Commonwealth Essays and Studies
38.2 | 2016 Geographies of Displacement
Claire Omhovère (dir.)
Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ces/4833 DOI: 10.4000/ces.4833 ISSN: 2534-6695
Publisher SEPC (Société d’études des pays du Commonwealth)
Printed version Date of publication: 1 April 2016 ISSN: 2270-0633
Electronic reference Claire Omhovère (dir.), Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 38.2 | 2016, “Geographies of Displacement” [Online], Online since 06 April 2021, connection on 01 July 2021. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ ces/4833; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ces.4833
Commonwealth Essays and Studies is licensed under a Licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modifcation 4.0 International. Geographies of Displacement
Vol. 38, N°2, Spring 2016
Geographies of Displacement
Claire OmhOvère • Introduction...... 5 Elizabeth Rechniewski • Geographies of Displacement in a Colonial Context: Allen F. Gardiner’s Writings on Australia ...... 9 Catherine Delmas • Transplanting Seeds in Diasporic Literature: Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table and Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke ...... 19 Giuseppe sOfO • The Poetics of Displacement in Indian English Fiction: Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King, Rushdie’s East, West and Desai’s Fasting, Feasting ...... 29 Angela GiOvananGeli and Kim snepvanGers • Spaces of Multiplicity: Rethinking Indigenous Perspectives in Australian Tertiary Education through Altering Teacher Beliefs and Practices ...... 39 Virginie BernarD • Displacement, Replacement and Relocation: The Noongar Aborigines’ Land Claim in Western Australia ...53 Carine Davias • Interconnected Spaces in the Life Narratives of Australian South Sea Islanders ...... 63 Christine VanDamme • “The Drover’s Wife”: Celebrating or Demystifying Bush Mythology? ...... 73 Mathilde rOGez • “Paradys” after the Fall: Mark Behr’s Novels and the Genre of the Plaasroman...... 83 Andreas pichler • The Spatial Turn of Geography during the Edwardian Era ...... 93 Florence laBaune-Demeule • The Novel in Post-Colonial Literatures: Re-Mapping the Genre ...... 109 Pascale GuiBert • “Common Place: Common-Place” A Presentation of Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of the Compounding of Places – Part 1 ...... 123 Reviews
Reviewed by Patricia neville • “Through the long corridor of distance”: Space and Self in Contemporary New Zealand Women’s Autobiographies. By Valérie Baisnée...... 133 Reviewed by John thieme • Surviving in My World: Growing Up Dalit in Bengal. By Manohar Mouli Biswas. Trans. and ed. by Angana Dutta and Jaydeep Sarangi ...... 135 Reviewed by Jean-François vernay • Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead. By Nicholas Birns ...... 139 Reviewed by Kerry-Jane Wallart • Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions. By Gillian Whitlock ...... 141
Contributors ...... 143
Introduction
Back in the summer of 2009 a small group of researchers with a shared interest in the consequences of the spatial turn upon postcolonial studies decided to launch an itinerant seminar that would meet every year once in the spring at Aix-Marseille University, and the following autumn in Montpellier at Paul-Valéry University. In sub- sequent years, the seminar began to attract participants from neighbouring universities in Toulouse, Grenoble and Dijon who, in turn, proposed to organize sessions in their own alma mater. After four years of stimulating collegial work, we felt that the moment had come for us to take stock of the ground surveyed in our bi-annual meetings and the gain this had represented for the evolution of our research. As a result, it was thought appropriate to conclude the first cycle of the Geographies of Displacement seminar (2009-2013) by an international conference that took place on 12-14 June 2014 at Paul- Valéry University. The expansion of the British Empire and its subsequent contraction and transformation into the Commonwealth was accompanied in postcolonial societies by the displacement of populations of diverse origins which, on coming into contact with each other, were transformed at the interface. The processes of exchange and transformation have given rise to original cultural productions which were the object of study of this conference, in the full diversity of their forms: literary, artistic, and cultural. For this occasion, as for the seminars that preceded it, we have adopted an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of the ways in which migratory flows and cultural diaspora transform cultural space to the point of redefining our very conceptions of space and territorial relations. We have been sensitive to the way that a society attempts to create unitary identity and inscribe it in space from a plurality of cultural visions. Lastly, the seminars and the conference alike gave us the opportunity to review the theoretical tools and conceptual instruments available in the ever-changing fields of postcolonial and area studies (including cultural geography, ecocriticism, geocriticism, diaspora studies, geohistory, transnational history, etc.) with a view to renewing our analysis and understanding of spatial configurations. The current issue ofCommonwealth Essays and Studies gathers together a selection of the papers delivered during the conference in addition to some of the presentations given in the course of the preparatory seminars. The final volume as it stands fairly reflects the complementariness of the approaches adopted by contributors to understand the historical and cultural forces that concur in giving existence to the object of our research. Maps, in combination with the various types of discourse they elicit, are of pri- mary importance in the articles collected for this issue. Mapping, of course, has always featured prominently in the European paraphernalia of expansion and conquest, as a necessary instrument in the process of territorialisation. This aspect is made clear in the correspondence of Allen F. Gardiner Elizabeth Rechniewski analyses. Rechniewski’s essay, like Andreas Pilcher’s contribution on Edwardian geography, both improve our comprehension of maps by showing that they do not simply record existing places, 6 but they also create spaces in which to locate new representations. Maps are always paradoxical creations, insofar as they invent the world through the identification and the modelization of what is still unperceived in the extant. Itself a troping device, the map is then necessary to conceptualize the forces of transformation and revision that operate in cultural representations. And nowhere is this process more visible than in the widespread legal procedures that Indigenous peoples throughout the world have initia- ted to reclaim the territories that colonial powers confiscated when they displaced Abo- riginal populations from their ancestral lands. Virginie Bernard discusses a particularly representative example of this evolution in her essay on the Noongar Aborigines of the south-west of Western Australia who lodged an application for determination of native title over their “country,” in the double physical and metaphysical sense that the word possesses among the Indigenous populations of Australia. The displacements they un- derwent and the strategies they subsequently elaborated to relocate in their “country” led them to confront the Australian state policy of repressive authenticity that excluded them from the contemporary present. The dynamic identities the Noongars developed as a result demonstrate that all maps are strategic and that their contours are never fixed once and for all. The historian’s handling of primary sources finds its counterpart in the constantly renewed efforts of literary critics to map out the changing contours of postcolonial literature. Florence Labaune-Demeule demonstrates that attempts to do so will lead to a fresh understanding of the plasticity of the novel, and the challenges its ever- changing form poses to the reader and the critic alike. Christine Vandamme retraces the successive displacements of the “Drover’s Wife” – a historical icon in the formation of an Australian identity – from its inception in Henry Lawson’s eponymous story to its visual embodiment in Russell Drysdale’s painting and grotesque rewriting in a later short story by Murray Bail. In this respect, features like hybridity, intertextuality, and even to some degree intermediality that have long been identified as postcolonial in their manifestations – if not in their essence – can no longer be viewed as pertaining exclusively to the field. In today’s global, postnational, age, such characteristics have become ubiquitous, borne as they are by the cultural flows that disseminate artistic productions through the internationalization of markets. Should we deduce from contemporary evolutions that, at some point, postcolonial literature is likely to become impossible to distinguish from a world literature increasingly written in English, its poetic strategies and political relevance dissolving into the multiplicity of voices that form the greater whole? Although none of the contributions collected in this volume could singlehandedly settle this question, there seems to be a general inclination to answer in the negative. Diversity has been fundamental to the flourishing of postcolonial literature, first and foremost as an index of the historical context in which it developed – the size of the British Empire, the mosaic of territories, peoples and cultures it ruled over, but also the various systems of economic exploitation that were devised to adapt and adjust to changing local circumstances. Although British rule took different forms in settler-in- vader colonies and in plantation colonies, the literature that emerged from a common experience of displacement, subjugation and forced acculturation retains a number of shared features. 7 Introduction
Concern for the commonality of displacement is thus primordial in Édouard Glis- sant’s philosophy and poetics of Relation, rooted as both are in the Caribbean islands and the experience of diaspora. In Glissant’s writing, the archipelago serves as a para- digm for all forms of colonial dislocations and relocations, its geography is elevated to the status of heuristic model reconciling the experience of dispersal with the idea of system. Pascale Guibert thus clarifies the conceptual shifts through which Glissant invests the “common place” – including the topos of displacement – with new significa- tions. The insertion of a mute hyphen between the two terms in “common-place” gives the compound a fresh articulation, since its hyphenation opens a silent yet productive space for the symbolic relations that are actively shaping the “places in progress” of the contemporary world. There is an unmistakable Glissantian dimension to Catherine Delmas’s contention that forms of historical scatterings call for a poetic gathering. Her essay compares and contrasts novels by Michael Ondaatje and Amitav Ghosh that engage with botany – the collection of seeds and plant species – as an imperial enterprise, a legacy of the plantation system and a poetic trope. Delmas shows how Gosh especially experiments with the historical novel as a time-honoured medium for the recollection of collective experience, which he diverts and diffracts into myriad voices and languages to expose “the collusion between scientific, aesthetic, commercial and political interests at the core of imperialism, and the displacement of people, cultures, and languages it entails.” Regarding the languages born out displacement, Chinese Pidgin English, Lascari and Creole were all used in the Indian Ocean for purposes of labour and trade in imperial times. Amitav Ghosh’s reclaiming of these former badges of infamy, which he turns into an aesthetic medium for poetic creation in the Ibis Trilogy, needs to be envisaged in relation to prior literary endeavours to embrace the condition of the migrant and the displaced as an enabling position instead of a historical curse, and write from the physical and psychological disruptions displacement entails rather than against them, as Giuseppe Sofo argues in his own essay on works by Rudyard Kipling, Anita Desai and Salman Rushdie. Even if the writers who come centre stage in Carine Davias’s essay have little use for the postmodern tricks and thrills found in Ghosh’s or Rushdie’s novels, they are concerned, as much as the literary giants of the Indian subcontinent, with the form of collective consciousness achieved through narrative. Davias’s essay introduces her research on the life narratives of Australian South Sea Islanders, the descendants of the Kanakas who were abducted 150 years ago from their original islands in the Pacific Ocean and forced to work in Queensland plantations. Their life-stories began to reach publication in the late 1970s, but so far they have received very little critical attention, although what South Sea Islanders have to say about past uprootings and the forging of a community through a shared story of resilience resonates with the worldwide expe- rience of populations dispersed along the routes taken by labour migrations. This volume finally insists on the multiple, often contradictory affiliations postcolo- nial writers and artists have been grappling with. In her own contribution, Mathilde Ro- gez scrutinizes the ambivalence that undermines Mark Behr’s post-apartheid rewritings of the Afrikaner farm novel, or plaasroman. The plaasroman traditionally pictured the farm and its pastoral setting as a miniature empire, the beautiful and the picturesque ser- ving as alibis for the exploitation of the land and the naturalization of spatial exclusions 8 based on race. Behr’s recent novels, however, are suffused with a pastoral nostalgia at variance with the ruptures the anti-plaasroman seeks to introduce with regard to the past. But bygones will not be bygones, as an Afrikaner perception of South-African history keeps surfacing in these novels through the use of Afrikaans words that convey ideo- logical values telling a slightly different story from the account their narratives struggle to settle in English. Settling the discontents of the past, or rather putting them in pers- pective, is a task that the curators of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Australia have chosen to approach in thought-provoking ways. In their collaborative essay, An- gela Giovanangeli and Kim Snepvangers discuss the outcomes of the critical reflection initiated by the museum authorities on the apportioning of curatorial space. Their de- cision to display within the same room artworks stemming from artistic traditions that have long been perceived as irreconcilable encourages visitors to engage in an ethical dialogue with Indigenous and non-Indigenous art practices. Starting from the curatorial experience’s positive results, the essay enlarges its scope to broach the pedagogical role played by Indigenous educators within Australian public institutions such as schools and universities where they are invited to contribute contents and approaches that were long ostracized from the purview of legitimate knowledge. If we read them from a Glissantian perspective, Giovanangeli and Snepvangers en- courage us to regard museums, schools and universities not merely as institutions of power, but also as common places where the postcolonial sense of the common can be critically examined, displaced and extended with a view to achieving more common- place. Hopefully this issue of Commonwealth Essays and Studies will demonstrate that there is much to be gained from a better understanding of Glissant’s philosophy of Relation. This is the reason why Pascale Guibert’s scrupulous explication of its ramifications will be given a sequel with the publication of the second part of her essay in the forthco- ming issue of Commonwealth Essays and Studies in the autumn of 2016.
Claire OmhOvère Paul-Valéry University – Montpellier / EMMA Geographies of Displacement in a Colonial Context: Allen F. Gardiner’s Writings on Australia
Naval officer, cartographer, town planner, explorer, missionary, Allen Gardiner’s life en- compassed many of the roles afforded within the framework of the British Empire. This article explores his engagement with Australia through a discussion of two texts: a series of letters that he wrote to his father in 1821-1822, and a pamphlet of 1833 advocating the further exploration and settlement of the continent. It explores the overlap between the two texts and their underlying ideological coherence within the context of colonial appropriation.
The Europeans “produced and reproduced” the landscape in so far as it was defined as having a particular relationship to Europeans: the relationship took place at two levels: one as an idealised and symbolic “gaze” which constructed the land as landscape, and two, in the material construction of land as a foundation for the social relations of production. (Mahar 66) In 1821, a young naval officer, Allen F. Gardiner (1794-1851), arrived in Sydney aboard HMS Dauntless. Already a seasoned sailor, for he had joined the navy at the age of fourteen, he had sailed many of the oceans of the world and been involved in battles with the French and the Americans, including the famous hunt and capture of the American Frigate Essex in 1813-1814.1 Enjoying on this occasion nearly six weeks of shore leave, he set out to explore the country around Sydney, venturing as far as the Blue Mountains that had been crossed by explorers only in 1813. During his travels he wrote lengthy letters to his father that recounted his experiences and recorded his opinions of the land, the settlers and convicts and the Aborigines. These letters, although never published, are held in a bound manuscript edition, the pages numbered consecutively, at the State Library of New South Wales (Letters from the South Seas). Twelve years later Gardiner wrote a pamphlet, Outline of a Plan for Exploring the Interior of Australia, pu- blished in London in 1833, that drew on his experiences during his time in New South Wales to advocate the further exploration and settlement of the continent. This article examines the ways in which Australia is represented in these two distinct genres of wri- ting, addressed to two very different audiences: the one a kind of travel diary addressed to his father; the other a call for government-sponsored exploration and settlement that claims to be based on the scientific presentation of facts and rational argument. It explores the overlap between the two texts and their underlying coherence within the context of colonial appropriation. Information is readily available about the life of Allen Gardiner although mainly from a particular perspective, that of his zeal in promoting the Anglican religion dur- ing the second half of his life. After a career in the Navy that saw him promoted to Commander in 1826, Gardiner, perhaps affected by the death of his wife in May 1834, perhaps frustrated at the lack of further career advancement, decided to leave the Navy
1. Gardiner distinguished himself in the capture of USS Essex and was promoted to Second Lieutenant. He subse- quently served with the Mediterranean Fleet, then in the Leander and the Dauntless in many parts of the world, arriving in Sydney after a voyage to Ceylon that included Sumatra, Malaysia, the Philippines and China. Gardiner’s journal of his time aboard HMS Phoebe, 1813-1814, has recently been edited by John S. Rieske, with an Introduction by Andrew Lambert (Rieske 2013). 10 to pursue missionary work, a calling whose roots may be found in his early religious education. Over a period of nearly twenty years of evangelical endeavour he travelled to South East Africa, a journey recounted in Narrative of a Journey to the Zoolu Country, in South Africa (1836), then on to the remotest parts of South America and finally to the desolate shores of Tierra del Fuego, where he and his party succumbed to a lingering death by starvation in 1851 (according to the diary he left behind, in a state of religious ecstasy). Because of the seemingly superhuman resourcefulness, courage and stamina he displayed in his determination to enlighten heathen lands, his fate became an exem- plar of sacrifice in the name of religion, depicted (or rather, imagined) in lithograph and frequently retold in hagiographies (Marsh) and popular religious texts. The Anglican Church commemorates his death every year on 6 September, with the “Allen Gardiner Day” as part of the Anglican Calendar for remembering martyrs of the Christian Faith. As a missionary for the Protestant religion, he combatted not only – in his terms – the Idolatry and Animism of the natives but also the “ignorant superstitions” spread by the representatives of the Catholic Church.2 The role of missionary was only the last of many that Gardiner filled in the course of his remarkable and varied life, roles that were created and sustained within the fra- mework of the British Empire. As naval officer, he enforced the rule of the Empire through the dominance of the British Navy over the oceans of the world. Trained at naval college in the observation and depiction of natural features, he extended his observations to record the terrain, the fauna, flora and ethnographic diversity that he witnessed during his travels across the globe. As cartographer, he drew up the first maps of Southeast Africa; as town planner, he proposed the layout of the new city of Durban, where references to him remain, to this day, in the names of streets and busi- nesses. Through his determination to bring the Bible to the natives of Natal, he played a morally ambiguous role as colonial negotiator with the Zulu King Dingane for the establishment of peace and the cession of land to the British settlers. He entered into a Faustian pact with the King whereby, in return for settler occupation of Port Natal and its surrounds, he would hand over to Dingane any fugitives from the King’s domains for punishment, an agreement that would lead to a certain and horrible death for the victims (Elphick 90). He had hoped to persuade the British government to create a new colony in “Zululand” but the government declined (Lock 48). Finally he was a man of a particular class who followed the pursuits of an English gentleman across the globe (on one memorable occasion hunting the wallaby instead of the fox) and who displayed the Romantic aesthetic sensibility and appreciation of the picturesque and the sublime that signalled intellectual, cultural and affective refinement. He was also, as we shall see, an Englishman of his time in his attitudes towards race and gender, his unquestioning acceptance of British imperial superiority and his hostility to the “superstitious dogma” of the Papacy. These roles were possible only within the context of a dominant and self-confi- dent British Empire. The boundaries between the roles were not clear, on the contrary, they were characterised by slippage, interference and occasional contradiction, but their ultimate underlying coherence lay in the overarching ideological and geographical fra-
2. At the end of a visit to Peru in 1822 Gardiner expresses the hope that the Indians will soon “meet the protection they deserve under a mild and equitable Government and exchange the Rosary and Crucifix grafted by superstition upon their ignorance for the less ostentatious realities of a purer Creed.” (“Letters” 137-8) 11 Geographies of Displacement in a Colonial Context: Allen F. Gardiner’s Writings on Australia mework of Empire. This vast enterprise of global domination supposed not only the exercise of physical force but also an accompanying mindset that read the environment as an object of appropriation.
Letters from the South Seas (1821-1822) Gardiner arrived in Sydney on 24 June 1821 aboard HMS Dauntless, an event recorded on 30 June in the “Ship News” of The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, although the paper’s report that the ship had called “merely to refresh” and would de- part again “with as little delay as possible” for South America was to be disproven, for Gardiner enjoyed nearly six weeks of shore leave. He used the time ashore to undertake extensive trips around Sydney and into the Blue Mountains, recounting his experiences in regular and lengthy letters to his father Samuel Gardiner (1755-1827), a man of subs- tance who had been appointed High Sheriff of Oxfordshire in 1794. Gardiner spent the first week in and around Sydney, venturing as far as Parramatta, where he visited the Native School, the Female Factory and the estate of Sir John Jamison at Regentville; he journeyed as far as the junction of the Warragamba and Parramatta rivers before returning to Sydney on 28 June. This tour is described in a letter dated 2 July 1821, written from Sydney, Port Jackson. On 3 July he sets off on a more ambitious journey inland, venturing as far as Bathurst in the Blue Mountains, from where he wrote a letter to his father on 7 July. The 20 July finds him back in Sydney, while the final letter that concerns this stay in Sydney is written on 1 August, shortly before the ship’s departure on 3 August. Gardiner’s letters are not merely accounts of his activities, but undertake to satisfy his father’s evident curiosity as to the nature of this unfamiliar country and its people: he writes at one point that his father “will be expecting to hear something of the natives of this country” (42). He endeavours to satisfy his father’s curiosity through a compre- hensive and detailed account of the different aspects of the colony: the terrain, climate, landscape and people. Adopting variously an aesthetic, economic, ethnographic and naturalist perspective, he frames the landscape through Romantic tropes; speculates about the reasons for the marsupial pouch, for “nothing is superfluous in nature” (39); assesses the soil, agricultural potential and economic future of the colony; and, as his father is expecting, describes in some detail the Indigenous peoples. The letters take up the interests and observations that Gardiner has been accustomed to record in his naval journals that reveal, writes Lambert, “the scientific curiosity of a newly minted trainee naval officer with the aesthetic sensibilities of a young man trained to paint coastal perspectives” (Lambert 3). His letters provide a welcome and little-known addition to the relatively few accounts that we have of the young colony; they also provide a case study of the ways in which the “colonial gaze” represents and appropriates the lands within its reach.
The Aesthetic Gaze: the Romantic, the Sublime and the Picturesque Sensibility to the aesthetic and understanding of the categories of the picturesque and the sublime were integral to the refinement of mind that marked an English gentleman. Gardiner’s letters are replete with illustrations of his aesthetic appreciation of his sur- roundings, from the picturesque pool: “the reflection of this rocky parapet fringed by 12 the elegant swamp bark and often cushioned with moss, had a beautiful effect in the water” (12), to “the sublimity of the scene” (21) that greets him as a new vista opens out before him. The element of surprise (and contrast) contributes to the impact of the scene, as coming to the edge of a ridge he notes that “the situation was as romantic as unexpected” (20). These observations play a dual function: they attest to the superior sensibility of the English gentleman but also subsume the countryside under the categories developed by “civilised” man. Paul Carter argues that the Europeans’ aesthetic depiction of the land- scape, whether of wild scenery or picturesque and peaceful vistas “gave the impression of visual cultivation, of an aesthetic history with a civilised future” (237) and made it possible for the observer to find his place within it: The picturesque in Australia made the space of travelling visible to the traveller. It realised for him his own historical destination – to travel or to settle down. […] To call [the scenes] picturesque was to attribute to them the observer’s own heightened sense of possession, his sensation of suddenly being at home in the world. (Carter 243)
The Naturalist’s Gaze As a man of the Enlightenment, Gardiner takes pains to observe closely and to describe in careful detail (sometimes with illustrations) the flora, fauna and natural features of the land. This scientific discourse constitutes a “field of visibility” that foregrounds a self-contained and comparative descriptive system, offering another set of categories that the white man could impose on the world, to understand, describe and order it. For Mary Louise Pratt this gaze “elaborated a rationalizing, extractive, dissociative un- derstanding which overlaid functional, experiential relations among people, plants and animals,” thus excluding the particular history and use value of plants, animals and land to the Indigenous peoples (38). The Naturalist’s gaze “naturalises”: “Through mastery of this discourse, the (letter’d, male, European) eye that held the system could familia- rise (‘naturalise’) sites/sights immediately upon contact, by incorporating them into the language of the system” (31). The Aesthetic gaze and the Naturalist gaze might seem incompatible – the one eschews scientific precision for the evocation of aesthetic appreciation tinged with- em otional and even moral judgement via a rich vocabulary of excess. The other employs a precise, unemotional vocabulary of careful and neutral comparison and description. However, they can be seen in the context of colonial appropriation as complementary perspectives, asserting forms of axiological and scientific mastery over the country. Both offer, moreover, a perspective that conspires to eliminate the Indigenous peoples from the picture, for the Aborigines are absent, indeed absented from this landscape, the connection between land, people and activity is broken. When they are described, as we will see later, they are often sitting passively around their fires or dancing.
