates for a methodology that runs "more along the lines of 'together (yet) distinct'" (xiii). Allen proposes radical acts of juxtaposition (“to move differently”) between Indigenous cultural and aesthetic traditions to unsettle the reductive teleology of free-market circulation typified by the field of world literature (2007, 33). He anticipates a more responsive form of literary scholarship that works with a multiplicity of Indigenous-Indigenous networks and the interpretative strategies used to navigate them.

My analysis of the Indigenous-Indigenous networks underpinned by Fogarty's and Eckermann's works is indebted to these studies, and I follow Allen's ground-breaking contribution to the field of Global Indigenous Studies by tracing direct points of contact between Aboriginal Australia and Indigenous cultures of the Caribbean, Celtic Ireland, and the Asian-Pacific region across this dissertation. Deploying Allen's trans-Indigenous methodology, I unsettle the settler-colonial narratives that underplay, appropriate, or otherwise limit the diversity, complexity, and relationality of Aboriginal literature. Fogarty and Eckermann encounter on "concentric" terms (Fogarty 2014, 117), that is, they engage other Indigenous cultures by imagining their ancestral commons in a way that overlaps with those of other Indigenous peoples. For example, in her 2013 poem "At Knowth," Eckermann blurs the differences between her Yankunytjatjara Country and the land she is in, Celtic Ireland, in a direct address to an Indigenous counterpart: "did they share Songlines from my country / on their return to you?" (n.p). The poet extends her Songlines, that is, the routes of creator-beings who shaped the land in ancestral times, that encircle Yankunytjatjara Country

18 For a recent publication in this area, see Lynda Ng (ed.). Indigenous Transnationalism: Alexis Wright's Carpentaria. Giramondo Publishing Company, 2018.

to encapsulate a Celtic counterpart in a shared compositional field and establish an inter- Indigenous form of dialogue. In this case, Eckermann is able to draw on cultural and spiritual roots, roots that are themselves a composite of lines of ancestral travel, to voyage through space and time and draw the reader into a relational imaginary that exceeds the spatiotemporal parameters of colonialism. In this way, Eckermann creates an alternative ontological and historical continuum by which to connect with an Indigenous counterpart, one that is, as Allen writes in a different context, "'together (yet) distinct'" (2012, xiii).

In comparison to the international stature of Brathwaite and Glissant, there is a dearth of scholarship on Fogarty and Eckermann. Despite Kinsella's suggestion that Fogarty is "the greatest living 'Australian' poet" (2013, 190), there has been relatively little scholarship conducted on Fogarty. Consider the fact that Fogarty has been an active poet for more than forty years and yet there has been no book-length response to his work. And too, Kalkadoon scholar Philip Morrissey writes, "the absence of official recognition of Fogarty, as expressed in awards and grants, is astounding" (26). In his poem, “Decayed Poet,” Fogarty targets a fellow poet who has had comparatively more success, “I don’t have the reputation most have so (fuck dem)” (2017, 142). I call for greater attention to Fogarty’s poetic oeuvre, and to the inter-Indigenous connections charted in his poetry that have until now been neglected in scholarship. While Eckermann’s work is similarly under-valued in respect to her poetic achievements, she is the recipient of a number of literary prizes, including two New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards in 2013 and Yale University's Windham Campbell Prize in 2017. Eckermann's work is also more recent than Brathwaite, Glissant or Fogarty, all of whom have been active for over forty years, a fact that informed my decision to dedicate the concluding section of this dissertation to her work. I temper preliminary readings of Eckermann’s poetics as a transparent expression of a "threshold sensibility" (Murn 339) by examining the opacities that surface in her poetry collection, Inside My Mother (2014), in addition to her contribution to Aboriginal Australian poet and scholar Peter Minter's Proteaceae chapbook (2013).

A World in Miniature: The Caribbean Archipelago

Where my study of Fogarty's and Eckermann's inter-Indigenous encounters proposes a more expansive view of Indigenous literatures, I analyse Brathwaite and Glissant against the alleged absence of an Indigenous Caribbean culture, a lacuna that has informed

representations of Caribbean literature as rootless. As the late Trinidadian writer V.S. Naipaul declares, "history was built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies" (1996, 20). Naipaul glibly suggests that the Caribbean appears to have no history other than the routes of empire, given that it is founded on the colonist's eradication of the region's Carib, Arawak, and Taino populations and the brutal treatment of enslaved Africans transported in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The presumption that the Indigenous Caribs of the Caribbean were ‘wiped out’ has helped determine the relational outlook of Brathwaite's and Glissant's writings. As Brathwaite writes in his essay, "Timehri": The most significant feature of West Indian life and imagination since Emancipation has been its sense of rootlessness, of not belonging to the landscape; dissociation, in fact of art from the act of living. This, at least, is the view of the West Indies and the Caribbean that has been accepted and articulated by the small but important 'intellectual' elite of the area [...]. The problem of and for West Indian artists and intellectuals is that having been born and educated within this fragmented culture, they start out in the world without a sense of 'wholeness' [...]. Disillusion with the fragmentation leads to a sense of rootlessness. (29– 30) Brathwaite suggests that Caribbean intellectual culture has been defined historically in terms of disassociation and rootlessness. As Eric Prieto argues in his account of representations of place in Francophone Caribbean literature (2012), that condition of disassociation is particularly manifest in islands such as Martinique that chose not to engage in anti-colonial nationalist movements and remain an overseas département of France (or DOMs, as they are commonly known). Hence, in Caribbean Discourse, Glissant reminds us that "nature and culture have not formed a dialectical whole that informs a people's consciousness" (63). Brathwaite’s and Glissant’s literary projects are thereby set against the “dialectical whole” of an Indigenous relationship to place.

My concern here is that rootless representations of the Caribbean, such as Cuban writer Antonio Benítez-Rojo's description of the region as a 'meta-archipelago' (1992), uproot the region's local historical, cultural and literary specificities in ways that encourage scholars to draw on Caribbean literature in order to become attuned to a global condition. Brathwaite and Glissant are widely drawn upon in various scholarly fields, including anthropology (Clifford), Island Studies (Pugh 2013), postcolonial theory (Lionnet and Shih), and American Studies (Roberts and Stephens), to present new terms of cultural, aesthetic, and ontological

engagement.19 These turns to Caribbean concepts and theories follow the dismissal of hybridity for what Jonathan Friedman describes as an elitist modelling of postmodern cosmopolitanism (75). Such universal or normative readings of Caribbean literature and theory has prompted an outcry from a range of scholars. In the field of anthropology, Stephan Palmié points out that Brathwaite's and Glissant's theories are often extricated from local contexts to evaluate "a global postmodern condition" (437). He goes on to ask, "what has all or any of this to do with the Caribbean?" (438). Jonathan Pugh reinforces Palmié's point in the field of Island Studies when he points out that we often "think with" islands like Martinique or Barbados in order to become sensitive to the workings of global relationality (2013, 10).20 In literary studies, the Caribbean is similarly aligned with fields such as world literature. As Rupp suggests, "a lot of Caribbean writing in English has been world literature all along [...] registering and co-shaping Caribbean spaces as well as their entanglements with a wider global ecology" (140-142). Interestingly, Rupp notes that in comparison to recognised writers such as Glissant, Walcott, Naipaul, Kincaid, or Aimé Césaire circulate widely, writers who employ Creole dialect like Brathwaite do not (156).21 Rupp's implication is that, like Fogarty, Brathwaite cannot circulate if he publishes poetry that appears to emulate local linguistic and cultural practices rather than the universal language of the global literary marketplace.

In response, I point out that both poets reimagine what it means to belong to a specific place through their different poetics of encounter, animating the local social and ecological textures that are excised when reading on universal terms. Using the language of rootedness and rootlessness, Brathwaite and Glissant reimagine the historical and geographical meanings of the root to reflect passage, flux, and oceanic environs. In this way, they prompt a radical revision of the ontological, literary, and environmental terms by which we understand the connection between people and place. For instance, when Brathwaite asserts in Contradictory Omens that "the unity is submarine" (64), he unearths a source of geographical, historical,

19 Both poets are known for their early definitions of creolisation, a term that has replaced hybridity in the popular lexicon of the humanities. Brathwaite was the first to use the term in a postcolonial context in Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in 1974 followed by Glissant in the Francophone Caribbean in his conference paper "Free and Forced Poetics" at the 1975 Alcheringa: Ethnopoetics conference in Milwaukee. 20 More recently, Pugh, alongside David Chandler, shifts his theorisation of relationality to reflect the resilience of island inhabitants, see David Chandler, Jonathan Pugh. "Islands of relationality and resilience: The shifting stakes of the Anthropocene." Area, no. 52, 2020, pp. 65-72. 21 This, among other reasons, prompts Kelly Baker Josephs to question whether "academic circles" represent a sufficient response to Brathwaite's work (2003, 11-12).

and cultural wholeness in the underwater slopes between the Caribbean islands. Glissant develops Brathwaite's description of submarine unity in Caribbean Discourse when he describes "[s]ubmarine roots: that is floating free, not fixed in one position in some primordial spot, but extending in all directions in our world through its networks and branches" (67). Both poets argue for a fundamentally different way of seeing our connections to time and space in order to disrupt the divisions between rootedness and rootlessness that has inhibited Caribbean self-determination. As such, I deploy Brathwaite's concept of tidalectics and Glissant's Relation as "alter/native" ways of thinking that step in for an Indigenous culture to orient the Caribbean subject in their navigation of time and space (Brathwaite 1999, 226).

Brathwaite first describes tidalectics as "a tidal dialectic" in a 1983 essay entitled "Caribbean Culture: Two Paradigms" (42). The term would recur across his literary oeuvre, as evident in the seventh section of his poetry collection, Barabajan Poems, where he describes a prayer meeting in his uncle's carpentry shop (182): it takes me back & drags me tidalectics into this tangled urgent meaning to & fro . like foam . saltless as from the bottom of the sea . dragging ur meaning our moaning / song from Calabar along the sea-fl-oor sea-floor The logics of "to & fro . like / foam […] along the sea-fl-oor" suggest a way of thinking that is built on the non-linear motion and historicity of the aquatic root. Brathwaite expands upon tidalectics in ConVERSations, where he describes it as based on "the movement of the water backwards and forwards as a kind of cyclic, I suppose, motion, rather than linear" (14). To date, scholars from a range of fields have deployed tidalectics as a non-linear way of thinking that challenges the binarism of Western thought. For example, Bill Ashcroft presents "a global tidalectic" as a mode of utopic thinking that may allow us to conceive alternative worlds beyond the present (2017, 105). Similarly, Stefanie Hessler argues that tidalectics is a methodological alternative to capitalist logics of exchange given that "it does not submit time to space in the capitalist logic of utility but rather constructs time and space actively and conjointly" (63). These readings usefully describe tidalectics as an epistemological alternative to Euro-centric modes of knowledge production. However, I caution against uprooting tidalectics as a normative concept without heed to its local cultural and historical specificities. In Chapter Three, I provide an example among Brathwaite’s local influences that has not

been the subject of literary scholarship thus far: the influence of the Hegelian-Marxist tradition of Caribbean literature upon Brathwaite’s tidalectics.

The most sustained engagement with tidalectics relevant to this dissertation's examination of the Caribbean and Aboriginal Australia can be found in DeLoughrey's Routes and Roots. For her, tidalectics is a "methodological tool that foregrounds how a dynamic model of geography can elucidate island history and cultural production" (4). Tidalectics allows her to explore the "complex and shifting entanglements between sea and land, diaspora and Indigeneity, and routes and roots" (4). DeLoughrey's insightful analysis of the ebb and flow of the tides presents us with an elegant way of restoring materiality to the uprooted Caribbean as well as a means of working through the knotty ties between Indigenous and Creole populations. I build upon her disruption of the roots and routes dichotomy in my examination of material points of contact between Aboriginal and Caribbean literatures in Chapters Two and Three. By exploring tidalectics as an encounter ethos, I am able to illuminate the concept's emergence from trans-continental histories of intercultural contact that link Indigenous and Creole populations in what Wai Chee Dimock defines as "deep time," a temporality that binds "continents and millennia into many loops of relations " (4).

In my reading of Glissant’s intercultural encounters, I deploy his concept of Relation to unearth the local social and ecological influences upon his work. As stated above, Relation refers to a field of constant, chaotic interaction across the planet that cannot be controlled or ordered in any way. Glissant describes this field of contact in Poetics of Relation as "latent, open, multilingual in intention, directly in contact with everything possible" (32). While Relation is never solely defined from one vantage point or in one place, Glissant does describe the concept using a phenomenological frame of reference. The key example he uses is creolisation, "whose genius consists in always being open, that is, perhaps, never becoming fixed except according to a system of variables that we have to imagine as much as define" (34). Scholars to date have analysed Relation as a universal way of thinking that can help us to visualise the connections between discrete entities and locations. The late Michael J. Dash understood the concept as an imaginative way of perceiving global relativity: "Relation ('relating,' in all senses of the word) is opposed to difference and […] ranges beyond the Caribbean to describe a global condition. Indeed, one could say that he sees the entire world in terms of a Caribbean or New World condition" (1995, 23). The global scope of Relation has precipitated a number of critiques from a series of scholars, including Christopher Miller

(1998), Peter Hallward (2001) and Christopher Bongie (2008), all of whom argue that the amorphous and abstract focus of Poetics of Relation represents Glissant's abandonment of local intellectual, cultural, historical, and environmental roots. As Hallward writes, the word 'Martinique' "scarcely appears in" Poetics of Relation (118).

Hallward and Bongie present valuable arguments that have challenged Anglophone and Francophone scholars alike to reconsider the political imperatives of postcolonial literature. In response, I argue that their readings of Relation limit our understanding of the continuity between Glissant’s early writings on local environments and the later essays on Relation. Further, as other scholars such as Sam Coombes have illustrated (2018), their readings excise Glissant's commitment to socio-political causes, locality, and ecology. Given the repetition of tropes throughout Glissant’s writings, most notably the figures of the cross-cultural encounter and the black sand beach, which present themselves repetitively in Poetics of Relation, I argue that Glissant’s descriptions of the encounter provide a useful key to the ethos of Relation. Further, examining these tropes allows us to draw continuities between the poet’s open-world imaginary and the concrete historicity of his local roots. As Drabinski has shown in his recent examination of the historical influences underlying Glissantian philosophy (2019), this means that we cannot read Glissant's work as either unrooted and abstract, or rooted in particulars. The salience of locality in Glissant’s imagination foregrounds his attempt to work through the absence of Indigenous culture in Martinique, as well as his ethnographic interest in Indigenous cultures in Australasia, the Americas, Oceania, Europe, and Africa. By rethinking Relation on these more flexible terms, and in dialogue with Aboriginal engagements with Glissant, I draw out new understandings of the roots in Glissant's imaginary.

This dissertation draws together Caribbean and Aboriginal poetics of encounter across four chapters. The first two chapters analyse the relationship between Brathwaite, Glissant, Fogarty and Eckermann through a comparative study of Aboriginal Australian and Caribbean histories and literatures. Chapter One examines each poet's contestation of First Encounter narratives before developing a more sustained analysis of each poet's use of opacity. In doing so, I interrogate the ways in which First Encounter narratives undergird, and have been read according to, a Euro-centric and Western history. To close the chapter, I argue that each poet presents us with distinct ways of thinking about the encounter that challenge the self-Other dichotomy of Western metaphysics. Having established shared differences between each

poet’s projects, Chapter Two explores a diverse range of Caribbean-Australian literary and historical engagements. Drawing on accounts of the movements of colonial administrators, ethnologists, and writers in their transoceanic voyages in, for example, McMahon's Islands, Identity and the Literary Imagination, I unearth the continuities of Caribbean and Aboriginal literatures. My argument here is that these apparently isolated literatures have in fact evolved in structural opposition to the other, a development that has informed their later engagements.

Across Chapters Three and Four, I disrupt the way in which Caribbean and Aboriginal literatures have been read as rootless and rooted. Chapter Three reframes studies of Brathwaite and Glissant by conceiving of their commitment to encounter as an attempt to create a discourse that is Indigenous to the Caribbean, or at least, to work through the absence of an Indigenous culture. To do so, I deploy the concepts of tidalectics and Relation to analyse the encounters described in Brathwaite's and Glissant's theoretical and poetic texts. After engaging with each poet's direct references to Aboriginal Australia in the literary journal, Alcheringa: Ethnopoetics, Chapter Four uses an inter-Indigenous framework to make a stronger case for the transnational agency and mobility of Aboriginal writers. In their descriptions of face-to-face meetings and literary encounters with an Indigenous Other, Fogarty and Eckermann poetically construct an ancestral commons shared by Indigenous peoples. Fogarty’s poems, "The Slaves Are Her People" and "Advance" (2014), engages Indigenous populations across the Pacific. Eckermann's poetic works, "At Knowth," "At Giants Causeway Northern Ireland," and "At Glendalough Ireland" (2013), describe a poetic field of contact between Aboriginal Australia and Celtic Ireland. By analysing their contributions to the field of Global Indigenous Studies, I argue that Fogarty and Eckermann transcend the national parameters that so often frame their works.

Aboriginal and Caribbean poetics of encounter are minutely intertwined at the level of colonial history, literary outlook, and planetary scope. By attending to these interwoven threads, we gain a more complex understanding of how postcolonial literatures are positioned in relation to one another and the world. Read together, Brathwaite, Glissant, Fogarty and Eckermann encourage us to reconsider the relational outlook of things that remain within themselves. That is, they animate the lines of connection between cultures that are often understood to be withdrawn or somehow removed from the world we live in. In this way, these poets do more than suggest that we can no longer think of encounter narratives from a single perspective. Rather, they ask us to recognise the ways of thinking embedded in their

encounter poetics that do not align with the conventional categories and compartments of postcolonial literature. Whether through "submarine unity" (Brathwaite 1974, 64) or the deep time of an inter-Indigenous commons, Brathwaite, Glissant, Fogarty and Eckermann develop a complex literary and ontological architecture to re-encounter on their own terms. In what follows, I read their work through juxtaposition and realignment to place their works in dialogue and argue that these attempts at self-determination are interlocked. In dispersing the singularly directed gaze of the "western mariner," my dissertation attempts to move alongside these poets as they speak of "other seas … other shores, other darknesses" (Glissant 2010, 208).

Chapter 1. First Encounter Narratives and a Poetics of Opacity

While the myth of the First Encounter between the European explorer and the savage native has been critically interrogated by a range of diverse scholars, including Bhabha (1994), Paul Carter (1987), and Smith (2010), academic scholarship is yet to fully explore the ramifications of contact from non-European ways of thinking and frames of reference. Many examples come to mind here. In Smith's book, Intimate Strangers, she writes that the Tahitian word tayo and its culturally particular notion of friendship is "the first word to translate across the beach, the first word to appear in European accounts, the signifier of contact itself" (2). As Smith indicates, however, these non-European ways of thinking are often disregarded in studies of encounter narratives. Bhabha expands upon this omission when he writes that as Indigenous peoples come into European historical consciousness, they "are shorn of their stories and traditions" (xi). As concerns this dissertation, these omissions make later Caribbean and Aboriginal writers the "spectral figures" giving "transparent testimonies" (xi). Their works are often read as withdrawn from the world we live in, posed in essentialist opposition or unrooted from the particular. To resolve this problem in postcolonial literary studies, this chapter deploys Glissant's concept of opacity to read each poet's response to 'transparency.' I underscore the formal and ontological complexities of poems that challenge the penetrating gaze of the European explorer: Glissant's "The First Day" and "Relation" (1963), Brathwaite's "Colombe" (1993), Fogarty's "Identity" (1980) and "Biral" (1995), Eckermann's "Australantis" and "Lake Eyre" (2015). In Glissant's terms, each of these poems underlines a line of separation between the reader and the encountered figure. Rather than interpret that facet of their works in terms of rootedness or rootlessness, I argue that these opaque figures demand a level of ontological inquiry that does not fix the Other in place through universalising literary terms. Across this chapter, I draw out these ontological lines of inquiry as they pass one another.

I. The First Encounter: "When the very idea of territory becomes relative"

While Australian and Caribbean First Encounter narratives typically have diametrical dimensions in that they underscore a relationship between the European explorer and an Indigenous figure, I argue that they also underscore inter-colonial historical and discursive connections. The first indication of these continuities is evident in the classical literary texts

and mythologies that guided Christopher Columbus and James Cook to New Worlds. Columbus' and Cook's First Encounters were pre-empted by a font of literature, philosophy, history, and cartography that depicted monsters, cannibals, and strange lands.22 It is well established that Columbus was an avid reader of The Iliad, The Odyssey, and Ovid's Metamorphoses, and that he carried Ptolemy's Geography, The Travels of Marco Polo, and Seneca's tragedies (including Medea) with him as he journeyed to the Americas. Similarly, the aforementioned secret instructions given to Cook to chart an unknown southern landmass imply the real existence of Terra Australis Incognita, a fictional continent that had been first theorised in 340 B.C. by Aristotle in "Meteorology" (1952).23 Australia and the Caribbean were both known and unknown to the explorer, already representational figures that had been speculated upon for thousands of years. In this sense, both explorers were engaged in a pre- destined relationship with a land that was storied in a collective European imaginary. In finding New Worlds, they were forced to disassociate reality from fiction—be it Marco Polo's Far East or the Terra Australis of Aristotle.

In his far-reaching examination of Australia's cartographic history in The Road to Botany Bay (1988), Paul Carter argues that the explorer must creatively remake the place-found from the place-imagined. He writes that the explorer moves "in a world of language, […] a cultural network of names, allusions, puns and coincidences" (7). Carter indicates that for explorers like Columbus and Cook, the act of exploration necessitated a creative level of engagement with literary precedents: to affirm, appropriate, or disavow altogether. It is for this reason that when he analyses Cook's journals, Carter rejects the myth that the explorer acted on objective principles: "the new country was a rhetorical construction, a product of language and the intentional gaze, not of the detached, dictionary clasping spectator" (36). Carter's analysis of Australian cartography also helps us to make sense of Columbus' journals. On his return journey from the New World, Christopher Columbus gave this account of circumnavigating current-day Iceland: "One hundred leagues beyond the island of Tile, whose northern part is in latitude 73 degrees N, and not 63 degrees as some affirm: nor does it lie upon the meridian where Ptolemy says the West begins, but much farther west" (qtd. in Columbus 11).

22 This is particularly true of the myth of Terra Australis, which is informed by Aristotelian speculations on the limits of the known world and what lay beyond it. See Paul Foss. "Theatrum nondum cognitorium." What is appropriation? An anthology of writings on Australian art in the 1980s and 90s. Edited by Rex Butler, Institute of Modern Art, 2004, pp. 119-130. 23 The public record also states that Cook was asked to observe the Transit of Venus from the South Seas and test existing theories on latitude and longitude.

Columbus's reference to "Tile" refers to the myth of Ultima Thule first conveyed by Ptolemy in Geography (c. 150 AD). Following Ptolemy, Ultima Thule became a popular literary trope repeated by writers as diverse as Pliny the Elder, Alexander Pope, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Bronte and Edgar Allen Poe to represent the furthest limits of the humanly occupied world, a place solely populated by monsters.24 In his own description of Thule/Iceland, Columbus infers that the literary trope was a very real precedent to his explorative journey, making the New World a simulation out of which the 'real' could emerge, "a rhetorical construction, a product of language and the intentional gaze" (Carter 36). An equally telling disclosure is made by the botanist Joseph Banks onboard Cook's Endeavour: [A]nother theory has been started which says that it is necessary that so much of the South sea as the authors of it call land should be so, otherwise this wor[l]d would not be properly bal[a]nc'd as the quantity of Earth known to be situated in the Northern hemisphere would not have a counterpoise in this. The number of square degrees of their land which we have already chang'd into water sufficiently disproves this, and teaches me at least that till we know how this globe is fixed in that place which has been since its creation assigned to it in the general system, we need not be anxious to give reasons how any one part of it counterbalances the rest. (Banks 32) With a confidence that mirrors Columbus' disproval of Ptolemy's map of Thule, Banks contests Aristotle's theory that the continents of the Northern Hemisphere would be balanced out by unknown landmasses in the Southern Hemisphere. Both explorers' disclosures indicate that the act of exploration involved passage through literary representations of what lay beyond the limits of the known world, a fact that necessitated the opening of imaginative and literary space for future journeys.

If Columbus' and Banks' disclosures indicate that acts of exploration were framed by literary fictions, how did literary texts prepare the explorer for an encounter with the Indigenous peoples of distant lands? McMahon raises this question when she suggests that Columbus and Cook drew on a "rich textual palimpsest of thought, ideology and poesis [that] not only propelled the actual voyages but also framed what they 'recovered'" (2016, 55). One answer to this question can be found in Poetics of Relation, where Glissant describes the books that guided the explorer onward:

24 The figure of the 'monstrous Other' in literary history is also examined by Jeffrey Cohen. See Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Monster Theory Reading Culture. University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

The great founding books of communities, the Old Testament, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Chansons de Geste, the Islandic Sagas, the Aeneid, or the American epics, were all books about exile and often about errantry. […] Within the collective books concerning the sacred and the notion of history lies the germ of the exact opposite of what they so loudly proclaim. When the very idea of territory becomes relative, nuances appear in the legitimacy of territorial possession. (15) Glissant argues that the legitimacy of Columbus' and Cook's claims to territory are belied by the thematic concerns of the works they read. In his view, the literary foundation that Cook and Columbus drew upon de-territorialise the European subject from their regional, linguistic, or cultural context. By de-territorialising these Euro-centric reference points, Glissant suggests that encounters do not, as McMahon finds, lead to "a concordance of self and space" (2016, 57). Rather, he suggests that these are the decisive moments by which we enter a shared historical consciousness, an interconnected sphere in which the Caribbean and Aboriginal Australia are aligned.

Given the way singular colonial histories tend to inform our understanding of the Age of Discovery, I would like to de-territorialise these acts of exploration further and draw geological and historical links between the Australian Antipodes and the American Antilles. From a geological perspective, the Caribbean first emerged from the basin of the Pacific Ocean. The Antipodes, an imaginary landform that would merge with Terra Australis, shifted on from the Atlantic. As DeLoughrey posits: Geologically speaking, the Caribbean region did arise out of the Pacific, the world's originary ocean. [...] While St. Ursula's islands and Antillia became cartographically fixed by Columbus in the Caribbean, other imagined islands like the Antipodes (Terra Australis Incognita) moved westward, out of the Atlantic region into the Pacific (2007, 11-12). DeLoughrey draws our attention to the fact that Australia and the Caribbean, while moved through different imaginary and geological processes, crossover with one another. The Caribbean navigates its way in the grinding together of tectonic plates and the collapse of mountain ranges, whereas Australia manoeuvres through the fantastical imaginaries of cartographers and explorers. To develop DeLoughrey's comment further, it is important to note that Cook and Columbus were also connected by shared information concerning Dutch

exploration in the East Indies encircling the Northern Coastline of Australia.25 Even as Columbus' and Cook's discoveries took place in culturally specific colonial histories, European explorers were beginning to link the Caribbean and Australia together on the outstretched arms of the Dutch East and West Indies Companies.

The continuities between the First and Last of the New Worlds continues in postcolonial representations of the figure of the First Encounter. Brathwaite contributes to the opening of a cross-colonial consciousness by speculating upon Columbus' imagination in a poem he would re-write over the course of his career, "Colombe," first published in Rights of Passage (1967).26 The version I analyse here derives from the later Middle Passages collection (1993, 10-11): Columbus from his after- deck watched heights he hoped for, rocks he dreamed, rise solid from my simple water.

Parrots screamed. Soon he would touch our land, his charted mind's desire The blue sky blessed the morning with its fire

But did his vision fashion as he watched the shore the slaughter that his soldiers

furthered here? Pike point & musket butt […]

25 For a sustained analysis of the colonial histories of the East and West Indies, see Susan Broomhall and Jacqueline Van Gent. Dynastic Colonialism: Gender, Materiality and the Early Modern House of Orange- Nassau. Routledge, 2016. 26 The appearance of Brathwaite's poems often differs as they are reproduced in different poetry collections. In the case of "Colombe," I refer to the Middle Passage version for its close connection to the video style conventions analysed in Chapter Three. Note that I have not been able to reproduce the poem exactly as it appears in publication but have spaced the section accordingly. For further insight into Brathwaite's reformatting of his poetry, see Kelly Baker Josephs. Elaine Savory. "'he changes your imagining': Elaine Savory on the Influence of Kamau Brathwaite." SX salon, no. 27, February 2018, n.p.

Now he was sure he heard soft voices mocking in the leaves What did this journey mean. This

new world mean. Dis covery? or a return to terrors he had sailed from. known before?

I watched him pause.

Then he was splashing silence Crabs snapped their claws and scattered as he walked towards our shore. The reader perceives the scene from the first-person perspective of an Indigenous Carib, one among those "soft voices mocking in the leaves" and privy to the opening of what Mary Louise Pratt describes as a 'contact zone,' a social space "where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power" (34). However, Brathwaite subverts our expectations of genocidal violence by exploring the chasmic gap between Columbus' "charted mind's desire" and the land in front of him. The Caribbean island rises from Columbus' hopes and dreams as the island comes into sight: Columbus from his after- deck watched heights he hoped for, rocks he dreamed, rise solid from my simple water. Immediately, the geological materiality of "the shore" undermines the fictions of Columbus' imagination, leaving him with no foundational myth to draw on. We may imagine visions of Homer, Ovid, Ptolemy, Marco Polo and Seneca taunting the explorer in their difference to the land in front of him. The literary fictions of Columbus’ imaginary, rather than provide a level of ontological security, upend his intentions. Brathwaite lampoons the fact that Columbus' actions were informed by an obsession with fiction – in fact, what turned out to be the wrong fiction, as the explorer set out looking for Marco Polo's Indies.

As Columbus reaches the shore, the dissonance in his "Dis/covery" becomes even clearer. To reflect the enormity of the shift in the explorer's thinking, Brathwaite alters the structure of each stanza from two or three lines to a single line at "I watched him pause." The caesura

invites us to imagine the triadic rhythm of the boat's oars stutter to a halt as the explorer is unable to bridge the gap between his explorational imaginary and a granular reality. Columbus' pause invites the reader to consider a different kind of explorative history, one inaugurated by an alternative, ethically grounded ethos of contact. In this way, the shift in line length illustrates a tidalectic opening of the stutter in the explorer's dialectic. As discussed, a tidalectics invokes cyclical motion as opposed to the 'one-two-three Hegelian' linear model Brathwaite critiques in ConVERSations. The transition between a linear and cyclical rhythm punctuate Columbus' progress. The first two stanzas indicate a linear-based flow where the last line acts as a concluding point that reflects the certainty of the explorer: "rocks he dreamed, rise solid from my simple water / The blue sky blessed the morning with its fire." After "But did his vision," lines collapse upon one another in successive enjambments: "his soldiers/furthered here?" The last stanza sees Columbus regain his ontological security and the poem returns to its linear-based rhythm: Then he was splashing silence Crabs snapped their claws and scattered as he walked towards our shore. Brathwaite suggests that the opportunity has closed. The reader is thrust back into the three- line structure, a rhythm built upon the synthesis of difference. However, the triadic rhythm is offset by diegetic sounds beneath the poem—the menacing sounds of crabs who snap their claws at his approach and the "soft voices mocking in the leaves." These interruptions draw our attention to a 'before' and an 'after' to our world-system, the histories that start "far far beyond [before] Columbus" (1999, 39).

If Brathwaite opens out the stutter in Columbus' stride to reflect the work of literary fiction, Glissant absolves the explorer's singularity in these literary materials altogether in his 1960 poetry collection, Le sel noir [Black Salt]. The collection opens with a section entitled, "Le Premier Jour" [The First Day]: The storyteller measures his voice by the disproportion of its brilliance. He will in utter solitude, sing the earth, those who suffer through it. He does not offer his voice to those it pleases, those who are exalted by it; but to bodies burned by time: thickets, confined people, naked villages, the shore's multitude.

When this wise sailor, careful speaker, is completed by his song, it recommences him. He arrives, a child, in the first morning. He sees the initial sea foam, the salt's first sweat. History, waiting. (2005, 103)27 Glissant opens the collection by naming Columbus, the “wise sailor,” as the conteur, the teller of Caribbean history who frames a reader's capacity to perceive new arrivals upon the beach. In taking up the mantle of the storyteller, the sailor must grapple with his interrelation with others: "He does not offer his voice to those it pleases, those who are exalted by it; but to bodies burned by time." In the process, the sailor comes to know what Celia Britton describes as "the primacy of the plural" in Glissantian thought, where "the collective dimension of being is not something added on to an originary individual subject, but is itself originary" (2008, 36). The sailor is "wise", "careful", and yet "a child in the first morning," a paradox that suggests contact begins a regenerative process that "recommences" the figure. In this way, the sailor's existence is framed by "the shore's multitude." His expressive style is inflected by this ontologically alienating experience – he "measures his voice" in recognition of its disproportionate "brilliance." At the close of the section, Glissant leaves the recommenced Columbus to describe the sounds of the sea as it rushes and recedes on the shore. The wise sailor tells us that the only story that can survive the dialectic between land and sea is the "initial sea form, the salt's first sweat." In this way, Glissant animates the imprint of past tides to give the reader a series of markers by which to recollect the event, rather than let the story be told from a singular perspective.

After recommencing Columbus in Le sel noir, Glissant invites his readers to connect the New Worlds of the Atlantic and the Pacific in his poetry collection Les Indes (1965). In doing so, he presents Australian-Caribbean continuities that build upon the imaginative explorative literature connecting Columbus to Cook. Each section of Les Indes begins with a brief prose passage. The first begins in the following way: "1492. The Great Discoverers hurl themselves upon the Atlantic in search of the Indies […]. The imagination creates ever new Indies, for which men quarrel with the world" (2005, 69). Glissant underlines the arbitrary selection of Columbus' or Cook’s First Encounter as a kind of origin story given that they are one among many explorers, all imaginatively revising the limits of the known world as they go. Glissant's allusion to “ever new Indies” conveys that all explorers act on a desire to reinvent

27 Glissant's poems included in this dissertation derive from the following edition: Edouard Glissant. The Collected Poems of Edouard Glissant. Translated by Jeff Humphries, University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

the worlds they came from. In this way, he exemplifies Walter Mignolo's thesis that "America was not an existing entity to be discovered. It was invented, mapped, appropriated" (2011, 7). In this way, Glissant likens the poet to the explorer, in that they share a common calling, a propensity for flux and relativity he describes so poetically across Poetics of Relation. For this reason, Glissant avoids presenting Columbus or Cook as genocidal imperialists. He instead portrays the explorer in what Dash describes as an "eternal pursuit of a dream," which is the same "point of departure for all poetic and human activity, whether the dreamer pursues the conquest of the Muse, of territory or of truth" (1995, 40).

Glissant then speculates as to the First Encounters between European explorers and the Indigenous inhabitants of the Pacific – effectively enclosing the planet in a shared historical consciousness (2005, 69): Who returns? And that man there, what does he, in his turn, covet? But perhaps after all man has only the same desire and the same fervor, whoever he is. And no matter where he comes from, the same recognisable suffering? What Indies call to him? […] From the prow of the ship to the blade of chalk is a moat, the last one. The sea, more mountainous, and more miserly with silence, is obscurely Agitated against the plain where glory dies, between the field and the crows. There! Let the call finish upon this world, in its shadowless geography! Oh may it be exhausted! And let there be neither atoll nor bay in desire (Yesterday that last island was peopled with cartographers and engineers, They have measured every dimension of the statues of Easter Island) Glissant opens by speculating as to the effect of bringing the explorer's objective impotence back into Europe: “Who returns? And that man there, what does he, in his turn, covet?” He echoes Medea’s Chorus as they warn of the consequence of bringing the witch Medea to Greece: "the world, now passable throughout, has left nothing where it once had place" (131). By rewriting the explorer as he who returns, Glissant suggests that intercultural encounters do

not cease as the sails fall from view. They reverberate in a shared, social imaginary as the monsters that encircle the known world are brought back into Europe by the explorer.28

At this juncture, Glissant perceives the last of the New Worlds, Terra Australis: “From the prow of the ship to the blade of chalk is a moat, the last one.” However, the Pacific proves to be difficult to quantify. Glissant writes that the explorer’s objective view is upended as the seas become "more mountainous, and more miserly with silence." The figure of Terra Australis, an inextricable mess of metaphor and material, resists the explorer’s penetrating gaze. It is a literal embodiment of opacity, a mass of undefinable material that exceeds representation. It is on this undefinable, opaque land that Glissant concludes the explorative mythos that would connect the two New Worlds – he makes landfall: "There! Let the call finish upon this world, in its shadowless / geography! Oh may it be exhausted!" (2005, 97). In this way, Glissant invites a relational correspondence across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans and the voyages of discovery that opened them up. He metaphorically represents the Caribbean as the model the explorer draws on as he searches the Pacific. In her own trans- oceanic comparison of the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans, DeLoughrey observes that "the use of one archipelago as an ideological and social template for the next reveals the ways in which the colonial discourse of islands repeated itself" (2007, 9).29 Following DeLoughrey's logic, when the need for a British colony emerged – with the American Revolutionary War on the horizon—the explorer's discovery of Australia was mediated (or simulated) by a shared imaginary.

The point at which the explorer’s desire is finally appeased is upon "the statues of Easter Island" (2005, 97). To contextualise Glissant's reference to Easter Island in Les Indes, I briefly turn to his novel, Sartorius (1999), where he juxtaposes the moai statues of Easter Island with the Anse Caffard Slave Memorial in South Martinique. Anse Caffard commemorates the destruction of a ship carrying enslaved Ibos in 1830, fifteen years after the

28 For an excellent analysis of the way cartography enables the Early Modern European subject to speculate upon the monstrous figures in distant lands, see Katharina Piechocki. "Erroneous Mappings: Ptolemy and the Visualisation of Europe's East." Early Modern Cultures of Translation. Edited by Karen Newman and Jane Tylus, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015, pp. 76–96.

29 DeLoughrey makes this point as she suggests that the settlement of the Canary and Madeira islands influenced the organisation of the Caribbean slave plantation. To her, the Antilles "literally mapped before they were found" (2007, 10).

importation of new slaves to the Caribbean was made illegal. In Sartorius, Glissant describes the memorial in the following way: The fifteen statues arranged in a triangle whose point faces the open sea, precisely on the line of latitude of the Gold Coast in Africa, rise from the earth, held fast in the rock which continues there under the water, with a moving restraint and dignity. Arms stuck to the body, head slightly inclined, they would bring to mind in a less colossal form the statues of Easter Island if they did not stare so fixedly, it seems, towards the sea where so many ships crammed with shackled blacks capsized. (162-163) Through the prism of Anse Caffard, Glissant returns to the undersea of the Atlantic, "where so many ships crammed with shackled blacks capsized." The meditation stretches out across the seabeds of the Atlantic and the Pacific and exceeds a national history of enslavement. As Dash explains, the connection between Anse Caffard and the moai statues "refuses the idea of a fixed or grounded past for a vision of archipelagic space that projects transversal connections, slippery geographies and masked origins" (2014, 37). Easter Island, the pinnacle of the undiscovered, opaque Pacific, a place of lost origins and cultures, is presented as a precedent for the explorative history of the Atlantic. Applying his notion of chaos theory in poetic practice, Glissant yokes the two oceans together in a shared imaginative and historical continuum, whereby the adaption or erasure of one culture will irrevocably alter the makeup of another.

While Glissant re-deploys the First Encounter mythos to unearth a relational link between the Atlantic and the Pacific, Aboriginal Australian writers like Fogarty and Eckermann often disavow European histories of discovery. In her poem, "Australantis," Eckermann suggests that re-writing the Age of Discovery will only produce fantastical illusions: there's a whole ocean filled with sand between what was and what will be where fish grow wings to climb the sky and water birds revert to earth a stark canvas devoid of view not a sand dune nor a tree only a shell hangs beyond the skyline spilling the noise of the in-between (2015, 4). Eckermann perceives Australia through the explorer's eyes as a place pre-informed by classical mythology. The great southern land is "a stark canvas," vast and there-for-the-

taking, yet simultaneously "devoid of view" in that no real perception can be made of it. As with Brathwaite's description of Columbus' "Dis/covery" (1993, 10), Australia becomes a composite of unfitting parts, an amalgam of classical mythology and geography, and the poem a whisper of "the noise of the in-between." In that sense, the "stark canvas" acts as an opaque surface that deflects the view of the observer, allowing the land to exceed its own representation. The "Australantis" title reinforces the imaginary quality of the land by renaming Australia as Atlantis, the imaginary city first evoked in Plato's Timaeus.30 As if tugging on the shared intertextual thread of Relation named in Glissant's Les Indes, Brathwaite, Glissant, Fogarty and Eckermann all use the Atlantis trope in their poetry.31 In this case, Eckermann likens Australia to the city that was sunk beneath the waves by the gods in order to condemn the wilful blindness to the rights of Indigenous Australians and draw attention to the gap between Indigenous and European ways of thinking. The lines "there's a whole ocean filled with sand / between what was and what will be" reflect the Australian land rights political refrain, 'always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.' In so doing, Eckermann challenges the Euro-centric reference points that moor Australian history. She proffers a counter way of interpreting the ‘Age of Discovery’: an Aboriginal relationship to Country.32 Deborah Bird Rose defines Country as a 'nourishing terrain,' a "place that gives and receives life. Not just imagined or represented, it is lived in and lived with" (1996, 7).33 In this way, the distinction "between what was and what will be" exemplifies the gap between modern history and what Dimock describes as deep time of an Aboriginal relationship with the planet, "a different archive, data of different nature and scope" (4). Hence, Eckermann's allusion to millions of years of evolutionary change, "fish grow wings to climb the sky," can be read figuratively and literally as a counter to the teleology of discovery and colonisation.

