This thesis has been submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for a postgraduate degree (e.g. PhD, MPhil, DClinPsychol) at the University of Edinburgh. Please note the following terms and conditions of use: This work is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, which are retained by the thesis author, unless otherwise stated. A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. INTERSUBJECTIVE ACTS AND RELATIONAL SELVES IN CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL AND AOTEAROA/NEW ZEALAND MAORI WOMEN’S WRITING Justine Seran Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy English Literature Department School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures The University of Edinburgh 2015 ii Declaration This is to certify that that the work contained within has been composed by me and is entirely my own work. Ideas and passages reproduced from other sources have been properly acknowledged. No part of this thesis has been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification. Certain ideas and passages from Chapter 4 have been published as “Australian Aboriginal Memoirs and Memory: A Stolen Generations Trauma Narrative” in the special issue “Decolonizing Trauma Studies: Trauma and Postcolonialism” of Humanities 4 (2015): 661-675. Signed: Justine Seran iii Acknowledgements To my supervisor Michelle Keown, a better adviser and role model I couldn’t have hoped for: thank you for your thorough, caring feedback and for giving me the space to grow professionally and personally. To my fellow September 2012 starts: many thanks for your support and your brilliance Sarah Sharp, Lucy Linforth, Lucy Hinnie, Simon Trüb, Phoebe Linton, Laura Chapot, and Kate Dunn. Knowing I wasn’t going through this alone meant the world to me. To the talented buddies who peer-reviewed bits from this thesis at some stage: cheers Dorothy Butchard, Dawn Sherratt-Bado, and Peter Cherry. To the colleagues and friends who through their acts of kindness, big or small, made the whole process much more manageable (at times even enjoyable!): Victoria Anker, Alison Garden, Alice Tarbuck, Jessica Legacy, Barbara Tesio, Laura Beattie, Veronika Schuchter, Amy Rushton, etc.; and of course Maja Milatovic whose strength kept me from self-pity when things got grim, and for being a total shero whose superpowers include Tim Tam transportation. To the employers who gave me work that allowed me to support myself during the PhD, because I literally couldn’t have done it without you. To my stepmother Thuy Seran-Luu for her sound (if somewhat cryptic) advice: guess I’m the fish that passed the gate and became a dragon now. To my mother Pascale Pouzoulet who made me: I owe it all to you, my successes are your successes and my failures are your failures. To my partner Gary Ankers, for his quiet confidence in my abilities and for being there every day. iv Abstract This thesis explores the dynamics of intersubjectivity and relationality in a corpus of contemporary literature by twelve Indigenous women writers in order to trace modes of subject-formation and communication along four main axes: violence, care, language, and memory. Each chapter establishes a comparative discussion across the Tasman Sea between Indigenous texts and world theory, the local and the global, self and community. The texts range from 1984 to 2011 to cover a period of growth in publishing and international recognition of Indigenous writing. Chapter 1 examines instances of colonial oppression in the primary corpus and links them with manifestations of violence on institutional, familial, epistemic, and literary levels in Aboriginal authors Melissa Lucashenko and Tara June Winch’s debut novels Steam Pigs (1997) and Swallow the Air (2006). They address the cycle of violence and the archetypal motif of return to bring to light the life of urban Aboriginal women whose ancestral land has been lost and whose home is the western, modern Australian city. Maori short story writer Alice Tawhai’s collections Festival of Miracles (2005), Luminous (2007), and Dark Jelly (2011), on the other hand, deny the characters and reader closure, and establish an atmosphere characterised by a lack of hope and the absence of any political or personal will to effect change. Chapter 2 explores caring relationships between characters displaying symptoms that may be ascribed to various forms of intellectual and mental disability, and the relatives who look after them. I situate the texts within a postcolonial disability framework and address the figure of the informal carer in relation to her “caree.” Patricia Grace’s short story “Eben,” from her collection Small Holes in the Silence (2006), tells the life of a man with physical and intellectual disability from birth (the eponymous Eben) and his relationship with his