A Land that is Compatible and Familiar As Gardiner seeks to evoke for his father at home his impressions of this unfamiliar land, his emphasis is often on the similarities he finds: on 28 June his party journeyed to the junction of the Warragamba and Parramatta rivers which he describes through a comparison with the Wye Valley, calling the “frequent windings beneath their preci- 13 Geographies of Displacement in a Colonial Context: Allen F. Gardiner’s Writings on Australia pitous banks a succession of wild and romantic scenery by no means inferior to many parts of the Wye” (11). Such comparisons, though perhaps inevitable in this generic context, establish a link to the homeland and help to make the unknown familiar and recognisable. 3 The fauna may look strange, but they – and the land itself – nevertheless lend themselves to the pursuits of an English gentleman, since Gardiner describes a “very fine hunt,” “one of the [wallabies] affording an excellent chase over some clear ground which enabled us to get in at the death” (37). Where the colonists have established themselves in this country, their estates are flourishing: at Sir John Jamison’s estate of Regentville, Gardiner comments on the rich black loam, the abundant crops of wheat and Indian corn, and the garden full of native and European fruits that have “found an asylum in this genial climate” (11). An accu- mulation of positive adjectives, given additional emphasis through the repeated use of intensifying adverbs, describes the potential of the land: “With regard to local advan- tages, few countries are more highly favour’d, the climate is delicious and the soil, excepting within about twenty miles of the coast, remarkably fertile and altho’ intersected by no Rivers of any magnitude, extremely well-watered” (55, emphasis added). On the transformative powers of the settlers in bringing forth the fruits of this land, Gardiner writes with rhetorical flourish: “There is perhaps no instance of so distant a Co- lony having arrived at so flourishing a state in so short a period. It is now but 33 years since it was first settled by Governor Phillip” (56, emphasis added). Already, he points out, it has exported wool to the Mother Country. The logical conclusion of such edenic des- criptions and positive comparisons with other colonies is that it must be the duty of the white man to unlock the potential of this “favored land” (20) and transform it into the Arcadia of plenty that God intended. However, as Mahar writes of similar descriptions of the unrealised potential of New Zealand: “in reality life in Arcadia was all about land, power and the control of resources” (70). The land is thus described as both aesthetically pleasing and potentially productive. However these positive representations are not echoed in the portrait Gardiner offers of the Aborigines whose incompatibility with civilised living, whether on moral, aesthe- tic or intellectual grounds, is central to his depiction. He shares the prevalent view of the hierarchy of the races: in Australia “the Human Species is here perhaps in the very lowest scale of degradation,” (4) “[a] more humbling portrait of human nature can not well be imagined” (51). Commenting on John Barrow’s descriptions of the African natives, Mary Louise Pratt writes: “To the improving eye, the potentials of the Euroco- lonial future are predicated on absences and lacks of African life in the present” (61). The Australian Aborigines are similarly described by Gardiner using a vocabulary that insistently evokes lack, negation, and transience: [O]wing to their aversion to industry and their migratory mode of living, so unfriendly to increase, being extremely scanty, the Human Species is here perhaps in the very lowest scale of degradation, without clothes, without houses, unless we dignify the temporary shelter afforded by a strip of bent bark by that name; roaming about in small tribes of 20 or 30 in quest of kangaroo-rat and opossum on which they chiefly subsist. Even their arms, on which most Savages display some little ingenuity, are of the rudest kind. (42) Aesthetically, their appearance is represented as repulsive:
3. During his sea voyages in the southern hemisphere Gardiner noted with amusement the places that were situated at the corresponding latitudes in the northern hemisphere. (“Letters” 59-60) 14
The natives in the neighbourhood of Sydney are of the middling stature, slightly limbed but straight and active; the complexion is a sooty black, the hair curled but not woolly with the nose as flat as the African negro and the lower part of the face very prominent. The countenance of the women is equally hideous, their clotted hair standing out in all directions, occasionally intermixed by way of adornment with feathers, kangerou teeth or fish bones, which does not a little contribute to their savage appearance. (45, emphasis added) The initial lines of the description, apparently neutral in tone, are overlaid by the unam- biguously pejorative “hideous,” a term that carries overtones of both aesthetic and moral condemnation. This term is used again in his description of a “Corrobora” [sic]: Gardiner cannot bring himself, he writes to his father, to describe their actions as a dance,4 while: “The accompanying song was equally novel and elegant with the rest of the performance; all throats were strained in chorus, of a more hideous yell it is not possible to conceive” (49, emphasis added). The term occurs yet again when Gardiner visits the Female Orphan Institution in Parramatta where he sees seventy-two (white) children taught according to “Bell’s system” with the result that “a great deal of order and neatness was apparent throughout” (15). He is affected by the contrast between their “sweet voices” and the “hideous yell of the Savage” who, only thirty years before, was “carousing in this delightful spot” (15, emphasis added). His visit to the Native School furnishes moreover another occasion to compare unfavourably the white and Indigenous races. Of the children at the Native School he writes: “Their appearance was stupid in the extreme and much care and severity was necessary to rouse them from their natural state of filth and indolence” (7). He laments, as a man of “sensibility,” the cruel treatment that the Aborigines inflict on their own people, on the young men who undergo painful initiation ceremonies, and on the women who, he claims, are “courted” by being knocked nearly senseless before being dragged to their new home (46). The latter contention in particular, which he does not claim to have witnessed, bears the hallmarks of European myth. Such reports cast further discredit on the Aboriginal way of life and suggest that the Indigenous people have to be “saved from themselves.” The colonists, he asserts, have tried to bring the benefits of civilisation to these “wretched people” through the establishment of a settlement for them at Elizabethtown.5 However, “altho’ living in the very heart of a flourishing colony, familiarised to our language which many speak remarkably well, and accustomed to witness all the various acts of civilisation, few are to be seen in this new asylum” (50-51), and none have lost “a predilection for their former habits” (51). Gardiner provides detailed descriptions of several of the tools and weapons used by the Aborigines: “an extraordinary missile called a Bummarang [sic],” the Wammera (throwing stick) and the Waddie, and the shields Tourow and Elooman (43-4). The Aborigines’ great skill in using these implements is acknowledged but of course these arms have already been dismissed as being “of the rudest kind.” There are occasional glimpses of Gardiner’s interaction with the Aborigines: he records their laughter when he tries to throw the Wammera for example (44). However it is interesting to note that he does not record whether natives guided him on his journeys into the Blue Mountains,
4. An implicit comparison, perhaps, with the “select ball and supper” aboard the Dauntless, to which the ship’s of- ficers invited the “Ladies and Gentlemen of the Colony” on 23 July 1821Sydney ( Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser. 28 July 1821: 3). 5. Governor Lachlan Macquarie set aside land near Elizabeth Bay as a “model fishing village” for Aboriginal people in 1820 (“Aboriginal People and Place”). 15 Geographies of Displacement in a Colonial Context: Allen F. Gardiner’s Writings on Australia or whether he met Aborigines on his extensive travels. He describes the presence only of urban Aborigines who appear “out of place” in the European world that has been thrust upon them, while the country he passes through seems to be empty of them. The combined effect of Gardiner’s diverse representations of the land and its people is to “displace” the Aborigines, to suggest that the “Savages” are “out of place,” a source of dissonance at odds with the beauty of the landscape and an obstacle to its development into the Arcadia it promises. The Europeans, on the other hand, are immediately at home here in a country that is familiar, compatible and that yields up its fruits to their productive industry. These representations thus tend towards a dual effect: they empty the landscape of its original inhabitants and install the Europeans as its rightful occupants. As Pratt writes: “The European improving eye produces subsis- tence habitats as ‘empty’ landscapes, meaningful only in terms of a capitalist future and of their potential for producing a marketable surplus” (61).
Outline of a Plan for Exploring the Interior of Australia (1833) Gardiner returned to Sydney in HMS Dauntless on 12 March 1822, an event recorded in the Sydney Gazette which notes that the ship had had “an encounter with the natives of the Marquesas to punish them for cutting off the boats of a whaler” (“Sydney”). He writes little to his father of this second stay in Sydney other than to record the invitations he re- ceived to social events and to note that it was on this occasion that he learned of the death of the Queen and the replacement of Governor Macquarie by Sir Thomas Brisbane. A decade later, however, Gardiner returned to the subject of Australia, but this time with a different aim and audience: his Outline of a Plan for Exploring the Interior of Australia (1833) was one of several projects advocating exploration of the continent drawn up in this period by a group of British officers that included Thomas J. Maslen and James Vetch. Maslen was the author of A Friend of Australia (1830), an extensively argued and detailed tome on the advantages to be gained from exploring and settling the rest of Australia, a task to which he brought the fruits of his voracious reading and his expe- rience in India. It was published anonymously and some libraries until recently recorded Gardiner as its author. Vetch was the author of Considerations on the Political Geography and Geographical Nomenclature of Australia (1836), a text that combines advocacy for further exploration with a comprehensive system for dividing up and naming the parts of the continent. It is noteworthy that all three men served in the Army or Navy: Maslen had served in the East India Company Army while both Vetch and Gardiner were in the Navy. Maslen, Vetch and Gardiner were able to travel the world, observe, report, and often intervene in the colonial enterprise because of the reach of the British Army and Navy; their military profession also supplied them with the knowledge, expertise, training and experience that they brought to bear on their engagement with Australia. In drawing up plans for exploration of the continent, Maslen and Vetch had to rely, however, on second-hand reports and on their experience in other lands since they ne- ver visited Australia. Gardiner, by contrast, can and does cite on occasion his first-hand knowledge of the continent,6 lending his arguments greater credence and authority.
6. Stating that the Blue Mountains are merely an “insignificant range” and not therefore a major obstacle to explo- ration, Gardiner adds “the author speaks from personal observation, having traversed the country for some distance beyond Bathurst” (4). 16
It is also significant that all three men were associated in some way with the Royal Geographical Society founded in London in 1830, that actively sought to recruit the collaboration of Army and Navy officers in its ambition to refine and extend geogra- phical knowledge (Barrow, “Prospectus” ix). Although he was not a member of the Society, Gardiner must have been aware of its objectives and its interest in recruiting travellers to report on little-known regions of the world, since in 1834 he wrote to a long-standing committee member, Lord Bexley, giving details of his proposed jour- ney to the Natal and the routes and equipment he intended to take (“Letter to Lord Bexley”). As the Chairman John Barrow had made clear in his founding address, the Society was particularly anxious to prove its worth by encouraging the exploration of uncharted regions of the world (“Prospectus” ix-x) and, in commenting on a report on the nascent Swan River colony, Barrow had identified Australia as one of the areas most deserving of attention (“Swan River Colony” 1-2). During this early period the Society was prepared to envisage the practice of “speculative geography,” believing that conjec- tures as to the nature of the terrain to be encountered in the uncharted areas of the world would better prepare explorers for the conditions they would find there (Graves and Rechniewski 65). In proposing his plan for the exploration of Australia Gardiner undertakes just such conjecture, considering the likely terrain to be encountered and the length and arduousness of the journey, before proposing several possible routes across the continent. Onto the “vast unknown” that is the map of Australia, Gardiner traces three pos- sible routes for exploring as much of the country as efficiently as possible, with the primary object of finding “navigable rivers and interior lakes”Outline ( 7). His proposed routes dissect the featureless map with a geometrical precision that seems to simplify the task ahead. After discussing the apparent advantages and difficulties of each route, he advocates mounting an expedition from the Swan River settlement, moving inland in a north-easterly direction, with a choice of a northerly or southerly route thereaf- ter. His recommendation relies on a series of assumptions about the likelihood of the chosen route following higher ground and thus meeting fewer obstacles such as “bogs and morasses,” while streams “being encountered nearer their sources would be more fordable” (9). He calculates in some detail (though in far less detail than Maslen) the provisions necessary for the expedition and makes suggestions as to the equipment the exploring party will need.
Marshalling the Arguments for Exploration The project of exploration put forward in Outline is “respectfully suggested to the pu- blic” but more specifically drawn to the attention of “government, or of some scientific society” that might be able to fund exploration (3). It is therefore a very different kind of text to the correspondence sent to his father: the nature of the addressee and the objectives of the texts suppose different generic conventions that are realised in their contrasting tone, style and vocabulary. A persuasive text, Outline marshals a range of materialistic, patriotic and supposedly idealistic arguments to build its case for explo- ration. Like Maslen and Vetch, Gardiner presents exploration as in the interests of the British nation, that “commercial nation” to whom his Outline is dedicated, and which in the long term may find in the Australian colonies a market for British manufacture (7). Like Maslen, he sees the opportunity for the Australian colonies to employ “the ener- 17 Geographies of Displacement in a Colonial Context: Allen F. Gardiner’s Writings on Australia gies of all our surplus population” since “[f]or aught we know, the central parts of this country may abound with veins of rich ore, or beds of coal or useful indigenous plants” (5). Gardiner castigates the “supineness” and “apathy” of the British government that may allow foreigners to seize the riches of the continent if the British do not rapidly lay claim to the whole of it (6). Finally he asserts it is Britain’s duty “to extend the range of science and civilisation,” for the “blanks on the map” that “deform our modern at- lases and […] disgrace the intelligence and enterprise of the nineteenth century” are a reproach to the spirit of progress (6-7). The representations that inform his portrait of the New South Wales colony in 1821 are present also in the 1833 text and form the underlying premises on which he argues for exploration and settlement. Thus he describes the country as a wasteland, as “a wilderness untrodden by civilised man” (6) and as these “southern wildernesses” (16). It is, however, a land of unfulfilled promise, enjoying “a climate and soil comparable to some of the finest portions [of Europe] such as Spain and Sicily,” (3) while the Bathurst and Liverpool plains offer “one of the finest grazing countries in the world” (5). The country is represented as welcoming and familiar, inviting occupation by the white man, for the latter quote suggests that it is “designed” to host cattle. It is therefore, he argues, the duty of Europeans to transform this land, “to unfold the manifold treasures of Providence” that lie unexploited there (6). As David Spurr writes: “the exploitation of colonised territories thus becomes a moral imperative as well as a political and econo- mic one” (29). We might add that in the eyes of Gardiner it is also a religious imperative, although in the two texts studied here the religious motive is not yet prominent.7 The Outline contains only two references to the Indigenous peoples: the first re- fers to their “wandering character,” (7) the second to their possible “hostility” (12). The potential role of Aborigines as guides or informants is never recommended nor even envisaged. Ammunition and arms make up by far the heaviest component of the baggage that Gardiner considers necessary for the exploring party, for this is to have a predominantly military composition: a Commander, a second in command, a surgeon and botanist, a non-commissioned officer and eight marines (11). Through the comparison of these two texts on Australia authored by Gardiner, the link between certain forms of representation of the land and people, whether aesthetic, scientific, ethnographic, political or economic, and the colonial project of appropria - tion, becomes clear. The theme of this issue, “Geographies of Dislocation,” can thus be given, through recognition of the impact of Gardiner’s roles as naval officer, tou- rist, ethnographer, imperial negotiator and town planner, a very concrete meaning: the geographical advance of the British Empire and the expansion of European settlement were accompanied and prepared by a conceptual mindset that disconnected and “dis- placed” the Indigenous peoples from their lands. Indeed their occupation of the land was represented as tenuous (they are merely “wandering” tribes), and unjustified -be cause they were disengaged from the “real” labour of its productive transformation. As Spurr writes: “Colonial intervention thus responds to a threefold calling: that of nature which calls for the wise use of its resources; that of humanity, which calls for universal betterment; and that of the colonised, who call for protection from their own ignorance
7. In the “Letters,” however, he foreshadows a period “at no great distance” when “these unfortunate tribes, now so rude and ignorant, may emerge from the thick darkness which surrounds them, to the confusion of those who still trifle with superior advantages” (52). His evangelical calling postdates his engagement with Australia. 18
and violence” (34). All three of these kinds of arguments can be found in Gardiner’s writings on Australia which offer a particularly coherent illustration of the conceptual means by which the landscape is emptied of its encumbering native peoples and laid open to appropriation, indeed expropriation, by Europeans.
Elizabeth rechniewski The University of Sydney (Australia)
W orks Cited
BarrOw, John. “Prospectus of the Royal Geographical Society.” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London 1 (1831): vii–xii. —. “State of the Swan River Colony, 1 January 1830.” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London 1 (1831): 1-16. carter, Paul. The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History. London: Faber & Faber, 1987. city Of syDney. “Aboriginal People and Place.” 3 March 2015
This paper examines the notion of transplantation on the literal level and as a metaphor, geographies of displacement being illustrated by the metaphor of botany. Ondaatje and Ghosh literally revisit the word “diaspora,” the scattering of seeds, through a reassess- ment of botany, and the power and money interests which underlie the discovery and commerce of plant species. Ghosh’s rewriting of History furthermore unveils the collusion between scienti- fic, aesthetic, commercial and political interests at the core of imperialism, and the displacement of people, cultures, languages it entails.
The displacement of populations in the context of the British Empire often was the direct consequence of colonial occupation and administration, and was generally due to forced circumstances: slavery, political, religious or economic emigration, inden- tured labour, the spoliation of land, the transportation of prisoners or convicts. The dis-location it entailed, as suggested by the prefix,1 was at once geographical, physical, cultural and psychological − the separation from place (both geographical and social), the tearing apart from one’s community and home, a sense of alienation and exile which diasporic people often try to reconstruct or preserve through memory, language and tradition. As Salman Rushdie explains in Imaginary Homelands: “It’s my present that is foreign, [...] the past is home albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time” (9). But as Rushdie further contends, this is our common lot; we are all exiles from home, from a childhood we imagine, yearn for, try to remember and reconfigure: “It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity. But the writer who is out of country and even out of language may experience this loss in an intensified form” (12). In Ondaatje’s latest novel, The Cat’s Table,2 and Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke,3 the first two novels of the Ibis trilogy, such geographies of displacement are illustrated by the metaphor of botany, i.e. the motif of uprootedness, transplantation for both people and plant species. Geography, -graphein, or the writing of the earth, is here taken literally, and figuratively, and the aim of this essay is to analyse how displacement is “written,” “inscribed” on the surface of the earth, and of the page; how displacement is actually displaced metaphorically. By focusing on transplantation, I would like to see whether this loss can be a gain, as Homi Bhabha (Nation 291), Salman Rushdie with his notion of crosspollination (Imaginary Homelands), or Jacques Hassoun (Les contrebandiers) think, and if displacement necessarily means dismemberment, mourning, or reconstruction.4 To answer this question, I will examine how Ondaatje and Ghosh literally revisit the word “diaspora,” the scattering of seeds, through a reassessment of botany, and the power and money interests which underlie it.