30 In Timaeus, Plato recalls hearing of Atlantis from an Athenian poet and lawgiver who lived three generations prior to Plato called Solon. Solon stated that the island could be found beyond the Pillars of Hercules. For an overview of the text, see Plato. Timaeus. Critias. Cleitophon. Menexenus. Epistle; with an English Translation by the Rev. R.G. Bury. Translated and Edited by R. G. Bury, Harvard University Press, 1975. 31 Brathwaite's formulation, "the unity is submarine" (1974, 64), Fogarty's reference to the undersea in "Advance" (2014), and Glissant's representation of the "womb abyss" (1997) all invoke a postcolonial inversion of the Atlantis trope. 32 The phrase also evokes the all-times of the Dreaming, a term translated from the Arrente word, 'Alcheringa,' in 1896 by Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen that is now understood to represent the trans-dimensional and spiritual facets of a collective Aboriginal belief system, see W. E. H. Stanner. White Man Got No Dreaming. Australian National University Press, 1973. 33 The term is capitalised in Aboriginal English as a proper noun to reflect that Aboriginal "people talk about Country in the same way that they would talk about a person: they speak to Country, sing to Country, visit Country, worry about Country, feel sorry for Country, and long for Country" (Rose 1996, 7).

This is a deep connection to place that Cook or Banks cannot acknowledge if Terra Nullius is to have any foothold in the public imagination.

A more vitriolic resistance to First Encounter narratives is found in Fogarty's poem, "Identity," which was published in his 1980 poetry collection, Kargun: Let's look at how it feels to have whites trodding on you. Going to school, learning the true? history of the Aboriginal is being told you are violent being told Captain Cook discovered Australia being called names like "you stupid, filthy beast, clean your arse!" (1980, 31) In a searing account of the colonial education he received in Cherbourg Aboriginal Reserve in South Queensland, a reserve housing Aboriginal peoples forced from their homelands across Queensland and New South Wales, Fogarty denounces Australia's "true? history." He implies that to re-write encounter narratives of as Brathwaite or Glissant do will only perpetuate the place of the European explorer in our collective imaginary and restate negative representations of the monstrous Indigenous Other, such as "being told you are violent" (31). In this way, "Identity" indexes the survival of an adaptable Indigenous culture against the myths of Terra Australis and Terra Nullius—the notion that Aboriginal land was uninhabited. Speaking from the perspective of the Indigenous culture, or the "soft voices mocking in the leaves" in Brathwaite's "Colombe" (11), Fogarty draws attention to a long history of Aboriginal Australian resilience and resistance. Where Brathwaite and Glissant use poetry as a way of working through their relationship with local space in the absence of Indigenous peoples, Fogarty asks his reader to come to terms with a collective responsibility to Indigenous displacement and erasure. He exemplifies Eve Tuck and K. W. Yang's recent definition of decolonisation as a necessarily active and unsettling process, putting forward a message that is unequivocal in its removal of "the asterisks, periods, commas, apostrophes, the whereas's, buts, and conditional clauses that punctuate decolonization and underwrite settler innocence" (36).

Sharrad accounts for each poet's disruption of the First Encounter in his comparative analysis of Brathwaite and Mudrooroo. He suggests that the "post-colonial quest for self- determination must both call into memory and destabilise historical encounters so that every

authorising return to beginnings is a rediscovery of complex being, rather than a revenant encounter with some master narrative" (70). Sharrad holds that Caribbean and Aboriginal writers return to encounter narratives to disrupt the historical and ontological infrastructures of the colonisation process. In their different ways, Brathwaite, Glissant, Fogarty and Eckermann recognise that the myth of the First Encounter upholds the narrative foundation for colonial and national modes of governance. In response, they use poetry to contest encounter events that are held to be universally important or singularly interpreted.34 Where Brathwaite and Glissant relativise the explorer's place in a history of displacement, Fogarty and Eckermann draw on an Aboriginal relationship to Country. Both approaches exceed the "stretched, punctured, and infiltrated" history of "territorial sovereignty," which is begun by a mythos that Dimock describes as a "poor prophylactic" (4).

II. To Dance a Laghia: New Readings of Opacity

As Brathwaite, Glissant, Fogarty and Eckermann revise the First Encounter, they face a troubling question: how to write an encounter narrative that does not restate the opposition of the self and the Other? A common solution that is shared by these poets can be loosely described as opacity, a line of separation between the reader and the encountered figure. I seek to explore their works here to illustrate the depth and range of this strategy. Rather than interpret the strategy as either praxis or poesis, I argue that opacity is better understood as a line of ontological inquiry into our ethical obligations to one another. To demonstrate this, it is necessary to distinguish between these poets’ ways of thinking regarding the encounter and the European philosophical tradition that has emerged from the relationship between self and Other. A cogent example of self-Other ethics is found in the works of Lithuanian-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas. Lévinas' idea that our subjectivity is informed by our ethical bond to the Other has been the fulcrum of a range of scholarly works in Australia and the Caribbean, including Rose's Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation (2004).35 In Lévinasian terms, the nature of our relational bonds makes me accountable to the

34 The notion that a literary text brings attention to the limits of singularity is also the subject of Derek Attridge's The Singularity of Literature. Attridge argues that the reader's encounter with literature encompasses "a call coming from the work itself – the work as singular staging of otherness" (124).

35 Lévinas' idea that subjectivity is inherently relational derives from German philosopher Martin Heidegger's idea of Dasein or Being-With (1962). For further exploration of the differences in ideology and politics between the two thinkers, see Rafael Winkler. "Alterity and the call of conscience: Heidegger, Lévinas, and Ricoeur." International Journal of Philosophical Studies, vol. 24, no. 2, 2016, pp. 219-233.

Other, despite their actions toward me: "the fellow human being's existential adventure matters to the I more than its own, posing from the start the I as responsible for the being of the other" (1998, xii-xiii). To Lévinas, the encounter disrupts all our preconceived notions regarding the Other. As he states in Totality and Infinity, "the face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me" (50-51). To Lévinas, the encountered figure is necessarily removed from specificity or particularity for us to perceive the limitless of the infinite: a metaphysical expanse binding us to the Other.36 As he explains, the nude (and therefore empty) human face is removed from the political, cultural, and philosophical context that birthed it: the face of the Other is "not resplendent as a form, clothing a content, as an image, but as the nudity of the principle" (26). He discounts the predetermining histories surrounding the encounter in order to invoke a universal – and therefore singular – human condition. In her examination of Glissant and Lévinas, Britton explains that "[For Lévinas] the ethical moment is synonymous with the interruption of comprehension, with the avoidance or refusal of cognition […] where 'autre' is taken to mean 'any other' and is not (necessarily) a synonym of 'different'" (2008, 98).

That which is discarded in Lévinas’ account is precisely the epistemological, historical and cultural source material allowing Fogarty, Eckermann, Glissant and Brathwaite to reinterpret encounter narratives. The normative human condition Lévinas alludes to emerges from a highly specific intellectual nexus of thought. It is for this reason that Glissant asks that we accept the opacity of the Other and not represent the encounter in transparent (and therefore universal) or particular (and therefore essentialist) terms. He sets out this balancing act in Poetics of Relation (131): The repercussions of cultures, whether in symbiosis or in conflict —in a polka we might say, or in a laghia⁠—in domination or liberation, opening before us an unknown forever both near and deferred, their lines of force occasionally divined, only to vanish instantly. Leaving us to imagine their interaction and shape it at the same time: to dream and to act.

36 Despite this, Lévinasian thought cannot be removed from the space and time in which it was produced—the years following the Holocaust—a time that necessitated firm commitment to a priori principles. In that respect, Lévinas shares with postcolonial writers an interest in renovating our social bonds to one another after catastrophe, a fact that Drabinski draws our attention (2011, 132). Drabinski analyses Lévinas within the thinker’s historical milieu in order to establish the culturally specific foundation of a 'universal' ethics: "Lévinas's own work, like any repressed force, is always already entangled in the prejudices of historical experience⁠—something he seems to take seriously only when it comes to the role of Judaism in thinking about otherness" (2011, 8).

For Glissant, our ability to understand or express intercultural encounters will always be limited by a singular perspective. As we attempt to characterise the intercultural encounter with any degree of authenticity it disappears: "their lines of force occasionally divined, only to vanish instantly." Observation or documentation of contact irrevocably changes the social event, as we "imagine their interaction and shape it at the same time." In other words, the reader will always be a contaminant to the encounter, as a singular lens will always fall short of the plurality of the world and its peoples. For this reason, he questions those who seek to attempt to achieve a total understanding of the "repercussions of cultures" for philosophical, anthropological, or historical ends. To illustrate his own approach to understanding the encounter, Glissant cites two dances: the Czech polka and the laghia, a dance that emerged in the aftermath of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Each dance has been perpetually reborn through minute changes and improvisations over the centuries and represent an idealised intercultural encounter: a mode of engagement that does not fix the Other in place. While the polka reflects its own discrete colonial history, I use the laghia as a performative re- enactment of opacity given its connection to the Caribbean slave plantation.37

Michael Dash defines the laghia as a "traditional Martinican dance in which two partners go through the motions of a fight without touching one another" (1995, 188). The non-violent nature of the 'fight' can be attributed to the manner of the dance's emergence on the plantation.38 As Louise Hardwick explains, "A likely cause of the laghia's evolution is that because fighting amongst [male] slaves was banned on plantations, dance became a permitted method of settling disputes" (121). If touch is consummated—with resultant physical injury—the slaver's attention is drawn. This aspect of the laghia explains Glissant's point that observation of "the repercussion of cultures" has a violent effect on the encounter itself. In the case of the laghia, observation of contact can lead to punishment. To perform under these

37 While the polka was introduced in Europe in the nineteenth century, the dance swept through the American colonies on the dancing feet of imperial colonists and settlers in elite society. Ann Hetzel Gunkel argues that the American polka "was not a transplant of a pre-existent Polish folk form," but "an amalgam of ethnic styles and mass-mediated popular music which emerged from out of America's multi-ethnic urban milieu" (2004, 5). For further reading, see Ann Hetzel Gunkel. "Polka Studies in the Scholarly Landscape." Polish American Studies, vol. 61, no. 2, 2004, pp. 5–8.

38 An analogous example is the Brazilian capoeira—a West African tradition of martial arts that allowed enslaved Africans to practice fighting under the guise of a dance. For further analysis on the literary references to the laghia in the Caribbean, see Louise Hardwick. "Dancing the Unspeakable: Rhythms of Communication in 'Laghia de la mort' by Joseph Zobel." Rhythms: Essays in French Literature, Thought and Culture. Edited by Laura McMahon, International Academic Publishers, 2008, pp. 119-133.

conditions is to engage others without endangering them to certain harm. For these very reasons, Glissant rejects the verb 'to grasp' [comprendre] given the fact that it “has a fearsome repressive meaning here" (1997, 26). As the laghia tells us, 'to grasp' the Other is to expose them to violence, the destruction of their subjectivity. Glissant’s reference to the laghia may come as a surprise to scholars such as Hallward, who suggests that Glissant dismisses folkloric traditions as mere "preliminary" steps in "the constitution of a national consciousness" (1998, 445-453). The laghia is vitally important to the cultural constitution of Glissantian philosophy, underscoring a link between Glissant's imaginary and Martinique's cultural and historical resources. It exemplifies what Drabinski describes as the effect of the trans-Atlantic slave trade on "conceptions of knowing, being, creating, and acting" (2019, 1). Put simply, where Lévinas suggests that the encounter forces us to detach ourselves from historicity, Glissant envisions an ethical obligation to the Other that emerges from the historical specificity of plantation labour.

To examine the relationship between the laghia and poetic opacity, it is necessary to analyse the points of connection between the figures and entities signified in Glissant’s poetry. As a case study, consider this section from Le sel noir (2005, 107): Like one born on a boat amid the brilliant trees. It is the final night. Tomorrow stone by stone will be selected. Like one sculpting a bone out of blue sulphur He sings the bitter night open to the salt and a woman Sadder than the sun's nubile body burning, When its fire, dying within itself, is altered Amid the day and its illumination. As with two performers of the laghia, who appear to fight but do not touch one another, the connection between "one born," a boat," and "the bright trees" is alluded to, but not consummated: "Like one born on a boat amid the brilliant trees." Similarly, the simile "Like one sculpting a bone out of blue sulphur" asks us to compare two figures without collapsing the two together in metaphor. The connections between these entities takes place outside the reader's field of vision. We are reminded that this is "the final night" that these transfusions can take place, before "the day and its illumination." With daylight comes the possibility of

seeing these interconnections more clearly, and yet the poem concludes as the Sun rises, meaning that the interaction between these various entities will dissipate with the capacity to perceive it. Thus, the reader must intuit lines of connection "between one thing and another, these saps, these countries" (Glissant 2010, 206). To read the poem, we are forced to accept the opacity of these figures without equating their withdrawal from view to a fixed position.39

Across the Caribbean Sea, Brathwaite establishes opacity through spiralling repetitions and duplications. Through these innovations, he deepens the pitch of what Glissant describes as "those stubborn shadows where repetition leads to perpetual concealment, which is our form of resistance" (1989, 4). As those familiar with Brathwaite's work will be aware, the Barbados poet frequently repeats phrases, poems, concepts, and ideas across his work. An example can be found in ConVERSations, a reformulation of a series of earlier published poetry collections such as Sun Poem (1982). As Kelly Baker Josephs recognises in her Glissantian reading of Brathwaite, Brathwaite's resistance to singular, totalising readings underscores a desire "to reach a point (or possibly return to a point) where the other is not readily grasped, is not transparent" (6). His poem, "Veridian" (1993, 35-37), is a case in point. The poem is dedicated to "Grandee Nanny & the Chankofi people of Palmares," that is, to a fugitive community of escaped slaves in colonial Brazil formed in 1605 and suppressed in 1694. The poem marks a poetic encounter between the poet and this community by way of shared cultural traditions: "we make the same blue cloth they make we mix our mortar / similar. Our tongues are always rough &bark &slark like theirs" (36). Brathwaite open the poem by describing the insider/outsider dynamics that frame the community (35): at the bottom of this high world above it all we draw the lion picket our stand &make our testament boy girl woman warrior elder statesman gunsmith technician food engineer shamir shama shaman we are all gathered here

guerrilla camouflage flack. jacket ambuscade thorny stockade. we smell our cooking &our evening smoke. the little ones collect

39 The ethic of the laghia is comparable to Spivak's concept of 'ethical singularity' (1999), which signifies a non- diametrical relationship between speaker and listener. Like the dance of the laghia, Spivak acknowledges the violence of participating in visual economies and thereby engages in lines of flight beyond the observer's grasp.

the firewood. Each line is composed of a language that is broken up into the bare fragments one needs to communicate, " boy girl woman warrior elder statesman gunsmith technician food." The spiralling course of the language conceals what is communicated from the reader’s grasp. These linguistic particles are deliberately broken up in concert with the smattering of images across each line " we smell / our cooking &our evening / smoke." The repetition or duplication of these images and words reinforce the line keeping insiders in, and outsiders out, the "guerrilla camouflage" that protect the community's boundaries. In this sense, these lines are composed to reflect an insider/outsider position back at the reader, who can only conclude that from the outside of this poem, "everything looks inward to this centre" (35).

However, Brathwaite's use of the English language in defence of the Palmares community is quickly offset by the threats that emerge from within the circle of battlelines, and inside a colonised subjectivity (36): &yet today the hawks on their warm rising roundabouts look like dark sorrows . for the portuguese have beaten us at last at their own game

surrounded us . camped hard all year against us . revved rockets up into the very kidneys of our cooking pots beguiled the younger female fauns w/foolish fans &beauty

contestants . have taught them shave their midden hair &brave. [...] tourists let inroads by the sweeper at the market gate rush in &shoot us w/their latest nikon leicas &many of our men are lured away to work at chipping ice in sin

cinnati While the battlelines that distinguish the Palmares and "the portuguese" appear to reinforce the self-Other opposition in "surrounded us" and "against us," Brathwaite draws our attention to a more insidious form of infiltration: the beauty pageant, tourism, and "the latest nikon." This is a form of colonialism that undermines the linguistic battlelines by luring the community away to "sin / cinnati." Brathwaite suggests that an act of refusal or withdrawal,

be it literary or otherwise, is always at risk of being corrupted by the 'universal' values of the West. In the last line of the poem, Brathwaite valorises the Caribbean's maroon communities who survive by these spiralling words and images, "washed away w/time &frogs &river &the mud &accompang," in words that attest to the "irreducible density of the other" (Glissant 1989, 133). As with Glissant, these densities are not oppositional or negational. As Ben Etherington writes in response to Brathwaite's Rights of Passage, "Brathwaite is not involved in a petulant negation of the English tradition that some would accuse him of [...]. His efforts are towards a generative poetics, capable of amplifying the voices and rhythms around him" (2013, 206).

While the concept of opacity has been explored in some depth in Caribbean literature, with the exception of Griffith’s work on the subject of Aboriginal novel-writing (2018) it has not been the subject of extended scholarly study in Aboriginal literature. The gap grows as we consider the attention paid to Glissant as a philosopher-poet (Gallagher; Wiedorn; Drabinski 2019), and Fogarty as a poet-militant. By working through this lacuna, I present new readings of the ontological relationship between the self and Other as it presents itself in Fogarty’s poetry. A case in point is his poem, “Indigenous Versus”: Just because we black Koori knowledge ethical we a truth of logic, not conjecture is what contemporary's here this blackfella putting Why treat us inhuman? I and I, just mean you and we (1995, 78) The poem laments the way Indigenous knowledge systems are disregarded as being somehow rooted in the past. Fogarty challenges this notion insistently, "we/a truth of logic, not conjecture/is what's contemporary's here." The poet fights for the "contemporary" as a way of unsettling these racist stereotypes. The poem's title suggests the oppositional terms of a self- Other relationship, that is, Aboriginal Australia versus White Australia. However, Fogarty unsettles this alignment by drawing our attention to the absence of the Aboriginal person's counterpart in the title, "Indigenous Versus." The withdrawal of the Other infers that there can be no challenger to the "truth of logic" conveyed by the poet. He then upends the oppositional terms of the encounter altogether in the last line of the stanza: "I and I, just mean you and we."

The phrase "I and I" is markedly similar to another strand of postcolonial poetics in the Caribbean: the 'I and I' of Rastafarian Dread Talk. While I do not wish to suggest these two idiosyncratic linguistic formulations are in any way equivalent, positioning my analysis of Fogarty's "Indigenous Versus" against Rhonda Cobham-Sander’s penetrating analysis of this linguistic form (1995) allows me to more fully examine the poet's use of language. To a poet such as Fogarty, language comes with a series of settler-colonial assumptions and rules that determine one's subject position, simply "because we black." In her research, Cobham-Sander argues that one of the ways Caribbean Creole marks its difference from the linguistic rules of the coloniser is that "their personal pronouns seldom differentiate between subject and object" (18). For instance, they use personal pronouns to define the object of a sentence, as "'me' takes the place of 'I,'' and 'im' (him) takes the place of 'she/he'" (19). When the Rastafarians appropriate English language in Dread Talk, they add a personal pronoun to "I" which emerges as "I and I," effectively disrupting the relationship between subject and object in a way that enables the Creole subject to define themselves against themselves. Fogarty is similarly tasked with upending the subject-object relationship. He is unwilling to extricate the linguistic sign for the self, the "I," from the signs of an interconnected ecology, signified by "you and we." The linguistic manoeuvre allows Fogarty to circumvent the limited options available to him as a poet speaking the language of the coloniser as well as critique the inability of the coloniser's linguistic system to make sense of his worldview. As Stuart Cooke notes of Fogarty's poem, "Ecology": "the ‘I’ becomes all manner of things, from the frill- necked lizard and the king brown taipan, to digging sticks, seeds, and a woomera [...]. His ‘I’ is highly flexible; it can be of his local community, of his ecosystem, or even of Aboriginal people across the whole continent" (239-241). Therefore, in contrast to the Lévinasian model, where the encounter is predicated on a recognition of difference, Fogarty presents an encounter ethics that is built upon a recognition of the same – an interweaving of self and world.

Fogarty's unwillingness to extricate the self from a communal ecological and social environs can be traced to his poem, "Biral Biral," originally published in Kargun. The poem records "a sacred song that belongs to the Butchulla people from Fraser Island way, as you go into

meeting with your forefather, the creator" (Fogarty and Moore).40 While Alizadeh has argued that the unconventional and anti-grammatical language Fogarty uses is intended to challenge his reader's expectations of Aboriginality given "there is nothing discernibly spiritual" about the poem (2013, 131), I argue that the poem presents us with the epistemological foundation of his escape from the self-Other dichotomy. That is, of course, the lesson of opacity: we cannot assume withdrawal is synonymous with inactivity. In interview, Fogarty supports this reading when he suggests that the poem emerged from his experience of "being told a word with no meaning given around it" and committing to "provide" his "own mystery of these words" (Fogarty and Moore). As it is published in New and Selected Poems, "Biral Biral" opens: Biral came down one day crystal stones went where none would dare. Just a little boy, known by everyone send a flower picked for this one, time expressed Reply had to be made, springs invoked "Who is Biral?" Walking alone sharp rocks cut my feet leaf push upon my skin. Bad tribes were known to never return greatest healthful huge size spirit enters manhood (87) Fogarty introduces his reader to a first-person speaker, "a little boy, known by everyone." We come to the young boy at a pivotal moment in his cultural and spiritual development as he "enters manhood" through initiation ceremony. However, it becomes clear to the reader that the boy is unsure of the existence of the spiritual figure he is asked to honour, Biral, the creator to the Butchulla peoples: "who is Biral?" Over the course of the poem, the poet unearths a repressed sense of community between the figure in the poem and his creator – an "I and I" relation that has yet to come into expression.

40 The word "Biral" is used by Murri peoples to refer to the creator, whereas "Ngunda" refers to a messenger of Biral, see Ali Alizadeh. "Naming the Voids of Multiculturalism in 'Biral Biral': A New Reading of the Poetry of Lionel Fogarty." Antipodes, Vol. 27, No. 2, December 2013, pp. 129-133.

In the next section, the boy is assigned to perform as Ngunda, the messenger of Biral, and the ceremony begins: Ambush admitted the tunnel of music entered the little boy now known by everyone Trumpeted the didgeridoos operaed a stranger calls. Speaking souls, race blows weird things onto faces made u'fella look like creatures of another era. (87) Fogarty frames the reader's engagement with the ceremony using the phenomenological perspective of the boy. We witness his emergence in the soundscape of ceremony, "Ambush admitted the tunnel of music / entered the little boy now known by everyone." In the same two lines, the poet establishes the boy as both intruder and guest in the ceremony through the alliterative oxymoron, "Ambush admitted." His perspective threatens the coherence of the ceremony. As with the laghia, this is a gathering that will vanish in the hands of those that attempt to grasp it. Fogarty’s disruption of the subject-object relationship draws our attention to the way an imported colonial language may prove destructive to aspects of Aboriginal spirituality. To name, totally and unequivocally, is to destroy: "race blows weird things onto faces / made u'fella look like creatures of another era." The poem acts in its own defence here: the ceremony appears to shimmer across past and future tense, vibrating with intensity as sounds reverberate as if coming from other times and places. The poet's use of "operaed" as a verb in the past tense reinforces this effect. The ceremony appears to be heard, it can be heard, and it appears as if it is about to sound: "Trumpeted the didgeridoos / operaed a stranger calls." Ethnomusicological studies of Aboriginal ceremony have long recognised the multi-temporal, transportive experience of ceremonial participation. From her field research in the Bundjalung and Gidabal ceremonies that were performed at Cherbourg Reserve where Fogarty grew up, Margaret Gummow notes that songs are structured around "textual repetition" as well as dance and musical cues (59). As Gummow suggests, the Butchulla ceremony described in "Biral Biral" has adapted to the displacement of Aboriginal peoples across Australia's Eastern Coastline in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From her research on Eckermann's Yankunytjatjara language group throughout the 1980s, ethnomusicologist Catherine Ellis argues that 'textual repetition' can "lead the performer or listener into a completely altered state of awareness, in which time seems in one sense to be 'frozen' and in another sense to be 'never ending'" (159). Likewise, Fogarty's poem is not

outside of time, but rather within 'ceremonial time,' a multi-temporal state of Being that reflects the all-times or everywhen of the Dreaming.

The encounter ethos underlying Fogarty's linguistic experimentation is drawn out at the close of "Biral Biral": Ngunda Biral Many influences, many spirits Nguthuru too. These words, not vocation Born, inbred by Aboriginal people I'm blood. Sheer and delightful. (88) Fogarty draws the reader's attention to words that are encultured by the spiritual practices of the Bundjalung peoples: "Ngunda," "Biral," and "Nguthuru." That these lines are not drawn into Fogarty's Babel-like linguistic profusion indicates the success of his attempt to restore the "mystery" of Aboriginal language. Recalling the intermingling of the self and Other in "Indigenous Versus," Fogarty brings divergent spaces and times back together into a reconciled present: "Born, inbred by Aboriginal people / I'm blood. Sheer and delightful" (88). "I'm" is pluralised, "inbred" through intercourse with a series of spiritual figures. The boy's encounter with his creator inspires greater pleasure in Fogarty's "I and I" tradition - not Dread Talk solipsism, but an inability to separate oneself from an interwoven and interconnected environment. In this way, Fogarty renovates traditional notions of subjectivity in a way that reflects an understanding of the self as integrated within, and answerable to, a shared, conscious universe.

In his own assessment of opacity in Aboriginal novel-writing, Griffith asks whether "refusal, with its insistence on opacity, can manifest engagement on the settler reader?" (2018, 180). As Griffith alludes, the opaque forms that surface in Aboriginal literature often tend to be misread or disengaged altogether. In his own research on Fogarty, David Brooks posits that Fogarty's non-Indigenous readers are left with the sense that there is some ambiguous meaning beneath the surface: Something like a worldview emerges? Or rather can be glimpsed, intuited, twisting beneath or within the world. Who am I to say whether or how much the language—

distorted, broken open as it has been—has been adequate to it, or even to the indication of it? What is anyone to say? (27) Brooks is drawn into Fogarty's poetic experimentation in search of truth-content. He suggests that the poet distances us from something valuable, that we read Fogarty's experimental poetic verse with the confidence that there may be some hidden element, concept or pattern to discern, that there is some value in deciphering Fogarty's linguistic riddles or "double- standard English" (Fogarty and Moore). Brook's reading indicates, as evident in "Indigenous Versus" and "Biral Biral," that Fogarty's experimental play with the English language exceeds a simple political opposition with the white Australian reader. Fogarty's refusal to indulge the reader does not indicate an absence of spiritual meaning as Alizadeh indicates, nor what Mudrooroo describes as linguistic resistance. Instead, the poem renovates traditional grammar structures to express an Aboriginal conception of subjectivity, what Victoria Grieves describes as "the interconnectedness of the elements of the earth and the universe, animate and inanimate, whereby people, the plants and animals, landforms and celestial bodies are interrelated" (370).

The salient difference in Fogarty's and Glissant's encounter narratives can be observed in their varying willingness to draw attention to the figure of the encounter. As opposed to the laghia, where Glissant refuses to name the connection between one thing and another, Fogarty's defers the reader's grasp through an unrelenting commitment to signification. We are left with a poetic product that appears to bounce back at us, "sheer and delightful" (1995, 88). Differently to Glissant's laghia, Fogarty's unceasing flow of words marks an almost excessive series of interactions between one thing and another that trouble our inability to untangle them or tell them apart. Rather than a writer who is disassociated from the language he uses, Fogarty's play with language evokes an unwillingness to separate self from Other, subject from object, in order to evoke his commitment to the patterning of a conscious universe, what Aboriginal poet and scholar Peter Minter describes as "networks of connection, interdependence and signification" (2015, 264). In the process, Fogarty creates a discursive world that can at times be incapable of communicating meaning, a tautological result that is not so dissimilar from Cobham-Sander's analysis of the 'I and I' tradition of Rastafarian Dread Talk: "a discursive world so circumscribed in its imagined range of interlocutors as to be incapable of communicating meaning" (2016, 6). However, I am less interested in the shortcomings of Fogarty's poetic practice—that is, whether it can be engaged by a readerly interlocutor—than in Fogarty's attempt to embed new terms of relating into

writing. I argue that it is precisely because of his linguistic deconstruction that he is able to reach across cultures – an argument I draw out in Chapter Four.

As Eckermann writes in her poem, "Lake Eyre" (2015), the interconnections of Aboriginal writers and a surrounding environment are often dismissed by readers if they do not reveal themselves: we float our churches down the river and you will not know you do not see our religion the reeds will share our journey weaving and weaving our songs into objects of splendidness (2015, 44). Unlike the complex linguistic play of "Biral Biral," where phrases like "Space veined howls around knowledge, bitter gift" thunder across the page (1985, 86), Eckermann writes in relatively transparent language. As Siobhan Hodge writes in review of Inside my Mother, Eckermann's poetic works "are accessible and stark all at once, demanding action" (65). Hodge implies that a reader may come to "Lake Eyre" and be assuaged by lexical clarity. However, the adjective used, "stark," draws our attention to a form of opacity that is "splendid," a blinding quality that appears to exceed our capacity to view it. As such, I argue that "Lake Eyre" is itself an "object of splendidness," in that it blinds our capacity to perceive the subject of the poem. "[T]he reeds will share our journey," Eckermann writes, "weaving and weaving" an object into so transparent a form that a passer-by will not notice it in its "splendidness." As the sounds of the reeds shifting in place recall an original journey, they evoke the complex interplay between textual presence and absence, a production of human and non-human expression that underlines – amongst other things – the material agency of Country. One may imagine the dance of the laghia at work here as a relational universe is forged in front of a reader unable to participate in the interweaving of textual and organic form. Therefore, rather than use opacity as a form of opposition, Eckermann writes to reflect an epistemological difference that cannot be quantified. To read this poem is to acknowledge the alterity of the interwoven collective of human and non-human forms that presents itself before us. Differently to Lévinas, however, this difference emerges from the historicity of Eckermann's understanding of the intermingling of the self and a conscious world.

In their respective poems, Glissant, Brathwaite, Fogarty and Eckermann use poetry as a vehicle of epistemological and ontological inquiry that enables them to think beyond a diametrical relationship between self and Other. To conclude this chapter, I wish to draw attention to the pedagogical purposes of their writings, something that underscores the generative nature of their ontological inquiry. For instance, "Lake Eyre" can be read as a continuation of Eckermann's use of her work to publicly contest one-sided views of Australian history that omit the experiences of Aboriginal peoples. Eckermann's writing of "Lake Eyre" also dovetails with the poet's commitment to a series of collaborative pedagogical projects, including her decision to set up a writer's retreat at her home in South Australia and invite a range of writers to contribute to a shared storytelling project (2016).41 Similarly, rather than simply a style of writing that embodies refusal, Fogarty's "double- standard poetry" (Fogarty and Moore) reflects the poet's interest in revitalising Aboriginal languages. In interview, Fogarty suggests that his writing in Aboriginal languages reflects his work as a teacher and guest lecturer in the University of Melbourne's Australian Indigenous Studies programme: "I'm trying to create a language [...] It's going to be re-introduced there in the brainwaves of the Aboriginal children growing up, so it will be compulsory to read and write" (Fogarty and Moore). He has also published numerous children's books directed to Aboriginal children – an intention that resonates in the opening of his poetry collection, Mogwie-Idan: Stories of the Land (6): Jingi Whallo Hello how are you all Nunyan Nyarri Lionel My name is Lionel Gita Gita Yoondoo Jarjum Good morning to you children Fogarty frames the collection as a school visit and translates Munaldjali language into English to guide a reader through the Aboriginal words he uses in his work. My point here is that Fogarty's and Eckermann's work has other audiences than the white Australian reader locked in riddles; they use poetry to commit their understanding of human obligations to community and land.

41 Eckermann is also named in the International Writing Program hosted by the University of Iowa. As a result of her educational focus, her collection, Inside My Mother was recently included on the Australian Higher School Certificate syllabus to be studied by Australian High School students.

A similar emphasis on literary education is evident in Glissant's literary works. Despite other Caribbean countries that sought independence from a colonial power, Glissant's Martinique remains an overseas département of France, a formal relationship that has informed a Francophone cultural outlook. As Forsdick points out, departmentalization has meant "a continuous and continuing [colonial] presence in the Lesser Antilles that now extends over almost four centuries" (2010, 133). Particularly in his work on "free and forced poetics" (1976; 1981), which refers to the linguistic division between the language one speaks that has adopted under oppression and the language one requires to achieve self-determination, Glissant describes the means by which the Martinique subject can become independent and escape a diametrical relationship with the Imperial metropole, Paris.42 While Glissant initially notes the limitation of the "forced poetics" spoken by the enslaved African in Martinique, he then writes of the "free poetics" to come, where Martinicans will write in "one language, shared by the community " (1976, 101). That teleology marks a gradual process whereby the subject can come into a self-determined cultural consciousness. Across his career, Glissant provided opportunities for such local literary and intellectual self-determination; founding the Institut martiniquais d'études, as well as Acoma, a social sciences journal, in 1965. Similarly, in his essay History of the Voice (1984), Brathwaite defines nation language by the example of a child who rejects the "tyranny of the pentameter" imposed on them by a colonial education (265). On that count, Brathwaite's work as lecturer, historian, and educator throughout the Caribbean and the United States has enabled him to define the cultural orientation and poetic style that younger, politically committed Caribbean writers currently emulate. In scholarship, Brathwaite's advocation that young Caribbean poets take up the "vernacular resources of the local" and the "zeitgeist" of the Caribbean is well recognised (Edwards 3). As with Glissant, Brathwaite asks his readers to break from the stranglehold of imposed cultural values, and in this way, the linguistic play in these two poetic oeuvres are inseparable from distinct pedagogical and epistemological aims.

The opacity that marks these poet's writings all reflect a distinct epistemological purpose: the creation of new terms by which to relate to one another. They are all situated in a common decolonial continuum, forced to rise above what Gauri Viswanathan describes as a colonial literary education in the Platonic tradition, designed to make the colonised more "amenable to

42 For further analysis of "free and forced poetics," particularly the connection between 'langage' and 'langue,' See Celia M. Britton. Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance. University Press of Virginia, 1999.

the practical requirements of daily governance" (347). Given their efforts to create new terms by which to encounter for a younger generation of writers, we must read their poetic works as at once necessarily intentional, instructional, dense with historicity, and on the other hand engaged in a poesis that is at times beyond our comprehension. To paraphrase Griffith's analysis of Aboriginal novel writing, these poetries refuse "to be either praxis or poesis" in order to challenge the "age-old binary itself" (2013, 18). Glissant's laghia, Brathwaite's spiralling linguistic course, Fogarty's deconstruction of the subject-object relationship, and Eckermann's weaving "objects of splendidness" illustrate the complexity and range of a poetry dedicated to opacity. Opacity allows these poets to engage with the Other without equating difference to a form of non-Being. By reading their works as lines of ontological inquiry, I move beyond postcolonial studies that present us with new perspectives or new constellations of literary texts while maintaining a European philosophical tradition as a universal. The poetry discussed in this chapter not only to revisits and reshapes the ontological continuum in which First Encounters came to represent the reference-poles of modernity but asks us to act-upon new connective structures altogether. As Glissant states in Poetics of Relation, "The poet's word leads from periphery to periphery [...] it makes every periphery into a centre; furthermore, it abolishes the very notion of centre and periphery" (29).

Chapter 2. "The First and Last of the New Worlds": Reading Historical and Literary Meridians Between Australia and the Caribbean

Staying with the trouble requires making oddkin; that is, we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. [...] Alone, in our separate kinds of expertise and experience, we know both too much and too little. Donna Haraway. Staying with the Trouble. 4.

This chapter makes the case that we should not confuse the shared differences between these literary projects as being indicative of their separateness. I unearth historical and literary continuities between Caribbean and Aboriginal Literatures in order to upend their structural opposition as rootless and rooted counterparts. The chapter’s title, 'First and Last of the New Worlds' is drawn from Sharrad's description of the Caribbean and Australia as bookends of European imperialism (1993, 58).43 Sharrad helpfully describes a relationship that is oriented around the pivot of an imperial power, the Caribbean and Australia being the first and last of overseas lands to be reached by a European explorer – the bookends of the Age of Discovery. As bookends, the two sites are independent of one another, their sole link being an imperial power. While previous studies by scholars like McMahon give incisive accounts of Caribbean-Australian interrelations (2016), I examine these continuities to present a more multi-directional idea of the operations that shape Aboriginal and Caribbean literature.44 The complexities of intersectional exchanges are addressed in Sara Ahmed’s Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (2000). She argues that future scholars must "pay attention to the shifting conditions in which encounters between others, and between other others, take place" (13). She suggests that while postcolonial theorists such as Bhabha or Fanon have successfully unsettled the relationship between self and Other, we will need to be attentive to the uneven power relations "between other others." I draw out this statement by examining the transversal continuities and entanglements that tie Aboriginal Australia and the Caribbean together, a series of connections that allow me to unsettle the cultural and

43 The title is also used as a sub-chapter in Elizabeth McMahon's Islands, Identity, and the Literary Imagination (2016). 44 While Anne McClintock is known for addressing the "multi-directional" nature of colonialism in Imperial Leather (1995), more recently, scholars such as Michael Rothberg draw on the term to refer to shifts across memorial temporality, see Michael Rothberg. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonisation. Stanford University Press, 2009, pp. 1–29.

historical constructions of the Caribbean and Australia as fixed and naturalised points of reference in a singular colonial history, as the ‘First and Last of the New Worlds.’ Further, I argue that we will better understand the entanglements of postcolonial and Indigenous literatures discussed by Reder and McCall (2020) if we take the relationship between "other others" into account (13).45 While writers such as Glissant and Fogarty disavow such inter- colonial links, I make the case that Caribbean and Aboriginal literatures evolve in relation to one another, as writers such as Brathwaite, Glissant, Minter, and Wright draw on their Aboriginal or Caribbean counterpart to counter local narratives of dispossession.

I. A History of Caribbean and Australian Encounters

The past is never dead. It's not even past. William Faulkner. Requiem for a Nun. 71.

Tracing inter-colonial connections is a current challenge for the humanities. As Sue Thomas notes in her recent study of West Indian plantations, "It is very tough working on Caribbean topics in Australia" (ix). She notes that relationship between imperial metropoles and distant colonies are more common and better supported, at least in terms of research funding and transport options. I'd like to add that language differences and the importance of specificity also inhibit inter-colonial analyses. All of these factors have limited research output on the relationship between the Caribbean and Australia. In her account of the history of Caribbean- Australian scholarship, McMahon writes, "until recently, there has been very little written on the relationship between Australia and the Caribbean apart, of course, from cricket" (2016, 49). To examine the relationship between the Caribbean and Australia, I will speak to McMahon’s ground-breaking study of these networks of exchange in some depth for its broad influence upon Caribbean-Australian scholarship. McMahon notes that the earliest scholarship connecting the two colonies is evident in Duffield’s charting the movements of convicts and soldiers, administrators and governors, teachers and clergy, ship-captains and sailors, wives

45 It should be noted that Black and Indigenous literary communities consistently reference each other's works, an intertextual infrastructure that is typically overlooked. For instance, in Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith's Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999), a work that would define the field of Indigenous Studies, Smith draws on the literary parallel of Toni Morrison: "An analogy can be drawn from Toni Morrison's argument about the black/Othered 'presence' in American Literature; the Indigenous presence is there in the literature on literacy, but it is a presence without form or substance" (37).

and farmers between British colonies in the West Indies and Australia.46 Duffield shows us that we cannot afford to interpret Australia as an isolated colony given that its existence necessitated transversal networks of exchange with other colonies.

