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"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
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