1. “Dis-” signifies a sense of undoing, “turning out of place,” “tearing asunder, depriving,”Oxford English Dictionary. 2. The abbreviation CT will now be used to introduce page references. 3. The abbreviations SP and RS will now be used to introduce page references. 4. For further developments on this issue see Delmas and Dodeman. 20
The issue of displacement is at the core of Michael Ondaatje’s fiction, framed by the imaginary recreation of and departure from home, in an inverted chronological and geographical order. In Running in the Family (1982), the narrator goes back to Sri Lanka, re/members, i.e. pieces together, the dis/membered fragments of his family history which he recreates in a comic and carnivalesque manner. In The Cat’s Table, his latest novel, through the use of a first-person narrative persona, Mynah or Michael, he revisits his departure for England as an eleven-year-old child severed from his native island, Sri Lanka, in a nostalgic manner tinged with magic realism as the journey becomes a “rite of passage,” an “adventure” (CT 72) among weird characters.5 In this novel hovering between memoir, autobiography, and fiction as the author’s note claims, the separation from home may be illustrated by the shift in the personal pronouns, since the first-per- son narrator refers to himself as “he,” and the sense of estrangement it entails: “I try to imagine who the boy on the ship was. Perhaps a sense of self is not even there [...] as if he has been smuggled away accidentally, with no knowledge of the act, into the future” (CT 5). In The Cat’s Table, Michael, the Ondaatje narrative persona, later tells his own chil- dren the story of his journey to England; in spite of the desire to transmit his story (while transmission for Jacques Hassoun is turned towards the future and is reconstruc- tive6), it conveys the same sense of loss and lack as can be found in some of his poems: the synesthetic remembrance of a garden at dawn, the chorus of birds and insects, the sound and smell of rain, the childhood memories of Narayan and Gunepala in Borales- gamuwa. The sense of place is conveyed by sensory perception and the musicality of place names − Bambalapitiya or the Pettah market CT( 77), Nuwara Eliya, Galle, Jaffna etc.−, places which are revisited in Running in the Family and turn the homeland into an imaginary cartography. The servant’s name, Narayan, although coincidental, evokes the Indian author (quo- ted on page 76) and the creation of place in his Malgudi novels through the portrait of a community, habits, and “well-defined encounters” (CT 76). These encounters are to be opposed to chance encounters with strangers on board the ship taking the boy to England which alter the course of Michael’s life and also contribute to the construction of his identity. The motif of the journey, or passage, combines with the image of roots, but also with those of grafting and hybridization as metaphors for place and displace- ment, or, as the title of James Clifford’s seminal work suggests, roots and routes. Intertextuality in The Cat’s Table is, for that matter, revealing: it hovers between Na- rayan and Joseph Conrad, i.e. the motifs of place and exile, illustrating the narrator’s departure from home; the East is “seen from a small boat” as the epigraph, a quote from “Youth,” shows.7 The Cat’s Table (also a metonym for the ship and a nexus in the eponymous novel) represents an in-between place, between past and present, childhood
5. As shown by the references to astrology and magic, and by the presence of characters who seem like figures in a pack of cards: M. Mazappa’s “extraterrestrial songs,” Miss Lasqueti, a theatrical company and a magician, “The Hydera- bad Mind,” a Baron thief, Niemeyer the criminal and his daughter Asuntha the acrobat, Hector De Silva the man with rabies and the ayurvedic. 6. For Jacques Hassoun, transmission is not a mere transposition of the past, but it enables the subject to undertake a journey, “not a circular journey around a petrified enclave,” but a journey which leads to an open space like “a delta where heterogeneous cultures are linked up and invigorate one another” (100-1, my translation). Yet Running in the Family and The Cat’s Table clearly evoke a circular journey “around [the] petrified enclave” of memory and nostalgia as “grandeur had not been added to my life but had been taken away” (CT 72). 7. “This is how I see the East [...] I see it always from a small boat” (Conrad 35). 21 Transplanting Seeds in Diasporic Literature and maturity as the rite of passage shows:8 the initiatory journey is illustrated by “geo/ graphy,” namely place and text, both the Suez Canal (the passage between the East and Europe, celebrated by Walt Whitman and E. M. Forster) and the reference to Conrad’s initiatory novella “Youth.” Displacement, however, is not only geographical; it has to do with imaginative re- creation. Sri Lanka is an island to which the author keeps returning, in Anil’s Ghost, and his Collected Poems, which are haunted by the loss of language, the loss of his father, and his ayah. Furthermore, Ondaatje’s work is traversed by the motifs of separation (Divisadero), division, exile and diasporic experience, due to war (The English Patient) and emigration (In the Skin of a Lion). The theme of dismemberment, of tearing asunder, is highlighted in all his novels by the motifs of cuts, wounds, mutilation, bomb attacks, and explosives, amplified in In the Skin of a Lion through intertextual references to an- other novel by Conrad (The Secret Agent). Ondaatje’s fictional and poetic work perfectly delineates geographies of displace- ment on the level of plot (emigration, war or civil war, family feud), through displaced characters travelling in the diegetic zone of the fictional space between India, Canada, Europe, Sri Lanka, the USA. The construction of identity is also associated with map- ping: for the young boy Patrick in In the Skin of a Lion, opening an atlas and looking for the name of the place he lives in; or for the young boy in The Cat’s Table whose parents have divorced, and who “will continue to be busy in the evolving map of this world” (CT 34). Building up and mapping place in an ever-changing world are not only a metaphor for identity construction. To illustrate the fact that cartography cannot be separated from power interests, Ondaatje uses a recurrent trope in his novels, that of “choreo- graphies,” a metaphor for both the configuration of the novel and “choreographies of power” to which the characters are submitted. On the poetic level in his novels, “geo- graphein” entails generic displacements (writing based on tropes borrowed from music and painting), nomadic writing, but we may wonder whether generic, poetic de- and reterritorialisation are not, to a certain extent, counterbalanced by the nostalgic circula- rity of his work. The Oronsay, the ship taking the boy and his two friends to England, is a microcosm, full of people, stories, and anecdotes, seen from the perspective of the child observer, Michael/Mynah, who slips from one deck to another, through portholes into cabins to help a thief enter the room, like Kim, the eponymous hero of Kipling’s novel, often referred to in The English Patient, although the intertextual reference in The Cat’s Table is to The Jungle Books (CT 115).9 The journey from East to West evokes and revisits Kipling’s poem, “The Ballad of East and West,” and also is a rite of passage for the three boys. Displacement across the ocean is echoed by movements on board compa- red to a “quadrille,”10 a simile which evokes the metaphor of choreography mentioned above. The ship, which is an imaginary, mythopoietic world, becomes a metafictional representation of literary creation: “If anyone wished to capture the daily movements
8. Based on encounters with the world of adults, sexual awakening, the discovery of death, and “a more com- plicated idea of Fate” (CT 151). 9. Another possible implicit reference to Kipling (“The Mark of the Beast”) is the episode of Sir Hector Da Silva’s death on board, twice bitten by a dog and according to the ayurvedic attending to him, the victim of a spell put on him by a Buddhist priest in Colombo. Lines from a Kipling poem are quoted during Da Silva’s funeral (CT 173). 10. “All these haphazard patterns of movement became as predictable as the steps of a quadrille” (CT 108). 22 on our ship, the most accurate method might be to create a series of time-lapse criss- crossings, depicted in different colours, to reflect the daily loitering”CT ( 108). Seeing from a distance and choreography are recurrent metafictional representations of point of view and narration in Ondaatje’s novels, as shown by older Michael’s vision of thun- derstorms in Canada: “I wake up believing I am in mid-air, at the height of the tall pines above the river, watching the approaching lightning, and hearing behind it the arrival of its thunder. It is only from such a height that you see the great choreography and danger of storms” (CT 122). The image is emblematic of the writer’s position, “in mid air” between the hand and the page, opening up an infinite creative space.11 Displacement obviously entails up-rootedness, and in The Cat’s Table, ships and botany are tropes (at once metonyms and metaphors) for displacement and transplantation, two associations also made by Amitav Ghosh in his own novels. In The Cat’s Table, the ship is a diasporic trope, all the more so as it carries a garden deep in its hold. As the etymology suggests, “diaspora” comes from the Greek speirein, the sowing of seeds. The owner, Larry Da- niels, born to a Burgher family, is a botanist from Kandy, where the Royal Botanical Garden, Peradeniya, is located.12 If Larry Daniel’s purpose is to export plant species, the aim of the Botanical Garden was to introduce new, useful plant species into Sri Lanka, like coffee, and later tea, for obvious economic purposes.13 The ships the boy sees in a print he is shown of a Greek trireme are emblematic of the link between science and conquest: “It fought the enemies of Athens and brought back unknown fruits and crops, new sciences, architecture, even democracy” (CT 38).14 A hint at “the thousands of workers who died from cholera during [the] construction of [the Suez canal]” (CT 173) so that Europeans could have a more direct route to the East underlines the cost of progress and the reality of commerce. The Oronsay carries local, medicinal plants to England. Michael reports Larry’s ex- planations about their use and origins, and Larry actually draws a map of displaced plant species from the Cameroons, the Azores, New Guinea (CT 68). His map evokes ancient maps that used to indicate countries in emblematic terms. The medicinal plants, used in ayurvedic medicine and given to Hector Da Silva, a character suffering from rabies, come from several places, like Nepal, and derive from “village magic, astrology, and botanical charts in spidery handwriting” (CT 92). Larry also imitates palm postures “from all over the world, [...] how they stood and how they swayed, depending on heritage or breed, how they should bend in the wind in their submissiveness” (CT 67) or resist the wind. The imitation and the description in anthropological terms, as well as the cartography of plant species, cast light on the geographies of both human and vegetable displacement.
11. “It was as if he had walked under the millimetre of haze just above the inked fibres of a map, that pure zone between land and chart between distances and legend between nature and the storyteller” (English Patient 246). 12. If the royal garden dates back to 1371 CE when the Kandyan Kingdom was ruled by King Wickramabahu, the botanical garden was created by Alexander Moon in 1821 and further developed in 1843 with plants brought from Kew Garden. 13. “The primary intention of the British colonial government was to introduce coffee plant, and a number of other tropical flora of economic value, such as the Rubber tree, to Sri Lanka. […] Plants brought from Kew Gardens in London were planted here. The Royal Botanic Garden played a major supportive role in establishing the Tea industry in Sri Lanka in the late 1820’s.” http://lankaexotic.hubpages.com/hub/Botanic-Gardens-Peradeniya#, accessed 19 April 2014. Paradoxically, it is onboard the Oronsay that Michael has his last cup of good, Colombo tea, associated with home, and afterwards “[he] would not drink tea for years” (CT 112). 14. The same association between science and power is exposed and denounced by Kip, an Indian subaltern work- ing for and betrayed by the Allied Forces, in his diatribe against White, Western power in The English Patient (283). 23 Transplanting Seeds in Diasporic Literature
Botany, a scientific field of research from the eighteenth century onward, was -fur thermore closely related to slavery during the colonial period; bread fruit was exported from Polynesia to the West Indies to feed slaves at a cheap price. Botany was at the core of triangular commerce (slavery, sugar and tea plantations, exports of plant species). After the abolition of slavery, Tamil coolies were sent from South India to Sri Lanka to work as indentured labourers on tea plantations. Roads and a railway track were built from Nuwera Eliya in the mountains to bring tea leaves to Colombo harbor more easily and more quickly, thus relating “progress” to commercial and financial interests, and the colonial exploitation of a cheap imported workforce. However, more than the image of negative displacement associated with botany, and the economic, historical context underlying it, botany becomes, in The Cat’s Table, a metaphor for fertilization. An exchange of seeds, recalling Rushdie’s notion of cross- pollination, takes place at the Cat’s Table which becomes a metonym for all the chance encounters with strangers that alter and enrich Michael’s or anyone’s life: “It would always be strangers like them, at the various Cats’ Tables of my life, who would alter me” (CT 270). The exchange of seeds enables “cross-fertilization” as the narrator in- dicates when the ship stops at Suez: “Who knows what was exchanged that night, and what cross-fertilisation occurred as the legal papers of entrance and exit were signed and passed back down to land, while we entered and left the brief and temporary world of El Suweis” (CT 178). The ship thus becomes a place of gathering,15 exemplifying Bhabha’s “gathering of seeds,” of exiles and émigrés and refugees, gathering on the edge of “foreign” cultures; gathering at the frontiers; gathering in the ghettos or cafés of city centres; gathering in the half-life, half-light of foreign tongues, or in the uncanny fluency of another’s language; gathering the signs of approval and acceptance, degrees, discourses, disciplines; gathering the memories of underdevelopment, of other worlds lived retroactively; gathering the past in ritual of revival; gathering the present. (Nation 291) The scattering and gathering of seeds is also at the core of Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Pop- pies and River of Smoke, which trace geographies of displacement down the Ganges to the Sundarbans, from Calcutta to Mauritius, Singapore and Canton. The journey is illus- trated by the structure of Sea of Poppies, divided as it is into “Land,” River,” and “Sea,” and the first two parts ofRiver of Smoke, “Islands,” and “Canton.” If Ondaatje’s Cat’s Table is an initiatory novel of displacement focusing on a child’s Bildung, Ghosh’s two novels are much larger in scope: the first two volumes of five hundred pages or so of the epic trilogy relate the emigration of a great number of characters, each introducing a web of other characters and embedded stories – and digressions are, for that matter, a type of inner, textual displacement. All the characters, scattered throughout northern India at first, converge on board a ship, the Ibis, anchored in the Delta of the Ganges,
15. The gathering for Michael later takes place at Ramadhin’s funeral, one of his two companions from Colombo on board the Oronsay who never recovered from the loss of home. Michael then re-enters his community, “a capsule of our youth” (CT 186), and later marries Massi, Ramadhin’s sister, whereas for Cassius, their other friend and fellow traveller, the memory of displacement is itself displaced into paintings of the Suez episode, seen by Michael at his friend’s exhibi- tion. Fonseka’s letter of condolences sent to Ramadhin’s bereaved family rewrites the episodes of Aden and the crossing of the Red Sea. It interestingly delineates old and new “geographies of displacement,” old pre-Islamic trade routes, and more recent imperial routes: “He wrote about how [...] Aden had been one of the thirteen great pre-Islamic cities; how there was an ancestry of famous Muslim geographers who’d lived there before the age of gunpowder empires” (CT 198). 24 bound for Mauritius, before they are dispersed again all over the Indian Ocean in the second volume. They are all connected to the opium trade, be they British, American or Parsi traders, Bengali investors, ship owners and sailors, addicts, direct and indirect victims. The novels superimpose two maps: the map tracing the routes of the characters’ displacement throughout the Indian Ocean, and the cartography of British power, trade and money interests in the colonial, economic context of nineteenth-century capitalism and free trade, more precisely in 1838 and 1839, just before the Opium War with China. Through his epic of displaced people and the numerous stories of subalterns revisiting official British History on the Opium War, Ghosh ironically shows what the routes of free trade entailed: the transportation of indentured labourers, coolies, prisoners, runaways from India to Mauritius, then Canton, Singapore, on board a former slave ship; the second mate, Zachary Reid, from Baltimore, is the son of a former Black slave and her White American master. The coolies (or indentured Girmitiyas16) are bound for Mauritius, whose plantation owners are in need of a new, cheap labour force after the abolition of slavery, recalling the history of Tamils in Sri Lanka. The first ironic association made by Ghosh is obviously between free trade, displacement and slavery. Transportation is also associated with transplantation, on the literal level (the ex- porting of seeds) and as a metaphor for the displacement of people. The commercial exchange of “seeds,” which concerns poppies grown in India and sold by British mer- chants to China, coolies, and botanical species imported from China to Kew Gardens, ironically revisits the etymology of the word “diaspora.” The scattering of people in Ghosh’s novels is a direct consequence of the triangular commerce of opium involving money interests in Great Britain, producers and merchants in British India and custo- mers in China. Traders justify the export of opium for economic reasons, the importing of silk and tea being too great “a drain of silver from Britain and her colonies” (SP 117). The gathering dissemination calls forth according to Bhabha (Nation 291) is ex- plored by Ghosh in Sea of Poppies as the Ibis, the ship transporting the characters to Mauritius, is a melting pot, literally, through the multi-ethnic food cooked on board, and metaphorically. The ship is obviously a “third space” (Bhabha, Location 37), a place in which cultures and languages meet, gather, intersect. For Baboo Nob Kissin, the Ghomusta in charge of the coolies, the ship is a “vehicle of transformation” (SP 440).17 Zachary Reid, “being neither of the quarter deck nor of the fo’c’tle [is] the link between the two parts of the ship” (SP 13); like Deeti, or Paulette, he acts as a mediator. The ship is a metonym for the in-betweenness of cultural encounters, as different castes, classes, religions, and origins mix, and all become “ship siblings” (SP 373). It is exemplified by the Lascars who “had nothing in common except the Indian Ocean”: “among them were Chinese and East African, Arabs and Malays, Bengalis and Goans, Tamils and Arakanese” (SP 14). Their language, Lascari, is a mix of different languages (SP 16) and its heterogeneity and hybridity evoke Glissant’s concept of the “Tout- Monde,” the creation of a language which contains all languages. This is also illustrated by Deeti’s
16. Girmitiyas because “their names were entered on ‘girmits’ – agreements written on pieces of paper. The silver that was paid for them went to their families, and they were taken away, never to be seen again: they vanished, as if into the netherworld” (SP 75). 17. Baboo Nob Kissin believes he is about to be “inhabited” internally by the womanly presence of his aunt, Ta- ramony. 25 Transplanting Seeds in Diasporic Literature language, Bhojpuri, which is the language of displacement for Neel, the Rajah sent into exile by the British and a prisoner on board: “of all the tongues spoken between the Ganges and the Indus, there was none that was its equal in the expression of the nuances of love, longing and separation – of the plight of those who leave and those who stay at home” (SP 416). The other syncretic and linguistic place of gathering is the shrine built by Deeti in a cave in Mauritius, where many of the characters – those who will later be known as “la fami Colver” – ultimately converge, bringing their language, a mix of Bhojpuri and Creole, along with them (RS 4). Deeti’s shrine contains the pictures of all the people she met on board the Ibis, which is also represented. During the passage, Deeti, who is pregnant, arranges matches, and symbolically bears the seeds of other lives and stories, which she preserves and transmits once in Mauritius. Both novels open with the motif of Deeti’s shrine which then regularly reappears in the narrative. Because of its inchoa- tive associations, it is a symbolic promise of regeneration and reconstruction of severed bonds.18 It is a way for the characters to re/member − i.e. both remember and recons- truct − the past, like the Temple Baboo Bob Kissim imagines before leaving Calcutta (SP 208). Such a syncretic place and ritual of revival, celebrated by shared meals, makes transmission possible:19 the stories of transportation are told over and over again, they are turned into legends − Kalua’s escape, the storm, Deeti’s destiny (RS 20) −, and act as the founding myth of a diaspora, by remembering an original place “back there” (RS 6) and displacing it “here.” However, the positive image of social, cultural and linguistic syncretism is debunked by the representation of the ocean. If the delta of the Ganges is an opening (as sugges- ted by Hassoun’s image of transmission as “a delta where heterogeneous cultures are linked up and invigorate one another” 100-1), the ship also is a prison ship, the coolies’ future in Mauritius is bleak, and the delta opens onto the Kala-Pani, the Netherworld to which the characters are sent. The mythic representation of the Ocean serves the parallel Ghosh makes with the historical precedent of the black Atlantic: the Ibis is a former slave ship, Zachary is the son of a former Black slave, and the slaves thrown overboard when crossing the Atlantic find an echo in the coolies jumping ship in fear of “the Black Water.” But in River of Smoke the gathering also ironically takes place in the merchants’ quar- ters (factories or Hongs) in Canton, the commercial and financial hub which organises the “sowing of (poppy) seeds” throughout China, and which is also a European and American microcosm responsible for the scattering of people on a global scale. Ghosh revisits official history from another, postcolonial standpoint by presenting the perspec- tive of subalterns and of the Chinese government on the Opium War, and by drawing parallels with the present, global situation. For instance, he underlines the detrimental effects of the cultivation of opium in India, which has replaced local crops and wheat, dal, and vegetables, “forcing cash advances on the farmers, making them sign asami contracts,” with the owner “never letting you off ” (SP 30-1). This is strangely remi- niscent of the contemporary, neocolonial context, with today’s Indian farmers buying
18. Like the Ibis, which is for Deeti “a great wooden mái-báp, an adoptive ancestor and parent of dynasties yet to come” (SP 373). 19. “They would speak of it to their children and their children’s children, who would return to it over generations, to remember and to recall their ancestors” (SP 208). 26 seeds from a notorious American company, being unable to pay them off, and commit- ting suicide. Ghosh also shows the collusion between knowledge and power, science (botany) and commerce, in nineteenth-century Europe, and this collusion is illustrated by the journey of the three ships, and their different cargoes: The Ibis (coolies), the Anahita (opium) and the Redruth (plant specimens). What is original in Ghosh’s novels is the parallel he makes between the opium trade and the scientific and aesthetic interest in botany, between “flowers and opium, opium and flowers”RS ( 564). Botany is not an innocent activity or hobby. If Lambert, the French assistant-curator of Calcutta’s bota- nical garden and Paulette, his daughter, seem to be motivated solely by the advancement of learning and their passion for plants, for naming20 and collecting flowers, and for applying Linnaeus’s system of classification “in the innocent tranquility of the Botani- cal gardens” (SP 143), the other botanist Paulette meets and works with, Mr. Penrose, a plant-hunter, “had made a great deal of money through the marketing of seeds” (RS 37). His sole interest is “thrift and profit,” investment and “return,” as the organization on board the Redruth shows (RS 82). Mercantile and financial interests underlie the dis- covery, export and transplantation of plant species, all of which are part and parcel of a single geography of free trade linking London, Calcutta, and Canton, and as regards botany: Kew Gardens (the curator of which was Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Geographical Society), Calcutta Royal Botanical garden, Pamplemousses Botani- cal Gardens in Mauritius, Chinese botanical gardens in Canton, and with Ondaatje, we could add Peradeniya Gardens in Kandy − a “veritable empire of scientific institutions” (RS 106). Such mercantile interests are masked, however, by the aesthetic value of flowers in River of Smoke: not only are they beautiful, do they ornate gardens in China and Europe, they are also represented, painted, reproduced when they cannot be transported. Pau- lette, working for Mr. Penrose, is looking for the Golden Camellia (camelia sinensis being the Chinese shrub grown to produce tea and whose colour, associated with profit, is revealing), only known through a painting, and which turns out to be a hoax. Her in- nocent quest for the mysterious painter and purloined painting actually highlights the mercantile aspect of painting, through the recurrent reference to the price painters hope to get for their portraits or pictures. Art, botanical gardens are human creations and part of a “traffic,” like opium, the “traffic” of which “is the creature of the East India Company” (RS 565). Examining the commerce and transplantation of seeds in the literal and metaphori- cal sense, through a web of images, linguistic hybridity, crosspollination and textual fer- tilisation, Ghosh rewrites History by unveiling the collusion between scientific, aesthe - tic, commercial and political interests at the core of imperialism, and the displacement of people, cultures, and languages it entails. Opium was “among the most precious jewels in Queen Victoria’s crown,” (SP 95) and by showing that the opium factory of Ghazipur is “an institution steeped in Anglican piety” (SP 95), that opium is synony- mous with “this age or progress and liberty,” Ghosh’s novels add moral condemnation to his historical vision.
20. The “Latania commersonii” named after Paulette’s grand-uncle and grand-aunt, both botanists in Mauritius (SP 262), “Acanthus lambertii” named by her father and “Ceriops roxburgiana identified by the horrible Mr. Roxburgh” (SP 397) or the bougainvillea, bearing the explorer’s name (SP 268). 27 Transplanting Seeds in Diasporic Literature
Even if Ghosh’s novels have an undeniable ideological value by the ethical stan- dpoint they adopt, they are not political treatises. The interest of the epic lies in the storytelling: in the creation of a web of interconnected characters delineated through their past stories and present adventures, origins and languages, like a Babel-like botani- cal garden which mixes plant species of different origins; in his nomadic writing which travels back and forth in time and place, between several characters, in every chapter, deconstructing Linnaeus’s system of classification and using displacement (digressions, letters, multiple points of view and voices) as a mode of writing. The “epic painting” Robin the painter has in mind could be a metaphor for Ghosh’s mode of representa- tion; yet the metafictional displacement best illustrating the unravelling of the novel, and the deconstruction of perspective is the Chinese scroll, “unfold[ing] in front of you, from top to bottom, like a story – you would see it like it happened; it would unroll before your gaze as if you were walking through it. [...] Should my epic painting be a scroll instead?” (RS 296).
Catherine Delmas CEMRA-ILCEA4, Grenoble Alpes University
W orks Cited
BhaBha, K. Homi. Nation and Narration. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. —. The Location of Culture. 1994. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. cliffOrD, James. Routes, Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997. cOnraD, Joseph. “Youth: A Narrative.” Youth and The End of the Tether. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. Delmas, Catherine, and André DODeman, eds. Re/Membering Place. Bern: Peter Lang, 2013. Glissant, Edouard. Introduction à une poétique du divers. Paris: Gallimard, 1996 —. Traité du Tout-Monde. Poétique IV. Paris: Gallimard NRF, 1997. GhOsh, Amitav. Sea of Poppies. 2008. London: John Murray, 2009. —. River of Smoke. 2009. London: John Murray, 2010. hassOun, Jacques. Les Contrebandiers de la mémoire. Paris: Syros, 1994. OnDaatje, Michael. The Cat’s Table. 2011. London: Vintage, 2012. —. In the Skin of a Lion. Toronto: Vintage, 1996. —. The English Patient. London: Picador, 1993. —. Running in the Family. 1982. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993. rushDie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands. Essays and Criticism. 1984. London: Granta, 1991.