To complement McMahon’s research on the subject, I seek to draw out the ongoing presence of Aboriginal peoples in this intercultural history. The first indication of this presence is in Duffield’s identification of the connections between slavery and convictism in the Australian and West Indian colonies. Developing Duffield’s research, Pybus states, "between 1788 and the middle of the nineteenth century, almost every convict ship carried people of the African diaspora to [...] Van Diemen's Land" (180). Pybus challenges the view of a singularly white Australian history of settlement and points out that Afro-Caribbean convicts were often used by British colonists to participate in the Australian Frontier Wars with Aboriginal populations encircling the young colonies (182). A notable example I refer to elsewhere in this chapter is the case of John Johnstone, an African freeman hanged for his role in the Myall Creek Massacre in 1838. Up to 1848, over 200 convicts from the Caribbean were transported into the state of New South Wales' Hyde Park Barracks alone.47 For incoming Afro-Caribbean freedmen, the convict system meant undertaking labour under the rules of the indenture and ticket-of-leave system. Their opportunities would be dictated by the political and economic transitions of the nineteenth century, including the uneven cessation of transportation from 1840. Nonetheless, in his own research of West Indian immigration to Australia, Barry Higman claims that Australia was seen as a "haven," and that the presence of Afro-Caribbean peoples into Australia increases following the Victorian gold rushes of the late nineteenth centuries (35).48 The continuing presence of Afro-Caribbean populations in Australian colonies bespeaks the necessity with which colonies engaged in a transversal connection for their own survival and evidences the nascent emergence of a form of kinship between supposedly isolated colonies.49

46 Early examples of literary figures who moved between the West Indian and Australian colonies are George Howe (1769-1821), a government printer in the West Indies and later publisher of Australia's first book of poetry, First Fruits of Australian Poetry (1819), and Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833-1860) poet and financial inheritor of a Barbadian slave plantation. 47 After 1848, the Barracks was repurposed as a Female Immigration Depot to remedy the gender imbalance in the colony. 48 Higman also makes the point that James McFie Campbell, a Black man from Kingston, was one of the thirteen men killed at the infamous Eureka Stockade in the Victorian Gold Rush (1976, 35-40). 49 The actions of one imperial power irrevocably affected others. For example, a shortfall in economic profit in French Guiana led to France's acquiring New Caledonia in 1853, much to the chagrin of British authorities in Australia.

To explore the complications of this relationship, I draw upon examples Mahon includes in the Appendix to her Islands, Identity and the Literary Imagination. McMahon’s collection of historical source in the Appendix demonstrates that transversal networks of exchange enabled British administrators and ethnologists to be relocated after acts of violence upon Indigenous or enslaved populations (50). For instance, after being employed as a trader around the West Indies, Admiral John Hunter (1737-1821) was pronounced Governor of New South Wales in 1795. After alleged mismanagement in the young penal colony, it was suggested by members of the British government that he be newly appointed Governor of the Bermudas. That Hunter could be shuttled back to the West Indies after 'losing face' in Australia exemplifies the way that inter-colonial immigration helped to sustain the mythic distinction between the superiority of the coloniser and the inferiority of the colonised. In another context, Palestinian theorist Edward Said makes exactly this point: When it became common practice during the nineteenth century for Britain to retire its administrators from India and elsewhere once they had reached the age of fifty-five, then a further refinement in Orientalism had been achieved; no Oriental was ever allowed to see a Westerner as he aged and degenerated, just as no Westerner needed ever to see himself, mirrored in the eyes of the subject race, as anything but a vigorous, rational, ever-alert young Raj. (1978, 42) In reference to the British Raj, Said suggests that the colonial administrator must keep an image of constant perfection or agelessness in order to convince the colonised population of the superiority of imperial culture. In Hunter's case, the potential of trans-colonial movement from Australia to the Caribbean enabled the coloniser to sustain an image of moral righteousness, despite his actions to the contrary.

A more notorious example of inter-colonial mobility can be found in the career of Australian explorer and controversial governor of Jamaica, Edward John Eyre (1815-1901). Eyre first gained renown in Australia as a land explorer (Lake Eyre is named in his honour), the first European to cross the Nullarbor with a Nyoongar guide, a man by the name of Wylie. After being appointed to the position of governor in Jamaica in 1864, Eyre was involved with the excessively brutal suppression of the Morant Bay rebellion in 1865. The Morant Bay Rebellion saw two days of continued public protest of injustice and widespread poverty. In response, Eyre declared martial law in the Jamaican county of Surrey. The decision led to the executions of six hundred and eight persons, the flogging of six hundred, and the burning of

one thousand dwellings. As McMahon suggests, the "apparent discontinuity" between Eyre's Australian and Caribbean histories has confounded many historians (76). These histories were kept independent from one another until a chance meeting between Australian writer Geoffrey Dutton and Jamaican anthropologist Fernando Henriques in Leeds in 1960: After chatting for a few minutes in his usual affable way, Henriques suddenly asked "Why did you send us that bastard Eyre?" The noun is a term of endearment in Australia, but clearly not in Jamaica. I had a vague idea that Eyre had got into some sort of trouble in Jamaica, but I did not know that our Australian hero had allegedly turned into a monster there. (9) That the two sides of Eyre were not brought together until this moment powerfully demonstrates the ways a singular national perspective tends to inform our accounts of colonialism. Henriques' question raises the crucial point that we may not only be taken in by the appearance of the "vigorous, rational, ever-alert British Raj" (Said 1978, 42), but also by the secondary façade—that they appear just for us, in our lands and histories alone, rather than the many lands encompassed by the British empire.

The myth that there were two sides to Eyre, that he is both hero and villain, underplays the continuities between his engagements with both Aboriginal Australian and Caribbean peoples. For instance, Julie Evans disputes the idea that there are two sides to Eyre when she writes: Eyre's actions in Jamaica are extraordinary only insofar as they represent the full realisation of the correlation between race, resistance and repression that was common to colonial governance. […] Eyre's writings about Aborigines, for example, were an early indication of how the correlation operated throughout the Australian colonies, where race initially upheld dispossession. (139) Evan's examination of the correlation between enslavement and colonisation necessitate that we anticipate the complex contiguities between different experiences of colonialism, even if they are separated by thousands of kilometres of seawater. Evan's point is reinforced by Kaiya Aboagye, a descendant of Adansi Ghana, Kukuyalanj Nation (Queensland), and Jamaican freeman Douglass Pitt, when she posits that "if we are not careful to consistently question these accounts without critical analysis, we run the risk of perpetuating the erasure of connections between Indigenous and Afro/Indigenous communities throughout Australia" (82). Reinforcing Aboagye's point, Aboriginal scholars such as Gary Foley (2009), John Maynard (2007) and Grieves (2018) posit that future scholars must interrogate the ways

transversal imperialisms and comparative racial discourses determine local conditions of oppression.50

While transversal imperialisms may appear to be disconnected from the later writings of figures like Glissant or Fogarty, they have a significant influence upon postcolonial literature. For example, consider the impact of British ethnologist Walter Roth (1861-1933) on Guyanese writer Wilson Harris. Roth worked in Australia as a Protector of Aboriginal peoples in North Queensland from 1898 to 1906 before taking up the role of Protector of Indians in British Guiana in 1906 under a cloud of public controversy.51 Roth laid the foundation for ethnological studies of the Indigenous peoples of both regions. He was the author of Ethnological Studies Among the North-West Central Queensland Aborigines (1897), the first ethnological text of its kind to be published in Australia. Across the Pacific, Roth was praised as the father of ethnology in British Guiana after his publication of An Introductory Study of the Arts, Crafts, and Customs of the Guiana Indians (1924). In an incisive examination of these two works, Russell McDougall argues that Roth's findings in Australia and Guyana were entwined (1998). He writes that "whenever a difficulty of interpretation presented itself in Guiana, or when analogy might prove useful, Roth naturally searched his Australian experience for some clue or point of reference" (574-575). For example, when observing the burial rituals of the Guianan Makusi, where the mourners yell into the ears of the deceased, Roth writes: In North Queensland I have observed a similar custom. There, the seat of intelligence, life, etc., is located in the ear, and at death these escape through this exit; hence, by shouting into the deceased's ears his friends are trying to restore these essentials to their proper place" (1915, 1). In this case, Roth's encounters with the British Guiana Caribs encircles the Aboriginal language groups of North-West Central Queensland. For the purposes of this dissertation,

50 A more positive example of this dynamic can be observed in the notebooks of Lieutenant William Dawes, which are now used by contemporary linguists to revitalise the language practices of the Eora Nation. Those notebooks relate the rise of the first recognised Aboriginal writer in the English language Bennelong of the Eora nation. Dawes would gain more public prominence in the next stage as a career while serving as a governor and schoolmaster in Sierra and Antigua. In the later parts of his life, he emerged as a key voice against the Caribbean slave trade.

51 While historical evidence deviates on the subject, it is reported that Roth's departure was attributed to his taking photos of an Aboriginal couple demonstrating a sexual position as ethnographic evidence, see Helen Pringle. "Walter Roth and Ethno-Pornography." The Roth Family, Anthropology, and Colonial Administration. Edited by Russell McDougall and Iain Davidson, Routledge, 2008, pp. 221-235.

McDougall unearths a perverse result of the transversal connections between colonial groups: a Carib modelled around an Ayerrerenge precedent.52

The inter-Indigenous connections in Roth's research would haunt Harris' efforts to write Caribbean history to reflect the Indigenous resources of the region. As a government surveyor from 1942 to 1953, Harris often retraced Roth's expeditions in British Guiana. He then familiarised himself with Roth's research throughout the 1960s and 70s to understand the Carib traditions that were suppressed in the colonial period. For instance, Harris writes of Roth's discovery of the "sacred ritual in which" the Caribs "consumed a portion of flesh over a bone of the enemy. This gave them, they felt, an inner knowledge of the enemy's plans and they hollowed the bone into a flute" (qtd. in Bundy 6). Harris chooses the Carib bone flute as the emblem of a new Caribbean that could free itself from the gravity of the colonial era: "We need somehow to find an original dislocation with which to unlock a body of claustrophobic assumptions which strengthens itself by promoting a self-encircling round of protest [...] like a static clock that crushes all into the time of conquest" (179). However, there is a tragic irony in that the "original dislocation" to which Harris draws our attention is sourced from an ethnologist who uses Aboriginal Australia as a precedent. In seeking to emancipate the Caribbean subject from the historical consciousness of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Harris draws on a doubled representation of Indigeneity: the Ayerrerenge from Western Queensland in the shape of the Carib, the Carib made to fit the Ayerrerenge example. He cannot escape the insular nature of colonial history, itself a "body of claustrophobic assumptions" concealing the continuities and shared experiences of Caribbean and Aboriginal peoples. I wish to point out here that inter-colonial histories often emerge in this way. The suppressed traces of Caribbean or Aboriginal history and culture, when unearthed, can disturb or unsettle the teleology and ontology of the self-determined postcolonial subject.

Harris' engagements with Roth's transcultural ethnology allow us to construct a cross-cultural dialogue between himself and the silenced Ayerrerenge haunting the Caribbean-based archives. His work unintentionally cuts across colonial fault-lines, aligning North Queensland and British Guiana as adjunct territories. In his research on the subject, McDougall states that

52 A current day example can be found in Gweagal descendant Rodney Kelly’s attempt to regain the Gweagal Shield held in the British Museum, an item used by his ancestors to defend Botany Bay from Captain James Cook.

by engaging these inter-colonial histories we may release "ourselves (however tentatively and momentarily) from the bind of polarised otherness" (1998, 580). McDougall's insightful commentary on Harris' connection to North Queensland continues to go unexamined. In his Introduction to Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis of The Imagination, Andrew Bundy writes that Harris' "entire body of fiction can be treated to a single continuous dream-book," a comment footnoted by the following: A conception not so remote from the Australian Aboriginal Dreaming where man enters a family kinship with a living landscape [...] Tremendous people and the events surrounding them fall back into the landscape to become a prominent rock or tree or ground water. The man who is privileged enough to make the discovery of the place where history has 'fallen into the land' becomes that place's intimate descendant, and that 'landfall' his intimate ancestor. (13) Bundy suggests that Harris' dreamscape is similar to the key tenets of Aboriginal spirituality in that Harris, as discoverer of a pre-existing Carib, Taino, and Arawak culture, can resume the work of narrating the surrounding country (or Country, to use the Aboriginal Australian term). It is unclear whether Bundy was familiar with McDougall's essay on the Harris-Roth connection, published a year earlier, which references the fact that Harris drew on ethnological research that likened South American and North Queensland Indigenous communities. Either way, Bundy's footnote has all the remarkable characteristics of a strike of lightning in that it illuminates a reflection of the same from across the oceans. Even if Bundy doesn’t realise the cross-cultural histories signified by his footnote, the comment brings to light the transversal foundations that postcolonial literature has emerged from. In this light, to study the self-determination of a writer like Harris necessitates engaging with what Anne McClintock describes as the "multi-directional" nature of colonialism (85). For instance, in her recent work, Allegories of the Anthropocene, DeLoughrey argues that Harris found Caribbean literary resources embedded in the earth, "not dead matter but 'living fossils' [...] theorising the memory of the Earth and its chronicles of human history" (46). While DeLoughrey insightfully examines the Indigenous source of Harris' oeuvre, I argue that his work presents us with a more complicated series of relations. The transmission of Aboriginal culture into the Caribbean via Roth indicates that Harris had to deal with a complicated archaeological site, a soil that was disturbed and rearranged by imperial ethnologists from across the planet and subsequently covered up by the singular colonial and national histories.

While these inter-colonial histories only began to surface in the late 1970s, Aboriginal and Caribbean writers began to unearth continuities between their experiences in the early decades of the twentieth century through the conduits of Black Consciousness Movements. These meetings would directly inform the cultural and political character of the future relationship between Caribbean and Aboriginal literatures. As Foley points out, the earliest indication of literary and political exchanges between Aboriginal and Caribbean populations can be found in the records of the political groups located around the Sydney waterfront (14), an example being the Coloured Progressive Association (CPA) formed in 1903. The CPA was comprised of foreign Indian, African American, and West Indian seamen in transit, in addition to Aboriginal Australians such as Fred Maynard, who would become the founding member of the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association (AAPA). At that time, Aboriginal populations were British subjects, not officially counted as members of the Commonwealth (unlike West Indian sailors). However, West Indians were equally subject to racist legislation policing their entry into Australia. Daylight, a periodical newspaper circulating in New South Wales throughout the 1920s, reports that the Australian government placed a tax on immigrants of colour, then "increased the tax, afterwards limited the number and finally prohibited their entry" (qtd. in Maynard 11). The ban restricted dialogue between Caribbean and Aboriginal peoples, while aligning their political worlds and prompting common cause and action on the waterfront through left-wing organisations.53

That common cause would surface in the 1920s as Black seamen and waterside workers mingled in Australia's harbours. In this period, a branch of Jamaican political activist Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) allied with local Aboriginal populations and support organisations. John Maynard, grandson of Aboriginal activist Fred Maynard, argues that these ties were crucial to the emergence of the later AAPA: Through their contacts with African American seamen on the docks and waterfront of Sydney it is likely that the Aboriginal leaders of the 1920s including Fred Maynard had acquired knowledge of the works of Frederick Douglas, Booker T Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, amongst others. Therefore, international Black

53 Another example of the racial discrimination faced by Black Caribbean sailors in Australian ports is recorded by Daylight on the 31st August 1925. Daylight records the story of an anonymous Jamaican seaman who resists passing through Australian customs. Upon being sent to a courthouse in Newcastle, he states on behalf of the coloured men on board the ship: "We do not see why we should have to pass the customs every time we come into port" (qtd. in Maynard 10).

movements and ideologies would form the core of the political directives and rhetoric of the 1920s Aboriginal leadership. (11) Maynard's account of the UNIA's literary and political influence upon the AAPA brings to light a transnational history of Black letters that exceeds the limits of the singular histories to which Aboriginal Australia and the Caribbean are often tied. The circulation of political rhetoric in the form of pamphlets, newspapers, radio and correspondence between UNIA members helped to uncover shared experiences of oppression between disparate colonised communities in countries such as Australia, despite the Australian governments' efforts to suppress their circulation. As Maynard suggests, the Sydney branch of the UNIA were able to push Garvey's writings out to a range of Aboriginal communities across the state (12-13).

While it is difficult to perceive the size or infrastructure of the Sydney branch of the UNIA, a letter from Tom Lacey, future Treasurer of the AAPA, to Amy Jacques Garvey, second wife of Marcus, is telling: "We have not had the time to organise the other four states yet, but I think are about fifty or sixty thousand; that is as far as we can reach at the present time" (qtd. in Maynard 15). Lacey pledges the support of ten thousand Aboriginal people across New South Wales and sixty thousand nation-wide to the UNIA. His promise to Garvey can be traced forward as the AAPA emerged in its own right in 1925 with the logo, "Australia for Australians." The logo references a call to Aboriginal nationhood, in addition to the Australian focus in Garvey's poem, "Africa for the Africans": Europe Cries to Europeans, Ho! Asiatics claim Asia, so Australia for Australians And Africa for Africans. (qtd. in Maynard 17) The Aboriginal leaders of the AAPA saw key similarities between Garveyism and their own political outlook. In his research on the subject, Maynard suggests that Aboriginal leaders such as his grandfather adopted and remodelled Garveyism in Australia to reflect "their own experience in Australia" (14). The conjoined history of the AAPA and the UNIA continues to be overlooked in national histories of Australia. Maynard laments that while "the discourse that influenced the AAPA in the 1920s was black internationalism [...] the belief that 'whites knew best' and were 'pulling the strings' of early Aboriginal political activity continues to contaminate present-day analyses" (20). Subsequently, the UNIA and the AAAPA were "erased from the Australian historical landscape in a very short space of time" (20). By contrast, Maynard offers a more expansive understanding of the Black internationalism that

links Aboriginal peoples with the Caribbean, South America, Africa, and the United States. While Afro-Aboriginal histories such as these have been historically disregarded, I argue that these connections provided the foundational discourse of Australian decolonial politics.

After Garveyism gave way to independent movements throughout the Caribbean, the rise of the Black Power and Civil Rights movements prompted further Caribbean migration to Australia, in addition to those seeking asylum from Fidel Castro in Cuba. These arrivals were hindered by the White Australia Policy until its abolition in 1973 under the Whitlam Labour government. Among these arrivals was Trinidadian-born Australian writer, Ralph de Boissière. Along with C. L. R. James, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, de Boissière was a member of the anticolonial Beacon Group, named after The Beacon, a Trinidadian literary magazine they founded that published political works by a range of West Indian writers from 1931 to 1933.54 After moving to Melbourne in 1948, De Boissière joined the Realist Writers Group co-founded by Eric Lambert, Frank Hardy and Stephen Murray-Smith. Four years later, de Boissière would publish his first novel, Crown Jewel (1952), which depicts a police shooting at a 1937 labour strike in Trinidad partly organised by Garvey's UNIA. While one can argue that de Boissière's immigration from Trinidad to Melbourne enabled him to look back on the island of his birth with a critical distance, an overly positive account of the writer's mobility tends to underplay the networked nature of racial discourse. My point here is that racial profiling is not an isolated phenomenon but something that is inherently networked, built on associations, comparisons, and equivalences across a global sphere. De Boissière recounts that his wife and two daughters, who were travelling from the Caribbean to Melbourne, were stopped by customers officers acting on Australia's White Australia Policy: "My family is still on board the Marine Phoenix. Why haven't they been allowed to disembark? What is all this about Canberra?" He [the customs officer] began to take me to task. I must have known that there were certain restrictions on entry, I had deliberately breached them, I had put the shipping line in a very difficult position. We left the ship with the sick, unhappy feeling that we were tolerated migrants. It would be long before she could put this humiliating episode behind her (163-164)

54 For further insight into the effect of The Beacon upon the nascent emergence of West Indian literature, see Reinhard Sander. The Trinidad Awakening: West Indian Literature of the Nineteen- Thirties. Greenwood, 1988.

De Boissière's experience serves as a reminder that the likeness or shared experience between Caribbean and Aboriginal writers is often the result of a violently enforced racial doctrine of whiteness, against which racial minorities could be policed on ambiguous directives. The vague directives of 'non-white' terminology asserted in the White Australia Policy allow for a wide range of applications, ambiguous enough to both enforce the movement of local Aboriginal populations and police the arrivals of Afro-Caribbean visitors.

Nonetheless, in this period, the literature of post-war Caribbean writers like Fanon, particularly Black Skin, White Masks, provided the foundation for the growth of a range of Black rights organisations in Australia such as the Brisbane chapter of the Black Panther Party, of which Fogarty was a member.55 In interview (Brennan and Fogarty; Moore and Fogarty), Fogarty has stated that he came to Fanon while working as an activist alongside Denis Walker and John Garcia.56 Fogarty may also have had direct contact with Caribbean intellectuals prior to his reading Fanon in the late 1960s. As Aboagye posits, during the time Fanon circulated into Fogarty's hands, a "small influx of African immigrants," including Carol Johnson and Roberta Sykes, began to make waves in the activist circles of Australian politics (74).57 Examples such as this present us with the shared political universe out of which Caribbean and Aboriginal literatures spring. I do not wish to suggest here that Aboriginal and Afro-Caribbean political causes were exactly aligned. Rather, these meetings were indicative of the slow process of working through cultural and political differences. The challenges of intersectional solidarity can be grasped in Melbourne, August 1969, as the Victorian Aborigines Advancement League invited Roosevelt Brown (the leader of the Caribbean Black Power movement) to visit. The decision prompted a nation-wide Black Power scare in white Australian newspapers. During the visit, Pastor Doug Nicholls engaged Brown in debate and challenged his claim that the Civil Rights movement could be "rubbed out" by well-meaning elites (qtd. in Maynard 19). While Brown and Nicholls had much in

55 In addition to Fogarty, the circulation of Fanon's work inspired a plethora of Indigenous writers, artists, and scholars, including Smith who cites Fanon's call "for the indigenous intellectual and artist to create a new literature, to work in the cause of constructing a national culture after liberation still stands as a challenge" (29). 56 The intersection of Aboriginal political life and the Black Power Movement is set out more extensively elsewhere, see Kathy Lothian. "Seizing the Time: Australian Aborigines and the Influence of the Black Panther Party,1969-1972." Journal of Black Studies, vol. 35, no. 4, 2005, pp. 179-200. 57 Fogarty also relates the influence of Malcolm X upon his literary and political output. The influence of the US Black Power Movement upon Fogarty is the subject of his poem, "The Spirit of Malcolm X," which commemorates Malcolm X as a martyr (1984, 67). In response, Ameer Chasib Furaih has recognised continuities between Fogarty and African American writers affiliated with the Black Panther Party (2018). For an insight into Roberta Sykes' work, see Love Poems and Other Revolutionary Actions. Saturday Centre, 1979.

common – the two Black leaders were mutually targeted by Australia's racist legislation—the political differences between them had to be settled over an extended discussion.58 Above all else, the connections in Aboriginal and Caribbean histories indicate that their solidarity is often inhibited by inter-colonial entanglements and a shared experience of racial oppression. These complexities would inform the manner in which Aboriginal and Caribbean writers engage one another, an ambivalence between these two groups that has not been addressed in previous scholarship.

II. The Doubling of Caribbean and Aboriginal Literature

These historical continuities underscore that, while Caribbean and Aboriginal writers appear to be employed in structural opposition to one another, in fact, these are literatures that have evolved in relation. This relationship, which is often framed by racial taxonomies, inter- colonial entanglements, and shared literary values, can be traced through early postcolonial theory, to Brathwaite's and Fogarty's discourses of self-determination, and on to writings that have been published in the last few years. The complexities of these continuities and similarities can be extrapolated from an example art historian Ann Elias uses in her recent book, Coral Empires: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropic, Visual Modernity (2019). Elias points out that surrealist artist André Breton, a contemporary of Glissant, reproduces an image of a Bahamas coral bridge in his book, Mad Love (1937). However, when it comes to publication, Breton misnames the picture, "The Treasure Bridge of the Australian Great Barrier" (qtd. in Elias 5). Breton's misnaming the two coral bridges is a striking example of the way an original meaning of an image or place is irrevocably lost when it is removed and reproduced elsewhere. As Elias argues, the reproduced coral reef appealed to surrealist readers, duplicated or not, given that "the visual spontaneity of coral reefs suggests life in its most spontaneous form" (27). However, by detaching the Bahamas from their attached meanings in the Atlantic to form a metaphorical correspondence with the Great Barrier Reef, Breton upends the geographical and historical mooring points which we attribute to either region. The slippage draws our attention to a network of trans-oceanic associations across a planetary ecosystem. Such detachment and reproduction typifies the relationship between

58 The relationship between the two regions continues from this period into the 1980s and the present day. For instance, in 1986, Helen Boyle, head of the Committee to Defend Black Rights remembers a visit to the Caribbean profoundly. Boyle suggests that Aboriginal-Caribbean solidarity continued to be invaluable in unveiling the future of the decolonisation movement, "There is a light at the end of the tunnel. If you want to see what shape the light is, go to Cuba and Nicarauga" (27).

Caribbean and Aboriginal literatures. As Caribbean or Aboriginal texts move beyond a local sphere, they are often confused or read in likeness with one another, leading to the complicated question, a problem that Aboriginal and Caribbean writers answer in various ways: do I disavow these inter-colonial connections and insist upon self-determination, or accept these points of similarity and emulate the other's work?

These complications are underscored in the literary scholarship connecting Australian and Caribbean literatures. In one of the earliest contributions to Caribbean-Australian scholarship, Helen Tiffin and Diana Brydon establish that Caribbean and Australian literatures share the thematics of diaspora, the linguistic conditions of colonisation, and the brutal violence involved in the removal of Indigenous peoples from their lands (1993). Having drawn out these commonalities, Tiffin and Brydon conclude that these two literatures are linked in their rebellion against the "imposed authority" of the "English literary tradition" (194-197). Their assessment of these similarities is advanced by McMahon. Among McMahon’s arguments is an examination of English novelist and historian James Froude (1818-1894), whose books, Oceania, or, England and Her Colonies (1886) and The English in the West Indies (1888), were lampooned by Australian and Caribbean literary critics. McMahon notes that as Australians ridicule the superficial view that Froude drew of Australia as 'Froudacious,' their Caribbean counterparts challenge Froude's racially-charged claim that the peoples of the Caribbean lacked unity, "No people there … in the true sense of the world," and coin the term 'Froudacity,' to mean false or obtuse (50). In this way, Froude serves the dubious honour of connecting Australia and the Caribbean in shared resistance against the arrogant impositions of imperial culture. McMahon goes on to say that while the historian was "deeply implicated in the racialized literary networks that connected the Australian and West Indian colonies at this time," we should acknowledge "that many Australians may not have taken issue with Froude’s racism" (78-80).59 McMahon draws our attention to the fact that the affinities or likenesses between Australian and Caribbean literature often foreground "the racialised literary networks" that bifurcate West Indian and Aboriginal peoples as two ends of a racial spectrum. To disavow or accept a level of inter-colonial similarity with the Aboriginal or Caribbean Other necessitates negotiating with these racial paradigms.

59 McMahon advances this dissertation' description of Froude's place in Caribbean-Australian history with a more sustained account of his impact upon future postcolonial writing (2016, 78-80).

Post-Froude, the two regions continue to be aligned together by writers in conscious and unconscious ways. In 1964, Australian novelist Randolph Stow notes in an article entitled, "Négritude for the White Man" that Australian writers who depict Aboriginal peoples must navigate "between the demands of sociology on the one hand and art on the other" (4). While taking a critical view of racist representations of Aboriginal peoples, his title invokes an undifferentiated pan-African consciousness to examine what he perceived as the invisibility of Aboriginal literature. He uproots the Caribbean concept, Négritude, from its Africanist context in order to measure the extent to which Aboriginal people are tied to local roots. The Caribbean is the rootless normative to the rooted specificity of Aboriginal Australia. Other attempts to draw a likeness between the two region have underplayed or obscured the differences in Caribbean and Aboriginal literatures. For example, consider the central Australian contribution to postcolonial literary criticism, the aforementioned, The Empire Writes Back. The authors describe the Caribbean as "the crucible of the most extensive and challenging post-colonial literary theory" (144). Brathwaite, among a range of Caribbean thinkers, is a key point of emphasis, a polydialectical example that framed their readings of other literatures, including Aboriginal Australian literary output. My intention is not to critique The Empire Writes Back given that its contribution to this area, and that the project of finding and affirming certain continuities between postcolonial literatures is analogous to the aims of this dissertation. Rather, I wish to situate the ground-breaking essay collection in the uneven power relations of inter-colonial exchange and on that basis make more ethically grounded interconnections between Caribbean and Aboriginal literatures. 60

That Aboriginal and Caribbean likenesses may nullify key distinctions and differences accounts for the way Indigenous and Creole writers disavow inter-colonial connections. A case in point is Lionel Fogarty's relationship with Martinique writer and psychiatrist Franz Fanon. In interview, Fogarty has cited Fanon's influence upon his poetry (Brennan and Fogarty; Moore and Fogarty). Despite this, Fogarty's complicated engagement with Fanon has not been fully examined in literary scholarship. Take for instance, Fogarty's

60 In her critique of the text, Dorothy Figueira states that The Empire Writes Back is indicative of the "ahistoricity and universalising deployments" of postcolonial theory (246). From another perspective, Araluen Corr argues that the universal focus of the text aligns "the vastly different life-worlds of the settler and Indigenous subjects [...] through forms of communal oppression" (n.p.). Both Figueira and Araluen Corr posit that the text paints postcolonial literature with a broad brush that obscures difference, a distinction that favours a Caribbean literary example. More recently still, Reder and McCall argue that The Empire Writes Back's representation of Indigenous cultural production within postcolonial theories suggested that Indigenous culture is "unknowable without an examination of the effects of Imperial power" (8).

transformation of Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks to suit an Australian context in his poem, "Do Yourself a Favour, Educate Your Mind": I was born into ashamed Blackness with Europeans hard pushing words that makes the peoples ideas tighten into european turn outs. I am not at an age to be trapped in deals such as the case of my old peoples. European education is a hardness to cope. So in turn, we rebel with no understanding of where to go So in fact I'm locked in their mind bashing dungeons. Every chance the body and mind got, I feed my thoughts with anger to lighten up my self ability. For myself, a new birth has arisen in enthusiasm Replacement needed at the brain to be fast educated in different knowledge. (2017, 33)61 In the opening line, Fogarty adapts Fanon's phrase "I was born in the Antilles" (15), itself an intertextual reference to the conventional opening of nineteenth century slave narratives, to "I was born into ashamed Blackness."62 As with Fanon, Fogarty suggests that decolonisation can only be achieved by tapping into a "different knowledge," that is separate from the Euro- centric foundations of settler-colonial education. However, the poet's reproduction of Fanon's phrase to resist the cultural baggage of a "European education" suggests that the poet takes on another baggage: a Fanonian-Marxist politics and Caribbean postcolonial theory. In this way, "Do Yourself A Favour" sees Fogarty's wrestling with both the imposition of European values and the postcolonial influence of the Caribbean.

Fogarty's consistent references to Fanon in his poetry and in interviews inspired early criticism on the Aboriginal poet. Mudrooroo describes Fogarty as "Fanon's native" who has

61 The poem also references the Stevie Wonder song of the same name, which came out in 1971. 62 For an insightful account of the link between early slave narratives and twentieth century African American literature, see Houston A. Baker. The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism. University of Chicago Press, 1980.

captured the language of the coloniser "in a guerrilla action and made it over into a free one of the Aboriginal spirit" (1995, xiii). Mudrooroo likens Fogarty's linguistic experimentation as an extension of Fanon's decolonial politics, making Fanon the precedent for Fogarty's disruption of Australian English. More recently, Fogarty's connection to Caribbean concepts like creolisation influence how the poet is read. For instance, Alizadeh opens his introduction to Fogarty's Mogwie-Idan poetry collection stating that Fogarty's poetry is frequently read as "the most vivid illustration of a creolised aesthetics in contemporary Australian literature" (14).63 While Fogarty does acknowledge Fanon’s influence in interview, he often dismisses the writer's influence. He states that he didn't read texts like Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks comprehensively: "I wasn't a very good reader, I used to dab in bits and pieces" (Fogarty and Moore). He expounds on his reading method in interview with Michael Brennan: "I am mosaic in reading, I nitpick readings. I often read back to front, similar to Chinese" (n.p.).

The link between Fogarty and Fanon is amplified at the close of "Do Yourself a Favour, Educate Your Mind": When first born my mother and mother nature it was early Lights of morning As the sun got closer to the body of mine I yelled to mother nature to give me what's rightfully mine but found it not my loving mother nature that's holding Back what's mine And wrote my death in George the Third. (34) Here, Fogarty symbolically disassociates himself with his Anglophone middle-name, "George," as signifier of the invasion of Aboriginal lands under and in the name of King George III. Beyond Australia's shores, Fogarty's decision times up with the name-changes of a series of writers who were familiar with Fanonian-Marxist ideology, including Brathwaite and Kenyan author and decolonisation activist Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo'o. In 1970, ten years prior to the publication of "Do Yourself a Favour," Thiongo'o discards his given name 'James' to honour his native Gikuyu tongue. One year later, Brathwaite was given the name 'Kamau' in a ceremony orchestrated by Thiong'o's mother (Thiong'o 1994, 677-682). While Fogarty was

63 For another example of Fogart's being read via Caribbean concepts, see Matthew Hall. "Forced Poetics in Lionel G. Fogarty's 'Disguised, Not Attitude' and 'Bam Gayandi'." Antipodes, vol. 32, no. 1/2, 2018, pp. 209- 223.

not in direct contact with Thiong'o or Brathwaite, each writer was immersed in a Fanonian school of thought that questioned the cultural baggage of the coloniser. The names they discarded, James, Edward, and George respectively, commemorate a series of British monarchs from across the colonial era, a linguistic cast of a colonial education.

While Fanon, Thiongo'o and Brathwaite may have served as a precedent for Fogarty's "new birth" (34), Fogarty makes a stronger case for local inspirations at the close of the poem. As Fogarty extends the birth metaphor, a local environment "mother nature" becomes synonymous with the maternal: "I yelled to mother nature to give me what's rightfully mine / but found it not my loving mother nature that's holding / Back what's mine" (34). The maternal reference, as well as the poem's consistent references to birthing, draw our attention to Fogarty's own rebirth as ‘Fanon’s native,’ the decolonised Aboriginal poet. The two iambic phrases "body of mine" and "rightfully mine" evoke the beginning and ending of a transition between two modes of subjectivity, between a colonised and decolonised imaginary, and between George and Lionel. In each line, the shift between unstressed and stressed syllables (bo/dy of/mine) marks the violent rupture of the poet's claim to selfhood. A similar fatalistic liminality marks Brathwaite's his rejection of the name, Edward, in Barabajan Poems, which Cobham-Sander analyses in the following way: The poet is hurtling through the space between two modes of potential subjectivity – the incompletion of Edward and the aspiration of Kamau [...] as in the process of birth the foetus/child must pass through a hypothetical moment when its connection to life's breath comes neither through the lungs nor via the umbilical cord. (2016, 83). Cobham-Sander describes the state of flux that underpins the task of 'decolonising the mind.' In the case of Fogarty, the transition is doubly complicated. The poet must take on a decolonial imaginary at the same time as he disavows the influence of the Afro-Caribbean precedent in order to articulate a self-determined Aboriginal identity. This complication is reinforced as Fogarty discovers that "it not my loving mother nature that's holding / Back what's mine," underscoring the fact that imposed sources of education, whether European or Caribbean, will distance him from a surrounding landscape. Fogarty closes the poem with a regained sense of connectedness to the land he was alienated from in Cherbourg Mission, Fanon looming in the background: "They'll never control us forever / who knows what tomorrow will bring for our peoples" (36).

That there may be an Afro-Caribbean precedent to Fogarty's decolonial metamorphosis raises two points. First, if we take Fogarty at his word in interview, the Fanonian phrasings and thematics of his early poetry become indicative of his use of the English language as a tool that is not encoded with cultural value, a fact that allows him to plug it in and out of his work without becoming dependent on it. Like a bower bird, Fogarty incorporates Fanon's phrases and formulations without tying himself to Fanonian cultural politics. Second, Fogarty's rejection of Fanon exemplifies the poet's need to disavow the inter-colonial conditions that lead to his self-determination. Contra Mudrooroo's characterisation of Fogarty as "Fanon's native" (1995, xiii), the poet recognises that he must be seen on his own terms, that his poetic output is read as somehow representative of the subjective character of Aboriginality, and to identify solely with Afro-Caribbean literary traditions would lead his readers to perceive Aboriginal literature as reliant upon precedent. In interview, Fogarty reflects on the influence of overseas decolonial movements: "I think that [Fanon] boosted my confidence in speaking my opinions, not through a Negro eyes, or African eyes, but as an Aboriginal [...] What that reading did was boost my understanding that there is more to the picture than hatred or violence at the time" (Fogarty and Moore). Fogarty's use of the word "boost" to denote his own intellectual and political contribution is not inconsequential here. The term conveys that decolonial texts from Caribbean writers such as Fanon can only supplement local epistemologies and poetical definitions.

Fogarty's decision to distance himself from Fanon indicates that the relationship between Aboriginal and Caribbean literatures is often framed in racialised terms. An experience of open racism has been a recurring trope in the experiences of Black artists and writers who visit Australia. These experiences almost always foreground the concurrent racialisation of Black and Aboriginal peoples. For instance, Trinidadian pianist Winifred Atwell would deplore the conditions endured by Aboriginals in her 'outback tour' of Australia in 1962. These accounts evoke the writer's sense that the racism they experience is a duplication of the racial divides elsewhere, making Australia a double of the United States or the Caribbean. Yusef Komunyakaa, who is of Trinidadian ancestry, made extensive visits to Australia over the ten years of his marriage to Sydney-based novelist Mandy Sayer. Out of that experience emerged his chapbook February in Sydney (1989). In interview, Komunyakaa has expressed his interest in a range of Aboriginal writers, including "Jack Davis, Kath Walker, and Colin Johnson [...] because of the magnitude of their vision," which reflects a continuous existence "in excess of forty thousand years" (qtd. in Gotera 215). Komunyakaa also celebrates the

resilience of Aboriginal peoples in his poem, "Protection of Movable Cultural Heritage," where he honours the memory of the Aboriginal leaders, Yagan and Pemulwuy: "the jaws of these two / resistance leaders haven't been broken / into a lasting grin for the empire" (2013, 175). However, the literary and political solidarity between Komunyakaa and Aboriginal Australians may stem from their shared experience of racial doubling, as documented in the title poem of the above chapbook, "February in Sydney." Komunyakaa describes a narrator who emerges from a screening of Bernard Tavernier's film Round Midnight onto "cool cobblestone streets," before being confronted by an all-too-familiar scene: Another scene keeps repeating itself: I emerge from the dark theatre, passing a woman who grabs her red purse & hugs it to her like a heart attack. (2013, 178) Komunyakaa suggests that Australian racism is "another scene" in a sequence. Even as the "scene" is specific, it unfolds in many repetitions and variations. The narrator perceives a moment that is always-already "another," one in a sequence. The sequential nature of the event invokes the cinematic mode of the poem: a visual panorama of a Louisiana/Sydney composite. The figure of "the dark theatre" metaphorically invokes the filmic nature of these racist duplications, while also calling to mind the segregation of public cinemas in Australia and the United States. As Giles states in his penetrating analysis of Komunyakaa's time 'down under,' Australia becomes "a parallel universe for the protagonist, who is doomed to carry his mental burden with him even into alternate environments" (2014, 409). That it is unclear whether Komunyakaa was confused as an Aboriginal or recognised as foreign reflects a mutually constitutive racial discourse that aligns Black populations together across the Caribbean, the United States, and Australia, yoked into a common identity in fear of blackness.