adoptive mother Pani. The main character of Lisa Cherrington’s novel The People-Faces (2004) is a young Maori woman called Nikki whose brother Joshua is in and out of psychiatric facilities. v Finally, the central characters of Vivienne Cleven’s novel Her Sister’s Eye (2002) display a wide range of congenital and acquired cognitive impairments, allowing the author to explore how the compounded trauma of racism and sexism participates in (and is influenced by) mental disability. Chapter 3 examines the materiality and corporeality of language to reveal its role in the formation of (inter)subjectivity. I argue that the use of language in Aboriginal and Maori women’s writing is anchored in the racialised, sexualised bodies of Indigenous women, as well as the locale of their ancestral land. The relationship between language, body, and country in Keri Hulme’s the bone people (1984) and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006) are analysed in relation to orality, gesture, and mapping in order to reveal their role in the formation of Indigenous selfhood. Chapter 4 explores how the reflexive practice of life-writing (including fictional auto/biography) participates in the decolonisation of the Indigenous self and community, as well as the process of individual survival and cultural survivance, through the selective remembering and forgetting of traumatic histories. Sally Morgan’s Aboriginal life-writing narrative My Place (1987), Terri Janke’s Torres Strait Islander novel Butterfly Song (2005), as well as Paula Morris and Kelly Ana Morey’s Maori texts Rangatira (2011) and Bloom (2003) address these issues in various forms. Through the interactions between memory and memoirs, I bring to light the literary processes of decolonisation of the writing/written self in the settler countries of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. This study intends to raise the profile of the authors mentioned above and to encourage the public and scholarly community to pay attention and respect to Indigenous women’s writing. One of the ambitions of this thesis is also to expose the limits and correct the shortcomings of western, postcolonial, and gender theory in relation to Indigenous women writers and the Fourth World. vi Contents Declaration ii Acknowledgements iii Abstract iv Contents vi Introduction. From terra nullius to Treaty Discourse 1 Chapter 1. Reading Violence, Writing Home, Unsettling Embodiments 25 Chapter 2. Caring for Cognitive Difference 73 Chapter 3. Voice, Body, Country: Language and Subjectivity 139 Chapter 4. Memoirs and Memory: Family, Trauma, and Survival 203 Conclusion. “Self is a Subjective Colony” 247 Appendix 257 Works Cited 259 Introduction: from terra nullius to Treaty Discourse 2 There is no future and no past, only a long, isolated now I am not connected to past relations I am not connected to future generations I am pulled away from the flow of time. […] As a Native ancestor and a Native descendant. Shandra Spears Tauiwi reading these stories must make a leap sideways, for this reality is not their reality. Hine Tihi and Ruth Gerson This is my story: it is a story about not being from the desert, not speaking my traditional language and not wearing ochre. […] But my story is of the journey of being a proud Wiradjuri woman, just not necessarily being the Blackfella – the so-called ‘real Aborigine’ – some people, perhaps even you, expect me to be. Anita Heiss 3 This thesis explores the dynamics of intersubjectivity and relationality, that is to say the ways people relate to themselves, each other, and the community. The aim of this study is to determine how subject-formation and relationships are articulated in a cross-section of late 20th and early 21st-century Aboriginal and Māori women’s writing, from Sally Morgan’s 1987 My Place to Alexis Wright’s 2006 Carpentaria, and from Keri Hulme’s 1984 the bone people to Paula Morris’s 2011 Rangatira. The texts that form the primary corpus are from the 1980s to the 2010s and cover a period of growth in publishing and international recognition of Indigenous writing, while the regional origins of the authors ensure that voices from the North Island to the South Island of Aotearoa and from Western Australia to New South Wales, north and south Queensland, and the Torres Strait Islands are being heard. The literary field of contemporary Indigenous women’s writing is not very well known to mainstream readers, especially since Indigenous literature is often subsumed within the category of postcolonial writing. In this thesis I examine the specificities of contemporary Aboriginal and Māori women’s writing and argue that the modes of intersubjectivity and relationality at play in the texts can be organised in four main themes around which the chapters are articulated: violence, care, language, and memory.