The Poetics of Displacement in Indian English Fiction: Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King, Rushdie’s East, West and Desai’s Fasting, Feasting
This essay analyses the poetics of displacement found in three works by three authors born in India and writing in English: Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories, Salman Rushdie’s East, West, and Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting. Focusing on the aspects of harmony, credibility and metafiction in these works, I will outline how these authors with very different backgrounds but a common “double unbelonging” have succeeded in offering their readers a consciousness of displacement and disruption which has become the driving energy that migrants and migrant literatures have offered to the world.
To write about displacement, it is necessary to define what “place” is. “Place is never neutral,” writes Ashcroft, “but corresponds to a normative landscape – ideas about what is right and appropriate as well as ideas about how the world is structured” (77). This is why Rushdie tells us that the migrant suffers “a triple disruption: he loses his place, he enters into an alien language, and he finds himself surrounded by beings whose social behaviour and codes are very unlike, and sometimes even offensive to, his own” (Homelands 277-8). Place, therefore, cannot be regarded by the displaced person as a stable reality, but rather, just like reality itself for Rushdie, as “an artefact, that […] does not exist until it is made, and that, like any other artefact, [...] can be made well or badly, and that [...] can also, of course, be unmade” (Homelands 280). As Ashcroft puts it: The most important process in the struggle over place […] is the narration by which place develops in particular identity. It is the narrations and contesting narration by which place comes into being […]. The sense of place an individual might develop is never entirely separate from the text created by cultural discourse […]. This contributes to the reality of the physical word itself. (88) With this essay, I will try to reach an understanding of common “poetics of displace- ment” in the fiction of three authors born in India and writing in English – Rudyard Kipling, Salman Rushdie and Anita Desai, focusing on the aspects of harmony, cre- dibility and metafiction in three of their works: Kipling’sThe Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories, Rushdie’s East, West, and Desai’s Fasting, Feasting. I have preferred to define the three writers of this study simply as “three authors born in India and writing in English,” (Kipling and Rushdie were born in Bombay, Desai in Mussoorie), but it is obviously necessary to point out that these authors have very different backgrounds. Rushdie was born to Indian parents, belonging to the Kashmiri Muslim minority, and moved to England when he was 14 years old; Kipling, born to English parents, was sent to England for schooling at the age of six and came back in 1882, at the age of 17, to work as a journalist in India; Desai was born to a Bengali father and a German mother. Different backgrounds, as we will see, that do not amount to a very different condition, as their mixed heritages and cultural backgrounds, their “double unbelonging,” have brought these authors to share a common poetics to describe what are, indeed, very different kinds of displacement. 30
The Narration of a Displaced “Self ” Once place and displacement are defined, we need to understand how a displaced iden- tity can be narrated. Rushdie writes that his aim is “to create a literary language and li- terary forms in which the experience of formerly colonized, still-disadvantaged peoples might find full expression,” and to give “a migrant’s-eye view of the world” ( Homelands 394). “Most of the stories in the present collection,” writes Cornell about Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King, “focus on the actions of men and women who find themselves isolated, like Punch, in just such a desolate and hostile world” (xxii). British author Ki- pling, with his Indian fiction, can then also be considered to be one of the forefathers of a migrant literature which tries to: Get inside the minds of ordinary people confronted with extraordinary situations for which their limited education and experience at home had left them unprepared […] who were confronted with radically unfamiliar places, cultures and conflicts […] [with a] close and sympathetic attention to the real lives of the Anglo-Indian British who did the work of empire, and to the lives of the Indians who were its usually unwilling subjects. (Damrosch xx, xxi, xxii) Anita Desai is certainly part of this group of writers, if we consider that “while for most of her career Desai was not an expatriate writer, her mixed background arguably places her in a similarly liminal position to that of exiles” (Dvořák 15). She dedicates her Fasting, Feasting “To Those Whose Stories I’ve Told,” and Dvořák describes “Desai’s creolization as negotiating a gap between worlds, and corresponding to that hybrid mode of postcolonial cross-cultural creation which cultural theorists such as Wilson Harris, Édouard Glissant, Homi Bhabha, and Salman Rushdie have celebrated,” (35) a literature of “hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs […] Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world” (Homelands 394). The three works analysed in this essay bear witness to the attempts by the main characters to find some kind of harmony between the different worlds they inhabit. As Jasper Jain writes about Desai’s work: “The world of Anita Desai’s novels is an ambiva- lent one […] where the central harmony is aspired to but not arrived at, and the desire to love and live clashes – at times violently – with the desire to withdraw and achieve harmony” (23). The “aspiration” to harmony in Desai’s and Rushdie’s works is actually even more important than harmony itself, which will never be reached or, if reached, will not last. As the displacements these characters undergo are very different, their attempted solutions also differ. Desai’s character Uma is “at home yet homeless,” (Sharma 71) desperately looking for an “elsewhere. Elsewhere. Elsewhere,” (Desai 117) while her brother Arun, on the contrary, seems to be looking for a nowhere, “the total freedom of anonymity, the total absence of relations, of demands, needs, requests, ties, responsibilities, commitments,” (172) through “a resistance to being included” (171). Likewise, Rushdie’s characters are constantly suspended “between here-and-there, between [their] two othernesses, [their] double unbelonging” (East, West 141). The “harmony of the spheres” they are desperately looking for, the bridge that could connect the two worlds and make their identity whole, is not the same bridge that Desai’s characters are trying to find. While 31 The Poetics of Displacement in Indian English Fiction
Rushdie’s characters in East, West struggle for a reunion of the elements of the East and of the West within themselves, both Uma and Arun are hoping for something else: not the East for Uma (who does not know the West), and neither the East nor the West for Arun. What Kipling’s characters are looking for in the short story “The Man Who Would Be King,” is once again neither the East nor the West, but what Rushdie’s Isabella calls the “Unknown” or the “Unknowable” (East, West 116). Their quest, which initially in- volved conquering a kingdom, later becomes an imperialist campaign; Dravot wants to create a “fine damned Nation” first, and “an Empire” laterEast, ( West 269). While Kipling’s and Desai’s movements in and out of a culture and of a place are also physical movements, for Rushdie, even though “all his stories deal with characters on the verge of leaving or coming back […] these movements encompass a wide variety ranging from transatlantic travels to textual borrowing and rewriting, to imaginary tra- vels,” (Cabaret 169) and “if we take a look at the first and last stories of the collection, we also realize they can be read as bridges in and out of the collection rather than as doors opening and closing the collection” (Cabaret 169-70). Rushdie’s displacements and re-placements can then also be simply textual; the new world looked for by Rushdie might be the word itself, a narrated world, in which everything can become true, or can at least be believed. Rushdie’s narrators, though, are often not to be trusted. Talking about Saleem, the narrator of Midnight’s Children, Rushdie writes: His mistakes are the mistakes of a fallible memory compounded by quirks of character and of circumstance, and his vision is fragmentary. It may be that when the Indian writer who writes from outside India tries to reflect that world, he is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost. (Homelands 10-1). In East, West the reliability of the narrators changes, and there is an extended use of metafiction, defined by Patricia Waugh as “fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (2). Ramani’s construction of a new and shining reality in “The Free Radio” from Rushdie’s East, West is his only way to recover the reality he has lost, his own body. And his words sound just like the music coming out of his imaginary radio. At the end of “The Harmony of the Spheres,” we discover that the narrator is much less credible than the character he himself had discredited throughout the story, and we discover this through Eliot Crane’s writings, another narration. Metafiction is also present in Columbus’s “dream of a dream,” (East, West 115) which becomes a reality when Isabella summons him, and in “The Prophet’s Hair,” where the levels of narration are almost in- finite: there is an initial narrator, then Huma tells Sín a story, and Sín himself is nothing but a character in Huma’s childhood. The revelations of the secret are also fundamental for the plot (from Hashim to his son Atta, and from Atta to the rest of the family), as well as the prophetic dream by Atta, who will die after having it, and the letter Huma sent to the police, which will cause Sín’s death by telling a story, with the help of “the tongue of a malicious cat-burglar” (57). About The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories, Cornell writes that “it is signi- ficant that in the last three stories in this volume […] the presence of the narrator and his complex relation to characters and events immeasurably deepen the richness of 32 effect” (xviii). Kipling’s story “The Judgement of Dungara” begins with the following words: “They tell the tale,” (122) but the narrator adds that he has no “space” to include everything: The tale of the Mission is a long one, and I have no space to show how Justus, forgetful of his injudicious predecessor, grievously smote Moto, the husband of Matui, for his brutality; how Moto was startled […] All these things belong to the history of many months. (126-7) In “On the City Wall,” Lalun is introduced as the one who “would need, so Wali Dad says, a thousand pens of gold and ink scented with musk” (224). Not only is she the one who knows everything about everybody, who could say one word and ruin a thousand men, but she is also, in herself, a song, and she says: “I choose to tell what I choose to tell,” just a few lines after Wali Dad has admitted: “I belong to a nation of liars” (228). Both unreliable narration and metafiction are part of Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King.” We are brought to question the credibility of Carnehan, once he comes back to the editor to tell him the story of their becoming kings, because of his apparent disturbed state of mind, and because he seems to have no proof of his story other than Dravot’s head. But we are later also led to question the “Kipling-like editor,” (Damrosch xxi) when we discover that Carnehan, apparently, had nothing with him when he died. Dravot’s head, the only physical proof of the truthfulness of the story is nowhere to be found, and we are left to wonder whether it ever existed. “There the matter rests,” writes Kipling (279) as a conclusion to the story and to our doubts. In Desai’s Fasting, Feasting we receive several versions of Anamika’s death: one by Anamika’s mother-in-law, one by the neighbours, one by the husband, one by Anamika’s family (although it is more of a judgement than a version of the story) and then Uma’s silence, “what Uma said was nothing” (151). All these versions do not differ from the message conveyed by the author, though. Whatever the truth is, Anamika died because of the marriage she was forced into by her family. Just as one reality can never be consi- dered dogmatically, then, many realities can actually lead to a single truth. If the subjects narrated are unstable, constantly suspended between “here” and “there,” East and West, “elsewhere” and nowhere at all, between the “Known” and the “Unknown,” or the “Unknowable,” then their narrations and the language narrating their stories, cannot be simple, constant, or predictable. The narration, like the language used, can be seen as shifting and unstable, thus reflecting the struggle to find a proper “place.”
Gender, Sexuality and Family Gender, sexuality, and family are crucial matters in most of these stories. In Fasting, Feasting the dominance of the male subjects is more problematic than elsewhere in De- sai’s writing. While the birth of a male child in the family calls for “proper attention,” (30) this will force Uma to stay at home and help with the baby rather than continue her studies. Arun is similarly controlled by his family: when he receives the invitation to stay for a while with the Pattons, we learn that: Immediately Arun was overcome by the sensation of his family laying its hands upon him, pushing him down into a chair at his desk, shoving a textbook under his nose, catching that nose and making him swallow cod liver oil, spooning food into him, telling him: Arun, this, Arun, that, Arun, nothing but... (175) 33 The Poetics of Displacement in Indian English Fiction
Families “bind” and “tie” the characters of Desai’s work (Sharrad, 179-200); we see this once more in the reflection of Arun’s family in his “temporary” American family. Arun’s being a vegetarian is despised by his father as much as by Mr. Patton, and by looking at him Arun “had experience of, even if a mirror refection of it – his father’s very expression, walking off, denying any opposition, any challenge to his authority, his stony wait for it to grow disheartened, despair – and disappear” (186). Melanie also suffers, in the lack of attention on the part of her mother, from the same sense of ina- dequacy as that experienced by Arun’s sister Uma. Mrs. Patton “smiles a bright plastic copy of a mother-smile that Arun remembers from another world and another time,” (194) and in the end, “on the other side of the world, he is caught up again in the sugar- sticky web of family conflict” (195). The very formation of families, through the institution of marriage, is also a risk: the marriages described by Desai are unstable and problematic socio-economic construc- tions. “According to Desai,” writes Manavar, “most marriages prove to be unions of incompatibility” (13). We can clearly see this in the marriages represented in Fasting, Feasting, as well as in those described by Kipling in The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories, and at times in Rushdie’s East, West, to the point that marriage becomes one of the main sources of displacement, and of tragedy in these books. In Fasting, Feasting, Uma will pay for her inability to find a suitor, as shown by the tricks played on her and on her family, and her parents’ silent (and sometimes voiced) resentment. Anamika, Uma’s beautiful and intelligent cousin, will burn to death, probably directly by the hand of her mother-in-law, but surely as a consequence of her marriage, and even Aruna’s apparently perfect marriage turns the younger daughter into a stranger to the family. Marrying the thief’s widow is the reason for Ramani’s “crime against his own body” in Rushdie’s “The Free Radio,” (East, West 28) the nasbandi (vasectomy) he undergoes to marry the woman he loves, who is much older than he and has several children already. Here, marriage is symbolically represented by Ramani’s letting his wife “deprive [him] of [his] manhood” (26). Although in Desai’s novels it is the women who suffer the de- privation, not only of their womanhood, but of their very life and identity, the loss is very similar, if not identical, both for the family created through these marriages, and for the society based upon them. Marriage turns Kipling’s “gods” in “The Man Who Would Be King” into humans, causing their sudden fall from Heaven to Hell. The initial contract signed by Daniel Dravot and Peachey Taliaferro Carnehan stated that they would not “look at any Liquor, nor any Woman black, white, or brown, so as to get mixed up with one or the other harmful” (254). When Dravot decides to break this part of the pact, it is not only his friend who re- minds him of the pact, and asks him to “keep clear o’ women” (270) because they will “only bring […] harm,” (271) but also Billy Fish, their best man, who asks Carnehan to “make the King drop all this nonsense about marriage, […] doing him and me and yourself a great service” (273). And in fact, when a woman is chosen to be his wife, she bites him and draws blood; the evidence of his being “Not a God or a Devil but only a man!” (274) will cause his ruin. “Dravot’s wounding by his would-be-bride,” writes Boo- ker, is a rather transparent example of the air of feminine threat that informs virtually all of Kipling’s work, just as his beheading serves as a potential image of castration” (114). Most of the stories in this collection have unsuccessful marriages as a starting (or ending) point of their plot. In “Black Jack” the Sergeant is able to escape a military plot 34 against him (although only thanks to the fundamental help of Mulvaney), but he cannot do the same when he dies on account of a jealous husband: “An’, in the end, as I said, O’Hara met his death from Raferty for foolin’ wid his wife” (Kipling 220). The same can be said about Jack Pansay in “The Phantom Rickshaw,” as a married woman is also what causes tragedy, although this time it is due to the refusal by a married woman. In the end, for all of these characters, who “are also fleeing from the feminine,” (Booker 114) the encounter with the feminine is what will cause the disruption of their life or quest, bringing them to madness, death, or the end of their empire to come. The sexual relationship between Isabella and Columbus alluded to in Rushdie’s story is also a metaphor for empire and colonization; not only because of the historical fi - gures these two characters represent, but also because Isabella does not come back to Columbus until she has conquered everything, and realizes that “no conquest satisfies her, no peak of ecstasy is high enough. […] she will never, never, NEVER! be satisfied by the possession of the Known. Only the Unknown, perhaps even the Unknowable, can satisfy her” (East, West 114-6). Columbus, too, believes that “the search for money and patronage […] is not so different from the quest for love,” (112) and views in “consummation” (107) a parallel to the quest for new lands, and for the Unknown. The Unknown is also represented by language, since Columbus, the “unspeakable forei- gner,” (197) responds to Isabella’s summoning by transforming his own words into an orgasm, or at least the promise of one: “he opens his mouth, and what almost spills out is the bitter refusal: no. ‘Yes,’ he tells the heralds. Yes. I’ll come” (119). If sex is a language, it is an absolutely unspeakable one in Uma and Arun’s family. Desai’s work begins with a clear “concern and embarrassment” (15) in the family due to the late pregnancy of the mother. We are told that the two girls, Uma and Aruna, “failed to understand the language although they caught the tone, and even the meaning. Something grossly physical – sexual. The word squealed loudly in their throats and they pressed their lips together so it should not escape” (15). But their youth is not the only reason why they fail to understand. Even as adults, the only time Aruna tries to ask her sister if she had any sexual relationship with her husband, Uma’s reaction is to “bury her [own] head in her pillow and howl ‘No! No!’” (95). The repressed language of sexuality will never be spoken by Uma, who will remain a virgin, as far as we know, and it will only come through in the form of some very shy allusions to Melanie’s beauty in the words of Arun. Another kind of repressed sexuality is to be found in Rushdie’s “The Harmony of the Spheres”; the hidden sexuality of Mala, the narrator’s wife, causes “the collapse of harmony, the demolition of the spheres of [his] heart,” (East, West 145) and of the whole story. Following his discovery of the sexual encounters between Mala and Eliot Crane, the reader comes to reconsider the whole story and acquire a vision of the world diverging from what was initially offered through the narrator’s point-of-view. When we understand that “serious, serene Mala, non-smoking, non-drinking, vegetarian, drug- free, lonely Mala from Mauritius, the medical student with the Gioconda smile” (129) is different from what we were led to think, we see the ground under the narrator’s feet collapse: every certainty he had, his “harmony,” his very place in the world, vanishes. He is, once and for all, dis-placed. 35 The Poetics of Displacement in Indian English Fiction
Religion, the Occult and Rituality Rushdie wrote that “a form must be created which allows the miraculous and the mun- dane to co-exist at the same level – as the same order of event,” (Homelands 376) because this would be the only way of expressing the reality of a place like India, where these two apparently diverging worlds share the same space in everyday life, mingling with each other. Reading Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting with this quotation in mind, we cannot avoid thinking about the divine worlds colliding in Uma’s life. Raised a Hindu in her home, she studies at a convent school. The difficulty of reconciling these two worlds is clear from the beginning, when her mother accuses her husband of having sent their daugh- ter to such a school: “‘See what these nuns do!’ she raged to Papa. ‘What ideas they fill in the girls’ heads! I always said don’t send them to a convent school. Keep them at home, I said – but who listened? And now – !’” (29). And in fact Uma is usually “kept at home,” but her rare excursions out of the family environment bring her to very intense encounters with the world of religion; through Mrs. O’Henry, “the Baptist missionary’s wife,” (98) and through Mira-masi who takes Uma along on one of her pilgrimages. This episode is particularly interesting, as Uma experiences here her first “trance” or “fit,” as the family will later say in referring to it. “‘You are the Lord’s child,’ says Mira-masi to her, ‘The Lord has chosen you. You bear his mark’” (59). The people surrounding her “became very respectful of Uma now, watchful and curious,” (60) “the head priests beckoned her, inviting her to come in […] The young priest who played the harmonium gazed directly at her when he sang, and his voice was no longer steady but quavered emotionally” (61). Is Uma a goddess, one of the “300 millions of gods” Rushdie refers to when he writes that, in India, the “vast multitude of deities co-exists in everyday life with the doubly vast multitude of people. You bump into gods in the streets. You jostle past them, you step over their sleeping forms. They take your seat in the bus” (Homelands 380)? And, if Uma was chosen by the Lord, who was He that chose her? For Uma does not seem to know which one to choose for herself: the God of Mother Agnes, of Mrs. O’Henry, of her mother, of Mira-masi, none of those, or all of them combined? Kipling’s characters Drevot and Carnhean exploited the belief of the people they conquered in order to become gods, and rule over their lands. The priests of the people summoned for the Masonic ritual are the ones who declare them gods when they find out that the apron Dravot is wearing has the same mark that is on the stone of Im- bra, of which not even the priests knew anything. Their power resides exactly in their being suspended between divinity and humanity; in their human abilities and in the divine aura that makes them untouchable. They live on the bridge built “between here- and-there,” the bridge between the occult and the rational inhabited by Rushdie’s Eliot Crane. They could be considered themselves as a bridge: by conquering Kafristan, in fact, they brought to this faraway and almost unknown land the customs of Britain and India: violence, colonialism, imperialism, nationalism. Dravot and Carnehan become gods, they earn and lose their empire through rituals. Another ritual is crucial to “The Judgement of Dungara,” in which the conversion of the Buria Kol by Justus and his wife causes the failure of the mission. As suggested by Athon Dazé, Justus gives the converts new clothes made of a special fibre, “white and smooth,” (Kipling 127) but what Justus does not know is that it is also poisonous. 36
And the failure of this mission, according to Wilson, is “a disaster as great as Dan and Peachey’s kingdom” (92). In Desai’s novel, Indian and American rituals showcase the differences and similari- ties between the two cultures. Both parts of the book begin with a food ritual, as “food has always been a universal basis of cultural identity, and its sharing the foundation of social order […] the refection of a society’s structure and world vision” (Dvořák 17). The Indian tea is paralleled by the American barbecue, and the uneasiness felt by Uma on account of all her duties is paralleled by Arun’s uneasiness at the table, having to “confess – again” (165) his difference, his alienation which is indeed double, as he is the only vegetarian in both houses. Feasting, after all, is not much better than fasting. Arun seems to spend his time with the Pattons only through these American food rituals: the barbecue, shopping for groceries at the Foodmart, for which Arun feels increasing dis- gust. And Arun “grows tense, finds his throat muscles contracting, tight with anxiety,” (208) precisely when Mrs. Patton encourages him to eat his “own kind of food,” (177) to make him feel both part of the family and at home, none of which will ever happen. In America, at the Pattons’, Arun is “Ahroon” or “Red,” neither Indian nor American, but he is over-Indian in the eyes of the family. Mrs. Patton’s re-placement of Arun in his own world, in the India he physically and mentally does not inhabit anymore, through the food he has never been keen on eating, even when he was at home, is here the very cause of Arun’s displacement.