If Caribbean writers have been subject to racist representations of Aboriginal Australians, then it is also the case that certain Black visitors to Australia have been complicit in and responsible for the racial oppression of Australia's Indigenous peoples. This history was recently taken up by Gomeroi poet Alison Whittaker in the poem, "Ships in the Night" (2018), published in a special edition of the literary journal, Transition, entitled, "Bla(c)kness in Australia." Whittaker remembers John Johnstone, a British African freedman who was hanged for his involvement in the 1838 massacre of the Wirrayaraay community at Myall Creek, "my freshwater neighbours near the namaay" (68). Johnstone's role in the massacre

threatens to upend the solidarity between the poet and Afro-Caribbean populations, Whittaker acknowledges, as the memory "takes our unsteady allegiance down this very old street" (68). Whittaker then points out the value of an intercultural dialogue based on truth-telling. To her, the worst outcome of such a complicated inter-colonial history would be if "bla(c)k lives don't talk to each other" (67). She concludes the poem in the following way: Those ships in the night did this to us. We cannot pass quiet – our currents gone an' wove (68) While Whittaker writes a message in blank verse so as to make it unambiguous, there is a considerable degree of symbolism that needs to be unpacked here. By "those ships in / the night" Whittaker calls attention to the figure of the slave ship in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, what Glissant describes as a "womb-abyss" in Poetics of Relation (5).64 Whittaker imagines the slave ship is silent, as Glissant does: "The only thing written on the slave ships was the account book listing the exchange value of slaves. Within the ship's space the cry of those deported was stifled" (5). In Whittaker's poem, the silence on the slave ship allows Aboriginal Australians and Afro-Caribbean slaves to pass one another without recognising the contiguities between their respective histories and experiences of empire, immigration, and colonisation. The poem rages against these historical mborders, linking Australia and the Black Atlantic as regions whose literary and historical outlook are often circumscribed by insular colonial histories, their interconnections disavowed and repressed. As Maynard suggests in his analysis of the relationship between the UNIA and the AAPA (2009), that sense of distance speaks to the way Afro-Aboriginal histories were excised from our collective memory. Whittaker’s commitment to interweave these histories is evident in the warp and weft of the linguistic fabric of the poem, as in "gone an' wove." The line places two stressed syllables in juxtaposition, "gone" and "wove," effectively mirroring the syllables against one another as well as the different cultures embedded into the text. As well as pairing the opposites of the Afro-Caribbean and Aboriginal Australia, the continuity underscored by "an” locates a source of common ground – perhaps the currents moving the

64 Paul Gilroy also analyses the figure of the slave ship in his landmark work, The Black Atlantic, describing it as a "living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion" (4).

ships amongst one another are interwoven. In this way, "Ships in the Night" simultaneously draws attention to the mobility of black populations between colonial worlds and the need to recognise the broader structures of inequality inhibiting their contact.

Whittaker describes a more fluid relationship between Afro-Caribbean and Aboriginal writers in the poem, "triangulating" (2018), also published via Transition: curls whose around the spit bay languid at the lip, a lip. exchange a string. a rump an' a more. gammon cultural spiral on to a mutual eat. you a mouth and me umami. one blak. I'm the you, we black. both bitter sweet. salty, or somewhere languid? repulsed. lay back loops. we spit. (71) Whittaker adopts a "languid" manner of speaking that inflects the structuring of the stanza itself. The poem's rhythm is created by consistent internal rhymes, "spit" and "string," alliteration, "mouth and me," and enjambment, "rump an' / a more." Rather than lead to closure, the ends of each line lead to liminal points of enjambment, as in "languid / at the lip, a lip." Through these strategies, Whittaker establishes a common plane of contact between "you" and "me," opening a poetics of encounter between herself and an Afro-Caribbean counterpart. The figurative doubling of the two figures is reinforced by a racial subversion of the double helix figure: "exchange a string […] cultural spiral." Whittaker conveys that the speaker and her counterpart are the shared authors of an intertwined stream of consciousness; their union produces "umami" or perfect balance. The enjambment "I'm / the you" illustrates Whittaker's decision to fold black identities onto one another, creating a palimpsest of what she describes as bla(c)kness. In a striking poetic statement, Whittaker recognises that Afro- Caribbean and Aboriginal literatures double one another, twinned in racialisation, colonial history, and literary resistance.

The tendency to align or double Caribbean and Aboriginal writers informs how Brathwaite and Glissant are read by Australian writers and scholars.65 Scholars working on Australian topics often deploy the concepts of Caribbean writers like Brathwaite, Glissant, or Fanon to understand and analyse Aboriginal literature. In the process, concepts like Relation or

65 The following scholars use Brathwaite as a key figure in their work: Sharrad 1993; Ashcroft 2017. Likewise, for a range of Australian scholarship on Glissant, see Wright 2006; "Envisioning the Archipelago" 2011; Minter 2013; Cooke 2013, 2-37; Griffiths 2017.

tidalectics become what Said conceptualises as travelling theory, a way of thinking that moves "from person to person, from situation to situation, from one period to another" (1991, 226). Said goes on to say that "a theory in one historical period and national culture becomes altogether different for another period or situation" (226). He suggests that an idea can help to unblock certain limitations in current academic thought, provide new horizons to the constraints of regionalized fields, and yet it can risk all the pitfalls of global circulation. Alike with Breton's misnaming the Bahamas as the Great Barrier Reef, a travelling theory can gain a second-hand original providence as new environments claim it as their own, devolved by serialised reproduction.

The reproductive processes that come with travel, especially inter-colonial travel, are underscored in the adoption of Glissant's archipelagic thought as an antidote to the isolationist tenets of Terra Australis. Consider Australian poet Les Murray's reformation of the Australian landscape in his poem, "Kimberley Brief" (1992, 3): With modern transport, everywhere you go The whole world is an archipelago Each place an island in a void of travel While possibly coincidental, it is nonetheless intriguing that Murray repeats almost verbatim Glissant's statement in Traite du Tout-Monde, "the entire world is becoming an archipelago" (194). While Glissant would publish the phrase after Murray's "Kimberley Brief" (1992), he expresses similar formulations in L' intention poétique (1969), Le discours antillais (1981, 17-19) and Poétique de la Relation (1990), all of which predate Murray's poem. In addition, following St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott's review of Murray's work in 1989, Murray would name Walcott’s poetics as a significant influence on his verse-novel Fredy Neptune (1998). Murray uses the figure of the archipelago-world to great effect. He extends the Glissantian trope to create fluid links between the isolated corners of the Australian continent, and in the process, re-materialise an Australian landscape lost to a "void of travel." To Murray, island motifs are useful precisely because, as McMahon points out, "they will always escape comprehension by dint of complexity, difference, and relentless processes of change" (2016, 56). Murray draws on these unsettling capacities in order to destabilise the panoramic command of the tourist who flits in and out of Australia's discrete corners, leaving ‘voids of travel’ in their wake.

As an Anglo-Australian poet, Murray's sense of alienation from the land evokes an all-too- familiar settler syndrome: unease in the Australian outback. In this way, Murray's use of the world-archipelago can be likened to the settler-colonial strategy of importing foreign cultural or literary resources to feel more at home. In another context, Jonathan Dunk writes that Murray makes frequent use of cultures and materials foreign to Australia, adorning "Lawrence of Arabia's keffiyeh, or a possum-cloak, stitching it to some of the more mythopoeic moments of Greek myth or Judaeo-Christian theology" (n.p.). He argues that such cross-cultural adoptions register, even subliminally, The closure, the antinomy that continues to structure settler writing in Australia, in which any simple assumption of formal cadence implies and reifies colonial possession [...] There is no direct or simple egress from this predicament, and anything that looks like it is selling you something that belongs to someone else. Dunk posits that a settler-poet such as Murray must not only take on Indigenous modes of knowledge production if they are to survive the outback, but also adapt the lessons learnt elsewhere – in islands like Barbados, St. Lucia, or Martinique. For this reason, Murray's use of archipelagic motifs can be likened to the Roth example discussed above, to take one example to make sense of others, to dress the Carib in a possum-cloak. Differently to Fogarty, who disavows his inter-colonial links to Fanon, Murray embraces the gravity of a Caribbean literature that had been celebrated by The Empire Writes Back a few years earlier.

The capacity for Caribbean epistemologies to unsettle or rearrange Australian geography also explains Indigenous Australian poet and scholar Peter Minter's turn to Glissant. Minter writes the following in an essay response to Murray's use of Glissant's archipelago motif in "Kimberley Brief": The image is metaphorically useful […] because it can be applied to any part of the surface of the planet to describe a set of relations between outcrops or nodes of intensity. Imagine an archipelago of psycho-geographic concentration, ballooning and emergent in related and unrelated physical and psychic and ecological relationships, in areas of Country in dreaming and story and law, or cohering as various kinds of habitus in cities and towns and across regions. (2013, 163) Drawing explicitly on Glissant's concept of Relation, Minter emphasises a connection to Country that is infinitely scalable. By way of Glissant, he perceives the unity between distinct points of emphasis through "psycho-geographic concentration." We may imagine Minter placing the 'image' of the Caribbean archipelago onto the island-continent of Australia, an

archipelagic frame that allows him to contest the view of Australia as an insular or isolated island-continent, as criticised by Eckermann in "Australantis."66 Fittingly, Minter opens the "Australiana" section of his poetry collection, Blue Grass (2006), with an epigraph from Glissant, "every way of speaking is a land" (8), and in the poem, "is it is," Minter applies Glissant's words with an understanding of the intrinsic connection between language and place: the sky remembering how things arranged between bodies tall on the city's plain will quietly seam space--the last gold light in the tender caravan window radiant as grasses. (35-36) Minter attempts to revive the interrelation between isolated bodies and spaces in an Australian metropolitan city, a site where the arrangements "between" are only commemorated in the sky above. To reanimate the vitality of "things [...] between bodies," Minter turns once again to "an archipelago of psycho-geographic concentration" (2013, 163). He places things into a set of relations in order to align the "city" with a memory of the "plain," a measure to give agency back to the land. It is the "city's plain," and not the poet, that "will quietly seam space" together. Differently to Bundy's reference to Aboriginal Australian Dreaming in parallel to Harris' dreamscape, Minter's poem expresses the tenets of Glissantian thought to reanimate the psycho-geographic continuities across Australian spaces. And again, as opposed to Fogarty's disavowal of the inter-colonial likeness between himself and Fanon, Minter uses poetry to construct a philosophical bridge between the two regions, less wary of the dangers of replication and reproduction.

Recalling Minter's projection of Glissant's archipelago onto the Australian metropolis, Waanyi writer Alexis Wright draws on Glissant in an essay published by the Australian literary magazine, HEAT, on the subject of her novel, Carpentaria (2006).67 The essay outlines Wright’s decision to distinguish her work from current Australian writing. She suggests that Carpentaria did not "fit into an English, and therefore [the] Australian tradition

66 A scholarly projection of archipelagic geography to contest the myth of the insular Australian context is provided by McMahon, see Elizabeth McMahon. "Reading the Planetary Archipelago of the Torres Strait." Island Studies Journal, vol. 8, no. 1, 2013, pp. 55-66. 67 As referenced in the Introduction, another angle to the Caribbean-Aboriginal solidarity is evident in Harkin's description of Kincaid's A Small Place as a significant influence on her work (Harkin and Minter).

of creating boundaries and fences which encode the development of thinking in this country" (82). She finds that her work exceeds, erodes, or otherwise escapes a porous national boundary to find "a larger space than the ones we have been forced to enclose within the imagined borders that have been forced upon us" (83). As with Minter, Wright turns to the Caribbean archipelago as a way of working through the experience of alienation that comes from an ongoing experience of colonisation. Faced with an Australian landscape bounded by "fences," Wright turns to Glissant: The French-Caribbean writer and philosopher Edouard Glissant in his Poetics of Relation describes the dialectic in Caribbean reality as the balance between the present moment and duration. Looking inside this reality, Glissant does not see the 'projectile' reality of a coloniser. His Caribbean is a non-projectile imaginary, mingling centuries, and continuing through the whorls of time. (2006, 5). To Wright, Glissant presents us with a more dialectical temporality where the present moment is durational, that is, an accumulation of multiple times together that mingle "centuries" and continue through "the whorls of time." In this way, his "non-projectile imaginary" disrupts the linear tenets of colonisation and can serve as a philosophical bridge to the all-times of Aboriginal spirituality. As with Minter, Wright describes Glissant's archipelagic thought as a parallel to the psycho-ontological sense of space underpinned by an Aboriginal Australian understanding of Country. As Castro-Koshy argues in her examination of Wright and Glissant, "Carpentaria allows the reader to apprehend a poetics of relation through an Indigenous perspective, anchored in a place, and 'where the spiritual, real and imagined worlds exist side by side'" (118). To negotiate a passage through both environments involves a conscious understanding of the intermingling of times and spaces together. Fittingly, Wright suggests that her novel "asks what becomes of the islands we have created, of communities, our places and ourselves. An island can easily destroy and remake itself from its own debris" (16-17). The discursive reconstruction of an archipelago from a set of islands is also the focus of Glissant's and Brathwaite's effort to inscribe a submarine unity across the Caribbean Sea, the central focus of Chapter Three. Wright's likening an Aboriginal sense of Country to Glissant's concept of Relation encircles the literary and ontological connections connecting these singular colonial histories, and in the process, heralding future connections between these literatures.

To embrace a foreign theory or literary text as a way of escaping a colonial reality, or insist upon a local discourse of self-determination? As McMahon indicates in her analysis of

Froude, this question is framed by a transnational racial discourse that can be a source of shared experience, as in the case of De Boissière, or persecution, as in the case of Whittaker. For a figure such as Fogarty, inter-colonial affinities can only ever be supplementary given that they may be used by a white Australian reader, critic or scholar to underplay local discourses of self-determination. By contrast, writers such as Minter and Wright embrace Caribbean concepts as a way of working through internalised colonial psyches. They utilise the Caribbean archipelago as a representational foil to resist the reduction of place into abstract form, what Glissant describes in Poetics of Relation as the "arrowlike" desire to conquer empty space (15-23). These distinctions illustrate the diversity of Aboriginal literary responses to the world, a point I underscore in Chapter Four. Moving forward to Caribbean writings on Australia, these engagements reflect an understanding of the Caribbean as being an inherently global literature, a literature able to transcend its local roots.

III. A Caribbean Discourse on Australia

The relationship between Australia and the Caribbean is defined by reciprocity, shaped and informed by writers in both the Atlantic and the Pacific. Here I turn to Glissant's writings on cultures and places outside of the geographical and historical context of what Gilroy describes as the Black Atlantic (1993). While Glissant is most often read against this mythic, geographical, and psychological framework, he does long for other literary worlds. In Poetics of Relation, Glissant laments the distance between himself and Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha: "At one time I regretted that such a world had not gone farther, spreading its vision into the Caribbean and Latin America. But, perhaps, this was a reaction of unconscious frustration on the part of one who felt excluded" (22). Although Faulkner reaches the Caribbean in his novel, Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Glissant suggests that he is somehow removed from Faulkner's literary world, on the outside looking in. The poet mirrors the feeling of Aboriginal writers such as Minter or Wright who, forced to look for other worlds to disrupt the colonial project in their local sphere, project the distant psycho-geographical figure of the Caribbean onto an Australian landscape. Glissant's desire for literary reciprocity is also evident in his concerted interest in ethnography, a field of study that allowed him to scrutinise distant worlds with varying degrees of intensity. In his 1956 essay collection, Soleil de la Conscience [Sun of Consciousness], Glissant describes himself as an "ethnologist of myself" (21-22). Prior to the book's publication, Glissant had been studying ethnography at Le Musée de l'homme from 1953 to 1954 under the surrealist writer and ethnographer Michel de Leiris.

Britton argues that Glissant believed Leiris to be capable of a reciprocal form of ethnographic study that brought "to bear on his study of others the honesty and rigour of self-analysis that, according to Glissant, characterise the literary writer" (2012, 41-42). In a telling point that throws his "unconscious frustration on the part of one who felt excluded" into relief, Glissant comments upon Leiris' reciprocal ethnography in Poetic Intention: "The distrust we feel towards [ethnography] comes not from the displeasure at being watched, but from the resentment at not watching in return" (122). Glissant suggests that cross-cultural studies, such as between his own Martinique and Aboriginal Australia, must be reciprocated, a logic that would be adapted into the poetical notion of Relation that characterises his later essays.68 In the vein of reciprocity, I turn to Caribbean writings on Aboriginal Australia.

Glissant makes several references to the Pacific region, Australia and its First Nations peoples in Caribbean Discourse and Poetics of Relation. The reference to Australia in Caribbean Discourse is made in a footnote. While footnotes might appear to be insignificant, consider the momentous critical debate generated by Dash's obscuring of a footnote where Glissant acknowledges his debt to Deleuze and Guattari in Caribbean Discourse. As Gilroy argues in The Black Atlantic, the omission was intended to preserve "the aura of Caribbean authenticity that is a desirable frame around the work" (31).69 Gilroy indicates that Glissant's oeuvre is framed by various cultural, ideological, regional, or historical points of reference. Recalling Fogarty's disavowal of Fanonian precedent, Dash excises the reference to Deleuze and Guattari in the fear that Caribbean Discourse would be dismissed for its reliance upon a European philosophical precedent, a critique placed upon the later Poetics of Relation by Hallward (2001) and Bongie (2008). If we take Gilroy's point, footnotes, references, asides, and translations become important topoi for tracing out the discursive boundaries of a self- determined postcolonial literature. Given the nebulous, labyrinthine nature of inter-colonial histories, Caribbean-Australian history especially, it is only fitting that Glissant's footnote did not make into the body of Caribbean Discourse given that these comments may mislead a reader from local roots.

68 For further work on Glissant's ethnography, see Kullberg, Christina. "Crossroads Poetics: Glissant and Ethnography." Callaloo, vol. 36, no. 4, 2013, pp. 968–982. 69 Further down the rabbit-hole, Kathleen Gyssels has argued that Gilroy's own lack of acknowledgement of Francophone writers like Glissant in The Black Atlantic is representative of an insularised Anglophone Caribbean that eliminates the Francophone from consideration (60).

The footnote charts what Glissant describes as a "map of significant situations in the relations between one people and another" as a way of contextualising the "obsession" of a Creole population for a singular cultural identity: The analysis of any global discourse inevitably reveals the systematic development of well-known situations (proof for all to see), as for instance on the map of significant situations in the relations between one people and another [...]. A dispersed people that generates on its own the impulse to return (Israel), that is expelled from its land (Palestine), whose expulsion is 'internal' (South African Blacks). A people that reconquers its land (Algeria), that disappears through genocide (Armenians), that is in distress (Melanesians), that is made artificial (Micronesians). The infinite variety of 'independent' African states (where official frontiers separate genuine ethnic groups), the convulsions of minorities in Europe (Bretons or Catalans, Corsicans or Ukrainians). The slow death of the aborigines of Australia [...]. Composite people but 'cut off' (Australians) and even more resistant to other peoples. (18) Recalling the outdated views of Prince Phillip as he asked a Djabugay performer if they continue to throw spears at one another (Sewell and Hartley), Glissant refers to the imminent extinction of Aboriginal peoples, an elegiac foil to an Antillean literary identity. The myth of Aboriginal Australians as a dying race can be traced back to the imperial discourse of Terra Nullius. Always contested, this lingering social Darwinism was well and truly refuted in an outpouring of work associated with the Australian Civil Rights era (1960-1970).70 Glissant's throwaway reference to Aboriginal extinction may indicate the limits of using relation as a universal way of thinking, an interrelation of all entities that is contingent upon the absence of ‘Indigenous’ cultures. Previous readings of Glissant in Australia have not uncovered the comment. For instance, Castro-Koshy's study of Wright and Glissant acknowledges the epistemological differences between the writers, but goes so far as to state that Carpentaria "allows the reader to apprehend a poetics of relation through an Indigenous perspective" (118). That the footnote has gone unrecognised suggests an unwillingness to engage his works on the specific meridians implied by the text and a tendency to avoid reading Indigenous and Creole theoretical discourses together.

70 For an overview of early critiques of Terra Nullius, see Kevin Gilbert. Because a White Man'll Never Do It. Angus & Robertson, 1973.

Glissant's reference to Australia as "composite but 'cut off'" reiterates the colonial tropes of Terra Australis that justified the selection of Australia as a British penal colony, that it was an isolated southern land that was separate from the life in the Northern Hemisphere. I argue that the colonial myth of terra nullius that made Australia a vacant or negative space reflects the repressed aspects of Glissant's cultural upbringing back into his writing, given that, as Bidjara scholar Jackie Huggins argues (1993), the circulation of ethnographical narratives relating to Aboriginality ultimately reveals more of the nature of Western ethnology than Aboriginal people themselves. That Glissant's works foreclose the agency of Aboriginal peoples speaks to the fact that ideas that travel beyond a local environment often reveal more of its new authors than its place of origin. In this case, what is reflected back into the text is Glissant’s desire to manifest local roots into the surrounding landscape, still pockmarked by the absence of Indigenous Caribs; Glissant makes this point in order to express the dialectical tenets of "free and forced poetics" (1981), which I defined in the previous chapter as the means by which the Martinique subject can transition from dependence to self-determination. His reference to Aboriginal extinction underscores the limits of this concept, as well as the biases that may have stemmed from the poet's ethnographic education. While Glissant's suggestion that Aboriginal Australians are destined to a "slow death" (1989, 19) is, as I argue in Chapter Three, informed by an entirely different history of Indigeneity, the footnote powerfully underscores the complications of Australian-Caribbean history, as writers such as Fogarty or Glissant move beyond a given cultural framework.

The recurring figure of Aboriginal Australia also emerges in Poetics of Relation as Glissant draws a distinction between his concept of errantry and the Indigenous cultures who engage in what he defines as circular nomadism, a Deleuzian-inspired term that refers to the nomadic existence of those who exhaust the resources in one space before moving on (15-23).71 In response, Glissant argues that nomadism reifies the "ideological claims presumably challenged by this thought," before extrapolating further: Is the nomad not overdetermined by the conditions of his existence? Rather than the enjoyment of freedom, is nomadism not a form of obedience to contingencies that are restrictive? Take, for example circular nomadism: each time a portion of the territory is exhausted, the group moves around. Its function is to ensure the survival of the group

71 In response to Hallward's suggestion that the Martinique poet is "the most thoroughly Deleuzian writer in the Francophone world" (1998, 441-442), Drabinski argues that Glissant's work is better read as underscoring the concrete history of Caribbean enslavement and colonialism (2019, 100).

by means of this circularity […] Circular nomadism is a not-intolerant form of an impossible settlement. (10-11) In Glissant's view, circular nomadism is predetermined by ecological conditions, making continued existence impossible, a formulation that reiterates the poet's thoughts on the limits of an Indigenous connection to place. Glissant then proposes his concept of errantry as an alternative, which he differentiates from nomadism by suggesting that errantry "does not proceed from renunciation nor from frustration regarding a supposedly deteriorated (deterritorialized) situation of origin; it is not a resolute act of rejection or an uncontrolled impulse of abandonment" (18). While Glissant's critique of Deleuze's nomadic theories may be valid, the above passage raises a distinction between Indigeneity and Relation that reflects the poet's limited awareness of the Aboriginal example – where nomadism marks a form of self-determination without that freedom being in any sense 'absolute.' For millennia, as scholars such as Bruce Pascoe (2014) and Bill Gammage (2011) have shown, Aboriginal language groups across Australia have maintained a highly complex agricultural and aquacultural system, reflecting a deep understanding of local resources within a larger, planetary ecosystem. In the current day, demonstrated anthropological evidence of these histories are the legal requirements of inhabitancy under Australia's Land Rights legislation, which are now synonymous with recognitions of Aboriginal 'settlement.'

Glissant would return to his earlier characterisations of Aboriginal peoples in an interview with Manthia Diawara in 2009. Prompted by Diawara to account for the recent surge in popularity of his work following the crises of the Balkans in the 1990s, where calls for diversity resulted in deadly ethnic cleansing, Glissant argues that The very movement of the world enables us to understand, because after seeing on TV the aborigines of Australia, Japanese, Parisians from the hood, Inuits from Alaska, we've understood that we can't understand everything and that there are things that remain within themselves. As a result, the world catches up with this sort of reflection on its complexity, on mixture, etc., and people end up accepting the idea. (Glissant and Diawara n.p.) In a striking statement for this dissertation, Glissant suggests that the circulation of televisual depictions of Aboriginal Australians, as a representation of the ends of the earth, allowed his readers to understand that everything is connected, and in so doing, come to his theories of Relation with new insight. The secondary implication is that despite being depicted in the transparent terms of a documentary aesthetic, Aboriginal Australians "remain within

themselves," that is, they remain opaque to the viewer. The absolute difference between the viewer and the Aboriginal Other frustrates any attempt to understand or come to terms with them.72 While this formulation can be likened to the tenets of Glissant's concept of opacity, indivisible and unchangeable representations of Aboriginality have been challenged by a range of Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, most notably by Yiman and Bidjara scholar Marcia Langton's ground-breaking essay, "Well I heard it on the Radio " (1993). Further, that Glissant conveys a fixed notion of Aboriginality contradicts the logics of his own ethnographic vision, an examination of others with "the honesty and rigour of self- analysis that […] characterise the literary writer" (Britton 2012, 42). My point here is that Glissant has written of Australia in his works but has done so through sweeping generalisations in order to conceptualise a world-in-Relation.73 When reading Caribbean and Aboriginal Literatures side by side, a contradiction emerges in Glissant's concept of Relation. This is a concept that reduces the complexity of itself as it is expressed in writing or in specific applications. Notably, it appears Glissant is conscious of this. In Poetics of Relation, he describes Relation as "a theory that tried to conclude, a presence that concludes (presumes) nothing" (183). While Glissant's shocking representations of Aboriginal Australia do not nullify the importance of the diversity underpinned by his work, they do open up discussion as to the intersectional applicability of his oeuvre as it is picked up in comparative literary studies.

Brathwaite also has a profound interest in Aboriginal culture. In ConVERSations, he describes the "unexplored, ignored, unknown INCOGNITA areas of Caribbean/American experience" that are evoked by Harris' study of Roth's ethnographic work in Australia and Guyana (197). Brathwaite goes on to argue that future Caribbean writers should take up the study of ethnological accounts of "explorations of/contact with the Americas – and Pacific Asia – and Australasia" (198). He refers to the ethnological research that emerged from the contact between European explorers and Indigenous communities, events which he deems as having the potential to begin another kind of world history, one imagined through the

72 The term, "flash agents" is translated by Betsy Wing from 'agents d'éclat' in Poetics of Relation (xiii). 73 Later in Poetics of Relation, Glissant refers to Australia as being irrevocably locked into the English language: "We must re-evaluate vehicular languages, that is, the Western languages, which have spread practically everywhere in the world. Communities that are too "dense" to be considered as the linguistic margins of their languages' countries of origin have adopted them in their diffusion. The United States is not considered peripheral to Great Britain (and neither is Australia or Canada); nor is Brazil peripheral in Relation to Portugal nor Argentina nor Mexico in Relation to Spain" (116-117).

epistemological lens of Indigenous peoples. Brathwaite's engagement with ethnological histories explains his references to Australia in the prose poem, "Meridian" (1989), which was published in the Australian literary journal, Kunapipi: Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Culture.74 The poem is an autobiographical account of the poet's experience listening to the BBC world music program, Meridian. The Caribbean radio-waves are a critical space in literary scholarship, the means by which Caribbean-based writers could reach new audiences and readers in Europe. Interestingly, the Meridian program gives us other points of connection than the much more well-known Caribbean Voices program that was edited by Henry Swanzy, which "allowed many writers to [...] probe aesthetic idioms more in tune with local Caribbean realities" (Rupp 143). As Michael Bucknor argues, the wavelength between London and the Caribbean presented by Caribbean Voices has obscured other cross-cultural meridians, such as that between the Caribbean and Canada transmitted via the Canadian Broadcasting Commission (108-115). I reinforce this insight and suggest that, in contrast to Caribbean Voices, Meridian presented its Caribbean listeners with an outlet to the West, to far-off cultures and places beyond the Pacific Ocean, such as India and Australia.

"Meridian" begins with Brathwaite waking from his slumber to find the radio playing the BBC broadcast of Meridian: The full moon wake me out of my deep sleep of space just before 3 in the morning to a blameless sky through my window, the BBC still on in the room & I heard Mora Singh (didn't catch her name right) giving a chrystal clear picture of a Brittanico-lndian actress' blues on Meridian. (60)75 Brathwaite attempts to trace the sound of the Indian singer Mora Singh along an invisible radio wavelength between the Caribbean and India. Such a task leads Brathwaite to imagine his own starry sky extended into other worlds. He turns his head "when the story was done, like at the slowly end of a dream" and then turns back to the night sky where he discovers two lights "in that bright totally unexpected clear shining more brilliant than any cloudless sky – shining in fact without any competition of pleiades or other shape of star" (61-62).

74 While there are several articles that focus on Brathwaite's work published through Kunapipi, the short story is the only piece of writing published by the Barbadian poet directly. The prose poem has titular similarities with "Veridian" published in his Middle Passage collection that I analysed in the previous chapter. "Veridian" is dedicated to the community of maroon slaves in Brazil, the Chankofi people of the Palmares; both poems evoke a discursive line of intercultural connection. 75 My transcription of "Meridian" includes Brathwaite's deliberate misspellings, which are sourced from the original text, as with ConVERSations.

Brathwaite wonders if the lights are meteors, the taillights of a plane, but concludes they must be "inter-planetary visitors" ( 65). Just as he ponders whether his neighbours are observing the sight, Brathwaite's meditation is abruptly undercut by the BBC service advising Australian listeners to tune out: "this transmission is now closing & listeners in Australasia where I am sure there are many" (71). Momentarily frustrated, Brathwaite walks back outside to get a better look at the lights in the night sky. Upon closer inspection, he finds that they are merely bright lights reflected off a flagpole 'jutting out from the front of the apartment above me," where the United States flag hangs "next to the doll of a small naked legba or girl that some lampooning lamposting student had guillotined there on that crossroads of space" (73). The legba Brathwaite imagines on the flagpole is an intermediary figure in Haitian Vodou who is said to stand between the spirit world and the world of humans. The legba emerges at the crossroads and enables or denies humans the chance to speak with the spirits. Its symbolic function here next to the "Stars & Stripes" suggests that the poet's inter-planetary perceptions will always be undercut or triangulated by a colonial or neo-colonial power such as the United States or Britain. Here, the legba manages the sonic crossroads of the Meridian program, a gatekeeper who, reinforcing the cultural hegemony of the United States, controls the ability of each listener to grasp the worlds that are transmitted through the radio.

If Brathwaite understands the United States as the centralised point where telecommunication is triangulated and controlled, then Australasia emerges as a figure of reconnection: this transmission is now closing & listeners in Australasia where I am sure there are many - don't their flags have plenty stars in their sky & not crowded & set out in order rows like in the United States of America - should noW turn or tune & at one time I used to try to see if I could get these palaces on that same little computerise Sony I had been listening to Meridian on but nothing ever came out but the static I suppose of Australasian stars & by now I was through the door & down the steps & down the steps through the street & back down onto the earth of the pavement in front & below my apart/ment & I looked up at the sky & saw nothing nothing nothing there but swirling clouds like on Creation Morning (72). Brathwaite's comparison of the Australian Southern Cross and the Star-Spangled Banner frames Australia as a counter to the United States' control over the airwaves, a figure that enables the poet to trace out localised constellations. It is as if the mere mention of the southern continent bends Australian constellations toward him, its outline projected onto the

Caribbean skyline. To Brathwaite, Australia's mythic geography is embedded with notions of origins and deep time. Like Glissant's references to the "slow death" of Aboriginal Australia (1989, 18), Brathwaite's sense of the distance between himself and "Australasian stars" reiterates the trope of Terra Australis: what appears, tantalisingly beyond his reach, is a projection of the constellations of a southern landmass by which to balance one's perspective of a local environment in the Northern Hemisphere, in this case, the Caribbean archipelago.

This chapter tracked material flows in immigration, economic exchange, and cultural continuities that have helped determine the discursive outlook of Caribbean and Australian literature. Despite the fact that poets such as Fogarty, Brathwaite, and Glissant disavow these inter-colonial links, I argue that these continuities underscore the fact that Aboriginal Australian and Caribbean literatures have evolved in structural opposition with one another. Where 'rooted' Aboriginal writers such as Wright and Minter draw on the Caribbean to present new relational complexities in their works, 'routed' writers like Brathwaite and Glissant draw on Australia to root their own conceptual apparatuses into a local environment. In the following chapter, I explore the structural opposition between the Caribbean, a rootless model of the world, and Australia, rooted in place, through the lens of Brathwaite's and Glissant's poetics of encounter.

Chapter 3. Reading for Roots in Edward Kamau Brathwaite's Tidalectics and Edouard Glissant's Relation

I build my language out of rocks. Édouard Glissant. Poetics of Intention. 49.

This chapter examines the rootless myth that has traditionally defined Caribbean history and informed the literary works of Brathwaite and Glissant. Caribbean history is often framed on the erasure of the Caribbean Indigenous populations, the brutality of Caribbean slavery, the racial and cultural diversity of the region, in addition to the traumas of displacement experienced by African slaves. This history has informed literary and scholarly representations of the Caribbean, despite the work of scholars such as Stephan Palmié, Melanie Newton, and Shona Jackson, who challenge the assumption that there is no Indigenous population in the Caribbean. Most pertinently, the rootless mythos has shaped how Brathwaite's and Glissant's poetic works are read in a global context by scholars such as Hallward (2001), Bongie (2008), Ashcroft (2013), and Hessler (2018). In this chapter, I argue that these readings may uproot the Caribbean’s literature from its localised history, and in so doing, mislead us from Brathwaite's and Glissant's literary projects of reimagining the spatial and ontological function of the root. I re-examine the links between Brathwaite and Glissant’s writings and a localised sense of Caribbean ecology in order to unsettle the rootless myth. More provocatively, I re-situate Brathwaite's and Glissant's work from an Indigenous perspective, that is, I argue that both poets attempt in some way to emulate or challenge Indigeneity in a way that roots their poetries into place. Here my approach resonates with DeLoughrey’s exploration of the tidalectic between routes and roots as "a poetic corrective to materialist approaches to Caribbean historiography" (2007, 47); however, I supplement her insights by drawing attention to Brathwaite’s and Glissant’s poetic appropriation of material points of contact. On this note, I analyse each poet’s attempt to reconcile the absence of the Indigenous Caribs, Tainos and Arawaks in order to ascertain the effect of these influences upon their engagements with Aboriginal Australia. These ties are crystallised in each poet’s contribution to Alcheringa: Ethnopoetics, a literary journal that I analyse at the close of this chapter.

I. Imagined Islands, Indigeneity, and a Global Caribbean

Figure 1. The World Islands, Dubai UAE.

In Traite du Tout-Monde (1997), Glissant declares that the "the entire world is becoming an archipelago" (194). For Glissant, geographical formations like archipelagos allow us to understand the complexities of a world in relation with itself. That our world(s) appears to share qualities with the Caribbean was the logic behind James Clifford’s controversial statement that "we are all Caribbeans now in our urban archipelagos […]. Perhaps there’s no return for anyone to a native land – only field notes for its reinvention" (1988, 173). Clifford’s glib phrase draws upon two Martinican poets: he adopts the title of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal [Returns to a Native Land] (1939) as well as the archipelago-world underscored by Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse.76 The implication of Clifford’ claim is that the Caribbean may be used as an adjective to make sense of global interconnectivity, given that the archipelago is without specificity. Anyone may 'belong' to the Caribbean archipelago – given that it is somehow removed from the world we live in, and that no ‘native’ Caribbeans continue to exist there. To Clifford, "the entire world is becoming a Caribbean archipelago." Metaphoric formulations such as these, which imply that the Caribbean archipelago can allow us to become attuned to global relationality, risk obscuring

76 Clifford's statement is also forged on the erasure of another local particularity, the famous chant "Nous sommes tous des Juifs allemands" (We are all German Jews) popularised in the 1968 student riots in Paris, as students worked in solidarity with the German Jew, Daniel Marc Cohn-Bendit. While I am critical of Clifford's glib statement here, it should be noted that the interdisciplinary historian has made a significant contribution to the diaspora and Indigenous studies that have influenced this dissertation, see James Clifford. "Indigenous Articulations." The Contemporary Pacific, vol. 13, no. 2, Fall 2001, pp. 468– 490.

the local historicity of Brathwaite's and Glissant's work and re-affirm the mutually constitutive bifurcation of roots and routes.

Universal readings of Caribbean concepts have been critiqued in the last two decades. Mimi Sheller argues in Consuming the Caribbean (2003) that using Caribbean theoretical concepts as floating signifiers for a universal zeitgeist can be likened to "theoretical piracy on the high seas of global culture" (188), in that universal applications of these concepts can set them loose from their original meanings. To Sheller, this practice parallels the global consumption of the region's land, plants, resources, bodies, and cultures. DeLoughrey also makes the case that comparative literary scholars must attend to both "the island as a world as well as the worldliness of islands" (2007, 7), that is, a study of an island as a self-defined space as well as an ecology that is interrelated with a planetary sphere. McMahon reinforces the need for future research on the question of the universality of Caribbean literature when she states that the world "has come to rely on" post-1950 Caribbean writing "for its ongoing reanimations" (2016, 107). Similarly, in their 2018 response to the 'relational turn' that has emerged in the wake of Glissant and Brathwaite, Pugh and David Chandler suggest that entities such as islands should be better understood as "too relational to be grasped in coherently governable ways […] ‘too close’ to focus on, too full, too present for us" (69). Put simply, they ask that scholars avoid using Caribbean theoretical concepts on Relation as if they are transparent and empty vessels of thought. The concern for universal or normative applications of Caribbean thought, as expressed by scholars working on Caribbean-based topics over the last twenty years, indicates that the global dissemination of Caribbean literature has not been sufficiently addressed.

In addition, I argue that the globalising of Caribbean thought is connected to both literary representations of islands as places of reinvention and the erasure of the Caribbean’s Indigenous history. Rather than analyse these factors separately, I suggest that in the case of the Caribbean, the abstraction of islands and the invisibility of Indigenous populations are mutually tied together. As Clifford himself indicates in reference to Césaire and Glissant, the propensity to imagine and thereby take possession of islands necessitates the absence of an original culture. If this is the case, then the arc of islands protruding off the coast of the Central Americas may be likened to the image of the World Islands, a development off the coast of Dubai, which opens this chapter. The World Islands offers its rich and famous clientele the chance to live in a manmade archipelago and to flit between the continents. At a

glance, the linked financial utopias/tax havens of the World Islands resemble mutant doppelgangers of Glissant's archipelagic imaging of the world in Traite du Tout-Monde (194).77 The World Islands draws out the global scope of Glissant’s reflection as well as the way the poet is often disassociated from a local environment in order to make sense of the world we live in – a writer of a global condition.