Displacement, Replacement and Redisplacement By analysing the themes shared by these works by Kipling, Rushdie and Desai, we have come to see common aspects in the poetics these authors have used to express different forms of displacement. The characters in Kipling’s world still had the opportunity to look forward, with the naïve hope of Bobby Wick in “Only a Subaltern,” to a future where everything still seemed to be possible, at least for a second, even becoming kings of an unknown land; “a world where will and energy can be expressed, for once, in meaningful action, even though the consequences involve the actors in a catastrophic downfall” (Cornell xxxvii). Whereas success is neither granted nor likely for Desai’s characters, Kipling’s characters “earn our sympathetic admiration not in proportion to their success but because they act resolutely in the face of a world that mocks or ignores their lonely endeavour” (Cornell xxiv). Desai’s attention is on the present, leaving little opportunity for looking forward to a future which does not promise change, or for returning to a past that has become part of the present. According to Afzal-Khan: Desai ultimately subordinates her poetic and mythic imagination to her moral vision. In other words, she is morally much more in favor of a “realistic” approach to life […]. She has opted to remain within history, despite its ravages and cruelties. She has shown in novel after novel her moral disapproval of a stance that refuses to shoulder responsibility for the past and present and chooses to withdraw from a painful present reality into a romantic or mythicized past. (60, 96) Rushdie’s position seems to be the opposite of Desai’s, as he “has used the genre of myth both as a ‘strategy of liberation’ and as an ideological form that avoids historical petrification” (Afzal-Khan 143). Peter Brigg goes even further, in indicating disorder as Rushdie’s own choice of order: 37 The Poetics of Displacement in Indian English Fiction
Rushdie proposes order and meaning, only to destroy them with the extremes of ironic voice and the creation of the over-ordered fantasy. What is left is the welter of confusion, suffering, passion and disorder that is the human condition in the lands Rushdie chooses to mourn […]. Disorder is proved. (185) Rushdie looks at the past, and at himself in “broken mirrors” to find the image of a past that is lost, but which could lead to a new future, a new world Desai does not seem to believe in, as “in fact, the very idea of achieving some kind of mythic retreat or escape from the burdens of reality, no matter how attractive, is rejected at the end of her no- vels” (Afzal-Khan 60). And if the whole world is the only home for Kipling’s and especially for Rushdie’s characters, for Desai’s even “domestic life is not their world, but a trap where their individuality is endangered and thus complete lack of interest and dissonance in their relationship bring solitary confinements and show their reluctance to face reality” (Metha 9). And the outer or other worlds are not any better: No, he had not escaped. He had travelled and he had stumbled into what was like a plastic representation of what he had known at home; not the real thing – which was plain, unbeautiful, misshapen, fraught and compromised – but the unreal thing – clean, bright, gleaming, without taste, savour or nourishment. (Desai 185) If none of the characters is able to find a stable place in the world, they all seem to find some kind of place in displacement. Kipling’s adventures, Desai’s alienation, and Rushdie’s attempt at replacement, all seem to lead to a redisplacement, a conscious pla- cement in displacement. “Just as place may be ‘created, reproduced and defended’ by the colonizer,” writes in fact Ashcroft, “it may also be produced and reproduced by the colonized” (77). If displacement is the only reality possible, and it has to be accepted, if not chosen, then its physical and psychological disruption needs to be transformed into a textual one, becoming a gain rather than a loss. This constant disruption can in fact lead to a wider understanding of the “other,” and to a universal language, because, as Rushdie writes: “maybe this impurity is the norm in the history of cultures, and […] notions of purity are the aberration,” (“Minority Literatures” 35) and “throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings” (Homelands 394). Displacement and disruption (see Sofo) can both be used as new forces and new energies, because the conscious use of these fragmentations of identity can become – or rather has already become – the essential message that migrants and migrant literatures have offered to the world.
Giuseppe sOfO Sapienza, University of Rome
W orks Cited
afzal-khan, Fawzia. Cultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel: Genre and Ideology in R. K. Narayan, Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, and Salman Rushdie. University Park: Pennsylvania UP, 1993. ashcrOft, Bill. Caliban’s Voice: The Transformation of English in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 2009. 38
BOOker, M. Keith. Colonial Power, Colonial Texts: India in the Modern British Novel. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1997. BriGG, Peter. “Salman Rushdie’s Novels: The Disorder in Fantastic Order.” Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie. Ed. M. D. Fletcher. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. 173-85. caBaret, Florence. “From Location to Dislocation in Salman Rushdie’s East, West and Rohinton Mistry’s Tales from Firozsha Baag.” Tropes and Territories. Ed. Marta Dvořák and W. H. New. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2007. 164-76. cOrnell, Louis L. Introduction. The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. xiii-xxxvii. DamrOsch, David. Introduction. Heart of Darkness, The Man Who Would Be King, and Other Works on Empire: Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling. Ed. David Damrosch. New York: Longman, 2003. xi-xxv. Desai, Anita. Fasting, Feasting. London: Chatto & Windus, 1999. Dvořák, Marta. The Faces of Carnival in Anita Desai’s In Custody. Paris: PUF, 2008. jain, Jasbir. “Anita Desai.” Indian English Novelists: An Anthology of Critical Essays. Ed. Madhusudan Prasad. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1982. 23-50. kiplinG, Rudyard. The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories. Ed. Louis L. Cornell. 1885-1888. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. manavar, Twinkle B. “Man-Woman Relationship in Anita Desai’s Novels.” Critical Essays on Anita Desai’s Fiction. Ed. Jaydipsinh Dodiya. New Delhi: IVY Publishing House, 2000. 13-20. mehta, Purnima. “Dehumanization of the Male in Anita Desai’s Fiction.” Critical Essays on Anita Desai’s Fiction. Ed. Jaydipsinh Dodiya. New Delhi: Ivy Publishing House, 2007. 8-12. rushDie, Salman. “Minority Literatures in a Multi-Cultural Society.” Displaced Persons. Ed. Kirsten Holst Petersen, and Anna Rutherford. Sydney: Dangaroo P, 1988. 33-42. —. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta Books, 1991. —. East, West: Stories. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994. sharma, I. K. “Between Sita and Helen: A Study of Manju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters and Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting.” The Fiction of Anita Desai. Ed. Suman Bala, and D. K. Pabby. New Delhi: Khosla Publishing House, 2002. 63-73. sharraD, Paul. Postcolonial Literary History and Indian English Fiction. Amherst, NY: Cambria P, 2008. sOfO, Giuseppe. “Disrupting Literature: Reading Rushdie through Rushdie.” Barnolipi 2.5 (2013): 27- 41. wauGh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London: Methuen, 1984. wilsOn, Angus. The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling. London: Secker & Warburg, 1977. Spaces of Multiplicity: Rethinking Indigenous Perspectives in Australian Tertiary Education through Altering Teacher Beliefs and Practices
Ongoing tension between Indigenous self-determination and Western educational frames of reference remains a potent force within educational debate. This essay voices some of the dilemmas of practice emergent in two Australian educators’ everyday work through exploration of some new spaces of possibility within this complex domain. Through observa- tion and surveys with Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian tertiary educators experiences, beliefs and practices about teaching Indigenous perspectives are presented. This paper invites a re-thinking of tertiary educational space, as a possible site of multiplicity that is not preoccupied with the differences of meaning between Indigenous and non-Indigenous worlds of knowledge and experience. Rather it is a space that recognises dilemmas and convergences of knowledge in relation to content and pedagogy.
Curatorial Spaces Two artworks currently hang in the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) at one of the entrances into the Australian art section. For the purposes of this paper, what is interesting about these works is the curatorial decision to hang these large works op- posite each other (see Figure 1). One work is by Gordon Bennett, the other by Imants Tillers, both Australian artists.1 In each panoramic artwork (see Figures 2 and 3) there is an array of seemingly insignificant small parts, comprising images and text. Each component part can be shown on its own or in an interconnected space, allowing many interpretive dimensions and voices to emerge. Displacement and relocation of indivi- duals from their home is a recurrent theme in each work. Both paintings examine geo- graphical mappings and cultural disruption. In Bennett’s case, his imagery is driven by a “strongly felt sense of injustice at the ‘homogeneity impulse’ of the colonizing white culture” (Gordon Bennett Profile). Tillers’ artwork appropriates Indigenous and Wes- tern imagery to process information and to communicate a contemporary view from the perspective of the European diaspora. Both artists turn towards respective histories and experiences for their inspiration – one Indigenous, and one European. The curato- rial space, or choices made by the curators in the positioning of the art work, produced by the discreet hanging of the two works together yet, not side-by-side, opens new spaces of multiplicity for contemplation, interrogation and scopic engagement. As a result of this curatorial decision, the viewer is allowed the physical and conceptual space and time to reflect, not so much on the binary of Indigenous and Western conceptions of place and history, but rather on a self-reflective interpretation of each piece. For an informed viewer familiar with the tensions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations in Australia, historical tensions and contemporary debates in contemporary art are given voice as well as a means for “conversation” as suggested by the title of Tillers’ work. For example, this curatorial space moves away from what art historian Sasha Grishin calls “the apartheid model” of traditional hanging spaces where “Indigenous
1. Gordon Bennett is an Australian artist with Anglo Celtic and Indigenous Australian heritage, born in Australia in 1955 and died in 2014. Imants Tillers is an Australian artist with a Latvian heritage born in Australia in 1950. 40 and non-Indigenous art practice is placed in separate camps” (x). The AGNSW curato- rial space is seeking, rather, new dynamics and synergies when the works are juxtaposed together revealing a multiplicity of relationships and meanings, including tensions and historical debates.
Figure 1. Curatorial space at the entrance of the Australian Art Section, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia. Bennett’s painting on the left is hung facing Tiller’s work. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Photo: AGNSW.
The debate between Indigenous and Western knowledge systems is not limited to the art world. Numerous government policies are giving shape to the Australian education system with respect to “closing the gap” between Indigenous and non-In- digenous Australian education outcomes and providing Indigenous Australians with professional opportunities (Bradley Review 2008; Berhendt Review 2012).2 It is the Australian Government’s intention that all primary and secondary teachers will have, as a minimum, a proficient level of demonstrable professional expertise in Indigenous Studies. In more recent discussions, tertiary institutions are examining ways of in- tegrating Indigenous perspectives and/or knowledges in their courses. This is an at- tempt by postcolonial Australia to address the effects colonial dispossession has had on Indigenous Australians. This research aims to identify the dilemmas of praxis that arise in the consideration of Indigenous perspectives through a pilot project on the personal accounts of the au- thors of this work who are two university educators in Australia and who are part of a
2. According to the Berhendt Report “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are significantly underrepre- sented in the higher education system, contributing to the high levels of social and economic disadvantage they often experience” (2012, ix). This same report refers to the Closing the Gap agenda. “Closing the Gap is a commitment by all Australian governments to improve the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people across six areas relating to health, early childhood development, education and economic participation” (2012, 3). 41 Spaces of Multiplicity community of practice that comprises Indigenous and non-Indigenous educators. It in- cludes participant observation and surveys conducted in their universities, in the context of discussions and workshops on Indigenous perspectives in university courses. This paper acknowledges the recent work on engagement with Indigenous perspectives in tertiary curriculum, which problematise the significance of rights and strengths in edu- cation (Ma Rhea), social activism and decolonisation teaching approaches (McLoughlin) and the Western/Indigenous Knowledges binary (Nakata, Cultural Interface), yet ex- tends this debate to examine the role of teacher knowledge and wisdom.
Teaching Practices and Art as Analogy This paper is focused on staff capabilities and how concepts of teacher knowledge, belief and practice need to be acknowledged in the dialogue on Indigenous perspectives in education. Educational psychologists Shulman and Shulman place individual teacher wisdom and capacity at the centre of educational change. They argue “capital” or per- sonal and professional resources, are a point of tension intervening and shaping a tea- cher’s capacity to act and to shape the curriculum. Teachers come to the classroom with a repertoire of teacher knowledge, which operates as working capital. This paper argues that teachers’ work cannot be degraded into predetermined sets of instructional data. Rather enhancing personal capacities and case-based knowledge within a developing sense of a professional community is a key focus of Shulman et al.’s research. This focus of attention on individual teachers work, corresponds to a longstan- ding, yet still emergent concurrence internationally regarding the rights of Indigenous peoples and a global move of Indigenous peoples seeking a voice in the contempo- rary, as a result of shared world views on the relationship between Indigenous peoples and nation states. This perspective is articulated in the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 2007, which formally recognises Indigenous difference rather than categorizing it as the other. Indigenous educator Martin Nakata also notes the shift at the beginning of the 21st cen- tury in attitudes towards Indigenous knowledge, which he sees as emerging at a “histori- cal moment where Indigenous peoples are much better positioned within the legal poli- tical order where issues of rights, sovereignty, self-determination, and historical redress, provide a better base for the assertion of Indigenous interests” (Cultural Interface, 8). Articulation of policy frameworks concerning educational rights and freedoms from an Australian Indigenous perspective, have long been in the public domain. For instance, over twenty years ago, the Coolangatta Statement resulting from the National Organizing Committee of the 1993 World Indigenous Peoples’ Conference on Education held at Coolangatta (Queensland), outlined a framework for discussing Indigenous Peoples’ Education Rights.3 Consequently, within government policy and rhetoric the role of education has become a key area in which to support these intentions to bridge the gap between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non-Indigenous Australian education outcomes (MCEECDYA 22-25). Accordingly, universities may play a key role in cultural relations by their willingness to engage in new ways of seeing and doing with regard to
3. The Coolangatta Statement on Indigenous People’s Rights in Education is a document prepared by a task force who met in Coolangatta between September 24 and October 1, 1993 at the World Indigenous People’s Conference on Education. This statement represents a collective voice of Indigenous peoples from around the world who support fundamental principles considered vital to achieving reform and transformation of education for Indigenous peoples. 42 learning and teaching in the area of Indigenous perspectives and knowledges. Indeed, there have been numerous discussions in this area through reviews (Bradley Review, 2008; Behrendt Review, 2012) and research on developing Indigenous cultural compe- tencies in the context of university teaching (Ma Rhea; McLaughlin; Moore; Nakata et al.). Despite these initiatives, recent reports on teaching Indigenous perspectives in education suggest, “postcolonial democracies such as Australia are struggling to em- ploy new frameworks in which to undertake teacher professional development in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander domain” (Ma Rhea 11). Furthermore, some stu- dies argue that the frameworks that exist “lack a guiding commitment to a rights and strengths perspective” (Ma Rhea 11). Other works reveal that the “uncritical transfer of Western knowledge systems through colonizing processes” require a “rethinking of how we educate future global cultural competency within the Australian context” and invite educators to “accept social and ethical responsibility to critique existing knowledge of Indigenous Australia” (McLaughlin 249). The teaching and learning of Indigenous perspectives by non-Indigenous academics therefore invite theoretical in- vestigation of the complexities of classroom contexts around two distinct knowledge systems: Indigenous and Western. Williamson and Dalal, writing from the perspective of university personnel who have been involved with what they call “Indigenizing” the curriculum, use the work of Nakata (Indigenous Knowledge; Ongoing Conversations), to outline the dilemma of running the “risk of implying the application of an ‘impo- verished’ version of ‘Aboriginal Pedagogy’ and the promotion of corrupted unders- tandings of Indigenous knowledge” (51). In each of these studies, Indigenous pers- pectives challenge the way educators conceptualise their teaching pedagogy. As Juliana McLaughlin notes in her paper on educating culturally competent professionals, the success of these initiatives depends on understanding Indigenous perspectives and knowledges (253) yet little discussion exists about non-Indigenous staff who make up the bulk of teachers in Australian universities, and how these initiatives should be ap- proached, or how they impact the professional practice of educators other than to suggest a decolonising approach to teaching practice (251). Subsequently, these initia- tives raise pedagogical questions around notions such as how teachers decolonise their teaching when their expertise is not in the social sciences or education disciplines, for instance, where critical thinking in these areas are often conceptualised. Likewise, how does a researcher in engineering studies know whether a desired attempt to decolonize the curriculum in engineering studies is not further perpetuating colonial ways of thin- king or stereotypes, particularly if the teacher has not received training or knowledge in the area of Western postcolonial approaches to knowledge? These questions also call into consideration a deeper understanding of the implications Indigenous perspectives in tertiary education may have in relation to concepts such as teacher judgment, values and wisdom and how this may inform the way teachers integrate Indigenous perspec- tives in tertiary education. To illuminate these questions, the authors of this paper conducted a survey in 2014 to examine some of the responses of academics working in their respective Australian tertiary institution. In total 12 educators working in the field of Humanities responded. Two were Indigenous educators and the rest were non-Indigenous with teaching expe- rience in tertiary education ranging between 20 to 40 years. Respondents were asked to 43 Spaces of Multiplicity present their views on Indigenous perspectives in their teaching. Parallel to this, we exa- mined a limited range of reviews of some of the paintings by Australian artists Gordon Bennett and Imants Tillers. The artworks and the curatorial space in the gallery setting were selected because of the way they seemingly reflected similar narratives in the per- ceived naturalness and relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledge systems. In this paper, we have not undertaken a comprehensive review of each artwork and its specific meaning in relation to the development of contemporary art. Rather, we have focused on how the placement and spatial arrangement of the artworks in the gal- lery setting can offer new insights into the juxtaposition of ideas useful for rethinking educational applications. Simultaneously, the two artworks engage in a dialogue between the Modernist bor- rowing of Indigenous artworks by Tillers and the rejection and political critique of white culture provided by Bennett. The tensions and contestation apparent within the curatorial space is salient for the research as we draw on the “framework of dilemmas” elaborated by Windschitl4 (132)) to explore the questions raised by academics who have been reflecting on Indigenous perspectives in their teaching. The “dilemmas- fra mework” has significant implications for teachers in examining their own practice. As a heuristic tool, the framework involves a number of critical questions that can prompt teachers to interrogate their own beliefs, question institutional routines and understand more deeply the forces that influence their classroom practice. Windschitl concludes that teachers and teaching are central to the “re-culturing of the classroom, meaning that familiar relationships, norms, and values have to be made public and be critically reevaluated” (164). This may mean a kind of destabilisation in lecture rooms, as tea- chers re-orientate practice to move beyond passive consumption of information in or- der to “respond to students” diverse approaches to learning, that are structured to take advantage of students unique starting points, and that carefully scaffold work aimed at more proficient performances” (qtd. in Windschitl 164). The curatorial space is also poised as a space in which to explore artworld and cultu- ral dilemmas through visual and historical case-based meaning making. The major chal- lenge then is to develop new theoretical conceptions that privilege the learner, proble- matise practice, and dynamically incorporate localised knowledge by including “all the players, the conflicts, and the tensions” (165). Stress is also placed on the central role of teachers’ personal and professional actions as key catalysts, and the “principle agents of reform” (165) within emergent theories of learning. To sustain such transformative practices Windschitl states that “researchers, reformers, and practitioners must jointly fashion a vision […] that involves more than theories of learning or instruction” (165). In the context of this framework, discussions on Indigenous perspectives in tertiary education acts as a useful, yet destabilising factor that brings into question how teachers teach and what systems of knowledge are applied.
4. Four frames of reference are used to describe these dilemmas (conceptual, pedagogical, cultural and political). These dilemmas often exist as concerns for teachers and their relation to students, administrators and the community in the context of reform-orientated education (Windschitl 132). 44
Art as Analogy The curatorial space referred to earlier in this paper is used as an analogy to illustrate complexities for non-Indigenous educators regarding Indigenous perspectives within tertiary curriculum and pedagogy. By making the curatorial decision to place Gordon Bennett’s Myth of the Western man (White man’s burden), (Figure 2) opposite the non-Indi- genous artist Imants Tillers’s Conversations with the Bride 1974-1975 (Figure 3), the vacant gallery space that divides each art piece prevents the viewer from looking at each of the works simultaneously. No one viewpoint is therefore privileged. Bennett’s work draws attention to the construction of identity in Australia. In a style suggesting Aboriginal Western Desert dot painting as well as abstract expressionist art in the style of Jackson Pollock, this painting explores key dates in Australian history such as the landing of the First Fleet, massacres of Aboriginal people, Mabo ruling and the establishment of the Tent Embassy in Canberra.
Figure 2. Gordon Bennett (Australia, b.1955, d.2014). Myth of the Western Man (White Man’s Burden) 1992 synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 175.5 x 304.3 cm. Art Gallery of New South Wales. Purchased 1993. Photo: AGNSW. 390.1993. © The Estate of Gordon Bennett
Tillers’ artworks stage a critical dialogue between European and Indigenous art practices. This installation features various landscapes and references to Western art such as Australian landscape painting and European Antiquity by way of 112 minia- ture paintings on metal tripods. It appropriates Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare and Hans Heyson’s landscapes of Australian settlement.5 Each image explores the
5. Hans Heyson was a German born Australian artist (1877-1968) who is recognised for his paintings that explore the unique character of Australian landscape at the turn of the 20th century. 45 Spaces of Multiplicity
Figure 3. Imants Tillers (Australia, b.1950). Conversations with the Bride 1974-1975. gouache, synthetic polymer paint on paper, type C photograph, aluminium, dimensions variable. Art Gallery of New South Wales. Purchased 1976. Photo: AGNSW. 235.1976.a-wwwwwwwww. © Imants Tillers/Licensed by Viscopy, 2016. relationship between artworks, artists and viewers through the layering of historic and contemporary references from art and literature. The particular hang and curatorship of these works remind us – as Korsmeyer states – that “we learn to understand ourselves in and through it [art]” (92). This space questions both the conversational and the oppositional aspects of Indigenous and non- Indigenous knowledge. In Russell’s scheme of things in “their differences, Indigenous knowledge systems and Western scientific ones are considered so disparate as to be ‘irreconcilable’” (Cultural Interface, 8). In working towards educational change, we on the other hand suggest that this void acts as a space where a possible exchange of knowledge can occur. Recognition of Indigenous perspectives in Australian tertiary education has led to some universities offering academic teaching staff an opportunity for professional de- velopment through training days, conferences, and individual support, and also an ex- tensive body of materials and resources to use in their teaching. The focus of these opportunities tends to be on cultural awareness and cultural competency workshops such as the current health condition of Indigenous Australians, or the effects of the Northern Territory intervention on Indigenous Australians rather than on programs that discuss frameworks for teaching and learning. The apportioning of curatorial space in the AGNSW display of Bennett’s and Tillers’ works mirrors to some extent, the possibilities, themes and dilemmas identified by teachers in relation to Indigenous 46 perspectives in tertiary education, namely: teacher fear and resistance about teaching Indigenous content; how to approach new histories; moving beyond appropriation and mimicry towards understanding and applying decolonising pedagogy; questioning staff and student beliefs about Indigenous Knowledge; and the literal spaces of multiplicities offered by the teaching and learning classroom.