That the Caribbean appears to offer itself as a world-model can be explained by the close link between islands and invention. As Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith suggest, what defines an island is its ability to "be held in the mind's eye and imagined as places of possibility and promise" (2).78 Edmond and Smith call attention to the fact that islands are often subject to the monomania of characters like William Shakespeare's Prospero and Daniel Defoe's Crusoe, or an explorer like Columbus – all of whom desire to take possession of islands in order to imagine the world in fundamentally different ways. It is this promise that also inspires Deleuze to liken the deserted island to a place of a ‘second origin’ in his essay, "Desert Islands." He means that deserted islands are places where human society can begin again, an idea explored in the biblical story of Noah, where the world's oceans cover the planet and the human survivors flock to the tip of the highest mountaintop. For Deleuze, this myth suggests that an island can be considered "an island or a mountain, or both at once: the island is a mountain under water, and the mountain, an island that is still dry" (12-13).79 The highest mountaintop/deserted island becomes Paradise Regained: "the survival of a sacred place in a world that is slow to re-begin" (14). Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens account for Deleuze's slippage between islands and mountaintops when they argue that our desire to imagine islands as places of possibility can make it appear as if the arrangement of islands across an archipelago is of human design: "the archipelago emerges as neither strictly natural nor as wholly cultural but always as at the intersection of the earth's materiality and humans' penchant for metaphoricity" (7). Roberts and Stephens suggest that

77 The manmade archipelago also acts as a mirror to Tobagonian poet and playwright's Eric Roach statement: "I am the supple rhythm of the seas/I recreate the world on islands" (1992, 147). Interestingly, the surrounding coral circle that attempts to protect the World Islands from oceanic currents and tides is beginning to be absolved by the natural elements. As reported by The Business Insider, each year the World Islands sink metres into the warm waters of the Persian Gulf, forcing developers to invest vast sums of money in importing sand from Australia (Ludacer 2018). 78 The paradoxical representation of islands in terms of "boundedness" and "limitlessness" is first established by Greg Dening in Islands and Beaches (1980). 79 The link between mountains and islands was taken up recently by Katharina Piechocki, who remarks that both mountains and islands "serve as productive nuclei of cartographic productions and translational activities" (2015, 96).

the Caribbean archipelago is irrevocably subject to the human propensity to inscribe metaphorical meanings onto geographical forms –a passageway to the Americas, a natural harbour, a social utopia, a eugenic laboratory, a penal colony, a speck of dust, or an unsinkable aircraft carrier as Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez put it (2017).80

Glissant and Brathwaite are forced to reconcile their native lands with these metaphorical meanings.81 In the Glossary to Caribbean Discourse, Glissant defines the Francophone Antilles as "Confetti, dancing girls, nightmare, incomplete archipelago, specks of dust, etc. That is how we are seen" 261). He suggests that the Caribbean is the sum total of mythologies that are projected onto its islands, rather than its native forms of expression (if there are any). Brathwaite also reminds us that the Caribbean’s metaphorical representation tend to romanticise the region’s violent history in his poem, "Islands", (1973, 204): So looking through a map of the islands, you see rocks, history's hot lies, rotting hulls, cannon wheels, the sun's slums – if you hate us. Jewels [...] The light shimmers on water the cunning coral keeps it blue. The stuttering enjambments of "history's hot / lies, rot- / ting hulls" dwells on the gap between literary and cartographic signifiers of 'islands' and their more dynamic geographical

80 The phrase 'speck of dust' derives from as French President Charles de Gaulle's remarks on the appearance of the Francophone Antilles from the air on his visit in 1964. Elizabeth McMahon makes a similar point to Roberts and Stephens when she argues that "To the reader who contemplates both man and island and their relation of alternating encompassment, the two terms appear coeval; neither begat the other, each is created in the other" (2016, 30). 81 In the field of Island Studies, a range of scholars draw upon Brathwaite and Glissant to challenge our propensity to fix islands in place (Baldacchino 2006; Pugh 2013). Hester Blum makes a comparable critique when she argues that "the sea is not a metaphor" (2010, 670).

realities. We are presented with an irreconcilable gap between a map and its geographical real. The unsettling effect is reinforced by the internal rhyme between "rock" and "rot," a lexical mirror aligning the human propensity to project metaphorical meanings onto islands with the romanticisation of the "rotting hulls" and "cannon wheels" that sit in a ferment of salt, water, and sunlight – a signifier of a brutally violent colonial history. The enjambment "rot- / ting" doubles oue unease, suggesting that what we find in a "map of islands" is a state of putrefaction. Ultimately, Brathwaite suggests that it is impossible for the signifier for an island to stand in for the island itself, yet we believe anyway, taken in by the trick.82

The metaphorical representation of the rootless island is tied to a broad acceptance of the erasure of the Caribbean’s Indigenous peoples, a point that frames Benítez-Rojo’s postmodern examination of the Caribbean archipelago as a ‘meta-machine': The Caribbean is not a common archipelago, but a meta-archipelago. […] Thus the Caribbean flows outward past the limits of its own sea with a vengeance, and its Ultima Thule may be found on the outskirts of Bombay, near the low and murmuring shores of Gambia, in a Cantonese tavern of circa 1850, at a Balinese temple, in an old Bristol pub […] in a windmill beside the Zuider Zee, at a cafe in a barrio in Manhattan. (3-4) The above can be read as an imaginative revision of Medea, where the Chorus prophesise that reaching the distant land of Thule will make all culture relative, whereby "the Indian drinks of the cold Arazes, the Persians quaff the Elbe and the Rhine" (31).83 If Thule was once the metaphysical concept driving the European explorer forward, Benítez-Rojo repurposes the term to suggest that the Caribbean has become a mode of refraction through which the world will be seen. Benítez-Rojo adapts Seneca’s vision to reflect the apparent disorder of the Caribbean, its different colonial histories, languages, cultures, ethnic groups, and political structures. The implication, as with Seneca’s Medea, is that such interchange has made it impossible to define the world with any objective clarity.

He goes on to say that the Caribbean archipelago is "a metamachine of differences whose poetic mechanism cannot be diagrammed in conventional dimensions, and whose owner's

82 Brathwaite's own propensity for trickery is the subject of J. Edwards Chamberlin's commentary on the Barbados poet's use of nation language. Chamberlin refers to the term as "an imaginary language spoken by no one" (84). 83 A more thorough analysis of Caribbean identity politics is provided by Bongie, see Christopher Bongie. Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature. Stanford University Press, 1998, pp. 1- 23.

manual is found dispersed in a state of plasma within the chaos of its own codes and subcodes" (18). Here, Benítez-Rojo parallels Clifford’s suggestion that "there’s no return for anyone to a native land—only field notes for its reinvention" (1988, 173). Both writers focus upon the way acts of writing, as in "field notes" and an "owner’s manual," foreground the disappearance of the Indigenous Carib. The ambiguity of the "owner" in Benítez-Rojo's statement matches that of the "native land" in Clifford's. In this way, Benítez-Rojo reflects Indigeneity's pull over the imaginaries of Caribbean writers like Brathwaite and Glissant. His statement reflects both Glissant's Poetics of Relation and Brathwaite's ConVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey, texts whose pages are littered with literary plasma: neologisms, gnomic turns of phrase, conceptual rabbit-holes, changing typefaces, and poetic re-formulations of earlier work.84 Brathwaite describes his oeuvre as "organon, or the organic, […] all of my work fits into a constant pattern which keeps on growing" (1992, n.p.), whereas Glissant notes that Poetics of Relation is the "reconstituted echo or spiral retelling" of earlier works (16). I argue that this sense of repetition does not mark a return to a native land, nor a reinvention of it, but is in fact an attempt to bring nature and culture together in a "dialectical whole that informs a people's consciousness" (Glissant 1989, 63). The ambiguous identity of the 'owner' of Benítez-Rojo's meta-archipelago encircles a lacuna that recurs across Brathwaite’s and Glissant’s poetic projects; namely, the invisibility of the region’s Indigenous peoples. In their different ways, Brathwaite and Glissant come to stand in for, emulate, or attempt to move beyond, the Indigenous figure. On that note, and on the basis of the literary and historical connections between Caribbean and Australian Indigenous histories elucidated in the previous chapter, I wish to explore the implications of reading Brathwaite's and Glissant's texts as Indigenous, or at least, texts that attempt to work through the absence of an original culture.

Most historical accounts argue that there are no remaining traces of the Caribbean region’s Carib, Arawak, and Taino populations. As John Carlos Rowe explains, "the relationship between indigenous and diasporic peoples is often neglected in part because of the colonial genocide that murdered native populations" (163). Australian scholars also dismiss the relevance of Indigeneity to the Caribbean. Sharrad, for example, suggests that there are more "pressing problems" such as the "conflicting racial, cultural and historical determinants" of

84 For further discussion of the reformulation of Brathwaite's poetry, see Kelly Baker Josephs. "Versions of X/Self: Kamau Brathwaite 's Caribbean Discourse." Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, vol 1, no. 1, December 2003, pp. 1-15.

creolisation (1993, 61). Sharrad and Rowe indicate a widespread acceptance of the fact that a particularly violent process of settlement and colonialism eradicated the Indigenous Caribs, "a genocide of astounding proportions that in some islands occurred within fifty years of European arrival" (DeLoughrey 2007, 230). These histories have come under question in the wake of a number of grassroots campaigns for public recognition of Indigenous identity and culture in the Caribbean. In 2006, the Guyana government passed the Amerindian Act to recognise the ongoing presence of a Carib population in its territories. While the Guyana government refused to call it the 'Indigenous Peoples Act,' as doing so would entitle the Carib communities to legal and political rights, the Act stimulated a reframing of Caribbean identity and culture.85 Jackson highlights a "growing body of work in the academy" that reflects "the ongoing efforts of Caribbean Indigenous groups to organise on a national level" via organisations like "the Santa Rosa First Peoples Community (Trinidad), the Amerindian Peoples Association (Guyana), and at the international level through the Forest Peoples Programme, the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues" (520). In her own assessment of Caribbean Indigeneity, Newton draws attention to the fact that Indigenous populations in the Caribbean were historically defined according to racial purity rather than survival, and thus Afro-Indigenous groups were frequently re-categorised as Black (2013).86 These purist racial taxonomies incited divisions between Creole and Amerindian populations and led to the destruction of Afro-Indigenous communities like the Black Carib communities of St. Vincent and Dominica. The claims of Indigenous communities in the Caribbean continue to be underplayed or disregarded, making "self-identifying Indigenes […] bold pranksters or perhaps self-deluding holders of a false consciousness" (Forte 47). In response to this growing body of work, I turn to the way the lack of recognition of the Caribbean’s Indigenous populations informs the region's literature.

If we gloss through the Caribbean literature of Clifford's "field notes" and Benítez-Rojo's "owner's manual," it appears that Caribbean writers initially affirm the extinction myth. As Kenneth Ramchand declares in 1970: "The aboriginal Indian seldom appears, and is not a centre of social or political interest either in verse, in drama, or in fiction by writers from the

85 Newton suggests that the omission of Indigeneity in Caribbean culture has erased the Indigenous identity of characters in Caribbean literature, such as the figure of Caliban, a free-born Indigenous Carib in William Shakespeare's The Tempest (2013). 86 For further research on the categorisation of Amerindian peoples in the colonial period, see Fay Yarborough. Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

West Indies" (164). However, as Jackson writes, what is conveyed here is a much-held belief, "the assumption of the historical disappearance of Indigenous peoples in the Caribbean" (520). The invisibility of the region's Indigenous peoples masks their complicated position in literary projects of self-determination. Following forbears like Wilson Harris, whose complicated engagements with Indigeneity are examined in the previous chapter, Caribbean writers have drawn upon the figure of the Carib and their cultural resources for a range of purposes: to assert their self-determination via genealogical ties to the natives or to affirm or challenge the region's stratified history. In particular, as Jackson posits, the supposed disappearance of the Indigenous Caribs "is continually repeated and reiterated in the postcolonial period as a condition of possibility for Creole belonging" (521). Jamaican playwright, historian, and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter produces perhaps the first sustained argument for Creole Indigeneity in 1970: The more total alienation of the New World Negro has occasioned a cultural response, which had transformed that New World Negro into the indigenous inhabitant of his new land. His cultural resistance to colonialism in this new land was an indigenous resistance. The history of the Caribbean islands is, in large part, the history of the indigenisation of the Black man. (35) Wynter makes the case that the history of enslaved Africans in the Americas is a history of Indigenisation, of transforming one's identity and culture in a contigent relationship with the land. Following Wynter in Contradictory Omens, Brathwaite states that following the destruction of the Indigenous population, the descendants of enslaved Africans became the new bearers of an Indigenous culture in Caribbean: "a real Alter-native Tradition since they have successfully replaced the Amerindians as the folk […] tradition" (29). Wynter and Brathwaite indicate a willingness among Anglophone Caribbean intellectuals to reimagine preconceived notions of Indigeneity in order to reflect the self-determination of the Creole population.

Brathwaite also makes the case that the extinction of the Indigenous Carib is over- exaggerated. He acknowledges that the Amerindian "presence was – is – not as 'totally eroded' as the stereotype has it […] and is at the moment even now consciously trying to 'unterrorize' – revitalize – reterritorialize itself" (1999, 199). Brathwaite’s theoretical and poetic work features consistent references to the continued presence of the region’s Indigenous peoples. For instance, in "World Order Models" (1985), Brathwaite suggests that

the submarine unity connecting the islands of the Caribbean extends from the voyaging traditions of the Indigenous Carib: From the Morne […] in the English/French-patois speaking island of St Lucia, you can look across the blue to Martinique: still a département of France. In 1480, you could have done the same thing, same way, from the same place. But there were cousins across that water then; or friends or intimate enemies. And if the group set off in the canoe at early dawn, they could be there next day: looking back from Martinique to the Morne. In 1980, unless you have [an] Onassis yacht, you could not get across unless you swim. (57) Brathwaite suggests that the Indigenous peoples passed through the Caribbean with ease due to the archipelago’s geological position, only to be disrupted by the settlement of penal colonies and the establishment of the plantation system. He takes up the mantle of re- animating these relational links in his poem, "Calypso," published alongside "Islands" in his much-celebrated trilogy, The Arrivants (1973, 48): The stone had skidded arc'd and bloomed into islands Cuba and San Domingo Jamaica and Puerto Rico Grenada Guadelope Bonaire The meter of the above section reflects the skimming of a stone across the Caribbean Sea, an original moment of geological upheaval that has informed Indigenous and Creole cultural formations. By tapping into these geological resources, Brathwaite rejects the metrical conventions of the coloniser, such as the iambic pentameter ("to be/or not/to be/that is/the quest/ion"), in favour of a rising anapestic meter ("Cuba and/San Doming/o").87 As the middle stressed syllable rises, supported by the unstressed syllables on each side, Brathwaite imitates the emergence of a series of literal islands above the surface of the ocean. Between "Cuba and San Domingo" the join "and" marks a land bridge for the reader to negotiate a path along the sloping mountain ranges of the Caribbean Sea. Contra Brathwaite's aforementioned "Islands," "Calypso" illustrates the poet’s desire to reconcile the gap between himself and a foreign environment; to rediscover the marine paths of Indigenous cultures.

87 In his 1996 "My Poetry" lecture, Brathwaite states that he first began to use anapestic rhythm after hearing African drum cycles in a passing parade.

Glissant has also addressed the Caribbean’s Indigenous past across his works. In Caribbean Discourse, he notes that "Indianization" has its advantages in glossing "over the problem of Martinican origins.” However, he goes on to say, "cut off from the meaning of the past, [Indigenous] folklore becomes neutralized, stagnant” contributing “to the collective drift to oblivion" (210). It is for this reason that Glissant begins Caribbean Discourse with the following statement: "We must return to the point from which we started—not a return to the longing for origins, to some immutable state of Being, but a return to the point of entanglement, from which we were forcefully turned away" (25). Unable to reconcile a history of diaspora with "Indianization," Glissant finds himself caught between "longing for origins" and a "point of entanglement." Glissant’s choice to dwell in entanglements can be traced forward to Poetics of Relation, where he describes cultural formations developing in the absence of Indigenous peoples: "They met the first inhabitants, who had also been deported by permanent havoc; or perhaps they only caught a whiff of the ravaged trail of these people. The land-beyond turned into land in-itself" (6-7). Glissant views the Indigenous inhabitants of the Caribbean as no longer 'original' in any sense. They are victims of their own "ravaged trail." By disavowing the Indigenous claim to land, Glissant is able to present his own ideal of placehood, a form of responsibility to the Caribbean landscape, which becomes, in his view, a "land in-itself." Hence, in Poetics of Relation, Glissant advocates for "a new relationship with the land: not the absolute ontological possession regarded as sacred, but the complicity of relation" (147). In response to Glissant, DeLoughrey points out that Glissant exaggerates the eradication of the Caribs and argues that the Indianization of the Caribbean "is certainly not perceived as futile" given the tendency among Caribbean writers "to imaginatively populate the islands with indigenous presence" (2007, 262). I concur with DeLoughrey's reading; Glissant can only animate the landscape in the absence of the region’s Indigenous peoples, something which exemplifies the extent to which his thought is shadowed by the structural absence of the Indigenous Carib. These two cases support Jackson's suggestion that references to, and appropriation of, Indigenous cultural forms foreground the (im)possibility of Creole belonging. With this in mind, I reframe scholarship on Brathwaite and Glissant against Caribbean Indigeneity, a concern that allows us to better understand each poet's attempt to root themselves into an archipelagic environs associated

with negation and thereby re-define the spatial and ontological properties of the root altogether.88

II. "ebb&flow": Kamau Brathwaite's Tidalectic Encounters

The unity is submarine. Kamau Brathwaite. Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean. 64.

I now turn to Brathwaite’s ConVERSations to consider tidalectics as a poetics of encounter designed to situate the subject in the social and ecological roots of the Caribbean. To date, the concept is often framed as a methodology that allows us to make sense of global interrelations. Readings by Ashcroft and Hessler deploy tidalectics in opposition to the logics of exchange that shape our world, given that "it does not submit time to space in the capitalist logic of utility but rather constructs time and space actively and conjointly" (Hessler 63). As stated in the Introduction, I do not take issue with the use of tidalectics in opposition to European philosophy or as a universal methodology. Rather, I argue that transnational or global readings of the term must take into account the social and ecological contexts from which the term emerges: its intellectual and geographical roots. Having illuminated these foundations here, I will follow the poet’s attempt to align tidalectics to Indigenous cultures in "Sri Lanka, South-East Asia, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Australasias, the Americas" (1999, 40). A revised understanding of tidalectics is vital to the future study of Brathwaite’s work, especially given the abstraction of the Caribbean's local textures and the erasure of its Indigenous peoples.

These inter-Indigenous meridians to places like Australasia cut across the cultural and ideological frames that have shaped our understanding of Brathwaite's trans-oceanic outlook. Scholars such as Ghanaian critic Josaphat Kubayanda understand Brathwaite’s work as an extension of Césaire's Africanist vision: "Brathwaite perhaps most effectively articulates the Négritude consciousness of 'race,' history, and language" (124). Although Brathwaite is

88 For further analysis of Indigeneity in the Caribbean, see Jodi A. Byrd. "A Return to the South." American Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 3, 2014, pp. 609-620.

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undoubtedly connected to Africa, I suggest that a rigid association of the poet with the Négritude project will limit our understanding of the poet's discursive links to other lands, cultures, and languages. In Barabajan Poems, Brathwaite states that he is most often read as either "an African-oriented writer" or an advocate of "Jamaican writing" (22-23). He goes on to say that "that is nothing but the truth, but not, however, all of it" (22). Glissant also points out the need to present more engaged readings of Brathwaite's work when he praises Brathwaite in Caribbean Discourse: "Whereas I feel that Brathwaite revives thirty years later Aimé Césaire's discourse, he places it actually in a new context: the concrete and diverse realm of lived experience" (109). Mackey repeated the above quotation in interview with Brathwaite, whereupon the Barbadian poet concurred, lamenting the "politicization of the cultural and the personal" in Caribbean studies (1995, 26). Brathwaite suggests that his work must be read on live terms; that is, on direct points of contact as they arise within his work, rather than an overarching cultural identity or national politics. These statements indicate to engage with Brathwaite's work on the specific cross-cultural frames that emerge from his work, a project I unpack with reference to ConVERSations.

ConVERSations is originally drawn from a live encounter between Brathwaite, his interviewer, Nathaniel Mackey, and a public audience. Brathwaite mediates these points of contact by reformatting the text in what he describes as ‘video style,' a stylistic distortion of uniform typeface and formatting.89 These effects give the illusion of bringing us closer to the encounter itself. Brathwaite himself describes the computer-generated video style as allowing his words to live "away from - the 'page'" (166-167). In her assessment of Brathwaite’s work, Cobham-Sander likens video style to computer hypertext, in that it produces for its readers the illusion that they can consume with Brathwaite's words all the ramifications of the multiple landscapes that have produced his poet's sensibility: his family networks, his aesthetic influences, his place within Barbadian society, and his relationship to the Barbadian landscape. (2016, 72) Cobham-Sander suggests that the technique allows the reader to feel as though they have unmediated access to poetic product. In this way, video style allows Brathwaite to open up to

89 As stated in previous chapters, I cannot replicate these stylistic aspects and have sought to copy down the line-spacing of these lines as they appear on the page. Other scholars refer to video style as ‘Sycorax video style’ because the poet aligns the computer with what he sees as the forbear of Caribbean literature, Sycorax, the mother of Caliban in William Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest. For further analysis of The Tempest’s influence on Caribbean literature, see Rob Nixon. "Caribbean and African Appropriations of ‘The Tempest.’" Critical Inquiry, vol. 13, no. 3, April 1987, pp. 557–78.

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his readers, following a series of crises alluded to in ConVERSations.90 Brathwaite's more open address to readers and audiences has resulted in a seismic shift in how the poet is understood. In 1978, Gordon Rohlehr states that Brathwaite’s poetry expresses "the several faces, masks, poses, and voices of the deracinated African in the New World" (64). In a more recent reading of Brathwaite in 2010, Rohlehr suggests that the poet uses "autobiography as history" (4).91 The contrast in the two references after more than forty years of literary criticism suggest an unequivocal turn to the personal: a desire that I describe as a commitment to work through what it means to encounter and be encountered.

Brathwaite describes ConVERSations as a process of several encounters between himself and his interviewer/editor, Nathaniel Mackey, and his transcriber Christopher Funkhouser. In the opening of the text, Brathwaite lists the processes with which his own voice is mediated by other actors (15): "(1) our conversation/tape (2) transcribe Funkhouser; (3) send to Nate & KB (4) KB undertakes the palimpsest & eventual return to Chris for precious process publication." He then reflects upon the effect of literary collaboration: in so signing things ethos, Nate makes it possible for me to encounter -and w/ revision – to even ?clarify – certain xplore further - ideas i only now on the threshold of i also DREAD Interviews – in the way, tho, that i suspect a jazz musician dreads the threshold precariousness of improvisation since this is what, essentially , an interview is for me, is; but what fascinates here is the 'product': from Nate's night fishing thru my haul thru so many water on/to this palimpsest wish also to thank the audience at Poets house that night, for creating this ebb & flow of the tides from time to time – esp at the beginning, a few people still coming in, getting suttleetc -

90 In 1986, Brathwaite's first wife Doris Brathwaite died of cancer, a tragic event that is documented in Zea Mexican Diary (1993). Two years on, Hurricane Gilbert ripped through Brathwaite's house in Jamaica and its precious archival holdings. Having moved out of his home into an apartment in Kingston, Brathwaite was then robbed at gunpoint in 1990. 91 In his introduction to Brathwaite's poetry collection, Dreamstories (1994), Gordon Rohlehr again characterises the poet's work after these crises as an attempt to reconcile personal trauma with broader cultural narratives regarding loss and guilt.

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when i think – even tho these movements are ever so 'slight' and unintentional etc - that i might lose the very momentum of the genesis (14)92 Brathwaite notes that each contributor brings with them a "threshold precariousness of improvisation" that opens up the work, creating a turbulence that is crucial to "the very momentum of the genesis." He states that the dialogue make "it possible for me to encounter […] ideas i only now on the threshold of" (Italics added). If the "genesis" of ConVERSations emerges from "improvisation," the text can be likened to the interwoven notes of African American blues and jazz, making the poet a nervous jazz musician yet to play a note.93 The collaborative manner of the text's creation foregrounds a tidalectic ethos of contact that recurs across the text. These logics are implied by Brathwaite's allusion to Mackey as fisherman, the first of many watery figures of speech: "from Nate's night fishing thru my haul thru so many water on/to this palimpsest" (14). The oceanic character of the text is reinforced by the poet's reference to the seated audience at Poet's House as the "ebb & flow of the tides" that energise the text itself, evoking the cyclical flow of ideas between many hands, a mimetic mirror to the collaborative process underlying the text.

Public discussion and the community it forms are fundamental to Brathwaite's work. The memory of the audience shifting in their seats provokes Brathwaite to ask the following question in the opening pages of ConVERSations: "does the poet/artist seek an audience & if so, how? Or does the 'audience' seek/find the po/artist & is this a fact/feature of 'market forces'" (26). The throwaway question indicates that Brathwaite's meeting with the audience may be a litmus test for a larger poetic project: to create a text that reflects the identity and culture of its readers. Or, as Cobham-Sander puts it, to create "an artefact that succeeds in articulating for his community a shared understanding of their world" (2016, 117-118). One among many litmus tests can be found in the pages preceding the above quotation, where Brathwaite imagines a family of latecomers to the conversation (8): 1st voice: is yu fault why we late why we always late 2nd voice: me juss couldn't get up trying to remember the dream that makes us possible

92 Note that Brathwaite’s quotations often contain deliberate misspellings, such as "suttle." 93 Interestingly, Donette A. Francis posits that Brathwaite saw African American jazz musicians such as Sonny Rollins as a counter to the "Eurocentric culture and aesthetics" the poet was taught in school (142).

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[…] 1st child: I wonder why these people don't leff us lone dragg- in us from pistol to post from root to route till we homeless The latecomers are victims of diaspora dragged "from root to route" in their attempt to attend the event in New York City. We are oriented through their strained perception of the event, at what appears to be "the end of their space" (9). In this sense, the flux created by Brathwaite, Mackey, Funkhouser, as well as the audience provides a navigational guide for the 'rootless' subject in their passage across space and time. It as it the perceptive limit of the diasporic subject that tidalectics comes into view.

Brathwaite describes a meeting, an encounter, between himself and an older woman sweeping her front yard on the North Jamaican coastline.94 The poet distinguishes the scene from a Caribbean tourist site, "This is not a Jamaica North Coast bikini situatio/(n) that you would go to tomorrow or at Thank/sgiving. This is not the North Coast of the great/hotels, James Bond, 'GoldenEye' and tourism. /This is a ole yard, okay?" (29-30). Brathwaite suggests that the yard is far from the Jamaica that is globally renowned, and which entraps the country in a self-perpetuating mythology of rootless escapism. The meeting between the poet and the old woman is also mediated by the unfolding of tides upon the beach, a fitting place to write an encounter narrative. As Greg Dening posits, "beaches divide the world between here and there, us and them, familiar and strange" (32). Against the looming threats of commercial tourism and an imperial history of beach-side encounter narratives, Brathwaite describes the "old woman of Caribbean history" attempt to sweep "sand from sand" (29-30).

94 In the preceding chapters, I have underscored the difficulties of escaping a diametrical relationship with the coloniser. Here, Brathwaite's poetic encounter with the old woman presents readers with another diametrical relationship between the male observer and the watched woman. This point has led to feminist critiques of Brathwaite's poetry, for instance Beverley Brown's "Mansong and Matrix: A Radical Experiment" (1986). A feminine figure has often emerged in Brathwaite’s poetry to guide the poet out of irreconcilable oppositions. Cobham-Sanders draws our attention to the female character in Brathwaite's Mother Poem, who guides the protagonist through "the labyrinth of their personal hells" (1993, 46). She returns to the relationship between Brathwaite and the feminine in the footnotes to I and I: Epitaphs for the Self: "there is often an implicit opposition in his work between woman – as place, land and mother – and man – as intellect, alienated subject, keeper of the word of the father" (2016, 257). Similarly, the above encounter between Brathwaite and the sweeping woman differentiates between the poetic reverie of the masculine observer and the naturalised and essentialised labour of the feminine figure. While there is much to say regarding this facet of Brathwaite's work, my focus here is on other structural oppositions, such as between the Caribbean and Aboriginal Australia.

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That is, she separates the sand of her yard from the sand of the beach in an unending repetition that is in sync with the perpetual unfolding of the tides upon the shore behind her.

The encounter allows Brathwaite to differentiate his "post-1990" work from what he describes as the "negative tradition" of Caribbean literature, including writers like "Patterson, Naipaul, & the early Walcott" (34), who he sees as equating the woman's labour with perpetual underdevelopment. The poet footnotes his meeting with the woman as a counter to Derek Walcott's poem, "The Testament of Poverty," published in 1950 via the Barbados literary journal, Bim, edited by Frank Collymore: "Her shame wants to burn / The paper house her sons earn" (qtd. in Brathwaite 31).95 Where Walcott's mother considers arson over intergenerational poverty, Brathwaite’s depiction sees the woman's labour as a trans-oceanic ritual (34): She is in fact performing a very important ritual which I couldn't fully understand which I'm tirelessly tryin to … And then one morning I see her body silhouetting against the sparkling light that hits the Caribbean at that early dawn and it seems as if her feet, which all along I thought were walking on the sand . . . were really . . . walking on the water . . . and she was travelling across that middlepassage, constantly coming from where she had come from—in her case Africa—to this spot in North Coast Jamaica where she now lives ... Brathwaite does not establish a clear point at which the woman's tireless pursuit begins and ends. As with the Greek myth of Sisyphus, a figure who was punished for trickery and forced to push a boulder up the hill only to watch it roll back to the bottom of the hill once more, the woman's labour evokes a cyclical rather than linear sense of time – a teleology that Brathwaite suggests is permeated into the sociocultural, ontological, historical, and environmental fabric of the Caribbean. In that sense, ConVERSations defends cyclical modes of thought and action as a way of articulating the psychology of a self-determined Caribbean identity, "to look into the mirror of your self" and not see "the face of […] of Charles Dickens or John Keats, Thack Colette, or Salvadare de Madariaga" (45-47).

95 Brathwaite's reference to the image of the mother burning her children's house in Walcott's "The Testament of Poverty" has another oblique reference in Brathwaite's poem, "How Europe underdeveloped Africa," as published in his Middle Passage collection: "a widow rushes out & hauls her children free" (1993, 56). For a succinct explanation of the dissension between Walcott and Brathwaite, see Patricia Ismond. "Walcott versus Brathwaite." Caribbean Quarterly, vol. 17, no. 3-4, 1971, pp. 54-71.

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The logics of self-determination that mark tidalectics are often underplayed by its opposition to the logics of Hegelian dialectics. To date, most scholars draw this oppositional quality out in their discussion of the term, a trend I outlined in the Introduction. In his closing essay for Archipelagic American Studies, Giles states that a majority of scholars understand the concept as a "cyclical" rather than "synthesizing" telos (432). The structural opposition between Brathwaite’s cycle and Hegelian synthesis contrasts with Glissant, who suggests that Hegel’s theory of dialectics informs his theory of Relation (Diawara and Glissant). These interpretations of tidalectics can be traced to ConVERSations, where Mackey suggests that Brathwaite takes " the 'thesis-antithesis-synthesis' format of the dialectic but envisions it as non-linear, like the movement of the water backwards and forwards as a kind of cyclical motion. (14). Mackey argues that Hegel's dialectics cannot account for the non-linear motion of the old woman "constantly coming from where she had come from" (33). While the opposition of synthesis and cyclical motion is central to tidalectics, Mackey and Brathwaite may be guilty of misreading Hegel’s dialectic method. Consider that Hegel himself critiques the thesis-antithesis-synthesis motif as a "spiritless scheme" (qtd. in Mueller 411). The third step in this method, which Brathwaite perceives as synthesis, is better understood as a negation of negation, or a determination of negations that "not only loses nothing and leaves nothing behind, but carries with it all that it has acquired, enriching and concentrating itself upon itself” (Hegel 482). Dialectical synthesis can instead be traced to Karl Marx's influential suggestion that "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" is an "absolute method" of Hegel's "rationalism" (qtd. in Mueller 414). As such, I argue that Brathwaite's understanding of the 'one-two-three Hegelian' leading to synthesis can be better understood in opposition to the Hegelian Marxist concepts that influenced the poet's literary contemporaries, including C. L. R. James, Fanon, Eric Williams, George Padmore, and Walter Rodney.96 The link between Brathwaite’s tidalectics and these local intellectual and social histories strengthens the case for the concept as a local poetics of encounter intended to root the Caribbean subject in place, in this case, the North Jamaican coastline.

Brathwaite challenges the Marxist-Hegelian tradition in his review of Rodney's essay collection, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), which asserts that the development of Europe could only be achieved with the underdevelopment of Africa. Brathwaite's review

96 For an account of Fanon's own path to dialectics, see Ben Etherington. "An Answer to the Question: What is Decolonisation? Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth and Jean-Paul Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason." Modern Intellectual History, vol. 13, no. 1, 2016, pp. 151–178.

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is entitled "Dialect and Dialectic" (89-99). It praises Rodney's critique as "truly revolutionary scholarship: history as teach, as thought, as verbal bomb and bullet: designed to refute and make the way clear for rightful building" (89). However, Brathwaite also critiques Rodney's reliance upon Hegelian-Marxist dialectics for making it appear as if African societies had to be escalated "from their primitive structures into something newer, more complex, more 'efficient'" (92). Brathwaite's point of dissension is methodological: "My maroon comments here concern not this brother's achievement, which quietly shines forth, but the feel and texture of this particular work: the need for some dialect to go along with the dialectic" (98- 99). Brathwaite suggests that to use the dialectic as method obscures the local ways of thinking that have emerged in Afro-Caribbean culture. While the poet would later use his term "nation language" instead of "dialect" to escape its "very pejorative overtones" as 'bad- English' in History of the Voice (266), Brathwaite's reference to dialect exemplifies his desire to couple Rodney’s project of political revolution with cultural revitalisation. This insistence upon dialect, and a commitment to Creole poetics, marks Brathwaite's own writings, as established in Chapter One. As a dialect of a dialectics, tidalectics underscores the cultural and social roots that were overlooked in Rodney's Hegelian-Marxist scholarship. In this light, the interpersonal encounters Brathwaite uses to frame the term take on vital importance as signifiers of local social and ecological dynamics.

Having defined a "dialectic" using "dialect" (98-99), Brathwaite is able to imagine the trans- oceanic encounters that are possible when one is acting on one's own terms (1999, 34): Like our grandmother's – our nanna's – action … like the movement of the ocean she's walking on, coming from one continent/continuum, touching another, and then receding ('reading') from the island(s) into the perhaps creative chaos of the(ir) future From Brathwaite's perspective, the woman's movements are projected onto the oceanic backdrop behind her. Her sweeping action crosses an enormous expanse of space along the horizon line, making landfall upon other continents and entering the historical continuums they encompass. In this sense, the figure of the woman sweeping is a part of a cyclical continuum between all cultures. Hence, the elderly woman reaches across to other islands and continents "into the perhaps creative chaos of the(ir) future." Brathwaite's poetic practice is inflected by the dynamic temporal modes of an island itself, a space that "ripples with time" as billions of entities come into zones of relation to each other, teasing "other objects into their sphere of influence" (Morton 63). Each of the temporal zones the elderly Caribbean

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woman reaches is animated by her labour, making the poem a fluctuating record of trans- oceanic history.

Brathwaite then describes the woman's trans-oceanic trajectory alongside the history of human migration out of Africa: "out of the deserts of the Sahara, […] and being transferred into the similar – no familiar – forests and desert(s) and valleys – of Sri Lanka, South-East Asia, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Australasias, the Americas, and the Caribbean – our nanna brooming the sand with her dawn and walking on the water" (40). The migration sequence underscores a trans-continental link between each of these locations. For the purposes of my dissertation's analysis of Caribbean and Aboriginal literatures, Brathwaite's reference to Australasia resituates the current sociocultural makeup of Australia against a larger history of human migration. Brathwaite's reference to "Australasia" upends an insular view of the Australian island-continent as separated from the rest of the world, curating and defining the (non-)presence of Aboriginal peoples, to re-envision a continent embedded in a deeper view of its spatiotemporal relations. My point here is that Brathwaite reads Australia on the principles with which the Caribbean is often engaged. As if reading back on Breton's canny flipping of the Bahamas and the Great Barrier Reef, Brathwaite imagines an Australasian archipelago within Caribbean paradigms: "the unity is submarine" (1974, 64). The Australia he finds is not the isolated southern continent "cut-off" from the rest of the world (Glissant 1989, 19), but a landmass connected to Southeast Asia and India via underwater mountain ranges. Gary Okihiro makes a similar comment when he realigns our maps of the Pacific against the mantle of the planet's core in order to reposition India as "part of Australia, not Eurasia" (203). Hence, in the deeper view Brathwaite takes of history, Australia is Australasia. In a later section, Brathwaite notes that each of the continents referenced "has a culture paradigm which can be 'read' from the totems of their landscape: Americas (cenote), Europe (missile), Af (circle), Asia (pagoda), Australasia (wave/boomerang)" (115). These references suggest Brathwaite's belief that cultural formations are contingent upon geographical formations. Even if using a reductive trope for the cultural output of the Australasian region (the carving and throwing of a boomerang is not shared by all Aboriginal Australian language groups), that Brathwaite aligns the looping motions of the "wave/boomerang" with the psycho-geographical tides of the Caribbean suggests that the poet connects the two regions together as part of a common oceanic history.

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Brathwaite's evocation of these totemic forms can be explained via the poet's essay, "Timehri," which examines the ancestral traces that are embedded in current aesthetic forms, such as the residues of African culture that survived the trans-Atlantic slave trade: "our own first marks of presence in stone upon wall; a way of 'history' before books" (200). Rather than reflect a bygone era, these traces become a wellspring for contemporary expression, making concepts like video style and tidalectics continuations of earlier forms of spirituality, "like quetzatcoatl flying" (205). Brathwaite's reference to these totems reminds me that he is a historian as well as a poet, a figure who perceives objects like manuscripts and journals as being imbued with expressive force in phenomenological terms. As Cobham-Sander writes, Brathwaite is the kind of writer "who understands the value of keeping everything – invitations, drafts, letters, invoices, manuscripts, bibliographies, journals" (2016, 70). To Brathwaite, to discover traces of African history in the Caribbean infers that objects can become animated through intercultural travel, a living composite tinged with a collective human imprint. The totemic forms mentioned in ConVERSations exemplify this line of thinking: the “cenote … missile … circle … boomerang” stand for aesthetic practices that unfurl together across deep time. The sequential connection between the African circle, the European missile, the Asian pagoda, the Australasian boomerang, and the Caribbean tide bear the imprint of a longitudinal views of time, an ancestral commons to which the Caribbean is immutably tied. In this way, ConVERSations presents itself as a text that is Indigenous to the Caribbean region in that it takes responsibility for housing disparate contributions to a shared compositional field. The futurity of these totems underpins the tidalectic ethos of the encounter between the poet and the old woman of Caribbean history: a mode of engagement that keeps trans-local chains of interaction in place, never synthesised or settled. By aligning the aquatic roots of Caribbean thought with this diverse range of Indigenous totems, Brathwaite radically disrupts the rootedness/rootlessness binary and orients the Caribbean subject in place and time.

III. 'Rooted and open': Glissant and the Encounter

What took place in the Caribbean […] approximates the idea of Relation for us as nearly as possible. It is not merely an encounter, a shock (in Segalen's sense), a métissage, but a new and original dimension which allows each person to be there and elsewhere, rooted and open, lost in the mountains and free beneath the sea, in harmony, and in errantry.

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Edouard Glissant. Poetics of Relation. 34.

Alongside new readings of Glissant's theoretical and literary contributions by Coombes (2018) and Drabinski (2019), this section locates continuities and roots in Glissant's thought, most notably the figure of the "risky encounter" and the "black sand beach" (Dash 2014, 33). Given that Glissant is often disassociated from a local frame of reference by a range of postcolonial scholars, most notably Hallward (2001) and Bongie (2008), this reading resituates our perception of the poet's work in a live context and in a local frame of reference. In doing so, I critique the notion that Glissant's thought is detached from a local environment in favour of Deleuzian nomadology. Alongside Celia Britton’s illumination of Glissant's local environments in his novels (1999), this chapter draws out these arguments by examining a previously unattended link between Le sel noir and Poetics of Relation.

Glissant's understanding of the encounter comes to life in an essay written by Malian filmmaker Manthia Diawara on the process of filming his documentary, One World in Relation (2009). Diawara describes an encounter that Glissant orchestrated between the filmmaker and an unnamed Malian, one of the so-called illegal immigrants [les sans-papiers] to France.97 Glissant related to Diawara that he and a number of French intellectuals and activists had campaigned to stop the French government from deporting the Malian and his family. As Diawara reflects on the prospect of meeting the man, he began to realise that he would have to attempt to act out the logics of Glissant’s concept of Relation: I was now more than anxious to meet our man from Mali, while at the same time hoping that he and I would not disappoint Glissant by exhibiting an exclusive ethnic identity (our Négritude), or by being too exotic (authentic-indigenous people according to anthropology). (5) Diawara recalls that Glissant made the introductions before leaving, "as if to give us privacy" (5). The filmmaker then discovers that the man had insisted on meeting him to ask if he could relay a thank-you to Glissant for saving his family. Diawara realises at this point that Glissant and the Malian "wanted me to relay a message to the other, that they were using me as yet another pathway, not a cleared road, but the trace of one, for their relation" (6). The

97 Le sans-papiers loosely translates to 'those without papers'. For greater insight upon Glissant's work for les sans-papiers, consider the manifesto he co-wrote with fellow Martinican writer, Patrick Chamoiseau. See Patrick Chamoiseau, Edouard Glissant. Translated by Jeffrey Landon Allen and Charly Verstraet. "When the Walls Fall: Is National Identity an Outlaw?." Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, vol. 22, no. 2, 2018, pp. 259-270.

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conveyance of the message illustrates a carefully orchestrated performance akin to the laghia, a dance in which each participant acknowledges the limits of their contribution. The encounter is built on an understanding that is relayed across different contributors, none of which have complete control over the event.98 That Glissant orchestrates the encounter in this way suggests that the poet's public role is interwoven with his poetic sensibilities and vice versa.

However, Diawara’s unwillingness to appear either "exclusive" or "exotic" also demonstrates that Glissant's thought is often read on rootless terms. Differently to Brathwaite, who, as Kubayanda alludes (124), is often seen as drawing on the Caribbean region's linguistic and cultural resources, Glissant does not fit easily within the ideological groupings of the Caribbean, despite being one of its most significant influences. Glissant does not follow Césaire (his teacher at Fort-de-France) into Négritudé, and he distanced himself from the Créolité group that took him as an inspiration.99 Citing Glissant's engagement with European philosophers like Deleuze and Guattari, in addition to non-Caribbean writers like Faulkner, Dash asks, "What does one do with a writer whose literary ancestors do not appear to come from his own cultural past? In particular, what does one do with a Black francophone writer who invokes neither Marx, Breton, Sartre nor Césaire?" (1994, 2).100 As concerns this chapter, Glissant's uneasy fit within the Caribbean led him to be associated with structurally opposed positions.101 For instance, there is Forsdick's reference to the public calls for Glissant to be recognised as a "'Nobel-ready' intellectual" (2010, 124), in addition to Lionnet’s suggestion that Glissant has "outlined the task of the postcolonial intellectual" (245). That Glissant could be considered as both the Nobel winner (following Walcott) and the postcolonial intellectual (following Brathwaite) suggests that Glissant is caught between irreconcilable commitments: a local postcolonial context and a larger planetary totality.

98 For further insight into the technicalities of how this technique works in Glissant's novels, see Celia Britton. The Sense of Community in French Caribbean Fiction. Liverpool University Press, 2008. 99 For a more specific analysis of the relationship between Glissant and Césaire's plays, see J. Michael Dash. "'The Stranger by The Shore': Archipelization of Caliban in Antillean Theatre." Archipelagic American Studies. Ed. Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens, Duke University Press, 2017, pp. 356-370. 100 For an excellent account of the connections between Segalen and Glissant's work, see Charles Forsdick. "From the Aesthetics of Diversity to the Poetics of Relating: Segalen, Glissant and the Genealogies of Francophone Postcolonial Thought." Paragraph, vol. 37, no. 2, 2014, pp. 160–177. 101 Griffith explores this aspect of Glissant in some depth, see Michael Griffith. "Toward Relation: Négritude, Poststructuralism, and the Specter of Intention in the Work of EdouardGlissant." Discourse, vol. 36, no.1, 2014, pp. 31-53.

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Perhaps the first to point out the distinction between the rooted thematics of Glissant's early essays in Caribbean Discourse as opposed to the rootlessness of Poetics of Relation, Christopher Miller laments in 1998 that "hybridity and nomadology have become a new orthodoxy in the study of francophone literature" (25).102 In 2001, Hallward supports Miller's critique of Glissant's nomadology by describing Poetics of Relation as "one of the most stridently enthusiastic fictional incantations of a borderless world ever written" (102). Seven years on, Bongie joined Miller and Hallward in suggesting Poetics of Relation is a "guilty recantation" of "once trenchant political commitments" (329). Hallward and Bongie have proved influential in shaping our understanding of Glissant's political commitments after his passing in 2011. However, their claims have also been subject to critique. In response to Miller, Hallward and Bongie, defenders of Glissant like Forsdick argue that Glissant's critics overlook his systematic public presence in political debates over the last decade (2010, 126- 128).103 In a more recent assessment of the 'late Glissant,' Coombes argues that Glissant has effectively redefined the political altogether and has given us a new set of methodological tools to understand "an alternative political future" (91).

As DeLoughrey's examination of rooted-rootless bifurcation suggests, the periodisation of Glissant's early rootedness and late rootlessness underplays continuities across his work, such as his references to interpersonal encounters and local environments that bridge the gap between the poet's theory and a lived reality. In Traite du Tout-Monde, Glissant writes, "I am this mangrove country around Lamentin in Martinique where I grew up [...] and at the same time, through an infinite imperceptible presence, which does not subjugate the Other, this shore of the Nile where the reeds turn to pulp like sugarcanes" (178).104 Glissant suggests here that his granular understanding of Martinique allows him to perceive an elsewhere, that his work emerges from a highly specific sense of place, culture, and history. Or, as Drabinski states, Glissant's "ontology of the subject emerges out of, rather than intervenes upon, space, time, language, and history" (2019, 100). The continuity between Glissant's work and a lived reality is the subject of Dash's response to Hallward and Bongie in 2014. He argues that future scholarship disrupt the binary of ‘nationalism’ and ‘nomadism’ by turning “from the

102 The 'late' turn is initially theorised by Edward Said, see Edward Said. On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. Pantheon Books, 2006. 103 Miller, Hallward, and Bongie wrote their critiques prior to Glissant's release of a series of political pamphlets, a fact to which Coombes refers (2018, 91). 104 The above translation of Traite du Tout-Monde derives from Prieto, who describes this as being indicative of Glissant's stereoscopic impulse to zoom in and out of local spaces with intensity (2012, 177).

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critical construct of the late Glissant" and discern "continuity in his thought that overrides concerns with the nationalist as opposed to the nomad" (31). Dash cites as an example the "risky encounter" between tortured subjects, a "dangerous dance between self and other" (2014, 33). Dash goes on to say that "as important as the poetics of risk for Glissant is the arena in which this dangerous game of grace and violation is played out. Glissant seems to position himself psychologically on the shoreline, invariably the black sand beach, precariously grounded between fire and water" (34). Dash draws our attention to the fact that the social and ecological nexuses of Glissant's imagination are intertwined at the "black sand beach," which refers to Diamant beach in Southern Martinique. In doing so, Dash elegantly draws out the need to root Glissant in place through his continuous references to "the risky encounter" and the "black sand beach," a line of thought I explore here in Le sel noir and Poetics of Relation.

The theoretical importance of the "black sand beach" is most clearly evoked by Glissant's early poetry collection, Le sel noir. Here I am reminded of Bernadette Cailler's warning that projecting theoretical analyses onto Glissant's poetry often reduce "the creativity of certain texts to simple illustrations or demonstrations of this or that theory or trend" (118). I argue that Glissant's poems are best thought of in organic terms; they demonstrate an exposure to poetic intention even as they intercede upon it. A case in point, Le sel noir is written in a standardised paragraph format rather than in poetic stanzas, a structure Dash characterises as combining "creative expression and investigative analysis" upon a given subject (1994, 37).105 Le sel noir opens with a dedication "to the sea / for the salt it signifies" (2005, 101), indicating that it tells a history oriented around the figure of salt. While the poetry collection records real events, such as the destruction of Carthage by the Romans and the sowing of their fields with salt, Le sel noir does not "present one simple or simplistic vision of history, or indeed of reality in general" (Cailler 102). Instead, it disrupts the reader's sense of historical events through a series of trans-local shifts: from Carthage, to the story of French peasants who paid the infamous gabelle (salt tax), the conflicts over control of salt reserves in Africa, and onto the salt that washes ashore onto the black beach of Martinique. Caught in its twinned signification of "splendour" and "bitterness" (101), the black salt is unceasing in its signification, necessitating the poet’s continual return to objects, thoughts, cultures, peoples,

105 This generic indeterminacy is also evident in the inter-modal and intertextual aspects of Soleil de la Conscience, where poems are thrust against visuals and graphics (as with Fogarty and Brathwaite).

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and landscapes that the sea has touched upon. In so doing, Le sel noir recalls the unceasing trans-oceanic path of the "old woman of Caribbean history" described in Brathwaite's ConVERSations (29), and connects Glissant's patch of earth to distant continents and continuums.

Le sel noir's opening registers the distress of a language being born, threshed and purified as it moves between the open ocean and the land-threaded delta: Splendour and bitterness yet again. Affliction of lights upon the expanse. Profusion. Theme, pure ideas, bound with sea form, with salts. Monotony: tireless clamor ruptured by the cry. There is—on the delta—a river where the word accumulates, the poem— and where the salt is purified. (101) The varying meanings and connotations contained by the salt is metaphorically indicative of the preservation of distinct oppositions. It is both "splendour and bitterness," as well as the chaos of "Profusion" and the categorical order conveyed by "Theme." At what point, Glissant questions, do these oppositions come together in a reconciled whole? Beyond the delta, the point where the saltwater of the ocean meets the fresh water of an inland river, and where linguistic convergence is at its most dynamic. It is there that the poem emerges: "where the word accumulates, the poem- / and where the salt is purified." The poem illustrates the way a composite of many parts can coalesce and become singular. In this way, the poem underscores a dialectic working through of oppositions. If we read this thematic against the 'rootless myth' of the Caribbean archipelago, I argue that the poem underscores the process by which foreign materials can belong in a new environment, and in this way, the poem may act as a metaphorical analogy for the Indigenisation of a Creole population.

The possibility of becoming Indigenous to the Caribbean archipelago is offset by the final section of Le sel noir: Acclamation It was the salt in the basin of time. Nothing was left but an obscure urn of words. Is it morning? Darkness is certainly a good omen —when words shine on the flight of steps before the house. In this realm of our hands. (132) The line "is it morning" awakens the reader with the poem's speaker, who gleans the time until morning with reference to the traces of salt left on the beach that indicate the changing tides. In this way, the "words" that "shine on the flight of steps" stand for the high watermark

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of the tide. These watermarks suggest a relational sense of time and place in that each line evokes its relation to others and the past times they represent. However, the sight becomes disconcerting. The figure of "an obscure urn of words" foreshadows the negation of the present moment and the inevitability of a time beyond the present. In this way, the salt is both a presence in and of itself and something that is brought into phenomenological (that is human-centred) cognition. The salt contains and exceeds the human capacity to view it, illustrating in its "shine on the flight of steps before the house" a series of durational view of change over time, a longue durée of signification. As Dash argues, the collection asks the reader to come to terms with the "nature of change and its inevitability" (1995, 59). The negation that Glissant equates with salt can be traced forward to Glissant's reference to the New World in Poetics of Relation as the "alluvium" for the "metamorphoses" of creolisation (7). The alluvium, a composite of salt and silt that is left by flowing floodwater, is the ecological foundation undergirding the Caribbean subject, and in this way, its figure comes to stand for the root of Caribbean experience, as trace of a fragile and dynamic archipelagic ecology.

The black salt signified by the title of Le sel noir references the black sand covering the beach of Diamant in Southern Martinique where Glissant lived for much of his life. Dash associates Glissant with that region, "the 'unhoused' poet facing the exemplary, elusive sea at the beach of Diamant" (1994, 7). In Poetics of Relation Glissant describes Diamant in depth. He distinguishes between the beach's appearance in hivernage [rainy season] where the beach becomes a "corridor of black sand" as the volcanic sediment from nearby Mont Pelée washes ashore, and caréme [dry season] where "this chaotic grandeur will be carried off, made evanescent by the return of white sand and slack seas " (121-122). Developing his meditation on the figure of the high tide in Le sel noir, Glissant evokes a temporal worldview that is interlocked with seasonal change. He suggests that the "order" of hivernage, the wet season, and the "chaos" of carême recall one another in absent opposition, as a line on the beach will recall a trace of the high tide. Peter Poiana calls attention to that dynamic in his examination of the Derridean trace in Le sel noir: "The black salt does not encapsulate the sea, but in its dryness and blackness speaks of its disappearance. It both denies the sea and recalls its presence negatively in its bitter dry taste" (158).

Glissant unifies his thought to this ecological nexus in Poetics of Relation by recounting an encounter between himself and a man he calls "le marcheur" [the walker] in Southern

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Martinique. The walker is first described as a "ghostly young man" whose "tireless wandering traced a frontier between the land and water as invisible as floodtide at night" (122). We then learn the walker has refused to speak "and no longer admitted the possibility of any language" (122). The walker's lack of speech manifests in his physical shrinking: "He didn't get angry; he didn't smile; he would move vaguely when a car missed him by a hair or threatened to knock him down. He walked, pulling the belt of his pants up around his waist and wrapping it tighter as his body grew thinner and thinner" (122). The walker's lack of speech appears striking, especially resonant in a country such as Martinique, where "all the languages of the world had come to die" (122), and in whose literary revitalisation Glissant had invested his energies. To break the walker's silence, Glissant attempts to gain a response as he passes the poet's garden, a liminal space between the house and the beach. In the days to come, the walker eventually responds to Glissant's efforts with an almost imperceptible gesture: a raise of his hand. The poet is satisfied by the gesture and reflects upon the nature of the walker's actions: We know in the end that his traveling, which is not nomadism, is also not rambling. It traces repeated figures here on the earth, whose pattern we would catch if we had the means to discover it. This man who walks is an échos-monde who is consumed within himself, who represents chaos without realising it. (208) The walker's refusal to speak or engage with others initially suggests a retreat from his community. However, as with Brathwaite's suggestion that the labours of the "old woman of Caribbean history" do not represent underdevelopment (29), Glissant characterises the walker's repetitive patterning of the earth in positive terms. He suggests that the walker's movements cannot be thought of as capitulation to the temporality of capitalist accumulation in the Caribbean, where time is measured according to the product of labour, nor an enclosed loop where postcolonial subjects are forced to perpetually relive their torturous relationship with the past. Glissant suggests that the man represents an internalised échos-monde, a term he uses to refer to the sonic resonance of the totality of the world's interconnections, making the walker is an active participant within a system of Relation that we cannot discern. In his assessment of Glissant's 'late work,' Hallward describes the walker as a Deleuzian nomad that reflects the poet's own deterritorialisation (1998, 454). However, to read the man as a Deleuzian ideal overlooks the salient connection between the man's repetitive actions and the seawater ecology unfurling in his wake. The walker embodies the ecological rhythms

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described in Le sel noir, an opaque representation of an ontology of the subject that exceeds Western metaphysics.106

The walker's acceleration of the pace of his walks is inscribed into the rhythms of the surrounding environment: an "exhilaration (that) also infected the surrounding country" (124). Glissant's description of the walker's actions mimic Brathwaite's evocation of the woman sweeping "sand from sand" (1999, 30). Both figures move in such a way as to reflect the ecological rhythms and patterns of an archipelagic environment via a repetitive act of labour. The walker "traces repeated figures" in the earth (208), an action that positions the reader against the fractal complexity of the beach, the dynamic space where the surf breaks. We watch as he traces "a frontier between the land and water as invisible as floodtide at night" (122) and are left with footprints in the sand that parallel the lines of salt left by the high tide. His path stretches out along the shore, an inexact measure of the length of the beach. The walker expresses the impossibility of having an exact measurement of Martinique's psycho-geographical parameters. The walker's patterns are non-exhaustive and incremental, suggesting that a place like an island, giving off the appearance of permanence and luxury in images related to the industry of global tourism, will always appear contingent to its visitors as the currents, tides, and seasons change. When they refer to Glissant's Poetics of Relation, Roberts and Stephens define the walker's pattern as an 'anti-explorer method': "An apprehension of the island's fractal infinitude" which asks us to look "at the putatively known world" and attest "to its final unknowability" (25). In so doing, Roberts and Stephens make the case that Glissant is far from a rootless poet of the world. Rather, they underscore the extent to which his work emerges from, and operates in the defence of, the complex materiality of island spaces. Where the certainty of the explorer's orientational methods reduced islands to points of geographical expansion in the Age of Discovery, Glissant's description of the walker reinforces the fact that islands are outside of our grasp, somehow before or after humankind.

The infinite archipelagic patterns and textures traced by the walker are then projected back onto the reader: "Distant reader, as you recreate these imperceptible details on the horizon […] look at him […] the man who walks" (208). Glissant's description of his "distant reader"

106 Lincoln Shlensky makes a similar reading: "The marcheur evokes a possibility that the even deeply self- alienated gestures, like the most marginalised culture or language, may become recognised as traces of what remains dissociated but always historically potential" (363-364).

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suggests that a third observer may be a threat to the infinitely scalable perception of space the walker sets out, as a grasp of the encounter will cause it "to vanish instantly" (131).107 Roberts and Stephens read Glissant's cue to the reader against the archipelagic motifs used by world literature scholar Franco Moretti to describe 'distant reading,' a quantitative view of formal variations in literary genres over time.108 They write that "before Moretti arrived at the archipelago as a geographical grounding for the practice of distant readings, Glissant was addressing distant readers who inhabit an archipelagic world" (29). They repossess the archipelagic motifs used to navigate a world literature and repatriate the figure of the archipelago to the Martinique poet as original possessor, marking a critical turn from route to root. The reference to the reader also signals that Glissant's work is in some way inscribed onto the ecological environs he describes. In this way, Glissant's encounter with the walker helps us to intuit the meaning of the repetition that marks Poetics of Relation and his wider oeuvre, what he describes as "spiral retelling" (16). The walker's carving imperceptible, continuous patterns on the beach at Diamant becomes a figure of Glissant's own writing practice, a textual pattern that has left onlookers like Miller, Hallward, and Bongie as perplexed as the Diamant community who try to "break down the barrier" of the walker's "total silence" (122). As with the walker's repeated patterns on the earth, Glissant's praxis is built on repetition and continuity. He encircles and retreads familiar paths and figures, such as the "risky encounter" and the "black sand beach" as Dash points out (2014). Recalling the "I and I" trope where the Creole subject projects themselves forward as an interlocutor, Glissant engages with the walker as a way of encapsulating the ethos of his work. The patterns the walker leaves in the sand, as well as the repetitive action they invoke, becomes Glissant's way of projecting the fractal complexity of his own archipelagic thought, an attempt to illuminate poetic intentions that cannot be named, "a theory that tried to conclude, a presence that concludes (presumes) nothing" (183). Therefore, contra Hallward's claim that Glissant's capacity for repetition represents an exercise in Deleuzian nomadology, I argue that the encounter between Glissant and the walker exemplifies the poet's desire to inscribe his work into the very rhythms and materials of Southern Martinique. The figure of the encounter upon the black sand beach foregrounds the ecological and imaginative roots in Glissant's oeuvre that animate both his 'early' and 'late' work. In terms of the rootless/rooted binary

107 Glissant also makes this point by differentiating between the French word for understanding, comprendre, which is derived from the Latin root comprehendere, which means 'to seize,' and the more generous verb donner , which translates to "give" or "look out toward" as his translator Betsy Wing states (1997, xiv). 108 Moretti's original reference to the archipelago is evident in his 1994 essay, "Modern European Literature: A Geographical Sketch," which is now published as the first chapter of Distant Reading (2013).

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studied across this dissertation, this means that readers of Glissant must navigate the intersections of a worldly imaginary and a material reality.

IV. Brathwaite, Glissant, and Alcheringa: Ethnopoetics

Ahead of my analysis of Fogarty and Eckermann, I turn to Alcheringa: Ethnopoetics, a now discontinued literary journal that was active from 1970 to 1980, to which Brathwaite and Glissant frequently read and contributed, and which circulated in Australia and the Caribbean. Despite its circulation throughout Australia and the Caribbean, the significance of the journal is not fully acknowledged in Caribbean Studies, nor in Australian literature, and has only been the subject of brief ethnopoetic scholarship.109 I resolve that void here and argue that each poet's commitment to the journal is a powerful illustration of the power differentials and diametrical representations that mark Caribbean and Aboriginal encounters. In a "Preliminaries" section of the opening edition, the editors, Jerome Rothenberg and Dennis Tedlock, state that the journal is "a place where tribal poetry can appear in English translation and can act [...] to change men's minds and lives" (1). In addition to tribal poetry from places such as the Americas, Africa, or the Pacific, the editors also published contemporary poetry and essays by writers like Ezra Pound, Glissant, Brathwaite, Fredric Jameson, Charles Olson and Gary Snyder. The journal is named after the Arrente term "Alcheringa", otherwise spelt "Altyerrenge," "Altjira," or "Altyerr." "Alcheringa" has no equivalent in the English language. It can be loosely described as a complex and all- encompassing spiritual belief system practiced by the Arrente people of Central Australia. Rothenberg and Tedlock's decision to name the journal after the term can be attributed to the widespread circulation of Francis Gillen and Baldwin Spencer's translation of "Alcheringa" as "to dream" (1899). Their translation was propelled into the broader English lexicon by the anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner, who argued that the term referred to the "Dreamtime," "Dream time" or "Dreaming" (54).110 As Victoria Grieves writes, however, 'the Dreaming' "is

109 Rothenberg and Tedlock inspire arguably the first non-Indigenous engagement with Aboriginal poetics, see Stephen Muecke. Paddy Roe. Gularabulu: Stories from the West Kimberley. Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1983. For an indication of prior analyses of the journal, see John Wrighton. "Ethnopoetics and the Performativity of Place: Jerome Rothenberg and ‘That Dada Strain.’" Spatial Practices, vol. 15, 2013, pp. 257–280.

110 For a more incisive analysis on the dangers of using a singular piece of ethnographic evidence to understand 'the Dreaming,' See Deborah Bird Rose. Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation. University of New South Wales Press, 2004.

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not equivalent to the meanings that exist in Aboriginal languages" other than the Arrente community and "has become a gloss used within Australian English" (2009, 8). As Grieves recognises, Stanner's term came to represent a singular spiritual worldview shared by all Aboriginal Australians, compressing an extremely diverse range of Aboriginal spiritual customs by a singular piece of anthropological evidence.

Alcheringa's title reflects the editors' belief that Aboriginal Australia was an ideal example of the tribal poetry to be included in the journal. If that is the case, then it is ironic that no Aboriginal writers contributed to Alcheringa, an omission that reflects a wilful ignorance or dismissal of contemporary Aboriginal writers such as Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Jack Davis, or Kevin Gilbert, in the belief that living Aboriginal Australians, particularly those living in regional or urban centres, were disconnected from the ancestral beliefs translated by Stanner, Spencer and Gillen. However, Alcheringa did publish numerous reproductions of traditional song-cycles that were collected, translated and interpreted by non-Indigenous anthropologists including C. G. von Brandenstein and A.P. Thomas’ translation of a series of 'tapi' that were composed and sung by Aboriginal language groups in the Pilbara region of Western Australia (114-119). The absence of Aboriginal Australians in the journal is tragically summed up in the aforementioned "Preliminaries" section of the inaugural issue of Alcheringa, where a single, unattributed quotation reads, "He who loses his dreaming is lost. --Australian Aborigine" (Rothbenburg and Tedlock 4). As with the Dreaming, the quotation has become a common saying, irrevocably divorced from the person who expressed it and the context in which it was said. It is difficult to discern whether the quote was said at all. Either way, the quoted "Australian Aborigine" embodied the blank space by which other Indigenous traditions could be 'recovered': a perfect void with which to represent the future of Indigenous cultures of writing after colonisation.

Alcheringa contributed to the extinction discourse conditioning Brathwaite's and Glissant's references to Aboriginal Australia. As someone who was familiar with Indigenous cultures across the world, and who had written of the 'alter-native traditions' of Afro-Caribbean populations in Contradictory Omens, Brathwaite often engaged with the source material supplied by Alcheringa. In his essay "World Order Models," Brathwaite quotes Snyder's contribution to Alcheringa, where Snyder defines the distinction between "traditional societies" and "expansionist societies," in order to outline his own distinction between "circle

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(traditional)" and "missile (expansionist)" cultures: "These two images are primordial, antagonistic and linked. The First Man threw in a stone or dug a hole. And that choice of action, his environment and psyche determined the nature of his culture" (54). Snyder's article in Alcheringa informs Brathwaite's understanding of the formative link between geography and culture that recurs across Brathwaite's oeuvre. The same opposition between "circle" and "missile" cultures inspires the first citation of tidalectics in "Caribbean culture: Two Paradigms" (42) and would surface again as Brathwaite references the totems of other landscapes in ConVERSations: "Americas (cenote), Europe (missile), Af (circle), Asia (pagoda), Australasia (wave/boomerang)" (115).111 From his readings of Alcheringa, Brathwaite saw the Caribbean's and Australia's Indigenous histories as enjoined: Before the missilic intrusion of Columbus, this was a part of Amerindia: and the fact that we can find no other than this artificial name is symptomatic of what becomes the problem: no name: no man: Red Skin, Bush Negro, Abori-ginee. But there were Taino here, Carib and Arawak and Luayo and canoe connection between Florida and Guanahani, between Yucatan and Aruba, and between Trinidad and the coasts of Venezuela to the south. (1985, 57) Brathwaite's reference to "Abori-ginee" suggests he understands the case of the Americas in hand with the voiceless Aboriginal Australian adorning the cover of Alcheringa, yet both are seemingly invisible, "no name: no man," making Aboriginal culture an exemplary case by which Caribbean Indigeneity would be measured.

The voices of Aboriginal Australia would haunt Brathwaite's own contribution to Alcheringa, as Rothenberg and Tedlock published Brathwaite's poem "Angel/Engine" alongside Brandenstein and Thomas' translation of "Aboriginal Song Poetry from the Pilbara" (114- 118). Among the translations is "The First Truck At Tambrey", a tapi originally delivered by a Yindjibarndi songman by the name of Toby Wiliguru Pambardu that recounts the arrival of the first truck that came into the Aboriginal community of Tambery. Rothenberg and Tedlock position the engine of "The First Truck At Tambrey" against Brathwaite's "Angel/Engine" by publishing the poems side-by-side in the same edition. To gesture to the ways in which both poems inform one another, it is necessary to analyse them together. Consider the following extract of "The First Truck At Tambrey":

111 Snyder contacted a range of Aboriginal Australians across his career as a visiting poet and teacher. In particular, he makes an extended visit to Pitjantjara and Pintubi communities in the central Australian desert in 1981.

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You stand there, fire spitting: eedj! your transparent eyes reaching everywhere, You stand there, fire spitting: eedj! transparent. - With its splutter Inside below the engine is built - with its splutter. Inside below the engine is built - with its splutter, Inside below the engine is built - the starter, Chirping "njeen njeen" in the front like crickets - the starter. (116) The song is built on a strict series of repetitions between lines, marking a gradual and accumulative sonic effect. In this section, the engine splutters between lines as in the enjambment "splutter / inside," a kind of mimetic mirror to the backfiring of the truck engine. A similar emphasis on mechanisation and spirituality informs "Angel/Engine", which retells the story of a woman in attendance at a Wednesday night service at the Zion Church who becomes possessed by the Yoruba God Shango, a deity associated with machines and lightning. I quote a longer extract of the poem here to illustrate Brathwaite's striking use of nation language (51-54): i tek up dese days wid de zion we does meet tuesdee nights in de carpenter shop praaze be to god i hear de chamman hall preacher shout out praaaze be to god [...] de tongue curlin back an me face howlin' empty all muh skin cradle an crackle an ole i is water of wood ants crawlin crawlin i is a spider weavin away

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my ball headed head is ancient an slack an it fall from de top of de praaaza be to tree to de rat – [...] who engine huh who engine hah "Angel/Engine" evokes the emergence of a suppressed Yoruba spirituality into a Barbados that had disavowed its connections with Africa, a traumatic arrival that makes its appearance simultaneously "ancient an / slack." Mimicking the contortions of the woman's body as it attempts to house these forces, the poem changes shape and rhythm to reflect the arrival of Yoruba deities. The line "i tek up dese days wid de zion" is swiftly cut back to allow for the vocalisation of these figures in the blank space surrounding the lines. As Cobham-Sander suggests, the "scholarly typeface contracts and recedes until it is crowded against the margins, mimicking the way the researcher now cowers on the periphery of the scene he is describing, overwhelmed by the unseen forces released through the possessed woman's body" (2016, 74). In mechanised, rhythmical correspondence with "The First Truck At Tambrey," Brathwaite's draws our attention to the figure of the engine as a marker of Shango's presence: "who engine huh / who engine hah." If we read the two poems together in sequence, a form of trans-Indigenous dialogue emerges between the poems. As with the spluttering backfire of the truck at Tambery, the alliterative "huh" and "hah" mimic the backbeat of an overworked engine, a release that structures the poem's oral delivery. That each may be told in sync with one another underscores the fact that these forms of expression that attempt to work through the complex survival of ancestral spiritual forms in a ‘post’-colonial present. We may envisage the possessed woman "chirping 'njeen njeen'" (Brandenstein and Thomas 116). The sequential publication of the poems together suggests a continuity between the spiritual practices of the Caribbean and Australia in distinction: the rootless Yoruba and the rooted Yindjibarndi spirits.

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That dichotomy is reinforced by Rothenberg and Tedlock's note introducing Brathwaite's poem: "Brathwaite's poetry here moves into 'Nation-language' of the West Indies. The god aimed toward is Shango; the condition is trance" (51). Unlike Pambardu, Brathwaite 'aims toward' the African deity Shango, yet a communion is not achieved. Shango can only be gestured to in the editors' eyes, reflecting their perception that Africa was at a distance to the Caribbean despite Brathwaite's description of the survival of these spiritual traditions in his essay, "The African Presence in Caribbean Literature": "it was still Africa; Africa in the Caribbean" (38). Tedlock and Rothenberg's unwillingness to accept Brathwaite's work as 'tribal poetry' indicates that in comparison to the mode of Indigeneity encompassed by Aboriginal Australia, Brathwaite is seen as a modern poet with no Indigenous claim to the Caribbean region. It is perhaps for that reason that Brathwaite turns to the image of the boomerang in ConVERSations as an example of an ancestral present, a recursive motion that allows the poet to move through time and space in order to connect to the voiceless Arrente community who first supplied him the word, "Alcheringa." To Brathwaite, Australia is that which returns or recycles in constant motion, a wave or boomerang perpetually returning to and folding upon its own past, a structural opposite to the Caribbean's modern history of routes and empire.

The structural opposition between rootedness and rootlessness also informs Glissant's contribution to Alcheringa. Glissant’s familiarity with the journal can be discerned through the path of his essay "Poétique naturelle, poétique force" [Free and Forced Poetics] into publication. First emerging in a conference presentation in Quebec in 1972, the essay was then presented and published through Alcheringa: Ethnopoetics. Glissant delivered the paper for the Alcheringa symposium at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in April 1975 alongside other papers by Fredric Jameson, Wynter and Rothenberg. Following the conference, Glissant published the essay through Alcheringa with the title, "Free and Forced Poetics" as translated by Michel Benamou (1976). The essay would be re-published as a key chapter in Glissant’s popular essay collection, Le Discours Antillais in 1981, a touchstone for Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean Studies. As of yet, its path through Alcheringa has not been the subject of academic study, a lacuna that allows me to develop my earlier discussion of the way ethnology informs Glissant's conceptual oeuvre.

In the Alcheringa edition of "Free and Forced Poetics", Glissant reshapes his work in response to the conference abstract, "What is ethnopoetics?" In response, Glissant states that

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for colonial regions such as Martinique that remain affiliated with an Imperial metropole, "ethnopoetics is ever in the future" (100). Glissant suggests that ethnopoetics is a linguistic marker of a subject’s self-determined connection to place, a mode of belonging that may not be possible in Martinique, where there is a dissonance between the 'free poetics' required to commune with one's environment and the 'forced poetics' spoken by the Martinique peoples, a mode of speech that developed "by means of a subtle noise system [...] because speech was forbidden" (96-97). Glissant goes on to suggest that Martinique "is a transiting place and not yet a homeland [...]. The time will come of a natural poetics, spontaneous and alive." (99- 101). The essay's description of a future time in which Martinique's inhabitants will create "a natural poetics" cannot help but be read as a rootless example against a rooted and voiceless Aboriginal Australia: "He who loses his dreaming is lost" (Rothbenburg and Tedlock 4). As with Brathwaite's "Angel/Engine," the publication of "Free and Forced Poetics" in Alcheringa positions Glissant as a modern example of one 'who has lost their dreaming'.

Glissant's publication of "Free and Forced Poetics" in Alcheringa in 1976, the same year as Brathwaite's "Angel/Engine," is arguably the first connection between the two poets. In History of the Voice, Brathwaite suggests that he associates Glissant via the journal: Recently, a French poet and novelist from Martinique, Edouard Glissant, had a remarkable article in Alcheringa. [...] The article was called "Free and forced poetics," and in it, for the first time I feel an effort to describe what nation language really means. For the author of the article it is the language of enslaved persons. For him, nation language is a strategy: the slave is forced to use a certain kind of language in order to disguise himself, to disguise his personality, and to retain his culture. And he defines that language as 'forced poetics' because it is a kind of prison language, if you want to call it that. (269-270) Brathwaite suggests that he came to know of Glissant through the pages of Alcheringa, despite Martinique and Barbados being at a relatively close distance to one another in the Caribbean. This implies that Alcheringa is a key fulcrum connecting the Anglophone and the Francophone Caribbean in the 1970s.112 This comment, usually quoted to connect Brathwaite's concept of nation language and Glissant's free and forced poetics, is not

112 While the first point of connection between the two poets is commonly understood to be Glissant's reading of Brathwaite's essay "Caribbean Man in Space and Time" (1975), which Glissant quotes as an epigraph in Poetics of Relation, "the unity is submarine" (1997, vi), it is doubtful that Glissant read the poem in the same year it was published. I argue that given Brathwaite's and Glissant's contributions to Alcheringa in 1976, it is more likely that the two poets met one another for the first time via the journal.

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typically investigated through the prism of Aboriginal Australian-Caribbean history. From this vantage point, it is fascinating that two giants of Caribbean literature came to familiarise themselves with each other's work through the pages of a journal entitled with the Arrente word "Alcheringa." First, it illustrates the linguistic divide separating the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean, what Kathleen Gyssels describes as "the pigeonholing of postcolonial authors and critics" in linguistic and disciplinary zones (61). Gyssels' assessment of linguistic insularity can be applied beyond the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean given the way Brathwaite's and Glissant's contributions are framed against Aboriginal Australia. Second, if Alcheringa is a crossroad between Barbados and Martinique, it is deeply ironic that Glissant's concept of free and forced poetics, which Brathwaite describes as "a kind of prison language" (1984, 270), is first translated into English against "Alcheringa," a mistranslated term that inadequately signifies Aboriginal Australian spirituality. Of course, “Alcheringa” is itself a form of “prison language,” in that it has become the universal model Aboriginal spirituality is measured against. Lastly, as with Harris' ethnological encounter with Aboriginal peoples that haunt the archival records in Guyana, Brathwaite and Glissant recognise each other in structural opposition to the voiceless Aboriginal culture the term fails to represent. In that respect, we can turn Glissant's suggestion that "every ethnopoetics is bound, at one time or another, to come to grips with politics" (1976, 100) upon the poet himself, who was unable to recognise his complicity in the reduction of Aboriginal Australia's diverse language groups.

To mark my turn to inter-Indigenous encounters in the coming chapter, I present a response to Brathwaite and Glissant via Fogarty's poem "Alcheringa" from his Minyung Woolah Binnung collection (48): Your jailed dance is freed in our bodies and souls We are breezing a wind of continuous international struggles The poem marks the distinction between a local and universal understanding of culture, a difference that manifests in Brathwaite's and Glissant's contributions to Alcheringa. Fogarty references "Alcheringa" in the title as one such example. The oxymoron "jailed dance," bearing connotations of Aboriginal deaths in police custody, conveys the restricted freedom that is possible when held to an overly generalised cultural norm – such as that of

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“Alcheringa.” Fogarty points out that Aboriginal Australia can free itself from these essentialist definitions by turning outward to the planet: "we are breezing a wind of / continuous international / struggle." Fittingly, the poem was published in a collection of his poems and drawings that advocate for a "telepathy of affection [...] a unity balance when we are not together, like smiles of mountains that sleep in oceans" (5). Fogarty’s description of the unity between the underwater mountains of the Pacific and the Atlantic aptly fits into Brathwaite's and Glissant's poetic attempt to reimagine the root in aquatic terms, floating free in all directions, where "the unity is submarine" (Brathwaite 1976, 64). While Brathwaite's and Glissant's contributions to Alcheringa suggest a fixed understanding of Aboriginal Australia, the poetic dialogue between Fogarty, Brathwaite and Glissant that I draw out across this dissertation unsettles the dichotomy between Creole routes and Indigenous roots that has shaped their contact. By returning to material points of contact between Aboriginal and Caribbean literatures, we are presented with more complex representations of belonging: Brathwaite and Glissant engage with Indigeneity in order to fortify the roots of Caribbean thought as Fogarty uses archipelagic metaphors to explore the aquatic continuities of the Indigenous Pacific.

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Chapter 4. Inter-Indigenous Encounters in the Poetry of Lionel Fogarty and Ali Cobby Eckermann

This chapter explores the notion that Aboriginal writers are rooted in place by drawing out Fogarty's concentric contact with the Indigenous communities of the Asian-Pacific, in addition to Eckermann's poetic meditation on the remnants of Celtic culture whilst on a literary tour across Ireland.113 By situating Fogarty and Eckermann in these new contexts, I establish a more expansive view of Aboriginal literature that does not equate their writings to an oppositional relationship with the Australian nation-state. In both cases, a deep understanding of one's roots in a local sphere allows the poet to situate themselves in an equally complex relationship with place elsewhere. By tracing these poetic and discursive connections, I explore the intersection of sovereignty and relationality, the contiguity of inter- Indigenous and trans-Indigenous methodologies, and most of all, Aboriginal representations of the planetary belonging: foci that are often overlooked in studies of the cultural and political roots from which Aboriginal literature emerges. I read Fogarty's and Eckermann's poetic works in hand with current debates in Global Indigenous Studies: a multi-disciplinary field dedicated to the study of the interconnections between Indigenous writers, artists, and cultural practitioners. Through the lens of the encounter, this chapter traces out the Indigenous-to-Indigenous as a means to locate a common ground – a planetary commons – of inter-Indigenous solidarity.

I. Global Aboriginality and Inter-Indigenous Approaches

In the wake of Wright's declaration that Aboriginal literature is essentially "self-governing" (2019), Aboriginal writers are often described as being more or less autonomous from the Australian nation-state. Fogarty's and Eckermann's writings are a case in point. As I demonstrate, both poets cross vast expanses of space and time in cross-cultural contact. The majority of studies of Aboriginal literature, identity and culture are invariably framed by national points of reference. This dynamic informs Langton's ground-breaking definition of Aboriginal identity in her essay, "Well I Heard It On The Radio" (1993). She argues that

113 An earlier version of this chapter is published as Dashiell Moore. "The inter-Indigenous Encounter." The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (September 2019): n.p. Please note that at present it has not been placed in an issue with this journal.

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Aboriginality "is a field of intersubjectivity in that it is remade over and over again in a process of dialogue, of imagination, of representation and interpretation" (33-34). To Langton, Aboriginality is a social and cultural construction that can be determined and redetermined by representations of Aboriginal people. The examples she provides are encounter narratives: the direct contact of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, meetings between Aboriginal peoples, and the discussion of what constitutes Aboriginality among non-Indigenous Australians (34). Each of these encounters form the basis of the intersubjective field of reference that Aboriginal lives are tied to. I wish to expand Langton’s formulation, in keeping with her recent call to review Aboriginality beyond the domain of white Australia: "Let's forget about this psychotic debate we keep having with White Australia and let's start talking to Asians and people from eastern Europe and Africa and so on and South America and talk about something else for a change" (qtd. in Muecke 2004, 157). Langton indicates that the dialogue between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians has reached a point of diminishing returns. Recognising the need to expand the intersubjective field that constitutes Aboriginality beyond a national public, Langton draws our attention to the fact that Aboriginal artists, writers, and cultural practitioners are immersed in, and actively shaping, an intersubjective global environment.

That Aboriginal Australia is not enclosed by the nation should be self-evident, yet the transnational and planetary concerns of writers like Fogarty or Eckermann have not been subject of adequate academic study. Aboriginal writers such as Fogarty, who addressed the 1976 International Indian Treaty Council in South Dakota, have been actively working in international contexts for decades. There are, of course, many references to the transnational agency or planetary outlook of Aboriginal writers. As Adam Shoemaker wrote in 1997: Once again, the dominant Black Australian issue of the 1990s will be a question which is followed and debated overseas; once again, the international scope and significance of Aboriginality will be underlined. The paradox continues: that which is rooted most firmly in Australian soil is that which will be of most interest beyond its shores. (95) The one aspect of Australian soil that appeals to those "beyond its shores" is Aboriginal Australia, Shoemaker tells us. "Once again" the conversation comes around, and once more the conversation is deflected by the idea that Aboriginal literature is so firmly "rooted" in place that it does not travel well. Both ends of the paradox he identifies (international interest in the trope of Aboriginality and an internal belief in Aboriginal rootedness) rely on a reductive or fixed account of Aboriginal Australia, as either a primitive figure in colonial

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history or a transparent commodity in a global capitalist world-system. Shoemaker's discussion of the "international scope and significance of Aboriginality" indicates the need to present more expansive representations of Aboriginality outside of a national field of reference in a way that does not reiterate normative logics of exchange. Here I propose a turn towards inter-Indigenous approaches as an escape from the repetitive cycle of 'once agains,' a reiteration that continues to tie Aboriginal literature to national soil, and as an alternative to capitalist logics of exchange. That is, I make a conscious turn towards Indigenous-to- Indigenous points of contact in order to situate literary study in materialist contexts such as intertext, shared experiences, dialogues, and collaborations. Such a turn indexes literary texts against trans-Indigenous relations as well as the communities that emerge as a result. The social nature of the encounter forces us to situate literary works in synchronous time and common space, allowing us to make discursive connections from local spaces outward. This is a particularly useful approach for examining the transnational scope of Aboriginal literature, given the discrepancy of publications and scholarship identified by Carter (2019).