Fear and Resistance While Indigenous perspectives in tertiary education aim to narrow the gap between In- digenous and non-Indigenous Australians, discussions at workshops and presentations around how to embed this in courses creates gaps of another nature – that of teacher knowledge or lack of knowledge in the area of Indigenous content The emotional qualifier “fear” or the cognitive recognition of “not knowing” are some of the words we have heard pronounced by non-Indigenous teachers attending workshops with re- gard to how they view Indigenous topics in their teaching. This is further reiterated by Indigenous experts in discussions at workshops we attended between Indigenous and non-Indigenous colleagues, who recognise that “Australia needs professionals to work for and work with Indigenous people but we don’t have the professional capacity to do this.” Likewise, Nakata relates that “things aren’t just white or black, and things cannot be fixed by simply adding in Indigenous components to the mix. This is a very compli- cated and contested space” (“Cultural Interface” 8). In this context of complexity and uncertainty, tertiary educators, in discussions on how to embed Indigenous content and viewpoints into the courses they teach, relate that in terms of their knowledge in this area “it’s not something you know” or “there is the fear of teaching outside our direct knowledge” or “we just don’t want to say the wrong thing so we say nothing”. A survey conducted asking non-Indigenous staff how they would embed Indigenous content into their curriculum further reflects these views. Some of the respondents dis - cussed their lack of knowledge in how they would embed Indigenous topics into their curriculum with responses such as: “no particular ideas at the moment”; “this is a major undertaking, as it involves (as I understand it) incorporating/integrating a new knowle- dge system into the way we understand what we teach”; “not sure”; “I have no idea”. One of the respondents also felt the need for Indigenous local teachers to be em- ployed when tackling Indigenous issues as they felt that: “lectures in Indigenous to- pics [should be taught], by Indigenous lecturers.” While another felt that Indigenous perspectives should incorporate worldviews rather than nation specific viewpoints: “it would be good to make students aware of Indigenous issues beyond cultural borders”. These observations show some of the reluctance or the inability of educators to en- gage directly with Indigenous topics in their teaching, and are consistent with some of the findings in other scholarly work on secondary schools relating that “teachers have fear and resistance about teacher standards that highlight Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander matters” (Ma Rhea 11). Furthermore, they highlight other related issues on teaching approaches on Indigenous knowledge such as who “owns such knowledge,” and underline questions on how this material is “used by non-Indigenous people wi- thout accountability back to the original knowledge holders” (Ma Rhea 9). In a similar way, Tillers’ art has become the subject of debate in contemporary art as he appro- priates Indigenous artworks and images. In such a climate of how and who teaches 47 Spaces of Multiplicity
Indigenous content, Ma Rhea’s work recognises similar concerns to those voiced in the workshops we have attended revealing that: many teachers do not teach Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and arguably as a profession have little or no appropriate qualification with regard to either the teaching and learning needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students or in the broader cognate area of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. (2) Furthermore, the work of Ma Rhea’ et al. raises the issue of teacher “resistance” to teaching Indigenous perspectives and knowledges as a result of the “lack of actual or perceived consensus on an overarching commitment to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rights and social justice,” and on “what constitutes the agreed body of knowle- dge” needed by teachers to meet focus areas (Ma Rhea et al. 57). In some of the works- hops we have attended, this lack of clarity for some non-Indigenous academics trans- lates into confusion regarding how Indigenous perspectives can be embedded in all courses. This, as a consequence, leads to resistance to incorporating material into teachi- ng that does not constitute the educator’s direct knowledge. Terry Moore expressed a similar concern in his work on the policy process in Aboriginal Australian Education that encouraged counter-productive attitudes and behaviours because of “education policy based in an imagined Aboriginal culture and self-locked in an imagined opposi- tional relationship with Australia and modernity” (142). In this context education policy becomes an “unorganized and disorganized dynamic of settler-Australian imagination” (142). These discussions mirror the criticism generated by the 1986 Biennale of Sydney when it introduced for the first time Indigenous work in its program of artworks. The Biennale was described by critics as occupying a “dangerous critical space” when it in- corporated Indigenous material in an attempt to bridge the gap between European and Indigenous art (McLean 13). Rather than narrowing the gap, the Biennale was accused by critics of being “politically regressive,” and of speaking “from inside the authority and prestige of a colonizing tradition” (McLean 13). It was notably the non-Indigenous artist Imants Tillers’ work The Nine Shots that was scrutinised because it was seen to appropriate and mimic Indigenous work. In response, Gordon Bennett viewed Tillers’ work as an act of cultural violence and expressed this in his painting The Nine Ricochets (Fall down black fella, jump up white fella) 1990. Although these questions were raised in the context of the 1980s and 1990s, they are still highly contentious in today’s context.
Teacher Values, Beliefs and Wisdom Within the postcolonial education context of this research, the notion of teacher values, beliefs and wisdom are like Tillers’ artwork subject to scrutiny in relation to how edu- cators impart knowledge about Indigenous material in universities. Will this teaching be viewed as mimicking Indigenous perspectives or perhaps perpetuating the imagined Indigenous Australian suggested by Moore earlier? By decolonizing could educators further perpetuate the colonial position that Nakata et al. claim in their work (“Decolo- nial Goals” 127)? Could the tokenistic inclusion of Indigenous content in tertiary curri- culum run the risk of disengaging learners from participating in the knowledge-making process? And finally, when teaching values whose values do you teach? 48
To investigate these issues, the survey distributed to 12 university educators, in- cluded one question referring to how these academics engaged with Indigenous content in their teaching. Their answers reflect the varying ways that some academics are em - bedding Indigenous content in their work. Some of the responses from non-Indige- nous educators revealed teaching content such as: Analysis of how Germans have engaged with Indigenous peoples, both in Germany and in Australia and how Indigenous people have played at exoticising German attitudes to their own benefit. Perspectives from the non-dominant group of speakers of the language(s) taught within the context of International Studies (for instance those in former colonies) are also included in language classes to bring these voices into the classroom. As part of the historical context for understanding transculturation in the Americas since 1492, and the current place of millions of Indigenous peoples in contemporary societies across the Americas. My approach is to get non-Indigenous students (the whole of the class) to engage with basic Indigenous vocabulary/terminology: such as “sacred sites,” “attachment to the land” by asking them to define these concepts within their own personal experiences. These examples demonstrate that non-Indigenous educators have begun thinking about the ways they integrate Indigenous aspects in their teaching, but they also show how diverse each teacher’s knowledge approach is with regard to Indigenous perspectives and the way they convey this in their subjects. Meanwhile, responses from Indigenous educators reveal a different approach to the way they embed Indigenous content in their curriculum. One respondent noted: When I taught in schools in NSW for 30 years as an Indigenous person, I set out to correct the history that was taught about development/expansion of the colony. The way Australian history has been portrayed has a ring of falsehood about it […] it is an idealized triumphant story of pioneering Mythmakers. Dispossession wasn’t mentioned. The same respondent further notes: “I found that a “trusted” Indigenous staff mem- ber was very effective in ‘correcting history’ and effecting attitudinal change”. Another Indigenous educator stated: “I utilise Indigenous only writings, films, radioetc. I have as many Indigenous guest lecturers who are expert in the topic as is possible”. Here the Indigenous educators talk about “correcting,” “falsehood,” “experts” and “trusting.” Each response shows that by incorporating Indigenous topics into curriculum areas, educators are “screening it through a filter that positions it to serve educational objec - tives, and which draws on prior theoretical investments in knowledge and knowledge practice” (Nakata, “Cultural Interface” 10).
Spaces of Multiplicity One of the Indigenous participants surveyed in this study has had many decades of experience in secondary schools. As an Indigenous Elder, this person’s response to awareness of Indigenous perspectives was: Our approach to Indigenous perspectives verges on tokenistic surfacing only when tragic incidents occur or on national ceremonial occasions e.g. […] Australia Day. We (Australians) seem to be ashamed of our Indigenous history unlike New Zealand where Maori culture and its history is kept alive and relevant to total population. 49 Spaces of Multiplicity
This answer evokes the continuing problem around the inclusion of Indigenous pers- pectives in educational curricula where for the respondent it is viewed as an “add-on” or as “tokenistic.” Meanwhile, the same respondent proposes the inclusion of Indige- nous content through Indigenous expertise in educational programs, and makes the following recommendations: - Employ Indigenous artist to produce art with children - Bring Indigenous poet/writer/Elder to school to workshop life stories and interact with students - Organise lesson on bush tucker, traditional land-use management practices. - Elders telling Dreamtime stories. This response underlines the importance of highlighting Indigenous educators’ colla- boration in a localised context, as well as the significance of communities and connec- tion. Alternatively, Nakata identifies the problem that exists when putting knowledge into either an Indigenous or Western framework – for him, one inevitably excludes one or the other. Rather Nakata, refers to what he terms the “cultural interface” as a way of embedding Indigenous perspectives in the curriculum. This is a space that is not preoccupied with the differences of meaning between Indigenous and non-Indigenous worlds of knowledge and experience. It is a space that recognises “all the disruptions, discontinuities, continuities and convergences of knowledge in this space and appre- ciations of the complexities that exist there” (Nakata, “Pathways” 5). The conditions of this space require appreciation and acknowledgement of the presence of Indige- nous and non-Indigenous standpoints. The interface, therefore, assumes complexity as a condition of the space, but does not see the solution to be the endless separation of Indigenous from non-Indigenous (Nakata, “Pathways” 5). What Nakata is suggesting is that we “normalise the presence of Indigenous content” so that it is not “an oddity, a novelty, a token or an add-on” (“Pathways” 6). In other words, Indigenous perspec- tives across the curriculum should not be equated with the inclusion of Indigenous content, but should rather be regarded as an inherent part of the diversity in the nation while still recognising Indigenous people as representing the first culture of the land. Likewise, the way that the “curatorial space” allows the space in Bennett’s work (Figure 2) to dissolve and become a fluid and dripping mass challenging the grid-like (Western) conception of structure within Tillers’ installation, suggests that a deeper interrogation of each artwork is essential in our further research to re-position and normalise Indige- nous knowledge as part of everyday educational experience. In order to try and comprehend further the complexity and dilemmas related to this interface, we refer back to the contested spaces and historical critique raised by Imants Tillers in an earlier artwork, The Nine Shots, which combined Indigenous and non-Indi- genous references. Bennett subsequently responded to Tillers’ use of Indigenous artist Michael Jagamara Nelson’s Five Dreamings (1982) as one of the main images with his own The Nine Ricochets (Fall down black fella, jump up white fella) which refers to the concep- tual power of a ricochet whereby Bennett in turn borrows images from Tillers’ work to speak about appropriation and alienation. By placing these artists’ respective works in a contested “curatorial space,” the AGNSW has deliberately chosen to continue the debate on identities based on locality and the ownership of cultural images once again into contemporary dialogue. As an example of the importance of a conversation that 50 has now been going on for twenty-five years, art scholar Ian McLean revisits the ar- twork of Tillers in a 2010 article which draws on the criticism during the 1986 Biennale The debate stands in relation to the artist’s appropriation (as a non-Indigenous artist) of Indigenous works and themes. McLean argues that Tillers’ work does not copy original Indigenous work, but rather constructs an “[…] empty and indeterminate image that is situated in a system of differences. Here “mimicry conceals no presence or identity behind its mask” (14). He adds further that the space created by Tillers is a “screen of ambivalence and uncertainty that, in the context of colonial power, disrupts the presu- med authority of the centre, stealing its aura for itself ” (McLean 14). In the postmo- dern world, Tillers’ work rather than an appropriation of the original is, as McLean sug- gests an “interconnected maze of endless copies with no origin, no centre and bound by uncertain relations” (14). If, as McLean argues, there is no “authorising centre” then the copy is not about submission or subversion but about the “reality of communica- tion, the way information is processed” (14). This particular critical and historical view of Tillers’ artwork highlights the need for ongoing dialogue in this interpretative space as authenticity, the copy and the original have particular significance in the colonising histories of Indigenous and Western knowledge in the Australian context. Bennett’s work provides a counterpoint to Tillers’ artwork and subsequent interpretive accounts, such as McLean’s. What is important is that re-thinking familiar narratives through pu- blic examples and new, multiple spaces of curation and displacement is required in order to work towards altered beliefs, destabilised routines and consideration of how contested views can be brought to the forefront of educational debates. Referring back to Nakata’s cultural interface and the teaching context there are his- tories, politics, economics, multiple and interconnected discourses, social practices and knowledge technologies which condition how we all come to look at the world, how we come to know and understand our changing realties in the everyday, and how and what knowledge we operationalise in our daily lives (Cultural Interface, 9). Likewise in both Bennett’s and Tillers’ artworks, there are unlimited interconnected possibilities offered by both Indigenous and Western viewpoints. For Nakata, the space of the classroom is not about the politicising of truths, but rather “the workings of knowledge and how an understanding of Indigenous people is caught up and is implicated in its work” (“Cultural Interface” 12). The “cultural interface” in the classroom refers to how a “social position is discursively constituted within and constitutive of complex sets of social relations as expressed through the social organization” of the everyday (Nakata, “Cultural Interface”12). Unpacking the complexity of social relations in this research is therefore best understood through the importance of everyday experience and the specificity of case-based knowledge. The local in this instance is evidenced through the analogical possibilities offered by two artworks hung seemingly in a neutral fashion in a gallery and the survey of tertiary educators. In seeking to create the “cultural interface” and enhance each educator’s “working capital” (Shulman et al.) by making connections across and between events, relations and examples, a point of tension emerges in the survey research with tertiary educators. For example, the Indigenous respondents tended to ensure that historical references and events were not just left as a piece of neutral historical data, rather each person’s particular “working capital” and nested knowledge systems allowed a more complex set of relations to emerge and be considered for learning. In contrast the non-Indige- 51 Spaces of Multiplicity nous respondents tended to choose a specific approach that seemed to relate to their specific existing course content (German/Indigenous engagement, transculturation in America and Indigenous vocabulary). Expanding teacher knowledge and wisdom about Indigenous Knowledge through Shulman et al.’s concept of “working capital” is essen- tial when engaging in the cultural interface. Whilst new spaces of multiplicity imply an intercultural learning arena, the question of the curriculum and what materials should be used when talking about Indigenous knowledge and experience remains. The au- thors conclude that the juxtaposition of diverse, yet conversationally significant careful- ly selected exemplars (in this case artworks) requires “curation” in tertiary classrooms. Importantly, as we have seen with the example of the displayed artworks, having an open-ended dialogue with both historical/temporal and spatial depths and complexity is essential. New “curatorial spaces” of tension and displacement also necessitate the interrogation of educators’ personal beliefs and practices in order to explicitly create the “cultural interface” utilising a dilemmas framework.
Angela GiOvananGeli University of Technology, Sydney (Australia)
Kim snepvanGers University of New South Wales (Australia)
W orks Cited Behrendt Review also known as the “Review of Higher Education Access and Outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People: Final Report July 2012.” 5 January 2014
—, and Ma Rhea, Z. “Editorial: Global 21st century Professionals: Developing Capability to Work with Indigenous and Other Traditionally-oriented peoples.” International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives 12.1 (2013): 1-7. MCEECDYA. Ministerial Committee on Education, Early Childhood Development and Youth Affairs: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Education Action Plan 2010-2014. (2011). 14 September 2014
Displaced from their own “country” by colonisation, the Noongar Aborigines of the south-west of Western Australia have lodged the Single Noongar Claim, an application for determination of native title, to seek the recognition of their customary land rights. Through that process, they were confronted with a second displacement by the respondents to their claim who tried to deny them this recognition. But the Noongars found ways to relocate themselves territorially, historically, socially, economically and politically in their “country.”
After the British Crown acquired sovereignty over the western part of Australia in 1829, British settlers progressively deprived the Noongars – the Aboriginal Australians of that area – of their lands. The Noongars increasingly came under control of the government of Western Australia which restricted their liberties and segregated them in town camps, missions and reserves. They have survived that history of oppression and, since 1995, they have sought the recognition of their native title. In Australia, the Native Title Act 1993 recognises that the Australian Aborigines’ connection with the land survived the acquisition of radical title by the British Crown at the time of sovereignty. It enables Aboriginal people to make legal claims over a territory they owned in accor- dance with their “traditional” laws and customs, provided that it is on Crown land. In 2003, eighty Noongars, represented by the South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council (SWALSC),1 lodged an application for determination of native title over the south-west of Western Australia, including the Perth metropolitan area. This appli- cation referred to as the Single Noongar Claim (SNC) was made on behalf of all the Noongars, a population estimated at 27,000 people. At the request of the State of Wes- tern Australia (the State) and the Government of the Commonwealth of Australia (the Commonwealth),2 the Metro Claim (Bennell v Western Australia) covering the Perth metro- politan area was treated as a separate proceeding of the SNC before Justice Wilcox. In his judgement delivered in 2006, Wilcox recognised the existence of a single Noongar society governed by a normative system of laws and customs at the date of settlement in Western Australia in 1829. He also confirmed the continuity of that society and its normative system to the present day. He identified native title rights which had survived the acquisition of sovereignty by the British Crown and should be recognised, subject to extinguishment. The State and the Commonwealth appealed this decision. In 2008, the appeals divi- sion of the Federal Court of Australia (the Full Court) handed down a judgement which confirmed the existence of a single Noongar society to sovereignty ( Bodney v Bennell). However, the Full Court concluded that Wilcox had failed to consider the continuity of this society and its connection with the area in the separate proceeding, and sent the
1. SWALSC is the Noongars’ Native Title Representative Body. NTRBs are organisations appointed under the Na- tive Title Act 1993 and recognized by the Federal government to represent the Aborigines in native title matters. 2. As the principal respondents in the case, the State and the Commonwealth will mainly be considered in this article. Among other respondents were the Western Australian Fishing Industry Council (WAFIC), various local govern- ment authorities and Christopher Bodney, a Noongar man who had registered five separate applications. 54 case back to the earlier Court for reconsideration. In consultation with the Noongars, SWALSC decided to pursue the SNC out of court and through negotiations with the State. During the colonial period, the Noongars were displaced from their own “country”3 but, with native title, they found themselves confronted with a second displacement. To deny the recognition of their land rights, the respondents to their claim tried to impose on them a legal definition of “society,” and how they should be socially and territorially organised. The respondents also strove to deprive the Noongars of their Aboriginality and their history. Without going too deeply into legal technicalities, this article considers the different aspects of this re-displacement and its implications through some of the arguments and concepts mobilised by the State, the Commonwealth and the Full Court. It also highlights how the Noongars resisted and managed to replace the definition of an “authentic” Aboriginality they were confronted with by a more inclusive approach. Finally, it examines how the Noongars succeeded in relocating themselves back on their territory.