Fogarty expresses his awareness of the difficulty of establishing Indigenous-to-Indigenous partnerships in his poem, "Anthology Our International" (2014, 118): The International causes are same as the days ahead. The night differ yet the bloods feels same as cuts Are put in to arms to cover the stars under our all feets. We have International kisses for the not so lovers. Pain stay here as rains of suffering leads help By the cost of life full. Let the human women's take us men to spaces Open with the dreaming stories for all International worlds. He International, Her national leaves Now those entire anthologies are our International's In a disruption of standardised syntax that is characteristic of Fogarty, he describes the tenuousness of the foundations by which inter-Indigenous connections are established: "The International causes are same as the days ahead / The night differ yet the bloods feels same as cuts." The equivocation in the non-grammatical phrases "are same" and "feels same" evokes the tenuousness of a relationship that is predicated on a shared experience of oppression. That ambivalence is reinforced by an opposition between the political solidarity of "international causes" and the blood quantum dogma that was used to differentiate between Indigenous

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groups, "the bloods feels same." Here Fogarty appars aware of the dangers in establishing unity or solidarity across a foundation of cultural or ethnic comparisons. However, he then suggests that thinking on a global scale can elide local conditions of oppression, as "Pain stay here as rains of suffering." Fogarty's meteorological reference to the "rains of suffering" is then bookended by the "days ahead." To that end, we may reconsider the poem offering a more generous view to the "days ahead" that will come as the planet turns on its axis. Recalling Brathwaite's sighting Australian constellations beyond his Barbados horizon, Fogarty imagines the different vantage points by which the planet is grasped as a way of foregrounding a relational continuum outside of colonial history: "The night differ yet the bloods feels same as cuts / Are put in to arms to cover the stars under our all feets." The poem suggests that the oppressed communities of the world are all linked in their expressions of planetary space. In this way, Fogarty's title "Anthology Our International" is both literal and figurative. It points to an idealised literary anthropology where Indigenous writers can come together in shared literary production, and gestures to our mutual contributions to an encultured planet.

That Fogarty is able to work through these complications by placing himself and other writers in a collective anthology indicates the contiguity between inter-Indigenous and trans- Indigenous methodologies. He aligns vastly different expressive and spiritual traditions in a collective community that does not subsume their differences. Rather, they come in contact from discrete local positions, as Allen says in the introduction to Trans-Indigenous Methodologies, "together (yet) distinct" (xiii). In this way, trans-Indigenous and inter- Indigenous have shared principles. Allen defines trans-Indigenous as a mode of reading designed "to recognise, acknowledge, confront, and critically engage the effects of differential experiences and performances of Indigenous identities" (xxxii). To preserve difference, Allen juxtaposes distinct Indigenous texts, performances, and contexts, in what he describes as "a series of distinct but related experiments" (23). To avoid reducing differential experiences of Indigeneity, Allen asks scholars to 'move differently,' a phrase that derives from the Maori phrase, 'rere ke,' which loosely translates to 'move' (rere) 'differently' (ke).114 He advocates that scholars move fluidly between Indigenous texts to avoid circumscribing their meanings to the norms of European literary criticism. He writes, "'moving differently'

114 For a sustained discussion of this point, see Chadwick Allen. "Rere Ke/Moving Differently: Indigenizing Methodologies for Comparative Indigenous Literary Studies." Journal of New Zealand Literature, vol. 24, no. 2, 2007, pp. 44-72.

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will not produce definitive readings, but it will place a more consistent and productive emphasis on the intellectual and artistic sovereignty of Indigenous writing (primarily) in English" (181).

In response, I argue that the alignment of inter-Indigenous and trans-Indigenous approaches will allow us to index texts in space and times in ways that apprehend global networks of circulation. These global networks often precede and inform actual contact, as in the travel of the Arrente term "Alcheringa" to the shores of Brathwaite's Barbados and Glissant's Martinique via Alcheringa. In that case, the negative stereotypes that emerged from local histories of colonialism were tied to, and reinforced by, a network of circulation that sustains the uneven relations of globalism. Allen makes a similar point when he opens Trans- Indigenous Methodologies with a face-to-face meeting recorded by Maori poet Jacqueline Carter in his poem, "Comparatively Speaking There Is No Struggle" (2003): So how many Maori have you convinced today that really us "Mahrees" should consider themselves lucky that things could have been worse as they are with the "Abos" (41) Carter describes a first-hand encounter with a visiting white Australian who comments that the local "Mahrees" are "lucky" compared to Aboriginal Australians. In this way, this is also a second-hand encounter between Carter and the Aboriginal peoples referred to, who are voiceless in the poem, absent from their own representation. This is precisely Langton's point when she argues that Aboriginality is partly constituted by dialogues between non-Indigenous Australians. Carter's poem echoes Fogarty's concern that inter-Indigenous partnership can sustain local oppressions given that "comparatively speaking / everything's alright" (41). Her implication is, given that white Maoris are 'better off' in juxtaposition with Aboriginal Australians, Aotearoa should not address its own systematic inequities. Carter suggests that simplistic comparisons between Indigenous peoples will only reinforce the primitive biases and racial taxonomies of settler-colonialism. Maori scholar Alice Te Punga Somerville also makes this point when she draws out Witi Ihimaera's short story, "Short Features" (1996), as a way of uncovering the "historic and ongoing patterns of circulation and mobility, many of which will be historically colonial" (2010, 684). By turning to the prism of the encounter, I argue that we may critically identify structural inequalities that are specific and in-common.

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More recently, and in a theoretical manoeuvre that dovetails with this chapter's approach, Allen expands his conceptualisation of trans-Indigenous reading across a series of "related though distinct modes," including a critical account of Indigenous-to-Indigenous contact (2015, 411). The scholarship that emerged in response to Allen's Trans-Indigenous Methodologies also reflects the need to align literary juxtaposition with a materialist focus, whether in regard to the actual infrastructures that support Indigenous studies, or upon the communities that emerge from dialogues between Indigenous scholars, writers and artists. In his review of Trans-Indigenous Methodologies, Rob Wilson makes much of Allen's "obsessive formalism" which is "driven toward reading/translating cosmic meaning (primordial or contemporary) into the slightest phoneme or syntactical turn" (92). In her own response to Allen, entitled, "Searching for the Trans-Indigenous," Somerville agrees that formalist approaches can break down given that trans-Indigenous readings rest "on the existence of texts in a common language, and that common language is colonial" (103). She holds that the construction of a scholarly field such as Global Indigenous Studies is, as much as anything else, constituted by a sense of community. She suggests that "in the end, the trans-Indigenous may be produced by Allen's arguments, but perhaps reciprocally--and deliberately, hopefully, necessarily incompletely (and, for many, ancestrally)--it finds us in the kinds of transnational conversations we have held here" (104). Somerville draws our attention to the ways in which the study of Indigenous texts always work in tandem with various forms of encounter.115

Somerville also suggests that we must remain attentive to the materialist intersections between Global Indigenous Studies and other academic fields and subfields (99-100), something which resonates with the previous chapter's analysis of Brathwaite's and Glissant's representations of Aboriginality. Glissant has had a sizeable influence on the emergence of Global Indigenous Studies. Wilson and Hsinya Huang (2018) both describe Glissant as having a significant role in shaping the field.116 Wilson, for instance, uses Glissant's opacity

115 Somerville's description of the legacy of Samoan poet Albert Wendt is telling here. She pays close attention to "Wendt's conscious and laborious production of communities of scholars and communities" ("Not E-mailing Albert" 2010, 265). 116 More recently, in her comparative analysis of Native American and South American literatures, Rebecca Macklin turns to Relation as a decolonial method, yet uses the term in a way that is "informed by the worldviews of selected Native American and South African cultures" (2020, 29).

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to note that "not all Indigenous culture wants or needs to be world-translated" in a footnote at the conclusion of his review of Allen’s Trans-Indigenous Methodologies (94). Somerville points out that "both Huang and Wilson draw on Glissant, whose Caribbean postcolonial work aids their engagement with the Pacific, despite his appearance on few Indigenous studies bibliographies" (99-100). Somerville's throwaway comment to Glissant indicates that he is somewhat of an outlier to the field. In doing so, she encircles a misrecognition between Indigenous and postcolonial groups that is also highlighted by Reder and McCall (2020). By drawing attention to the ways in which scholarly fields are "produced by their respective scholarly bookshelves as much as they are by their objects of study" (100), she names a conceptual conflict that I have extrapolated in this dissertation, simply, the difficulty of making connections between different experiences of colonialism. Huang and Wilson fail to recognise Glissant's continued reflection on Aboriginal Australia and other Indigenous cultures, in which the Martinique poet refers to extinction narratives and ethnographic research of the Indigenous Other. This point of misreading does not limit their contributions to Indigenous studies, but does bring our attention to material points of crossover between fields and subfields, to the various institutions that house our discussions, and ultimately, to the points of contact that constitute Global Indigenous Studies.

Here, my conception of the inter-Indigenous encounter evokes interconnections between Indigenous groups that are grounded in space and time in a way that is intended to align the discursive scope of literary practice with social and collaborative purposes. Such an approach accords with Allen's recent description of trans-Indigenous thinking as "an optics for noticing, describing, and taking critical account of Indigenous-to-Indigenous literary and artistic contacts, interactions, exchanges, and collaborations in all historical periods" (2015, 411). Attending to these points of contact helps us to envisage new constellations of Indigenous literatures as they crossover in world space. As I demonstrate, aligning trans- Indigenous juxtapositions with points of Indigenous-to-Indigenous contact provides us with a more effective way of reading the collaborative aims of Aboriginal writers such as Fogarty and Eckermann.

II. "The waves of our humanity is the same": Lionel Fogarty's Transnational Poetics

From his contributions to international liberationist movements in the 1970s, highlighted by

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his aforementioned address to the 1976 International Indian Treaty Council, Fogarty actively works to instil literary and political solidarity between Indigenous peoples across the Pacific Ocean. By reading Fogarty in the context of his inter-Indigenous connections to the Pacific Ocean via his poems, "The Slaves Are Her People" and "Advance Those Asian an Pacific Writers Poets," we unearth a different poet than the one with whom Australian literary scholars were so familiar: a poet keen to extend the outlook of Aboriginal literature in partnership with a range of Indigenous communities across the Asian-Pacific region. Despite this consistent activity, the only references to Fogarty's transnational interests are provided by Cooke, in his analysis of the nomadic poetics of Chile and Aboriginal Australia (2013), and Corey Wakeling's assessment of Fogarty's "Advance" (2013). Fogarty is predominantly read in relation to a national colonial history. After being raised on Cherbourg Reserve in Queensland, Fogarty became heavily involved in political activism, and in the early 1970s, he became an active member of the Brisbane charter of the Black Panther Party. Fogarty has consistently engaged with Aboriginal political issues, including the Aboriginal Land Rights movement and campaigns to stop the deaths of Aboriginal people in custody. In 1993, Fogarty's own brother, Daniel Yock, was killed in the back of a police van after being arrested.117

From the appearance of his first poetry collection, Kargun, Fogarty's literary output appeared to be an outlet for his political views. As stated in the Introduction, Mudrooroo describes Fogarty in 1986 as a "guerrilla poet" whose poetry breaks "open the shell of the English language" (47). The characterisation of Fogarty as a militant poet was reinforced by Adam Shoemaker, who argues that Fogarty positions "the white Australian reader [...] on the outside, purposely externalised from an easy understanding of the text" (1989, 221). Describing the publication of Fogarty's 1980 poetry collection, Noonuccal stated that "I would rather see Aborigines write a book called Kargun than pick up a shotgun" (qtd. in Shoemaker 179). Fogarty stated in interview with Philip Mead in 1997 that his poetry was intended to oppose certain academic conventions: "I really liked the way Kevin Gilbert said to me, 'Look, Lionel, you're carrying a club there, you know, you just go around and club all these academics'" (n.p.). In the same interview, however, Fogarty cautioned against reading

117 A series of poems published in Fogarty's poetry collection, New and Selected Poems: Munaldjali, Mutuerjaraera (1995) commemorate the life of his brother, including "For Him I Died - Bupu Ngunda I Love" (4), "Murra Murra Gulandanilli: Waterhen" (5-6), and "Consideration of Black Deaths" (18-23).

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his later work on those terms: "I'm still looked at as an activist today. I want to be looked at, really, in terms of my knowledge, as a writer."

The notion that Fogarty's work is intended to be read in opposition led critics to attribute the poet's experimental poetics to his politics in a broad, causal sweep, ultimately suggesting that his poetry is not conducive to more nuanced, literary interpretation.118 A key moment in the evolution of Fogarty scholarship can be found in Alizadeh's response to Fogarty's "Biral Biral" in 2013. Alizadeh suggests that politicized interpretations ensured that Fogarty's writing was "most commonly seen as a representation of his staunchly decolonised, Aboriginal identity" (129).119 He characterises the lines, "She turned, asking her people / I've never seen Ngunda / So why show a boy meaning nothing," as a challenge to the "identitarian assumptions apropos of Aboriginality in contemporary, multicultural Australia" (129-131). Far from interpreting Fogarty's poetry as simply reflecting his political or cultural identity, Alizadeh suggests that Fogarty's poetry exposes the gaps in the more mechanistic forms of identity politics that helped frame his work as inherently and automatically political. Fogarty speaks out against the predispositions that position his readers in his poem, "Standardized": My co-ercing structures, yes or no are nonsense Where have we direction land exchanging old established ways validated personal meaning may symbolise progressively, your conceptualisations towards a difference of gubbas interchangeable boundaries. So balance western minds Abstraction is scientist, sane and again Still further afflict them. Ha. Fucken migloo behaviour

118 For further scholarship on the question of the 'authenticity' of the Aboriginal artist, see Eric Michaels. Bad Aboriginal Art Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons. University of Minnesota Press, 1994. 119 For a contemporary example of the Fogarty-Guerrilla trope, see Louis De Paor. "'Stepping Stones Across a River in Spate': Images of Language Loss in Irish Writing and in the Guerrilla Poems of Lionel G. Fogarty." Eds. Tadhg Foley and Fiona Bateman. Irish-Australian Studies: Papers Delivered at the Ninth Irish-Australian Conference. Crossing Press, 2000, pp. 34–44.

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impression by history, linguistically relatively didn't discover us yet theory or practice … (2017, 110) Fogarty lampoons the literary scholars who "symbolise progressively" in order to present a more progressive ideas of "gubbas" with "interchangeable boundaries." In doing so, he draws a connection between the conceptual limits of the academic scholar and the rigid borders created by colonial administrators to police the movement of Aboriginal peoples, both being responsible for the careful curation of Aboriginal subjectivity in national colonial history. He does not simply resist the white Australian reader here. Rather, he encircles the epistemological differences that cause his poetry to be overlooked. The poem's great irony is that Fogarty recognises that his own "double-standard poetry" (Fogarty and Moore) is considered "nonsense" by the academics he targets, and acknowledges that his play with language will not be recognised in his own lifetime: "relatively didn't discover us yet / theory or practice." Fogarty frames himself as a Cassandra figure of Greek mythology or a Truganini from the bloody pages of Australia's history books, those figures who can only speak the truth yet cannot be heard or believed.

Where Cooke warns against "neglecting" Fogarty's "specifities beneath an abstracted notion of a 'global indigenous poetics'" (223), I argue that Fogarty's poetics are intimately interwoven with his social and political commitment to Indigenous-to-Indigenous points of reference. Fogarty has repetitively outlined his interest in the material circulation of his works beyond a national framework: I'd really like to get all my poetry overseas and I'd like to get it to places in Europe, in Asia, in America, and the Pacific. I mean I'd like to get it to communities of indigenous people as well as into bourgeois society, into communities where they can understand the great intelligence of Aboriginal writers in this country. (Fogarty and Mead) Fogarty's trans-Pacific visit to Latin America for the 8th International Poetry Festival of Medellín, Columbia in 1998 exemplifies his willingness to undergo the gains and losses that come with intercultural circulation and translation in order to forge a wider community of readers. Fogarty performed two poems, one unpublished, "Assume Unbelievers," and a poem that would be included in New and Selected Poems, "Sue and Due," that were live-translated to an audience comprised of Columbians and fellow poets from around the world. Following the conclusion of the festival, Fogarty's poems were recorded for the Tiempo de Poesia [Poetry Time] television series, which has been shown throughout South America and

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continues to be publicly accessible.120 The poems were also published in the festival's literary magazine, Prometo in the same year, a magazine that Brathwaite (2000) and Glissant (2004) would contribute to in years to come. The translation of Fogarty's work adds to its lexical complexity; Cooke draws attention to Fogarty's use of Spanish phrases, which underscores the fact that "a trans-Pacific postcolonial poetics cannot insist on the primacy of one language, or on rules for using a language" (263). As I demonstrate, translations with gains and losses. In Prometo, the title of "Assume Unbelievers" becomes "Atribuido a los incrédulos" [Attributed to Unbelievers]. Where the original title expresses a cynical and complex take on Australian politics, as in lines like "don't believe in land rights," the translation becomes a generalised address to the disbelievers of Aboriginal culture. Considering this, and the historical erasure of Aboriginal languages, lore, and ceremony, I suggest that the bilingual relay of Fogarty's poetry into other languages represents a radical act of openness and solidarity.

Fogarty's poems are deliberately constructed with other poetic aspects in mind, however. "Su" engages a non-English speaking audience through a rhythmic soundscape that transcends linguistic limits: The Wakka Wakka are there walking, talking, singing in the land. The Gabi Gabi are there, walking talking, singing in the land. The Dungidau are there walking, talking, singing in the land. (1995, 30) The poem is structured on call and response, "walking, talking, singing / in the land." This reactive mode of engagement links Fogarty's poetic practice to his live audiences, an aspect of Fogarty's work that Cooke draws our attention to (243). When prompted to recall his experience at the International Poetry Festival, Fogarty suggests that he chose the poem for its sonic effects upon an audience: I did this poem called, 'Su,' and when it's translated into someone else's language, it comes across really powerful spiritually and politically, […] especially when these

120 To watch the recorded version of "Assume Unbelievers" available online, one can use the following link: https://www.festivaldepoesiademedellin.org/en/Multimedia/fogarty.html

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tribes are still singing and dancing on the land, it's giving pride and dignity to those people. When you do that to your own tribe when you're translated abroad, it's also giving them pride to their own people, to their mob. When I did that in Latin America, I find that […] there is a generalised understanding amongst everyone […] it's going to make them understand that I'm not Americanised, Britishised, and that's the feeling they get; that Indigenous peoples are not going to be wiped away. (Fogarty and Moore) Fogarty suggests that the (mis)translation of "Su" and "Assume Unbelievers" does not necessarily lead to misunderstanding. These are rhythmical structures predicated on continuity, underpinning the survivance of the Indigenous Pacific in the face of centuries of colonisation.

Fogarty has worked in partnership with Indigenous activists, writers, and cultural practitioners in the Pacific for decades. Early in his writing career, Fogarty helped host the Fifth Festival of Pacific Arts in Townsville in 1988 on the bicentenary of the First Fleet's arrival in Botany Bay. Fogarty would record the event in his poem, "Two Weeks … 1988," which describes the arrival of "Islanders from all lands / over the sea" (2017, 123). However, the earliest example of Fogarty's solidarity with the Indigenous Pacific may be the poem, "Native America: We Looked And Seen Together" (1982, 78): We know down Navaho way all abo well off Joom we have lot Doongi from migloo, no morn do […] Sioux corroboree fossilising tradition to us is Sovereignty all in shadows are Aboriginal preserved by Dreamtime Fogarty suggests that the cultural practices of Navaho and Sioux Amerindian communities are in temporal synchrony with the all-times of Fogarty's Dreaming. Fogarty refuses to indulge the settler-colonial view that spiritual gatherings such as the "corroboree" are a "fossilising tradition," and raises them as an indication of sovereignty. The next lines, "all in shadows are Aboriginal preserved / by Dreamtime" sees Fogarty use a local term, "Aboriginal" as adverb to "preserved." The adverb projects the Aboriginal Australian

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example and its place in deep time outward to the Americas. My understanding of a local environment, of place, is equal to your understanding of place, he appears to say. Fogarty extends this local field of reference across the planet in the knowledge that he and his counterpart have mutually inscribed a local compositional space over millennia. In his own assessment of Fogarty's cross-cultural engagements, Cooke calls this relational aspect an attempt to inhabit "a region between the celestial discourses of the abstract and the myopia of ultra-localism" (263).

A more explicit inter-Indigenous encounter between Australia and South America can be found in Fogarty's poem, "Mapuche 'Campesinos'" (2017, 169): Chilean brother we here are unity for you Columbus 1492 was a white man like Dampier and Cook Yet today we still find them in society [...] Indigenous Chilean you shall shine in our heart's spirits We had civilisation before they came so us know the way to a future Chile Mapuche we are with you to liberation [...] Maybe we been see over the Americas so aborigines bring back our guerrilla fighter Che Guevara well armed in action inter out well-known Pan Aboriginalism struggles Argentina 'gumboo' we shall 'attack' The poem's title addresses the Mapuche Campesinos, the peasant farmers of Chile, who, like Fogarty, bear the burden of the historical mythos of a First Encounter: "Columbus 1492 was a white man like Dampier and Cook." To forge some form of continuity with the Mapuche outside of a colonial history, Fogarty invokes a longue durée that exceeds European arrivals: "We had civilisation before they came so us know the way to a future." There are, of course, gaps in the cultural values and terminologies between Aboriginal Australia and Chile. As Cooke notes, "Mapuche might baulk at being called 'Indigenous Chileans' [...] the more pertinent point is that Fogarty doesn’t seem to be aware of this. He is speaking a local discourse rather than a global one, in which his language is firmly attached to the realities of Murri life" (229). From his deep attunement to Country, Fogarty crosses the Pacific Ocean in rapid shifts. He notes that the Americas are "over there," as in across the expanse of the

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Pacific Ocean, yet wonders, "maybe we been see over the Americas." The line references modern circulations, as in the "guerrilla fighter / Che Guevara," in addition to a deeper understanding of planetary time, in that the Mapuche and the Murri have provided the Pacific Ocean with compositional meaning across millennia. Against that history, the First Encounters between Indigenous inhabitants and Columbus, Dampier, and Cook are mere fragments of experience.

The spirit of Fogarty's encounters with other Indigenous nations is evocatively put in his poem, "Concentric Blacks Fleets" (2014, 117): A whispering stream enters my system gloomy Yet a survivor's whirl embroils many pleasures of harmony. Equal alienation whistles were natural marred curiosity. As with Brathwaite's description of Australasian wavelengths in his prose poem, "Meridian," Fogarty records his perception of "a whispering stream" that bespeaks the presence of other colonised communities. However, as the sound draws Fogarty in, he disregards it in "a survivor's whirl" which "embroils many pleasures of harmony." He suggests that the manner of Indigenous survivance, a shared traumatic experience of colonisation, will temper any common-feeling between Indigenous nations. Fogarty reinforces that point when he writes, "equal alienation whistles were marred curiosity," a line suggesting that "equal alienation" will never serve as a common ground. In this way, he turns our attention back to Wilson's and Somerville's suggestions that trans-Indigenous methodologies may break down when the "common language is colonial" (Somerville 2018, 103). Somerville and Wilson posit that these continuities privilege Euro-centric and Western intellectual and aesthetic standards. .

In a surreal sequence that reflects his own thoughts on the subject, Fogarty decides to engage the "whispering stream" of the Indigenous Other in what he describes as a "concentric" fashion: This change made strangers stretch view on the images By the window of dead birds, an epic materialised. Chilling erect dreams was now my greasy life gets up morning Calm a present. Curiosity was now satisfaction just when I wanted to kill, A mess smoked city. My feeling changed to concentric fleets. (117)

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Fogarty brings his writing into relief against the arrival of other "Black Fleets," a vista that "made strangers stretch view on the images." One may read this line as underscoring Fogarty’s awareness of the way reception on his writing has changed in light of shifts in postcolonial and African American literary criticism overseas. After reorienting his reader according to these new horizons, "an epic materialised" in the form of the synchronous processes of habitus shared by Indigenous populations. To participate in the telling of that "epic," Fogarty thinks in "concentric" terms; that is, he thinks of his work as situated within an immediate locus of enunciation, a centre or vantage point by which he can see the curvature of larger and larger circles that emanate from a local position. As the title, "Concentric Blacks Fleets," suggests, each centre evokes a series of concentric relations that crossover with the concentric circles of other long-marginalised Black populations across the world, each situated within their own poetical locus, thinking outward.

The balance between sovereignty and relationality that is struck in "Concentric Blacks Fleets" also informs the inter-Indigenous encounters described in Fogarty's poems, "The Slaves Are Her People" (2017) and "Advance" (2014). Fogarty dedicates "The Slaves Are Her People" to his mother, who has a genealogical and spiritual connection with the South Sea Islanders brought to northern Australia as indentured labourers in the late settler period (302). The history of the South Sea Islanders unsettles the dominant historical narratives that emphasise a dyadic opposition between the British settlers and a vanishing Aboriginal people. As Corr writes, "The kidnapping and enslavement of South Sea Islanders in the nineteenth century to generate labour and wealth demonstrates the concurrent processes of settlement, subjugation and empire" (2017, n.p.).121 Araluen Corr suggests that the Australian government's claim that they were never responsible for enslavement is unfounded. The forced transportation of South Sea Islanders into places like Cherbourg Reserve, where Fogarty was brought up, exemplifies that the Aboriginal stations, reserves, and missions were inseparable from the islands of Pacific archipelagos in housing the workers of an itinerant, colonised workforce, linked by the relational implications of empire.

In "The Slaves Are Her People," Fogarty explores these ethnic and cultural entanglements by addressing his mother:

121 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang raise a similar critique of settler-colonialism when they argue that colonisation is enabled by 'internal' and 'external processes'. See Eve Tuck. K. Wayne Yang. "Decolonization is not a metaphor." Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 1, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1-40.

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her eyes are grey her love is of a slave she's not mud and slaves the land she's black in my mother's family we have ancestors from overseas they call them kanakees yea they brought them here as slaves to work the land for white men in poor conditions they are black skinned and knotty hair big lipped they say she don't identify as kanakee 'cos her mother's father was an aboriginal man, and her own father was an aboriginal man, yea her heart and spirit is in this land [...] we know you don't know the legends, traditions even beliefs of those poor slave kanakees but what you have is a murri look into things and speak bits of that lingo, sure long silence have been here. in Australia the slaves of natives is to touch their beating hearts is like hearing the drums of many a war angry tribes (2017, 232) Fogarty opens with a series of tender descriptions of his mother, "her eyes are grey / her love is of a slave." Yet the lines prove unsettling. Fogarty couples together "slave" and "love" in an oxymoronic contrast. The dissonance draws our attention to another distinction, the difference between an insider and outsider understanding of Aboriginality. Across the poem, Fogarty resists the eugenic discourse of Australia's colonial history. The blood quantum discourse fixing Indigenous peoples to 'authentic' labels is critiqued by Allen in his discussion of the concept of "blood memory" (1999). He points out that a range of Indigenous writers have defied the way in which legislators have called upon blood quantum "to inscribe Indigenous identities as a number always less than that of the generations that came safely before, as a number moving inevitably toward zero" (111). Similarly, Fogarty targets the Australian governments who place the Murri and South Sea Islander people together through the "long silence" of the colonial archive. There is also the vocalisation of the doubters of Fogarty's mother's identity, "they say she don't identify / as kanakee." Finally, there is the financial profit of the "white man" who oversees the indentured labourers. By contrast,

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Fogarty proposes an internalised idea of Aboriginal identity that does not stem from eugenic discourse. He writes that Aboriginality is not limited by one's alienation from the "legends, traditions, even beliefs" of a particular community. To Fogarty, the terms of cultural citizenship stem from a mode of thinking: "a murri look into things." The distinction between the eugenic codes used to classify 'the full Black' and an encultured way of knowing exemplifies Minter's description of 'Aboriginality' as "a projective structure [which is] both sensational and immediately genealogical [...] along vectors of interiority and exteriority" (2015, 259). Here, Minter builds upon Langton's formulation to suggest that Aboriginality is the product of both exterior processes such as encounters and interior feeling.

In interview, Fogarty states that the poem was written to forge a level of kinship between the ethnic groups who found themselves in Cherbourg Mission in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Pacificans, Kanakees, Asians, and the Kanakees were always coming over […] as the enslaved as workers in [the] Brisbane area, and a lot of them married into Aboriginal people for their spiritual survival, not their political survival, because they were cultural people too […] I have throwback to Asian, Indian, Indonesian, Pacific, Macassan. […] most Aboriginal people say I don't give a fuck, my daughter has pale skin, blue eyes, but they still identify their race as being Aboriginal, not the identity that was pushed onto them like the South Sea Islanders. That's one good thing about Black Aboriginal people, we don't look at the colour of the skin or the features, we look at the spirit which produces the language, the song, the love. (Fogarty and Moore) To establish identity based on ethnicity, Fogarty argues, would be to return to the terms of Australia's assimilationist policy of breeding out the "Black Aboriginal." By contrast, Fogarty refers to the "spirit" shared by Aboriginal people, what Minter describes as "inner-feeling" (259), a common outlook produced via shared spiritual attachment to place.

Inner-feeling gives way to a more complex focus on the Pacific Ocean itself in "Advance Those Asian an Pacific Writers Poets," a five-page poem published in Fogarty's 2014 collection, Eelahroo (Long Ago) Nyah (Looking) Möbö-Möbö (Future). The poem's title may be a pun on Australia's national anthem, "Advance Australia Fair," using the connective tissues underscored by the anthem to link the songs of the Indigenous Pacific. Fogarty differentiates these communities from the British coloniser by suggesting that "Asian is not cassation / Pacific are not anglosacktion" (70). The phrase may be read as a simple critique of

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the imperial powers sacking the environmental and intellectual resources of the Pacific. However, that reading would ignore the discursive consequence of the pun. We expect "Pacific is not anglosacktion." In subverting our expectations, Fogarty sets up a tension between the singular 'is' and the plural 'are.' The jarring "are" draws our attention to the successive waves of human migration that crossed the ocean prior to the arrival of European explorers. Such a history of inter-Indigenous encounters upends the view of Australia as a New World whose first contact with an overseas nation was with Cook. For example, Fogarty alludes to the Yolηu communities in Arnhem Land who traded trepang (sea cucumber) to the Macassans from Sulawesi (Indonesia): "The Makassar came then stayed so we live equal passion and ate blood on blood drank the earth as writers to today" (72). While there is some debate on the subject, historians have traced Macassan-Yolηu trading networks as early as 1600 by radiocarbon dated rock art depicting the Macassan traders (Wesley, et al 71). The connective tissues between the Macassans and Yolηu peoples evoke an alternative view of Australia's history, binding Indonesia and Australia together in the longue durée of planetary time. As Rebecca H. Bilous speculates, the lack of acknowledgement of longstanding relationships between Aboriginal Australian communities and other Indigenous nations reinforces the perception that Australia is a 'separate' island, a myth that "continues to create inequalities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples" (377). Bilous suggests that Aboriginality continues to be interpreted in the dualism between coloniser and colonised, despite many interactions that exceed the structural opposition.

Fogarty differentiates inter-Indigenous histories of contact from a European history of voyaging in the Pacific: Asian we can love on open eyes Pacific we can love on open arms They weren't our oppression We know here lot bugged like the white man's peoples. But that not the ones on homeland (71). While Fogarty acknowledges the violent ramifications of an encounter with other Indigenous communities, "we know here lot bugged like the white man's peoples," he contends that "they weren't our oppression." To reopen the connective tissues between Australia and the communities across the Pacific, Fogarty reconceptualises the psycho-geographic appearance of the Pacific:

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Asian unity we need is most important They are the beings on top of us and on the side of us. At our arms is the Pacific of knowing We need to unite for rights in all writing powers. Our Asians are on our earth if we walk under the seabeds we sleep together Think where there's no sea the waves of our humanity is the same (70) Rather than interpret the Pacific as a sparse, unpopulated ocean, Fogarty poetically reimagines the ocean as an embodied space: "At our arms is the Pacific of knowing." Through this ontologically disconcerting metaphor, he envisages the Pacific as a field of interconnections across time and space. The Pacific undersea becomes an inter-Indigenous commons: "think where there's no sea the waves of our humanity is the same." On his way down underwater mountain slopes to this commons, Fogarty describes "mountains, unseen mountains" (2014, 72). The line contests the notion that islands are discrete or deserted places in favour of interconnected outcrops of intensity linked by submarine lines of connection across the Pacific. In this way, Fogarty reconceptualises the Pacific as a continuous space of interconnection and exchange.

Given the similarities between Fogarty's suggestion that the reader "think where there's no sea" to Glissant's suggestion that islands extend "in all directions in our world through its network of branches" (1989, 67), I draw out "Advance" in reference to Glissant's writings on the Pacific.122 Glissant first wrote of the Pacific in an essay included in Caribbean Discourse entitled, "Dispossession" (13-52), which responds to the Federated States of Micronesia's movement for independence from the United Nations in 1979.123 Glissant predicted that if Micronesia would gain independence, it would then become dependent upon the United States: "the 'Micronesian experiment' shows that there can be no real 'development' within dependence" (49). Glissant’s point is that Micronesia gained self-sovereignty at the cost of a free association, or dependency, to use the poet’s phrase, with the United States; the Pacific Islands receive economic support in exchange for strategic airspace in the Pacific. Negotiation of this relationship is ongoing, threatened by the growing influence of China in

122 Glissant has also influenced a series of scholarly works on Pacific literary culture (DeLoughrey 2007; Stratford, et al; Rowe). 123 Glissant's comments come in response to Jean-Pierre Dumas' essay, "La Micronésie dans la stratégie américaine en Asie" [Micronesia in American Strategy in Asia] written in 1978. In the essay, Dumas advocated for a stronger US military presence in the Southwestern Pacific as a way of restoring balance to the region in the aftermath of the Vietnam war.

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the Western Pacific. In Glissant’s writings, Micronesia’s Faustian Pact (to exchange rights to land and water for economic support) operates as an analogy for the independence movements in the Caribbean, and particularly, Martinique’s dependency on France as an overseas département. In response to "Dispossession," John Carlos Rowe suggests that Glissant forges a "politics of Relation between the Pacific, Caribbean, and Atlantic worlds" (171). While there is more to say about Glissant’s reading of the complex history of Micronesia, Rowe draws out the significance of this essay as regards this dissertation; Glissant envisages the Atlantic and the Pacific as intertwined spatial and imaginative fields, whereby the actions of one will influence or shape the character of the other.

The contingent relation between these oceans informs Glissant's essay collection, La terre magnétique (2007) [The Magnetic Land]. La terre magnétique emerged from a project Glissant undertook under the charge of UNESCO, an organisation he had been affiliated with from 1980 as editor of Courrier de l'UNESCO, and for whom Glissant organised twelve expeditions to visit human cultures on secluded islands, riverbanks, and coasts. The majority of these expeditions went to the Pacific, to destinations such as Easter Island, Fata Hiva (Marquesas Islands), Raga Island (Vanuatu), Indonesia, and the Philippines (Ridon 146-154). The title derives from Glissant's description of Easter Island: The island wanders, and no one knows how many centimetres in a year, so perhaps it will experience the fate of the archipelagic countries that one day (and likewise, no one knows when) will be torn apart by the unavoidable frictions between the plates in the deeps, and the imagined notions of the inhabitants of Easer Island steer through the space of the Pacific and under the moon of the Great Triangle in search of the lost word. That is almost true. (qtd. in Ette 286) To Glissant, Easter Island is a place that continuously unfolds in motion. That no one is able to pin down its exact position mirrors his description of the fractal infinitude of Diamant in Poetics of Relation. The dynamism of both places contest the explorer's ability to accurately map them in exact terms. In this respect, Glissant draws continuity between his own theories of Relation and the Polynesian wayfinding methods that "steer" the island onward, where "the islands and cosmos move towards the traveller" (DeLoughrey 2007, 3).

These similarities allow Glissant to make a more radical observation, that Martinique and Easter Island are connected via "the lost word." The "lost word" is a repetitive trope in Glissant's oeuvre. It is used in the "Acclamation" section of Le sel noir, where the reader

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awakens to the discovery of words on the doorstep of the house. That the word so bewilders the subject suggests it has come from other worlds, alike the enslaved Africans forced ashore from Africa. In contrast to Glissant's discovery of a foreign word that washes ashore, the inhabitants of Easter Island must retrieve their own "lost word." As such, I suggest that theirs is the trace that Glissant discovers, an original island outline and emblematic Indigenous figure to which the Caribbean is inescapably related. In this way, we may adapt Benítez- Rojo's statement to say that the original 'repeating island' is in the Pacific (1992).124 The word that washes up on Glissant's doorstep also emerges in Fogarty's description of a mutually encultured sea-floor: "if we walk under the seabeds we sleep together [...] Make our books be the beach to lay on" (70-72). The word Fogarty locates in the Pacific undersea is indicative of expressive traditions that have evolved over centuries, a durational imprint of the compositional field that has shaped the Indigenous Pacific. In this way, Fogarty exemplifies Tongan and Fijian writer and anthropologist Epeli Hau'ofa statement that "the sea is our pathway to each other and to everyone else, the sea is our endless saga, the sea is our most powerful metaphor" (1998, 408).

Fogarty draws on the ocean as a material force that augments the opacity of his images: Our dancing not same, yes but thing can say and feel. Our looks are not same but we see in painting art looks don't mean we apart. […] Pacific some trash our calendar histories, Yet most of them know savagery is a wall-to-wall things. And the sea makes all inland the body of man and women's. Asian history must be on our side for future frail fake are not civilianise. The words here is to rib the rid of bone requiem deceit in the rackets. (70-72) Fogarty draws on the ocean's capacity to contest the explorer's optical command of space. Lines such as "the words here is to rib the rid of bone requiem deceit in the rackets" unfold outwards in linguistic currents, making connections in intentional and unintentional ways. For instance, to rib" reiterates Fogarty's aforementioned idea of the Pacific as a continuous body, whose various parts are isolated from one another by what Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang define as an 'internally' and 'externally' directed form of colonialism (2012). Fogarty extends

124 For further analysis on Glissant's interest in Easter Island, see Jean-Xavier Ridon. "J.M.G. le Clézio et EdouardGlissant: Pour une Poétique de la Trace." Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, vol. 19, no. 2, 2015, pp. 146-154.

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the metaphor by describing Pacific-Asian writers as being enclosed "wall-to-wall" with his fellow cellmates. Fogarty suggests that colonisation can reinforce differences between Indigenous communities, "our looks not the same." However, Fogarty chains or 'ribs' these writing practices together, as "the sea makes all inland the body of man and women's," and in the process, he draws us back to a common field in which these communities intermingle. Fogarty writes as though the members of the Indigenous Pacific are "inland" from one another, rather than isolated on individual islands above the waves. In "inland," Fogarty draws our attention to a psychic geography shared by the Indigenous Pacific, "a Pacific of knowing," an internalised ocean or common compositional field that shapes thought and action.

On that basis, Fogarty suggests that the spiritual worldviews of the Indigenous peoples in the Asia-Pacific are irrevocably linked, "Dreamtime multiple declare all mistakes be a past tears for those unfriendly warpaths / Familiar our write-to-write together now Pacifica Asian's narrow and bigger…" (72). By aligning the European history of exploration with an Indigenous history of transoceanic diaspora, Fogarty reveals the limits of prior conceptions of Indigenous roots. As DeLoughrey suggests, the postcolonial field in which Fogarty's work is often situated "has not adequately addressed the ways in which indigenous discourses of landfall have mitigated and contested productions of transoceanic diaspora" (2007, 4).125 Fogarty contests the explorer's singular grasp of the Pacific in conclusion that "Dreamtime multiple." The turn of phrase conveys Fogarty's awareness that the spiritual narratives encoded onto Yoogum and Kudjela Country are in synchronous relation with the spiritual practices of communities across the Pacific: "All people of Pacific Asian are star travelling poetry" (71).

125 In Australian scholarship, Dimock's point was developed by Robert Dixon and Brigid Rooney, see Brigid Rooney. Robert Dixon. Scenes of Reading: Is Australian Literature a World Literature?. Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd, 2013.

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Figure 2. Draft Manuscript of "Advance Those Asian and Pacific Writers Poets."126

By describing the poem as "the beach to lay on" (2014, 70-72), Fogarty draws attention to the page-craft underlying his inventive, inter-Indigenous (and in this case, pan-Pacific) poetics. My analysis of "Advance" benefits from reading drafts of the poem that were gathered for the poem's publication by the editors of Lionel Fogarty Selected Poems 1980-2017 – the first piece of scholarly research undertaken on Fogarty's unpublished material. "Advance" is written on blank, unlined pieces of paper, composed diagonally at various points to best fit the available space. Hasty composition has caused several words to be blurred in the desire to fill the vacant white page. Fogarty corrects as he goes, as in "Harvest the last learners," "Blunders," "and burial in ch shround," "un unbroken," and "h hopeless," a rare occurrence given that Fogarty's other draft manuscripts included in the aforementioned archive emerge whole and complete, without errors. I consider the poem as 'oceanic' in length and breadth, its manuscript-face awash with corrections, notations, and ink stains, a free-floating, un- grammatical poetics that reflect the demands of imagining the entwined nature of Pacific spiritual beliefs. Where Fogarty typically inscribes the time and date of a poem's completion, he has written "Time Anytime" as well as "END" with an arrow pointing to the end of the page. He notes only the month it was completed, "June." These notes do not adorn any of the

126 At present, the manuscript materials I refer to are not housed in a designated archive. As such, full citation details cannot be provided. These manuscript materials are also referred to in Philip Morrissey. "Introduction." Lionel Fogarty Selected Poems 1980-2017. Edited by Philip Morrissey and Tyne Sumner, re.press, 2017, pp. 15-29.

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other draft materials Fogarty completed in Victoria that were gathered by the editors, a decision that may suggest the poet's considerable satisfaction at having finished the poem. In a broader sense, the peculiarity of those inscriptions aligns with its multi-temporal subject matter. "Time Anytime" displays Fogarty's aversion to a mono-temporal view of the Pacific. If Pacific peoples are to come together, Fogarty poses, their pluralism must be upheld, "Dreamtime multiple." My reading of the Fogarty's inter-Indigenous engagements across and within the Pacific counters still-dominant understandings of his work as being positioned against the white Australian reader or the Australian nation-state. Further, Fogarty's willingness to engage in both face-to-face and literary encounters with Asian and Pacific writers evidences the need to align trans-Indigenous juxtaposition with points of contact between Indigenous writers. The connective tissues between Indigenous nations that are recorded in "Advance" do not only indicate aesthetic, historical, or spiritual differences. Rather, they exemplify a shared compositional field of reference built on continuity and interconnectedness, a fact that can be discerned through further analysis of the figure of the inter-Indigenous encounter.

III. Simple Form and Poetic Paths: Ali Cobby Eckermann and Celtic Ireland

This section extends my analysis of Indigenous-to-Indigenous contacts by turning to Eckermann's poetic engagement with Celtic Ireland. The relationship between Aboriginal and Celtic is, as with Caribbean-Aboriginal engagements, rarely examined in scholarly discourse, least of all from an Aboriginal perspective. The scarcity of work on the subject is compounded by the above-mentioned tendency to interpret Aboriginal literature solely within a national framework. I analyse the inter-Indigenous encounters that surface in Eckermann's poetry to remedy that void and re-situate her work in the context of a planetary commons. Rather than engage in an inter-Indigenous encounter across a shared spatial field like Fogarty does in the Pacific, Eckermann links herself with Celtic Ireland in temporal synchronicity. That is, she entwines Yankunytjatjara and Celtic ancestors in the deep time signified by their engagement with the figure of the night sky. By tying the disparate spaces of Aboriginal Australia and Celtic Ireland together in common time, she asks her readers to understand our planet as an entity that is encoded with durational meaning.

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Like Fogarty, early scholarly engagements with Eckermann position her in relation to a local space, rather than a transnational or a planetary context..127 Thanks to earlier pioneers in Aboriginal literature like Fogarty, Eckermann is less interested in (and not bound to) the literary project of "breaking open the shell of the English language" (Mudrooroo 1995, xii) and is more interested in developing what Wright defines as a self-governing Aboriginal literature (2018). The nascent scholarship on Eckermann has positioned her work in a local framework: the poet's connections to Yankunytjatjara Country in South Australia. Describing Eckermann in an editorial essay for Wasafiri, Etherington writes that, "We see a poet balancing twin imperatives of narrating and singing a new history of country" (3). More recently, Matthew Hall writes that Eckermann's poem, "Thunder Raining Poison" explores the distinction between an "individual and collective narrative of land and creation" (159). In one of the only pieces of scholarship to read Eckermann beyond a given local environment, Kate Fagan likens Eckermann's "contrasting and accomplished use of minimalism within serialised narratives" (2017, n.p.) to Glissant's Poetics of Relation, in which "every detail [is] as complex as the whole that cannot be reduced, simplified, or normalised" (32-33). In Fagan's view, reading Eckermann becomes, as with Glissant, an immersive experience traversing "multiple temporalities" across the "postcolonial cultural processes [...] that drive a poetics of decolonisation" (n.p.). Fagan’s use of Glissant's concept of Relation to examine Eckermann’s decolonial poetics once again illustrates the way in which Caribbean literature often serves as a kind of precedent to Aboriginal literature, despite their historical and epistemological differences.

This chapter challenges the broad acceptance that Eckermann's work is solely connected to local spaces by exploring the trans-local reach of her work. Separated from her mother at birth as a member of the Stolen Generation, a term referring to the Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their Indigenous families due to governmental policies, Eckermann's reconnection with her mother's community at the age of thirty-four informs the ethical principles that guide her encounters with other Indigenous communities.128 Consider Eckermann's evocation of her birth mother's reunion with the earth in the title poem, "Inside My Mother":

127 For a brief overview of that scholarship, see Cooke; Etherington 2016; Hall 2018; Murn. 128 In that way, Eckermann has commonalities with Brathwaite and his nanna, Glissant (who dedicated his novel, La Lezarde to his mother), and Fogarty for inscribing the maternal figure with relational agency.

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my mother the dying crawls down into that final embrace […] over the sand her mother the earth and I walk away leaving her there in that cradle, safely nestled in the roots of that tree, safe in her country our solace, her grave (2015, 20-21) As the poem concludes, the life of her mother becomes richly entangled with the "roots / of that tree." The space becomes its own locus of enunciation that produces a series of lines of connection that extend outward through the land. These lines of connection, and their attendant meanings within Yankunytjatjara Country, do not cease when she visits Celtic Ireland. Rather, they spiral outwards in often confusing and uncanny ways to encircle the poet and her interlocutor in an ancestral commons. Cooke describes this link as "an ability to shift between regions thanks to an intimate knowledge of the history of the places [she is in]" (2013, 285).

Eckermann has indicated in interview that literary collaborations across cultures can generate mutual understanding. She has inspired and collaborated with Indigenous poets including Witi Ihimaera, Nigerian-born author Chika Unigwe, and translated her work in partnership with a range of Indian Dalit poets.129 Working with the Dalit poets, Eckermann wrote the poem “Home” to express the importance of inter-Indigenous solidarity when it comes to environmental issues. It describes Aboriginal and Dalit children forced to find home in a “dry river” with “dead birds’ beach fenced,” and “dead fish on shore” (qtd. in Pratap Dash 18).130 Eckermann remembers working with the Dalit poets fondly: The Dalit and tribal poets who I have met, they're not just appreciating the words on the page, they actually get a whole sense of the experience of what you're writing about and understand that impact straightaway because they are cultured people and treat you

129 Eckermann has met with and collaborated with Maori poet, Witi Ihimaera, with whom she was interviewed by Eleanor Wachtel during the 2017 Vancouver Writers Festival, see Eleanor Wachtel. "Witi Ihimaera and Ali Cobby Eckermann on the power of Indigenous storytelling." CBC Radio, January 6th, 2019. For a more comprehensive summary of Eckermann's influence upon Chika Unigwe, see Elizabeth Bekers. "Writing Africa in Belgium, Europe: A Conversation with Chika Unigwe." Research in African Literatures, vol. 46, no. 4, 2015, pp. 26-34.

130 Another, more intentional analysis of the translation of Eckermann's poems, can be found in Pratap K. Dash. "Homeward Bound: Poems from Australia and India." Transnational Literature, vol. 7, no. 2, 2015, pp. 1-3.

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accordingly […] I think that when the readership can reflect their conversation back to you it also grants healing by understanding beyond the words on the page. (2016, 16) Eckermann suggests that cross-cultural literary engagement goes beyond circulation and publication. To her, literary collaboration can grant "healing by understanding beyond the words on the page" (16). In this case, translation, while often leading to gains and losses, as was the case with Fogarty's "Atribuido a los incrédulos," generates a mutual understanding that leads to ontological repair, to use Fagan's term (2017).

For Eckermann, the prospect of achieving mutual understanding with Celtic peoples is complicated. On this note, it is firstly necessary to contextualise her poems in the complicated history of Irish and Aboriginal Australians. Eckermann acknowledges the travel of Irish Australians into Aboriginal communities in her poem, "At Knowth" (2013, n.p.), where she says to her Celtic counterpart that there may be Irish Australians bound for home "on their return to you." The line hints at the complicated co-experience of exile and colonising faced by Irish Australians, many of whom could not return home once granted a ticket-of-leave.131 Most Irish Australians were either forced to immigrate to Australia as prisoners of war from the Irish rebellion of 1798, or they arrived as convicts and free settlers having not been able to survive the harsh years that followed the Irish famine. Scholars such as Ann McGrath indicate that the shared oppression of Aboriginal and Irish people by the British gave the two groups common ground.132 She suggests that the two cultural groups often crossed over, as in the extensive numbers of so-called "Shamrock Aborigines," that is, Aboriginal people of Irish descent (2010). Numerous Irish Australians were also complicit in the persecution of Australia's First Nations as convicts and bush labourers, miners, bushrangers, squatters, police, church-folk or timber gatherers. In an address to the Western Australian parliament in 2017, Irish President Michael Higgins has acknowledged that Irish settlers played a significant role in the injustices faced by Aboriginal Australians, citing as one instance the aforementioned Myall Creek Massacre of 1838, where up to thirty unarmed Aboriginal people were killed in Northern New South Wales. Irish Catholicism also played a role in the repression of Aboriginal languages, cultures and lore on the Missions that housed Aboriginal

131 Those convicts were often under magistrate's order to remain in certain districts such as Parramatta and Campbelltown. For an autobiographical consideration of the crossings of Celtic and Aboriginal histories in an autobiographical medium, see Peter Botsman. Wakuwal. Valentine Press, 2018. 132 In recent news, Amerindian and Irish solidarity has also drawn attention. See Rory Carroll. "Irish support for Native American Covid-19 relief highlights historic bond." The Guardian, 9th May 2020.

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children separated from their families. Wright speculates on that history as she reflects on her own Irish-Indigenous ancestry: If I look at Michael Demes' Mythic Ireland, I wonder what I might have learnt from my father's family had I known them, and what of them I have inherited. I have often thought about how the spirits of other countries have followed their people to Australia and how these spirits might be reconciled with the ancestral spirits that belong here. […] What songs should be sung in recognition of our national collectivity? (2007, 93) Rather than dwell on Irish complicity in the genocide of Aboriginal peoples, Wright imagines the spiritual traditions that that came with Australia's Irish settlers. In so doing, she rethinks Australia's spiritual outlook in light of the complications of colonial history. Wright asks that if we are to acknowledge a complex and shared colonial history, what songs should Australians sing?

A response to Wright's question can be found in Eckermann's poems, "At Knowth," "At Glendalough Ireland," and "At Giants Causeway" (2013, n.p). Eckermann wrote these poems whilst touring Ireland as Australian Poetry Ambassador in 2013. Alongside fellow Australian poet Diane Fahey, Eckermann was chosen by the Literature Board of the Australia Council to deliver a range of poetry readings across Ireland. No doubt Eckermann would have appreciated the grim irony of travelling to Ireland from another, far-flung outpost of the Queen's Commonwealth as an 'Australian ambassador': a position that belies Eckermann's criticism of Australian governmental policies. Indeed, these poems demonstrate Eckermann's distaste for the expected niceties of an ambassadorial role.133 As she travels through sites commemorating Ireland's pre-Norman Celtic past, Eckermann commits to a deep affinity with the Indigenous peoples of the land on which she walked and presented the poems. The result was published the same year through Cordite Poetry Review in a chapbook entitled, Proteaceae, that was curated by Peter Minter.

Minter's introductory essay to Eckermann helpfully frames my analysis of the interconnection between Aboriginal Australia and Celtic Ireland:

133 For a prior example of Aboriginal travel writing, one can turn to the case of Oodgeroo Noonuccal, who travelled to China as an Australian Ambassador in 1984, see Nicholas Jose. 'Oodgeroo in China.' Australian Literary Studies, vol. 16, no. 4, 1994, n.p.

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[We share] an embedded planetary and genetic inheritance that, despite the complexities of our technologies and linguistic apparatuses, is always and unescapably experienced 'in common.' Indeed, it is the deepest of the commons, the shared information – geological, biological, cosmological, cybernetic – that is central to our core relations to the earth and each other. Gondwanaland is a temporally opaque but profound precursor to our core existential relationship with the cosmos. It inflects a human commons and a politics of speciation, the deep unfurling and substantiation of organic and cultural form. The poets gathered here are sisters and brothers of Gondwanaland and its temporary emergence among human actors – spanning time, politics and cultures. (n.p.) Minter argues that the ancestral links between regions such as Celtic Ireland and Aboriginal Australia, are often disavowed due to the increasing technological development. However, he suggests that humanity will always have a "planetary and genetic inheritance" in-common. To Minter, Eckermann's poems draw our attention to the "deep unfurling and substantiation" of organic form. For Minter, Eckermann's work bears the durational imprint of the earth, and as such, inescapably expresses the nature of our human condition, which is "always and unescapably […] in common." Minter's discussion of the relationality of Eckermann's work draws upon the chaotic indeterminacy and interconnections underpinned by Glissant's concept of Relation, a further example of Caribbean-Australian literary interconnections.

In "At Glendalough Ireland" (2013, n.p.), Eckermann acknowledges the difficulty of engaging with a Celtic past that is in the grip of global tourism. The title, "At Glendalough Ireland" immediately positions us alongside Eckermann on the tour bus to Glendalough, a pre-Norman monastic settlement from the sixth century dedicated to St. Kevin. We do not have any sense of the time Eckermann spent in transit to Glendalough. Instead, the poem opens with a lament at the tourist industry: What is this obsession to tourist the dead? I can't understand if it is to prove A history of belonging Or a pride of invasion. Eckermann questions the benefit of a commodified site commemorating Ireland's Celtic past. Her opening statement on "the obsession to tourist the dead" suggests that the profits of the tourist industry rely upon the extinction of Indigenous people, and certainly, the monastic settlement of Glendalough appears to fulfil the purpose of creating cultural and economic

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value for the nation-state. In this way, Eckermann's opening lines indicate that representations of Indigenous peoples are often deployed in structural opposition to the viewer. Either for "a history of belonging" or "a pride of invasion," sites such as Glendalough act as a foil for the modern Irish citizen to express a longstanding connection to place.

Given that such a reductive understanding of Indigeneity threatens the complexity of her writings, in the following stanza, Eckermann creates an opposition between her own poetic mode of engagement with the cultural site and the Irish tourist circuit, which she describes as a "rapunzel tour": The rapunzel tours have failed To pierce the blue velvet of sky The graveyard is trampled by spectators Only the river reminisces a monastic past. The Rapunzel folktale by the Brothers Grimm appeals to Eckermann for its familiarity to a global audience, an allusion to the good-feeling of "a pride of invasion." "The rapunzel tours" surround Eckermann, emblematic of what John Urry describes as a choreographed proliferation of images, representations, and signs that condition the viewer into "socially patterned and learnt 'ways of seeing'" (150). To Urry, tourism is performative and instructional; a choreography typified "in passing, such as from a tourist bus window" (91). In an Aboriginal Australian context, the act of witnessing the ghostly traces of Aboriginal culture 'in passing' reinforces existing power relations between Indigenous and non- Indigenous peoples.134 Across a trans-Indigenous history, Eckermann's poem also decries how tourism appraises the value of "a monastic past" as a fetishized, 'drive-by' display of cultural difference. We are left with the sense that the truncated encounter narrative fails "to pierce the blue velvet of sky." Similar to Carter's resistance to Indigenous-to-Indigenous comparison, a formulation suggesting that "comparatively / everything's alright" (41), Eckermann refuses to provide a sentimental representation of either Indigenous-to- Indigenous difference or equivalence.

While Eckermann turns to the river ever-so-briefly, "only the river reminisces a monastic

134 John Frow posits that underdevelopment is a key factor in the attractiveness of non-Western tourist sites, see John Frow. "Tourism and the Semiotics of Nostalgia." October, vol. 57, 1991, pp. 123–151. As Robert Clarke has also shown, the proliferation of Australian tourism has led Aboriginal writers like Langton, Wright, and Morrissey, to manage the point of contact between 'underdeveloped' community and the cultural outsider (2016).

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past," this is but the briefest of interludes before the overwhelming and undifferentiated disorder of tourism looms in the following stanza: So many languages are spoken here The languages have arrived by bus But there is no cohesion The tourist culture as dead as the graves. Eckermann alludes to the fact that encounters conditioned by tourism are designed to produce a lack of "cohesion." The following lines, "so many languages are spoken here / the languages have arrived by bus," evokes the paradox that the tour bus encloses tourists together, but limits the opportunity for them to gain an understanding of one another. Under those terms, a poetic encounter between Celtic Ireland and Aboriginal Australia fails to produce an "understanding beyond the words on the page" (Etherington 2016, 16). Despite this, Eckermann returns to the river in a passing line at the close of "At Glendalough Ireland" (2013): Do not bury me and weight my soul with stone Burn my body on the campfire Scatter my ashes along the river An unmarked grave for peace. The river's flowing body promises renewal, a flowing re-expression of an ancestral past. That Eckermann uses the river as a symbol of an encounter narrative between herself and the monastic settlement indicates that an encounter that is inherently unfixed. Recalling her poem, "Lake Eyre," where Eckermann writes, "we float our churches down the river" (2015, 44), the poet envisages a flowing river across Yankunytjatjara Country from the vantage point of Glendalough, "Scatter my ashes along the river / An unmarked grave for peace." Eckermann interconnects the two sites on the basis of the watery flows between the two regions, and, in this way, "At Glendalough Ireland" re-situates the original reference to Lake Eyre in a planetary, rather than national, framework.

A more fruitful inter-Indigenous encounter between Eckermann and her Celtic counterpart is evident in her poem, "At Knowth" (2013, n.p.). The poem expels the reader from the vacuum of the tourist bus at the Knowth Megalithic Passage Tomb in Northern Ireland, an enormous burial mound that conceals an underground tomb dug into the hillside. The site is surrounded by kerbstones adorned with carvings that are thought to represent lunar symbols, featuring spirals, wavy lines, concentric circles, dots, zigzags and chevrons (Prendergast 68). As well,

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the Passage Tomb is comprised of numerous passages containing stone basins, pendants, pins and beads that surround the remains of the Celtic deceased. Eckermann's poem is written as an encounter between the poet and the artists who carved the kerbstone designs. Recalling Fogarty's "Advance," Eckermann's opening lines evoke the difficulty of establishing an inter- Indigenous connection: we are all just passing through this place of tabernacles and tombs scripted in a language we can no longer read Eckermann insists that she is "just passing through" through the site, possibly the only mode of engaging with the Passage Tombs when there is no Indigenous language with which to fully interpret the artworks depicted on kerbstones surrounding the site. She bus-tours a land that is estranged from itself through the loss of languages that encoded it with cultural meaning. However, the lines also bear trans-Indigenous ethics of contact in that her personification of a mute tomb that is "scripted in a language we / can no longer read" draws our attention to the language losses that came with the British invasions of Aboriginal Australia. In that regard, the poet's opening description of the brevity of her encounter with Knowth, "we are all just passing through," realises Hall's suggestion that Eckermann's overarching poetic project is to preserve "stories which otherwise would have been obliterated from the history of the nation" from beyond Australia's shores (160). Her alignment of Celtic and Yankunytjatjara land is reinforced by her union with the Celtic figure she encounters: "we are all just passing through" (emphasis added). If that is the case, then the image of a mute tomb gains greater pathos. Rose explains that in Aboriginal communities, "one's death belongs not only to one's self but to others as well: to those who mourn, to those who remember, to those who incorporate the death into a community of memory" (27). Rose suggests that from an Aboriginal perspective, one's death cannot be silent or mute. Death necessitates a communal vocalisation of the life of the deceased.

The doubling of Celtic and Yankunytjatjara culture takes on greater significance in the following stanza, where Eckermann directly addresses her Celtic counterpart via two rhetorical questions: do the concentric circle carvings freeze the breath of your sentimental heart? are the zigzag lines accounts of storms

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when lightning led the way? Eckermann's opening question, "do the concentric circle carvings / freeze the breath of your sentimental heart?" criticises the way that tourism has worked to sentimentalise the afterlife of Celtic culture. She suggests that a tourist visa does not form the basis for inter-Indigenous kinship and distances herself from the double she finds in the Passage Tomb. Subsequently, she describes the Celtic megalithic art as "zigzag lines accounts of storms / when lightning led the way," a superficial reading of Indigenous forms of expression. Her light mocking of her Celtic counterpart suggests that the Indigenous double may be a product of the tourist industry, an embodiment of the cheap reproduction of Ireland's pre-Norman Celtic past. In doing so, Eckermann reiterates her point that the current purpose of the "zigzag lines" at Knowth is to represent a bygone era in structural opposition to the modernity of the tourists who observe it. In this way, Eckermann's Celtic counterpart is a reflective composite of passing glimpses. That is, the figure is made of a series of representations that are projected onto the Passage Tomb. In that regard, we might imagine the Indigenous-to-Indigenous encounter staged by the poem as a projection of Eckermann's internalised self.135 Eckermann's (dis)identification with the Celtic Other reflects Somerville's analysis of the way "respective colonial experiences deeply inflect the ways in which various Indigenous communities 'look' at one another" (2010, 684). In this case, Eckermann directs her questions outward and inward, a Yankunytjatjara/Celtic subject who is inextricably inflected by neo- colonial operations of power.

The limitations of inter-Indigenous dialogue lead Eckermann to draw a distinction between the poetic and superficial modes by which a viewer can encounter the "concentric circle carvings": oh the different stars and planets in your sky are the living compass on which we all rely mankind can journey in simple form or pave poetic paths

135 The projection also raises the questions of 'Indigenous authenticity,' a debate Eckermann is well aware of, particularly in regard to the land rights denied by the Australian nation-state. For a more pointed examination of this issue in regard to literary studies, see The Spirit of Kuti Kina: Tasmanian Aboriginal Poetry. Ed. by Jim Everett and Karen Brown. Eumarrah Publications, 1990.

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The stanza opens with a series of full rhymes that reinforce her satirical critique of the reproduction of Celtic culture ("sky"/"rely"/"mankind"), a "simple" mode of representation that is juxtaposed with a "poetic" grasp of the interrelation of human and non-human form. In this case, a surface-level appearance of "concentric circle carvings" is indicative of the way an onlooker can impress their own designs onto the kerbstones. "Simple form" becomes an analogy for the desire to orient the human subject in opposition to a natural world that is fixed in their place. By contrast, Eckermann describes the "concentric circle carvings" as a "living compass." She implies that the carvings have an epistemological function in structuring the spatiotemporal existence of the Celtic subject as they move across vast expanses of time and space.

As with Glissant's and Fogarty's reference to the wayfinding practices of Polynesian peoples in the Pacific, Eckermann's allusion to the navigational methods of Indigenous peoples as a "living compass" invokes an understanding of the universe that does not rely on fixing non- human elements in time or space. Even as the language that was used to engage with the Passage Tomb is lost, Eckermann suggests that the site retains expressive agency. To her, it is a conscious form that is aware of the viewers that seek to apprehend it, an understanding that reflects an Aboriginal relationship to Country. For instance, the distinction Eckermann draws between "simple form" and "poetic paths" can be likened to Rose's distinction of a Western concept of a landscape and an Aboriginal relationship to Country. While a landscape might be 'lived in,' denoting a "distance between the place […] and the person or society which considers its existence" (7-10), Country is 'lived with,' which implies responsibility. In a similar manner, Eckermann understands the "concentric circle carvings" inscribed on the Knowth kerbstones as a marker of Celtic commitment to a "conscious universe" (Rose 10).

Knowing that the Passage Tomb was used by the Celtic people to mark innumerable lunar cycles in relation to the Sun, Eckermann imagines the celestial contact between the creators of the kerbstone patterns at Knowth and Aboriginal astronomers. By writing that the "stars and planets in your sky / are the living compass on which we all rely" (Emphasis added), Eckermann scales between the figures of Celtic and Aboriginal astronomers that were interconnected by the passing of the sun and the moon over millennia. Fittingly, in the third poem of the series, "At Giants Causeway Northern Ireland" (2013), Eckermann asks her reader to protect the "Burrup Peninsula," a region in Western Australia that houses the highest concentration of rock engravings of any known site in the world (n.p.):

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We must protect the sacred rock writing With every drop of blood we can spill Stand in the shadow of a valley not yet dead As buses dispel an endless stream The ambience ruined by tourism Ah! Disguise the proverbs of carved rock truth That means more, so much more than a photo shoot Eckermann finds some form of continuity between "carved rock truth" of the Burrup Peninsula and Giants Causeway. Both sites exceeds the historical continuum of colonialism and its contemporary representation in the optical, touristic lens. It is that sense of approximate (dis)identification between these sites that informs the conclusion to her poem, "At Knowth" (n.p.): how did your people learn my art? did your people adorn their skin did they share Songlines from my country on their return to you

let us sing a song for the Nungas a song for the Gaeliges brave at Knowth I stand in reverence my art carved by your hand Eckermann finds that the carvings in front of her are dissimilar to the cultural forms of Aboriginal Australia, but that they share the same ancestral author. Reading "At Knowth" and "At Giants Causeway" together, Eckermann intimates that the carvings on the petroglyphs of the Burrup Peninsula and those adorning the kerbstones of the Knowth Passage Tomb have a common celestial source. Both express the continuous unfurling of human and non-human form across deep time. The astrological convergence between these two worlds reflects Minter's suggestion that Eckermann's "At Knowth" exists in-common with Celtic Ireland by virtue of "the deep unfurling and substantiation of organic and cultural form" (2013, n.p.). For the purposes of my argument that Aboriginal literature is self-governing, in that its relational boundaries exceed the nation-state, Eckermann's extension of Aboriginal Songlines to Celtic Ireland constructs a geological and astronomical commons for ancestral dialogue. From beyond Australia's shores, Eckermann expresses the teleology Philip Mead has in mind when he suggests that we must resolve the gap between the pre-colonial and post-colonial

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histories of Australia by expressing "fundamental redefinitions of Australian antiquity and modernity" (401). Eckermann resituates her reader's sense of 'Australian time and space' against the longue durée by which "Nungas" and "Gaeliges brave" inscribed rock carvings in their respective regions. Like Fogarty, who re-defines the Pacific Ocean as an undersea commons by which the Indigenous Pacific can come together in dialogue, Eckermann creates the means for Indigenous communities to encounter one another, situating their meetings in the cycles of planetary movement.

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Conclusion: A Favour for The Western Mariner

As I have demonstrated, Brathwaite, Glissant, Fogarty and Eckermann appropriate the encounter narrative to present radically new conceptualisations of world space. Rather than interpret their use of encounter tropes as a contestation of one-sided colonial histories, I have shown that these poetic works are world-making. That is to say, they move beyond the needs of self-determination to create a collective discourse of worlding counter to the mechanisms of empire. To conclude this dissertation, I wish to review the worlds that are produced by these poets in order to open my research from a planetary perspective and indicate the contribution of this dissertation to what Cheah names 'postcolonial world literature' (2017). It goes without saying that the world is not typically reserved for postcolonial writers. For example, Cheah argues that global circulation may be the "antithesis of freedom" for "those transported for colonial slavery and for Indigenous people who survived genocide" (217). This only underlines the importance of working with alternative logics of exchange such as those examined by this dissertation, including tidalectics, Relation, and inter-Indigeneity. To paraphrase Allen, we must "move differently" between the various focal points that orient our comparative literary projects (2007), and in so doing, self-consciously appraise the methodologies and scales with which we navigate world literature. To read Brathwaite, Glissant, Fogarty and Eckermann together necessitates that we alter or perhaps do away with the methods with which we have hitherto examined cross-cultural encounters.136 Otherwise, we risk pinning these poets to rigid social and discursive categories - rooted or rootless.

By working through the complicated power relations between Caribbean and Aboriginal world-making projects, I have unearthed the possibilities for postcolonial-Indigenous solidarities at a critical moment in literary studies. The need for a form of relation between postcolonial and Indigenous literatures is an overarching focus of a recent special issue of ariel, "Intersections of Postcolonial Studies and Indigenous Studies" (2020). In a roundtable discussion included in the issue, Trinidadian-Canadian writer David Chariandy negotiates a path between Glissant's concept of Relation and Indigenous ways of thinking:

I guess this idea of a "poetics of relation" speaks personally to me as a Black writer whose ancestors include not only enslaved people of African descent but also

136 An analagous phrase, 'a change in the terms of the conversation' borrows from Mignolo's work, The Darker Side of Western Modernity (2011).

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indentured South Asians from the Caribbean. But it’s also true, and most relevant here, that the relations between Black and Indigenous peoples are unique and longstanding in the so-called Americas. Each group has survived catastrophic violence and unspeakably bitter dehumanization—everything from genocide to the most craven and merciless practices of appropriation. I believe that Black and Indigenous peoples have a lot to share with one another. I believe that there’s a precious and powerful—if also imperfect—legacy of solidarity that ought to be remembered and asserted. (63) While Chariandy acknowledges the fundamental differences in the cultural and literary imaginaries of the descendants of enslaved and colonised peoples, he makes the case that there are also continuities between these experiences. One could use as an example the Black Consciousness movements connecting Aboriginal Australian and Caribbean political networks across the globe that I explored in Chapter Two. An imperfect "legacy of solidarity" also accounts for Fogarty's and Glissant's encounter in the Pacific Ocean. When Fogarty remaps the Pacific Ocean, he begins from a position of entanglement and describes "the moody Pacific mingling" (2014, 71). To him, imperfect relations are the fecund matter out of which intersectional solidarity between oppressed communities can be forged. Of course, Fogarty could not anticipate discovering Glissant in the Pacific undersea, who comes to Easter Island "in search of the lost word" (Ette 286). Fogarty's and Glissant's common interest in the Pacific Ocean illustrates the congruity between diametrically opposed expressive traditions. As they come together in the undersea, they create an assemblage of words that we must read in sum and specificity.

My examination of the world-making force of these poets' writings intervenes in larger discussions regarding the systematisation and institutionalisation of world literature. David Damrosch defines the field of world literature as encompassing "all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language" (2003, 4). Damrosch's definition has stimulated much discussion concerning the proximity between literary study and the tenets of world-systems theory.137 The relationship between these fields is most explicitly noted by Alexander Beecroft, who argued for the re-insertion of the crucial hyphen (world-literature) to reflect that field's imbrication with the global marketplace: "World-literature […] is not the sum total of the world's literary production, but

137 To compensate for the inter-disciplinary work required by Damrosch's definition, Franco Moretti develops his concept of 'distant reading,' a quantitative analysis of the circulation of literary works across time and space.

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rather the world-system within which literature is produced and circulates" (1). He suggests that world literature may sustain the late capitalist values of the global marketplace if we do not take other logics of exchange into account. Additionally, when Gayatri Spivak commemorates the death of comparative literature, she establishes that "discourses of worldliness are autobiographical in genre and confessional in institution, even when their interest is exactly not so" (2012, 458). Put simply, Spivak draws attention to the fact that scholars in world literature are often trained in one or two languages, cultures, or literatures, and as such, produce worlds that are highly idiosyncratic.138 The collective effect of this, she suggests, is a world literature that is conditioned by familiar geopolitical and cultural terrains, economic pre-determinants, and the normative values and unifying force of the literary canon. Together, Beecroft and Spivak indicate that a world literature may only illuminate terrains with which we are already familiar. They indicate the need for a more materially focused approach to world literature that attends to the nebulous forces that predetermine our encounters with other worlds.139 As Shih argues in her proposal of relational comparison, "world literature must be understood as a field of relations that extend horizontally across space and are transmitted vertically across time" (231). I have sought to illustrate this field of relations through select literary examples that redefine the space in which world literature circulates.

Fittingly, if Damrosch's original definition of world literature can be read as an affirmation of what Beecroft describes as the "world-system within which literature is produced and circulates" (1), his more recent book concludes in a discussion of the intercultural encounter (2018, 129): Reading world literature should stimulate us to get out into the world. Although no literary work is a direct mirror of its society, all writers come out of a culture and respond to it in many ways [...]. Spending time attentively abroad can tell us a good deal about Dostoevsky's St. Petersburg or Muraskai Shibiku's Kyoto. [...] We can then return home with a deepened critical understanding and new possibilities for

138 The most self-conscious response to the problem of institutionalisation is the forging of the Warwick Research Collective by a diverse number of specialists in the field, see Lawrence Deckard, et al. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool University Press, 2015. 139 Rachel Bower goes so far as to reconsider world literature as based on the "concept of encounter" given earlier Goethian formulations of Weltliteratur, a world literature where "literature operates as an object of exchange in a world of its own, with its own logic that transcends national boundaries" (6).

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enjoyment, as we continue reading our way into the literary legacies of the past and into the multiple worlds opening out before us today. Damrosch describes a world literature that is infinitely intersubjective in that it contains within it an inexhaustible number of new encounters between readers, places, and literary texts. However, by aligning world literature with literal travel "out into the world," Damrosch re-traces the structural imbalances between literary worlds: one cannot help but question who is able to "get out into the world" and "then return home"? This is, as Moretti posits, a world literature that is "one, and unequal" (2000, 55), a fundamentally uneven space that encourages Brathwaite, Glissant, Fogarty and Eckermann to create new relational terms.

I am interested in another question raised by Damrosch's recent description of world literature: how do we move between the scales of "world" and "home"? Brathwaite, Glissant, Fogarty and Eckermann all flit between a single patch of earth, or as Glissant writes in Soleil de la Conscience, "quelque carré de terre" (70), to a larger planetary sphere. Eckermann describes this movement in her imagined encounter with a Celtic counterpart in "At Knowth," where, as I have said, the poet creates a wavelength between Aboriginal Australia and Celtic Ireland via the fulcrum of the "stars and planets in your night sky" (n.p.). Like this, and in their different ways, Brathwaite, Glissant, Fogarty and Eckermann trace a discursive path from a discrete local position to a seemingly distant landscape. The gap between these places necessitates a level of attunement to the world and its literary representations. As I have suggested across this dissertation, the manner of each poet's transition between local and planetary frames drive the differences in the worlds they produce. As Brathwaite and Glissant animate oceanic and estuarine ecologies of North Jamaica and Southern Martinique through strategies of repetition, like re-sweeping and re-treading, they reconfigure the planet on the infinitely scalable terms of the Caribbean archipelago. For example, Glissant concludes Poetics of Relation by imagining far-off places on archipelagic terms: Plantations of the world, lonely places of isolation, unnatural enclosures, that you, nonetheless are touching. Mangos, bayous, lagoons, muskegs, ice fIoes. Ghettos, suburbs. Volga beaches, barrios, crossroads, hamlets, sand trails, river bights. Villages being abandoned, ploughed fields given over to roads, houses shut up against their surroundings, seers bellowing inside their heads. (209) Over the course of this passage, each of these ‘lonely places of isolation’ become attuned to the exigencies, voices, presences of the other. Here, Glissant does not project the Caribbean onto the world. Rather, he suggests that from a planetary perspective, our various ecologies

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appear related in an assemblage of interconnected outcrops, archipelagos, shorelines, and mountain ranges. By advocating for his readers to remap and rearrange space according to various scales, Glissant presents a vision of a planet that can be observed at various levels of intensity and focus. As I have demonstrated, this scalability allows Glissant to shift from a phenomenological position on the black sand beach of Diamant to a broader planetary frame without becoming uprooted.

Fogarty’s and Eckermann’s sense of the world is of course different to Glissant's infinitely scalable vision. As the popular Australian pub-rock band, Icehouse put it in their song, "Great Southern Land," "Anyone will tell you it's a prisoner island / Hidden in the summer for a million years." The lyrics speak to a Euro-centric view of Australia as the 'Great Southern Land,' a place that existed in the realm of myth before its manifestation as a British colony. To counter this Euro-centric concept, I analysed Fogarty's and Eckermann's poetic construction of an inter-Indigenous commons, a sphere of interrelation that is predicated on the alignment of aesthetic and cultural practices across deep time. For example, Fogarty connects the Indigenous communities of the Asia-Pacific region on the basis of epistemological continuity, "All people of Pacific Asian are star travelling poetry " (2014, 70). Similarly, Eckermann is struck by the synchronous artistic practice of Celtic Ireland and Aboriginal Australia in "At Knowth": "how did your people learn my art?" (2013, n.p.). Both Fogarty and Eckermann reconceptualise the planet as a shared compositional field, a geo- poetic commons for inter-Indigenous encounters to come.

Where the world-as-commons enables Fogarty and Eckermann to grasp the continuities between discrete positions, securely aligned in the longue durée of deep time, the world-as- archipelago allows Glissant to differentiate between various outcrops of intensity. The commons counters Euro-centric or Western biases of modern history by positioning it as one infinitesimal moment in deep time, the archipelago ripples with the imminent arrival of worlds to come. These differences do not lead to a further bifurcation of the commons and the archipelago. Instead, these differences speak to the way in which a literary text can reshape what we know of the world without losing its attachment to a local field of reference. Both the world-as-commons and the world-as-archipelago contest the world-as-globe, a formulation Spivak defines as "an abstract ball covered in latitudes and longitudes" that is subject to "the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere" (2012, 338). She suggests that globalisation allows us to gain a false sense of command over our planet. It is

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for this reason that Spivak proposes a turn toward planetarity: "If we imagine ourselves as planetary accidents rather than global agents, planetary creatures, rather than global entities, alterity remains underived from us, it is not our dialectical negation, it contains us as much as it flings us away" (2012, 338-339). She claims that our social bonds with one another are intimately tied up with the representation of the planet. To imagine the world is also to imagine our ontological relationship with one another. I have argued that Brathwaite, Glissant, Fogarty and Eckermann underscore this shift toward planetarity. While they first reprise encounter narratives from colonial history in order to provide new horizons for their work, they leave us with new ways of conceiving of the planet by way of the encounter.

Here I return to one of the epigraphs that opened this dissertation: "The favour to grant you, western mariner, is indeed to read your oeuvre diagonally, to apply other seas to you, other shores, other darknesses" (Glissant 2010, 208). Glissant's statement follows an extended meditation on the role of the poet a few pages earlier: "The poet's vow is not now to abstract himself from his being, to entrust his song to strange forces that will soon smother him, nor by a contrary exercise, to withdraw into his gravity and rage lyrically at what is most desolate in himself" (206). Put simply, Glissant suggests that the poet must either acknowledge the plural influences that shape the poem or face the limits of a singular perspective. Glissant disavows the poet's intentions as an influence upon the poetic work, and, at the same moment, draws our attention to the dialectical process by which a writer shapes and is shaped by a collective culture: "The One of Being has perished [...] fruitful duality prevailed" (224). To Glissant, literature is a monument to the collective voices held within it.140 Glissant’s commitment to this collective can help us to understand his reference to the "western mariner": So, to open to the arduous complexity of the world. Not to an other, but to the martyred vow of the other. May the earth in chaos come to us, for light. The favour to grant you, western mariner, is indeed to read your oeuvre diagonally, to apply other seas to you, other shores, other darknesses. (208) Here Glissant breaks the fourth wall to address the reader as "the western mariner," a reader who is used to watching the surface, using the West as reference point or guide, for currents, disturbances, any sign of signification. We might well imagine this reader in the dark. For

140 Walter Benjamin goes through a similar meditation when he states, "I am unpacking my library" (59), a project that informs Somerville's own discovery of Glissant's place on the bookshelves of Indigenous studies.

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Glissant, this darkness is not an obstacle to the reader's pursuit of truth. Instead, the dark and the worlds it conceals stand for the collective influences out of which the literary text emerges, and which shape the reader's sense of the text itself. By gesturing to shores that are veiled from the reader, of which they had no prior knowledge, Glissant asks us to uncover the forces that inform our sense of the world. We may of course apply Glissant's words to his own Poetics of Relation, which has become a cultural monument in a time of "arduous complexity" and with "the earth in chaos." As Glissant's theories of Relation gains traction among scholars, it will be necessary to apply "other shores, other darknesses" to Glissant himself, that is, to uncover the collective influences that shape his worldly outlook. This dissertation has contributed to this project in unearthing Glissant's interest in, and reference to, Aboriginal Australia, a cross-cultural connection that illuminates new aspects of his work, such as his intersection with Indigenous studies. Similarly, I have sought to bring Aboriginal and Caribbean literatures into a common light by illuminating the darknesses surrounding these poets. I have thus aligned Aboriginal and Caribbean literatures as a "favour to the western mariner," a prompt to think through the underlying forces that determine our singularities and the worlds they produce. As a result, I have unearthed a shared horizon to these entwined projects of worlding to present a planet that is more open, interconnected, and alive.

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