Displacement To have their native title claim recognised, the Aboriginal applicants must prove their existence as a “society” which originates in the society in existence at the time of sove- reignty. They also have to demonstrate their cultural continuity with the precolonial so- ciety, endorsed as the model to which the postulants must correspond to be recognised as “traditional,” and thus “authentic” Aborigines. The native title legislation is modelled on anthropological concepts which have been crystallised into legal concepts, despite the fact that they have been questioned since. The judges and lawyers use anthropolo- gical writings as proof during the trials where anthropologists are also called as experts (Dousset & Glaskin). Anthropology is the basis on which each party will defend its picture of a “traditional society,” and attempt to persuade the judge to recognise it in preference to rival versions presented. The anthropological concept of “tradition” which shapes the native title legislation evacuates history and context and freezes the peoples it is applied to, displacing them into another time. The moment when “traditional” societies were recorded by some an- thropologists has been termed the “ethnographic present” (Burton; Dousset; Fabian). During this short lapse of time, the “primitive” societies under scrutiny were thought to have ceased to exist, due to their encounter with Western society, but they were not yet considered too acculturated for a reconstruction of their precolonial “traditional” state to be undertaken. Anthropological writings in this vein were dedicated to recreating a picture of these societies as they “really” were before being contaminated by the West. “Traditional” societies were thought of in terms of “tribes”: social entities defined as territorial, linguistic, kinship-based, political and religious units. For the whole Aus- tralian continent, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown elaborated a theoretical model of the tribe as a social unit composed of hordes, patrilineal and exogamic groups who exploit the
3. For the Aborigines, country represents both the physical and the metaphysical worlds. During the Dreamtime, mythical ancestors produced a cultural framework and shaped the physical world. Topographic features are their phy- sical traces and embody their power. Through their rituals, human beings reactivate that power to ensure the renewal or maintenance of natural species. Human beings, the natural elements and the spiritual world are thus interrelated and form a single whole. 55 Displacement, Replacement and Relocation: The Noongar Aborigines’ Land Claim in Western Australia resources of a territory they own. The concept of “tribe” has been criticised since the mid-twentieth century for its early implications with evolutionist theories and its lack of relevance, as it does not reflect the cultural reality and the flexibility of the social and territorial systems observed in the field (Godelier; Hiatt). “Traditional” societies were the reflexions of the Western preconceptions projected on them by the anthropologists: they were imagined (Burton). The concept of “tradition” has also been questioned to reveal that traditions are not fixed and unchanging and can be, for instance, invented (Hobsbawm & Ranger), reinvented, and employed as a strategic resource (Keesing & Tonkinson) or can reflect both continuity and discontinuity (Handler & Linnekin). The native title legislation has remained impervious to these questionings and re- quires the Aboriginal applicants to demonstrate that their social and territorial organisa- tion corresponds to Radcliffe-Brown’s classical model. In 2002 in the Yorta Yorta case,4 the High Court placed greater emphasis on the term “traditional” (Yorta Yorta 46-47; Strelein 77-80). It considered that the members of a society are bounded by the obser- vance of a common normative system of laws and customs. To prove that their society is “traditional” and obtain the recognition of their native title, the postulants have to establish that their normative system of laws and customs derives from the pre-sove- reign normative system of their ancestors and has been substantially maintained. To the common understanding of “traditional” as meaning “transferred from generation to generation,” the High Court added a notion of age and continuity. The SNC is a perfect example of the way the Australian State implements its “re- pressive authenticity,” a strategic tool designed to eliminate the Aborigines (Wolfe 163 sq.). Patrick Wolfe argues that the Australian State is still to be regarded as a colonial state which pursues the logic of elimination of the Aboriginal population it has been deploying since the early days of colonisation. The land rights legislation, Wolfe explains, is the continuity of that logic of elimination as it imposes an ideal “authenticity” against which the Aborigines cannot measure themselves, and thus are excluded from native title. Wolfe writes that “[colonialism] does not appropriate a historical indigeneity; it replaces it with a conveniently mythical one of its own construction. The condition of its replace- ment is precisely the elimination, or displacement, of the empirical indigene within civili- sation” (208, author’s emphasis). The Aborigines, such as the Noongars, who have fully endured the impact of colonisation are displaced from the category of the “authentic” Aborigines. Because they are historicised, they are not found to meet the standards of the fabricated “traditional” Aborigines living in a mythical time, and are elided. In the SNC, the State, the Commonwealth and the Full Court acted to reinforce this “repressive authenticity.” The Noongar applicants’ referential for “traditional” society was the same that existed in 1829. To defeat the Metro Claim, the State and the Com- monwealth based their arguments on the report by their expert anthropologist Ron Brunton. They adopted the classical model of social and territorial organisation inte- grated by the native title legislation to demonstrate that there was no Noongar society at sovereignty. Instead, Brunton claimed that there were several smaller social units with no overarching authority, even though he found himself unable to identify them. He suggested they could correspond to the eleven tribes identified for the South West by
4. The Yorta Yorta case was a native title claim made by the Yorta Yorta Aborigines. The case was dismissed by the Federal Court in 1992, the Full Federal Court in 2001 and the High Court in 2002 on the grounds that the Yorta Yorta people had ceased to occupy their lands in accordance with their “traditional” laws and customs. 56
Norman Tindale.5 Brunton found there was insufficient cultural unity between these groups to support the idea of a single society: language, customs and beliefs – especially laws and customs concerning land – which did not distinguish them enough from other neighbouring groups to bind them together as Noongars. The State and the Commonwealth held that contemporary Noongar society was not “traditional” because it had changed in a fundamental way, so much so that its rights and interests in land could not be recognised. According to Brunton, the contempo- rary Noongar community was not governed by a normative system and thus could not be considered as a society. Were it to be found otherwise, Brunton claimed that any such system is not a continuity of the pre-colonial normative system and therefore the contemporary Noongar community is not “traditional” in the accepted sense of the term. When they appealed Wilcox’s verdict before the Full Court, the State and the Commonwealth reiterated these arguments. The Full Court confirmed the existence of a single Noongar society at sovereignty. However, the way the judges treated the other issues on appeal further reinforced the Noongars’ displacement initiated by the State and the Commonwealth. They decided that Wilcox had committed the error of focussing on the continuity of the community itself while he should have more closely analysed the laws and customs of the contem- porary Noongar community. The judges found this issue critical since the definition of the SNC as a “communal claim” in itself did not suffice to give the Noongars commu- nal title over the South-West. They suggested that these laws and customs could allocate different rights in land to the postulants. The judges also considered this would help identify Noongar individuals still connected to the area of the Metro Claim. They argued that Wilcox had wrongly attempted to demonstrate the postulants’ connection to the whole area of the SNC, and that his approach had failed to prove the specific connec- tion to the area of the Metro Claim. This connection could be considered extinct (as claimed by the respondents) if the individuals related to that area had not continuously observed their “traditional” laws and customs.6 Moreover, the judges deemed the study of the laws and customs crucial, as their premise was that the continuity of a society did not necessarily prove the continuity of rights and interests. Indeed, in their legal understanding, the laws and customs forming the normative system of a society give rise to rights and interests, not the society itself. The conception of the judges of the Full Court required that the postulants’ laws and customs remain unchanged if they wanted to have their native title recognised. They declared themselves open to the notion of change only in as much as the rights and in- terests in land were still “traditional,” otherwise change would be “unacceptable” (Bod- ney 74). The judges reproached Wilcox with not having sufficiently established whether the Noongars’ land tenure system had undergone “acceptable adaptations” or “unac- ceptable changes.” They declared that some elements even suggested discontinuity, and that Wilcox should not have taken into account the external causes for change, such as
5. Norman Tindale (1900-1993) was an entomologist and a self-trained anthropologist. In 1974, he published Abo- riginal Tribes of Australia: Their Terrain, Environmental Controls, Distribution, Limits, and Proper Names, a map and a catalogue of the Aboriginal language groups at the time of European contact. This is the realisation of a project commenced in the 1920s with a revised version of a map he first published in 1940. 6. To obtain the recognition of their native title, the Aboriginal applicants have to prove their “connection” to the area they claim in accordance with their “traditional” laws and customs. This issue remains vaguely defined by the legis- lation and open to interpretation. 57 Displacement, Replacement and Relocation: The Noongar Aborigines’ Land Claim in Western Australia the European colonisation. To them, “[Wilcox]’s reasoning [had been] infected by an erroneous belief that the effects of European settlement were to be taken in account – in the claimants’ favour – by way of mitigating the effect of change” (Bodney 97). Lisa Strelein, director of the Native Title Research Unit at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), emphasises the problema- tic vocabulary employed by the judges of the Full Court and writes that “[instead] of focusing the inquiry around the seemingly objective test of ‘traditionality,’ the Court introduced overtly judgemental language as to what is ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ change and adaptation in Indigenous society and determined that it is the Court’s role to judge this” (102). The judges assigned themselves the power to define Noongar society and its social and territorial organisation, its internal allocation of rights, and the extent to which it can change. They increased the burden of proof that the postulants already have to provide to be recognised as “traditional” and obtain their native title. The State, the Commonwealth and the Full Court displaced the Noongars once again by not granting them their native title. They refused to recognise the Noongars as “traditional” because, having endured the impact of colonisation, they were histori- cised. To curb the threat that the land claims are felt to represent to the integrity of the Australian nation and its territory, the Noongars were placed into “modernity” and de- prived of their Aboriginality (Attwood; Wolfe). Ironically, while history was used by the State, the Commonwealth and the Full Court as a justification to reject the recognition of the Noongars and their land rights, at the same time, they negated their history and their capacity to adapt and survive as Noongars. However, the Noongars found ways to resist this displacement.
Replacement The Noongars knew the burden of proof that the process of native title imposes on the applicants and prepared themselves accordingly. The experts working for them de- fended the existence of a single Noongar society at sovereignty which shared com- mon laws and customs, beliefs and language. Their expert anthropologist, Kingsley Palmer, argued that the groups Tindale had mapped and which Brunton considered as the relevant “societies” for the SNC, corresponded to the different dialect groups of the Noongar language. He emphasised the fact that “[mapping] territories hides the complexity of the relationships between individuals and the implications that these re- lationships might have had for the exercise of rights to country in practice” (Bennell 84). His report was oriented towards the flexibility and adaptability of the Noongars’ social and territorial organisation. Wilcox listened to the arguments the Noongar applicants brought before him as well as the Noongar witnesses’ testimonies, and stated that “in considering non-Aboriginal accounts of Aboriginal society, it is always necessary to make allowance for the authors’ (and one’s own) assumptions and prejudices, including any tendency to view Aboriginal society through a Eurocentric lens” (Bennell 106). He chose to use the term “commu- nity” to distance himself from the legal definition of “society” and its focus on the laws and customs of a group. Wilcox acknowledged that the legal term “society” could refer to social entities of varying sizes, and that it was difficult to identify those to apply it to for the purpose of native title. However, he argued that what needed to be determined was the relevant social entity of each claim, and that it did “not matter that there may 58 exist a smaller, or larger, group of people which may properly be regarded, for other purposes, as a ‘society’ or ‘community’” (Bennell 425). The social entities defended by Brunton could well be regarded as “societies,” he conceded, but in the Noongar case, he was convinced that the members of these groups were bounded by a larger normative system and recognised the existence of the pre-sovereign Noongar community. Wilcox then turned his attention to the contemporary Noongar community and its relationship with that pre-sovereign one. He had to determine whether there was a continuing observance of its laws and customs, or a discontinuity with a recent revival that would have entailed the failure of the claim (Bernard). Palmer argued that “the rights and duties of the Noongar people in respect of their country have not changed in their fundamentals and the normative system upon which an owner is understood to relate to his or her country, remains founded upon the same principles as it did at sove- reignty” (Bennell 704, emphasis added). The applicants stressed that it was a question of degree as to whether native title was satisfied. They said that “the question is likely to be whether the community or group, as a whole, has sufficientlyacknowledged and observed the relevant traditional laws and customs” (Bennell 776, author’s emphasis). Wilcox found that, despite many factors of fragmentation, the Noongar families had remained connected through a “Noongar network,” that could be regarded as a “com- munity,” and declared himself impressed by the Noongars’ survival in the face of the drastic conditions that colonisation had imposed on them. He embraced the applicants’ definition of continuity. He interpreted the judgement of the High Court in Yorta Yorta as conceding that, as long as “traditions” had been substantially maintained by the com- munity, a certain degree of change was unavoidable, and not fatal to native title, given that the European settlement had had a profound impact on the Aboriginal groups. While the State, the Commonwealth and the Full Court subsequently would reproach him for this on appeal, Wilcox’s judgement on continuity was informed by the effects that the historical context had on the Noongars. He acknowledged their history of dis- possession, and was ready to accept a considerable degree of change. He argued that: “[...] one should look for evidence of the continuity of the society, rather than require unchanged laws and customs” and that “significant change [was] readily understandable [if] [it] was forced upon the Aboriginal people by white settlement” (Bennell 776, 785). According to him, what had to be determined was whether the changes, brought about by that specific historical context, were adaptations or a departure from “tradition.” As already mentioned, this approach led him to conclude that contemporary Noongar society is the continuity of the 1829 society and, thus, the Noongars’ laws and customs, and more specifically their rights to land, derive from the pre-sovereign normative sys - tem and are “traditional.” In the Statement preceding his judgement, Wilcox made the following remark: Undoubtedly, there have been changes in the land rules. It would have been impossible for it to be otherwise, given the devastating effect on the Noongars of dispossession from their land and other social changes. However, I have concluded that the contemporary Noongar community acknowledges and observes laws and customs relating to land which are a recognisable adaptation to their situation of the laws and customs existing at the date of settlement. (Bennell 7; emphasis added) He decided to focus on the adaptability of the Noongar community rather than on its unchanging character. Hence, he accepted that the Noongars were part of the history 59 Displacement, Replacement and Relocation: The Noongar Aborigines’ Land Claim in Western Australia of the South West, and were not a fixed social entity, frozen in time. Social and cultural change could thus be perceived as a normal response to their changing historical context. Wilcox identified native title rights that should be recognised subject to extinguish - ment. Considering that, in the Metro Claim, proofs were given from the entire area co- vered by the SNC and that “the whole includes its parts,” he declared that these rights should be recognised in the whole claim area (Bennell 82). Keeping his distance from the legal concept of “society,” he regarded these rights as communal and identified the Noongar community as the native title holding group, which implies that all Noongars can have rights and interests in the South West. As we have seen, this is another finding that the Full Court rejected. Wilcox thought that “[it] is not necessary (and it would be inappropriate) for the Court to become involved in issues as to the intracommunal distribution of special rights over portions of the total area, in relation to which native title has been established.” He concluded: “The Court leaves it to the community to determine those issues” (Bennell 78). This standpoint is confirmed by Strelein (111) who points out that the State, the Commonwealth and the Full Court’s position “is a dange- rous and inappropriate infraction on the jurisdiction and authority of the Indigenous communities to determine membership of the group and entitlement or distribution of rights and interests under their own law and custom.” The response of the Full Court to Wilcox’s findings shows that the Noongar appli- cants managed to unsettle the native title legislation. Noel Pearson, an Aboriginal lawyer and land rights activist, wrote that “[just] when the whitefellas were getting relaxed and comfortable about native title, Justice Murray Wilcox of the Federal Court has drop- ped a bombshell right in the centre of Perth” (n.p.). Wilcox “dropped a bombshell” because, given the harsh legislative response to previous claims, the positive outcome of the SNC was not expected. Glen Kelly, SWALSC Chief Executive Officer, explained to me in interview that the State thought the Noongars’ land claims would be easily defeated and was unprepared for the outcome: The State’s legal strategy was: “We’ll try and take this part [Perth area] to court, we’ll knock that off and then the rest of them [SNC] will just fall from there. We go to court on the weakest part and then the rest will fall like dominoes after that.” Now, unfortunately for the State, they were very very badly prepared because they thought it was just going to be a walk-up start and they had seriously underestimated the strength of Noongar connection to country. Irrespective of the extinguishment of native title, the strength of people’s connection to country remains quite strong and the State really underestimated that, really badly, like massively. (Interview 08/05/2012) The Noongars succeeded in convincing Wilcox that they were still “traditional” and had retained their land rights. The repressive category of “authentic” Aborigines excluded the vast majority of Aborigines. The Noongar judgement raised the prospect of repla- cing the official definition of Aboriginality with a more inclusive one that would give the historicised Aborigines the opportunity to access native title.
Relocation Despite the fact that the Full Court confirmed the displacement initiated by the State and the Commonwealth, the Noongars built on Wilcox’s positive judgement and are now in the process of relocating themselves territorially, historically, socially, economi- cally and politically. Empowered by Wilcox’s recognition of their “society” and the exis- 60 tence of their land rights, they decided not to run the risk of a new trial and, to resolve their land claims outside of the native title process, they pressured the State into nego- tiating. In spite of the financial cost and the slowness of the procedure, and given that native titles have been massively extinguished in the South West, the Noongars have more to gain from a negotiated outcome than the recognition of certain rights and inte- rests in relation to land. As Glen Kelly told me: “Native title is not land. In native title, you go to the court, you don’t get land. You do an alternative settlement, you get land but that’s because we’ve been able to get the admission from the State Government that something more needs to be done than just the basics of resolving native title claims” (Interview 08/05/2012). Indeed, native title is a bundle of rights and interests in land which can be extinguished one by one. Native title is symbolic, as it neither grants land nor the possibility of developing the area over which title has been recognised in a non- “traditional” way. The negotiations started in 2010 and the State made several offers that were presen- ted to the Noongars through a series of meetings across the South West. In November 2014, the State made a final official offer which consisted in the official recognition of the Noongars as the “traditional” owners of the South West by an Act of the Wes- tern Australian Parliament; a land estate (of up to 320,000 hectares); a financial fund (AUD$50m a year for 12 years to set up a “future fund” and $10m a year for a further 12 years); the establishment of a Noongar system of governance; a community deve- lopment package aimed at strengthening Noongar culture and society; the joint mana- gement of natural reserves and national parks; and the creation of a Noongar Cultural Centre. Between January and March 2015, SWALSC convened six Indigenous Land Use Agreement (ILUA) Authorisation Meetings in the South West, and all six claim groups voted to accept the negotiated settlement.7 The ILUAs were signed by Colin Barnett, the Premier of Western Australia, on 8 June 2015, but legal issues have to be finalised before they can become operational. Instead of being submitted to the restrictions of the native title legislation and the discriminatory attitude of the Courts, the Noongars decided to take their future into their hands by negotiating with the State. This pushed them into strengthening and re- fining the process of identity-building they had initiated when getting ready to face the legal system. The Single Noongar Claim journey is finally leading the Noongars to physi- cally and culturally relocate themselves in their “country”. This also forced them into re- flecting on their society and history (Bernard) and the demands of authenticity imposed on them. Ironically, while the recognition of native title requires that they should not have substantially changed since sovereignty, by going through the SNC legal process, they have ended up building themselves a flexible and dynamic identity which reconciles “tradition” and “modernity” and provides them with political and economic impetus.
Virginie BernarD Aix Marseille University, CNRS, EHESS, CREDO UMR 7308
7. If the Noongars had rejected the offer, the SNC would have been sent back to the Federal Court for a new judgement. 61 Displacement, Replacement and Relocation: The Noongar Aborigines’ Land Claim in Western Australia
W orks Cited
attwOOD, Bain. “Mabo, Australia and the End of History.” In the Age of Mabo: History, Aborigines and Australia. Ed. Bain Attwood. St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1996. 100-16. Bennell v State of Western Australia [2006] FCA 1243. 2006. 29 November 2012
Interconnected Spaces in the Life Narratives of Australian South Sea Islanders
In commemorating a history of displacement, resettlement and adaptation, the life narra- tives of Australian South Sea Islanders focus on a long-forgotten past which helps their writers shape a common diasporic identity encompassing people from different South Pacific islands who share a common fund of memories and experiences. These recollections are both rooted in particular places related to their diasporic experience and connected in time and space through remembrance and writing. They thus partake in a rhizomorphic network of trans- cultural connections extending across national and conceptual boundaries.
In 2013, Australian South Sea Islanders commemorated the 150th anniversary of their ancestors’ arrival on the Australian continent in order to work as indentured labour on the cotton and sugar cane plantations of Queensland. These people mainly came from the near-by Melanesian Islands including the Solomons, the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) and the small Loyalty Islands of New Caledonia, and they represented a cheap labour force who greatly contributed to the economic development of Queensland. The fact that they were abducted, or blackbirded in the first days of the traffic,- in ad dition to the treatment they received once they landed in Australia made them compa- rable to slaves, despite the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833. Although they were discriminated against, and marginalised by the White Australia policy, these workers managed to settle and adapt to their new social and cultural environment. In 1994, they were officially recognized as a distinct cultural group by the Commonwealth government1 and, subsequently, by the Queensland government in 2000. Since 1977, writers from the Australian South Sea Islander community such as Faith Bandler, Noël Fatnowna, Mabel Edmund, Francis Wimbis and Jacqui Wright have greatly contributed to the formation and recognition of a collective diasporic identity in recalling their personal memories, shared experiences and those of their forebears which all acquire a common dimension through the writing process and become “a privileged carrier of diasporic identity,” as shown in the introduction of Diaspora and Memory: Figures of Displacement in Contemporary Literature, Arts and Politics (Baronian et al. 11-2). This identity encompasses a small number of people from different islands2 who live in scattered communities situated along the east coast, near the towns formerly associated with the sugar industry. Through their little-known and rarely-studied life narratives, these authors perpetuate their ancestors’ memory by putting down in wri- ting their stories of displacement, survival and adaptation orally passed on from one generation to the next. In referring to their ancestors’ experience of “blackbirding,” the writers also chose to unveil a hidden and contentious part of Australian history as Australian historians like Clive Moore or Peter Corris tended to minimise this practice.
1. The Commonwealth government is the federal government of the Commonwealth of Australia which was crea- ted on January 1, 1901 “when six partly self-governing British colonies united to become a nation” (2 February 2016
Finally, their life narratives conjure up the importance of the community spaces where they grew up and developed a unifying community consciousness. The purpose of this essay is therefore to show how writing stimulates processes of memorialisation and identification by weaving together spatial, social, and cultural connections between places and people from different backgrounds. From a theoretical point of view, the context of uprooting and re-rooting in the Pacific region invites the reader to rethink the notions of “home” and “identity” in that space. As the works by Stuart Hall, James Clifford, and Paul Gilroy have earlier demonstrated in different yet analogous circumstances, these notions cannot be considered as fixed entities exclusi- vely tied to one place or one centre insofar as they belong to a network of fluid trans- cultural and transnational links which resemble the paradigm of the rhizome elected by Deleuze and Guattari, insofar as it allows multiple connections as well as the inclusion of heterogeneity, all of which resist conceptualization in arborescent conceptions of knowledge (Deleuze and Guattari 13). In the introduction to Mille Plateaux, they use the botanical image of the rhizome to describe a process of expansion when a main root has aborted and a new multiplicity of secondary roots come to be grafted onto it and start to develop in an unexpected way (12). In the case of Australian South Sea Islanders, the rhizomatic paradigm helps us better understand successive forms of de- territorialization and reterritorialisation after the loss of their island, their uprooting, dispersion and re-rooting in another place where they try to maintain connections with their island heritage and identity. As a result, this essay first focuses on the places of ori- gin of Australian South Sea Islanders, and the way the former are depicted in narratives transcribing the ancestors’ memory. It will then follow the displacement of these popu- lations towards Australian places of settlement, around which small community spaces started to develop, favouring the emergence of a common identification. It will finally become apparent that the narratives of Australian South Sea Islanders rely on the pro- cess of memory to map out identity routes between places that become genuine “lieux de mémoire,” in keeping with the definition given by French historian Pierre Nora. The life narratives under discussion were written by authors descended from the first South Sea Islanders who came to work on the sugar cane plantations. Faith - Ban dler, who wrote Wacvie and Welou My Brother, belongs to the second generation while Noel Fatnowna, the author of Fragments of a Lost Heritage (with the contribution of an- thropologist, Roger Keesing), and Francis Wimbis whose story is told by Jacqui Wright in The Secret: A Story of Slavery in Australia, are both members of the third generation. I chose to refer to these narratives as “life narratives” instead of biographies or autobio- graphies because the term does not enclose them in a predetermined genre that fails to reflect their heterogeneity in form and content. These narratives cast a retrospective glance on the life of the authors and/or their kin, and hinge on two types of memories associated with distinct places: personal remembrances, linked to the authors’ lives, and memories borrowed from the accounts of the first islanders relating their abduction and displacement to Australia, as well as their living conditions there. As emphasised by Smith and Watson in Reading Autobiography, by “engaging the past,” life narratives enable us to “reflect on identity in the present” (1). This reflection takes into account the re - presentation of places and how they get connected in Australian South Sea Islanders’ narratives. 65 Interconnected Spaces in the Life Narratives of Australian South Sea Islanders
The Island of Origin as a Place of Anchoring and Uprooting Presented in turn as an “island home” (Wimbis and Wright viii), a “homeland” (Fatnowna 82) or “home,” the original island is central to the memory of the first islanders, insofar as it represents the place of their childhood, an anchorage in space and time which is linked to their family history, language, customs, beliefs and traditional knowledge – in other words, to their cultural heritage. This inheritance varies from one ancestor to an- other since they all came from different islands: Fatnowna’s grandfather used to live in Malaita, an island from the Solomon group, while Bandler’s father, Wacvie, and Wimbis’ grandfather came from two islands situated in Vanuatu. Different as they may be, these islands share two characteristics: they all belong to Melanesia, and are all situated in the South Pacific, a vast geographical area where islanders have in common a number of values related to their way of living, such as sharing and helping one another. Orally transmitted by the ancestors from one generation to the next, the island cultural legacy acquires a symbolic value for these writers because of its connection with the often vio- lent and irreversible loss of their place of origin, as indicated in the title of Fatnowna’s book, Fragments of a Lost Heritage. It is therefore threatened by oblivion and needs to be remembered. Because it is depicted as a place of family and cultural anchoring, the island soon becomes synonymous with loss and uprooting when Wacvie is captured and led on an English vessel to work as an indentured labourer in Australia. The same situation is to be found in Fragments and The Secret since the two narratives recount the tragic and trau- matic circumstances of the ancestors’ kidnapping. Their forced removal induces a loss of identity which finds its concrete expression in the crossing of the sea in the ship’s hold, leading the islanders towards the unknown, the world of the white man whose values and lifestyle completely differ from their own. In Wacvie (Bandler 19) and The Secret (Wimbis and Wright 8), this long journey is comparable to a displacement out of time, space and even consciousness during which a violent process of dehumanization is at work. The hold is compared to a dark hole, a cave (Fatnowna 89), or even stinking bowels (Bandler, Wacvie 19). It is the place where South Sea Islanders are locked up, crammed together and mixed like cattle, irrespective of their origin or social status. Those who used to be free are now removed from their islands as prisoners and slaves. In The Secret (4), Jacqui Wright underlines the irony of that “rebirth” through a crude and detailed description of the crimes perpetrated in that place (rapes, murders) that stand in stark contrast with the promise of a wonderful new world made to Wimbis by a missionary who tried to help him escape. The last stage in this transformation consists in changing the islander’s original name into an anglicised, simplified version of it, often indicating his geographic origin like Man Tanna or Man Malaita, for instance. Australian South Sea Islanders’ stories therefore take shape in a place situated beyond the boun- daries of their island where they have no choice but to establish new connections and identifications in a composite environment. Because of its ambivalence as a place of anchoring and a place of uprooting linked to loss, the island is imbued with symbolic associations in the way the authors portray it from their personal memories, and their captured ancestor’s experience. It is recurrently described in Wacvie’s nostalgic memories as a place of abundance (6-7) where the lush natural environment provides man with everything he needs, where life itself is ruled by the repetitive cycle of the seasons following one another without interruption. The 66 original island leaves an indelible mark on Wacvie’s memory where it is often idealised, perpetuated like a frozen picture, surrounded by an everlasting aura: “The blueness of the sky folded into the sea and it was never-ending. It was always like this. Everything was eternal. The moons came and went and came again. The sun came every day” (14). As a place of no return, the island becomes part of the islanders’ collective imagination, or even perhaps their unconscious, inspired as it is by legendary stories, dances, cus- toms, beliefs and traditional knowledge that give rise to much fascination. As Fatnowna explains (30), the ancestors impressed the importance of the home island on the minds of their descendants thanks to these stories: “It was like going back to our island itself ” (31). Clinging to the memories of their islands also enabled the ancestors to survive during the crossing, and once they arrived in Australia (89). As a result, recollecting their forebears’ memories of the island and those related to their experience of loss and displacement enables the writers to show how common these memories are to all islanders, despite their different islands of origin. The life narratives of Australian South Sea Islanders may therefore be regarded as a means to strengthen a collective identity to which other types of memories also contribute, no- tably those linked to the places of settlement in their new country.
Places of Settlement in Australia Two kinds of places are of particular interest here insofar as they are linked to the lives of South Sea Islanders in their new country: first, the places to which they were brought, and then, the places they chose for themselves, where people create commu- nity spaces and share positive and negative memories or experiences. The plantation is the first place where the islanders were forced to settle after being auctioned upon arrival in Australia. Life at the plantation epitomises the power relations between white masters and their black servants, and as such, it is given a detailed description inspired by the ancestor’s memories in Wacvie and The Secret. Even if its natural environment and tropical climate remind the islanders of their lost home, the plantation soon turns out to be a hostile place where the feeling of abundance and the working of the earth have been replaced by another form of toil based on productivity, exploitation and discrimination entailing ill-treatment, malnutrition, and physical and mental exhaustion. The supple and rhythmic movements once performed during traditional dances or for navigation have been replaced by repetitive, mechanised gestures to prepare the land for the production of sugar cane (Wimbis and Wright 24). Muscles have hardened; hands have become callous. Echoing the logic of production, the narrative’s temporality has also contracted and accelerated, as indicated by the use of shortened sentences built from gerunds in the following example: “Straining, sweating, prising boulders from the earth with crowbars. Hacking at them with picks. Loading them onto sleds” (Wim- bis and Wright 19). The plantation seems to work like a reversed image of the island of origin, all the more so as the values, feelings and living conditions associated with each of these two places stand in absolute contrast. Nevertheless, through their close connection with the island’s natural environment, their dispersion and their experience of the white man’s rule on the plantation, Australian South Sea Islanders come to share a common history and common memories which create connections between them and helps them identify as a group. The fact that they are all called “Kanakas” by the white masters and overseers also contributes to that common identification even though in 67 Interconnected Spaces in the Life Narratives of Australian South Sea Islanders this context “Kanaka”3 remains a pejorative term, reflecting a relationship of bondage between white masters and black workers. On top of their hard working and living conditions, the islanders living on the plantation shared a common name and status as well as the Kanaka Pidgin English, the lingua franca thanks to which they could communi- cate both among themselves and with the white men. Moreover, they gradually conver- ted to Christianity and were allowed to gather for worship once they had completed their work. These circumstances were propitious for the development of a community life and the shaping of a common identity of which Wacvie becomes the spokesman in Bandler’s eponymous novel. While raising concern about the conditions of his “fellow islanders” (108) and their spending money on horses or alcohol, he tries to rekindle their community spirit, and tells them: “This place is not good for us. Horses are to work for us, not to take our money. If we come to this place, the money the white man gives us for working, he will now take back – then we can’t start to work for our own ground – and our freedom” (109). The recurring use of the personal pronoun “we” can thus be interpreted as a sign of empowerment because it indicates that Wacvie is taking a stand in favour of his community’s interests in a long-term strategy of survival designed to help his people to settle in Australia. Contrary to the plantation, the second category of place of settlement was chosen by the freed ancestor to build a family after his escape, like Wacvie, or because he was allowed to work for himself on a plot of land, like Fatnowna’s father. As a gathering place around which the family history is built, it is endowed with a particular emotional value for the writer, and therefore plays an important part in the memories associated with his childhood. Furthermore, this was the place where the ancestors’ memory was perpetuated through the stories told at night, in the kitchen, near the fire, as revealed in the following extract from Welou where Bandler’s mother, Ivy, discovers the remains of a past that her husband is trying to enliven and share as a foundational part of their history and cultural heritage: Around the fireplace, as seats for the adults, were pine boxes, some old as the house itself and almost as shiny as the family’s Sunday boots. Wacvie always sat on the same box. Each morning, in front of that box, sketched on the ground were illustrations of the stories he had told the night before […] The boys enjoyed most the stories told of the white winged ships that had gone to the shores of Ambrym in search of men to work the Queensland sugar fields. On the mornings after those stories, Ivy would find islands and ships in the cold grey ashes, and she would shiver, remembering those stories. She felt an affection for this kitchen; it held the past, and the past was the foundation of her family’s future. (35-6) More than their factual content, it is the social significance of these stories from the past that explains why they have made such an important contribution to the forging of a South Sea Islander identity. They exemplify the tension between “living here and remembering/desiring another place” peculiar to diasporic cultures according to Clif- ford (311), and articulate notions of loss and hope as regards these people’s settling in the new country. The latter is given a concrete counterpart through the planting of trees, vegetables and rhizomatic tubers like yams or taros imported by the Islanders as they did not previously grow in Australia. Similarly, in The Secret, Jack Wimbis draws
3. “Kanaka” is actually a Hawaiian word meaning “person” but white people used it as a synonym for “boy” to designate their cheap and docile labour force. 68 a comparison between the young mango tree he planted near his new home and his baby son: “You’re the first of the new generation born in this land. You’ll put your roots into the soil, just like this tree” (52). With the planting of new roots in Austra- lia, the meaning of home undergoes a shift and comes to designate the chosen place of settling, although the memory of the island remains vivid as the place where one belongs. This very verb, however, is increasingly used and repeated in relation to the new settling place, situated as it is in a geographical environment similar to that of the island, near the sea and the mountains, on the fringe of cities. This place also epitomises métissage and diversity in a broadened community space which relies on mutual support and sharing because it gathers black people from different islands, but also Aboriginal people and some whites from different European countries who decided to migrate to Australia for political or economic reasons. Consequently, Aus- tralian South Sea Islander identity embraces diversity, as indicated by the name these people chose for themselves. Referring to the experience of Africans the slave trade displaced to the West Indies, Stuart Hall emphasised that same characteristic when he presented his own conception of cultural identities as an ongoing interaction of “points of similarity” and “points of difference” undergoing “constant transforma- tion” due to the “continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power” (“Cultural Identity and Diaspora” 225). As far as Australian South Sea Islanders are concerned, it is this interplay of shared cultural values and differences inherited from their island customs, their common experience of forced contact with the white man, their subsequent displacement, bondage and adaptation that made a common identification possible in a place where they had to assert their rights as individuals first and then as Australian citizens with an island heritage, in need of recognition for what happened to them and their forebears as well as for their valuable contribution to the economic develop- ment of their country. Hence the validity of the rhizome paradigm, and the analogies it contains in terms of growth, dissemination, movement and connection to express the fluid and unpredictable development of Australian South Sea Islander identity as a network of crisscrossing connections between different people, different places and different times across the Pacific Ocean. The life narratives under discussion contri - bute to that weaving as they link together the memories associated to each of those three components as part of a mapping process: the mapping of Australian South Sea Islander identity.
Writing as a Means to Map Identity As already shown, these stories are endowed with a double memorial function, as they weave together the recollections of the ancestor and those of the writer. The narratives partake in a process of memorialisation and ultimately become “lieux de mémoire” because they commemorate the places related to Australian South Sea Islander history of dispersion and resettlement and secure their symbolic meaning for the future gene- rations in recounting the memories they hold. Repeated allusions to the two types of memories aforementioned frequently disrupt the narrative scheme of the story in which they intermingle. These reminiscences produce a temporal discontinuity similar to the discontinuous operations of human memory, as it selects and preserves certain recollec- tions rather than others by virtue of their emotional value, for instance. Supported by the profusion of verbs referring to the remembering process, these memories pervade 69 Interconnected Spaces in the Life Narratives of Australian South Sea Islanders the narrative and commemorate the Elders by paying tribute to their fight for survival. In The Secret, for example, the whole story relies on a mise en abyme enabling the writer to recall the ancestor’s story within the narrative frame. Writing is therefore a means to perpetuate these memories, making them available to a wider audience who may have never heard about “blackbirding” or Australian South Sea Islanders, at a local or na- tional level. In their life narratives, the writers articulate collective memory around the places which hold the memories of their forebears’ diasporic experience of uprooting, dispersion and re-rooting. As Pierre Nora puts it, these places become “lieux de mé- moire” because they bear witness to what happened to Australian South Sea Islanders and acquire a historical dimension. According to him, this passage from memory to his- tory means that each group needs to redefine its identity in revitalising its own history (xxix). This is what Australian South Sea Islander writers are doing here, in trying to fight against oblivion and resist discordant historical accounts which tend to minimise the practice of “blackbirding.”4 As places of memory per se or monuments dedicated to their remembrance, their life narratives partake in the commemoration of their his- tory and identity in connecting fragmented and disseminated memories anchored in the symbolic places associated with their ancestors’ history. Australian South Sea Islander narratives also contribute to a mapping of their iden- tity by weaving together these dispersed places at a local (small community space), na- tional (Australia) and transnational (island of origin) level. These connections form what French sociologist Stéphane Dufoix aptly calls “nonterritorialized links” (106) which literally and metaphorically grow like a rhizome from the seeds planted by South Sea Islander ancestors in Australia and from the words, memories and places shared by the writers.By linking together people and places, the narratives shift in their focus and cause a splintering in identities that are no longer perceived as monolithic, fixed and rooted in a single location but rather as fragmented, moving and related to several places. These diasporic identities shared by both the writers and their characters seem to perpetually extend and reshape themselves when exposed to the dominant culture which caused their splitting through a “process of alterity” and reinterpretation that Bhabha calls “hybridity” (The Location of Culture 251) as Australian South Sea Islanders came to realize that they were no longer quite the same as they were before their en- counter with the whites, and that they were perceived as others than themselves through the other’s eyes (as “Kanakas” by the white man for instance). Bhabha refers to that process as “a splitting of hybridity that is less than one and double” (166). In addition, the dynamic nature of this reshaping echoes the narratives’ textual dynamics due to spatial and temporal discontinuities as well as to the use of oral language, which gives them more spontaneity, especially in Fragments and The Secret. The authors clearly realize that they belong to different places connected to their history and which shape their identity. In the epilogue of Fragments of a Lost Heritage, Noël Fatnowna comments on the town where he lives with his family: “Mackay is almost a part of the Solomons, as it was a hundred years ago” (176). Another example of this feeling of connectedness appears in Wacvie’s first chapter, when Faith Bandler describes Ambrym as “a small dot in the vast ocean of the Pacific and one of many islands that make up the New Hebrides” (1). She adds: “Each house has a well-worn path connecting it to the others and the island
4. For further details, see Moore 87. 70 is protected by a coral reef ” (1). These two quotations reveal that a link exists not only between the people living in a same village, or on a same island but also between all those living in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) thanks to the sea. The sea is the link as it has always been in the history of the South Pacific since people from South-East Asia started to colonise these islands. No wonder most Australian South Sea Islanders, including the writers, chose to settle down near the sea, in places related to the sugar industry. To a larger extent, they all seem to share a diasporic consciousness relying on a common, but not an exclusive identity, which echoes the notion of a common regional identity developed by Tongan writer and anthropologist Epili Hau’Ofa as a means to counter any belittling strategies from the Western world which keeps considering the Pacific as a set of small and scattered “islands in a far sea” (31). In an essay entitled “Our Sea of Islands,” Hau’Ofa presented instead a new, positive and inspiring vision of Oceania as a huge, interconnected network of islands in the sea where “peoples and cultures moved and mingled, unhindered by boundaries of the kind erected much later by imperial powers” (33). He argued that the awareness of this common space should be propitious for the forging of a shared regional identity, both rooted and mobile, which could help Pacific Islanders defend their collective interests and heritage in order to survive in a ever-changing world. But he also added that this identity was not unique: “The regional identity I am concerned with is something additional to the other identi- ties we already have, or will develop in the future, something that should serve to enrich our other selves” (“The Ocean in Us” 42). Anchorage and movement, roots and routes: all these features are part of Australian South Sea Islander identity in a South Pacific environment and echo the contemporary definition of the term “diaspora” provided by Stéphane Dufoix according to whom “it can designate both the roots and the rhizome; a persistence in time and space as well as the emergence of new forms of time and space […] the static nature of identity or its constant transformation; all kinds of identities from the most local to the broadest” (108). Such a definition encompasses “the challenges of modernity and supermoder- nity” as it goes beyond the traditional opposition between “community diaspora” like the Jewish one for instance and its “hybrid” version associated with “the black diaspora of the Americas” (Bruneau 37). To conclude, the life narratives written by Australian South Sea Islanders demons- trate their determination to pass their story onto future generations and contribute to the shaping of a common identity as they engage with a history of displacement, relo- cation and marginalisation through memory. Writing enables them to perpetuate their history and makes it visible on the Australian literary scene, although their books have not yet received the full attention they deserve. Unsurprisingly, many of these accounts are now out of print and remain difficult to find, even in libraries. By taking a historical, geographical and also a political stand (although I have not had the opportunity to show it here) in favour of a recognition which is still in the making, these life narratives represent precious testimonies on a long-forgotten part of Australian history that is still subject to controversy. They also map out transnational networks of connections between people and places, which characterises the diasporic identity of Australian South Sea Islanders and gives them a stronger sense of belonging to a wider, regional community. As it is difficult today for South Sea Islanders to write 71 Interconnected Spaces in the Life Narratives of Australian South Sea Islanders their story for publication, they resort to new media such as the Internet to create new identity spaces beyond communities and boundaries.
Carine Davias Paul Valéry University – Montpellier / James Cook University, Australia
W orks Cited
BanDler, Faith. Wacvie. Adelaide: Rigby, 1977. —. Welou, My Brother. Glebe, NSW: Wild & Woolley Pty. Ltd and Aboriginal Artists Agency Ltd, 1984. BarOnian, Marie-Aude, Stephen Besser, and Yolande jansen, eds. Diaspora and Memory: Figures of Displacement in Contemporary Literature, Arts and Politics. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. BhaBha, Homi. The Location of Culture. 1994. New York: Routledge, 2004. Bruneau, Michel. “Diasporas, Transnational Spaces and Communities.” Diaspora and Transnationalism: Concepts, Theories and Methods. Ed. Rainer Bauböck and Thomas Faist. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2010. cliffOrD, James. “Diasporas.” Cultural Anthropology 9.3 (1994): 302-338. Davias, Carine. “Cultural Heritage and Identity.” Etropic:TransOceanik Special Edition 12.1 (2013): 33-40. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Mille plateaux : Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2. Paris: Minuit, 1980. DufOix, Stéphane. Diasporas. Trans. William Rodarmor. Berkeley: U of California P, 2008. Trans. of Les Diasporas. Paris: PUF, 2003. fatnOwna, Noel, and Roger keesinG, eds. Fragments of a Lost Heritage. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1989. hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identities and Diaspora.” Framework 36 (1989): 222-37. hau’Ofa, Epili. “The Ocean in Us.” We are the Ocean: Selected Works. Hawaii: U of Hawaii P, 2008. 41-59. —. “Our Sea of Islands.” We are the Ocean: Selected Works. Hawaii: U of Hawaii P, 2008. 27-40. mOOre, Clive. “Kanakas, Kidnapping and Slavery: Myths from the Nineteenth Century Labour Trade and their Relevance to Australian Melanesians.” Kabar Seberang: Sulating Maphilindo 8.9 (1978): 78-92. nOra, Pierre. “Entre mémoire et histoire. La problématique des lieux.” Les lieux de mémoire Vol.1. Ed. Charles-Robert Ageron and Pierre Nora. Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 1984. i-xlii. nd smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2 ed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010. wriGht, Jacqui, in association with Francis Wimbis. The Secret: A Story of Slavery in Australia. Gin Gin, QLD: Wimbis & Wright, 1996.
“The Drover’s Wife”: Celebrating or Demystifying Bush Mythology?
The essay aims to show the cultural, aesthetic and identificatory displacements at work in the successive revisions and reinterpretations of Henry Lawson’s “drover’s wife” fi- gure who became a national icon right away. It is quite interesting to note the surprising abstract and bare nature of both the figure and the bush, even in Lawson’s original short story. They seem to crystallize national character precisely because they leave it rather unspecified and open to interpretation, except as a struggle to cope with one’s adopted land and the acceptance of possible failure.
“The Drover’s Wife” is both a household classic in Australian literature and an ar- chetypal figure in the Australian canon of representative national types. As such, a close scrutiny of both the original short story by one of the founding fathers of Australian literature, namely Henry Lawson, and its successive rewritings or adaptations, is very il- luminating with regard to the importance of the figure itself and its problematic nature as a national icon. This essay will focus on three successive versions of the national figure which all share a highly visual impact: Henry Lawson’s Hemingway-like behaviourist tale was published in 1892, Russell Drysdale’s dream-like painting was produced in 1945 and Murray Bail’s grotesque rewriting of the original short story, with its obsessive search for a flesh-and-blood drover’s wife, came out in 1975. With each new version, there is a reappraisal of both the character of the drover’s wife and the idea of a national type exemplifying courage, endurance and self-sacrifice. The three works are centered on national myth-making as a matter of imagination, in other words as a process of produ- cing images, whether an allegory for Lawson, surrealist symbols for Drysdale or a wild goose chase after the original for Bail. In all three works, the notion of point of view and horizon is central to the reader’s own vision and interpretation of the drover’s wife. The ultimate demystification of the myth is offered by a short story inspired by the other three works, namely Moorhouse’s ludicrous mock-academic paper in which the archetype of the “drover’s wife” suffers a last fatal blow as it is turned into a national joke. The reason why the original short story has been so often adapted and readapted from one generation to the next is that the drover’s wife belongs to a host of bush figures sharing basic characteristics of the Bush legend which historian Russel Ward famously identified in his bookThe Australian Legend. As a matter of fact, in Lawson’s version, the Bush is more of a theatrical backdrop than an element of distinctively Australian local colour: it is a pretext to showcase bush virtues but in a feminine guise.
Lawson’s Bush Mythology: An Allegory of Human Courage and Endurance There is an interesting paradox in the presentation of the bush in Lawson’s “The Dro- ver’s Wife.” Indeed, despite the fact that Lawson is considered one of the main foun- ders of the Australian Bush mythology, and his highly popular “Drover’s Wife” is often 74 cited as a canonical example, his description of the bush is surprisingly abstract and bare. In his study of Australian short stories from the end of the nineteenth century to the late 1940s, Bennett underlines the fact that the bush seems to be taken for granted as if everybody knew what was being referred to without any need of further specifi- cation (165). Lawson’s text was first published in 1892 in the nationalist Sydney-based magazine The Bulletin which offered its readers short stories, ballads or poems about distinctively Australian places set in the “bush” or “outback,” places that served as a repository of associated virtues and images typical of the new life of the Australian pioneer. When the bush is first mentioned in the second paragraph of the story, it appears as a place of negations and a rather vague setting: Bush all round – bush with no horizon, for the country is flat. No ranges in the distance. The bush consists of stunted, rotten native apple-trees. No undergrowth. Nothing to relieve the eye save the darker green of a few she-oaks which are sighing above the narrow, almost waterless creek. Nineteen miles to the nearest sign of civilisation – a shanty on the main road. (195)1 Such a description is devoid of any particular impression that a visitor would have when passing by the drover’s wife’s house. The landscape does not offer itself to the narrator’s gaze – or the reader’s gaze for that matter. There is no horizon, as if no one could place himself in such a place. Such a description contradicts all our expectations in denying the presence of any significant shape or presence: “the country is flat. No ranges in the distance.” Another point of interest is its grimness, the very opposite of a Garden of Eden. The first natural element to strike the visitor’s eye is the “apple-trees” but they are “stunted and rotten” as if to suggest the Eve-like “drover’s wife” of the title has already eaten of the forbidden fruit.2 To that extent such a representation runs counter to what the new generation of native-born Australians of the 1890s projected onto Australia as a land of plenty and an ideal pastoral place. Comparing Lawson’s description with popular iconographic representations of the bush at the time, one cannot but be struck by the stark contrasts. In Streeton’s Purple Noon’s Transparent Might, a painting contemporaneous with Lawson’s short story which historian Richard White considers as expressing the “ultimate Australian sentiment” about the bush (107), there is definitely a horizon: it is framed by ranges in the distance. Fertility is indicated by the river which occupies centre stage, and gives to it an unde- niable depth of perspective in flowing from the bottom left to the upper middle right. On the contrary, in Lawson’s short story, the creek is “narrow” and “waterless,” and all elements are presented on the same indistinct plane. In Streeton’s painting there are also majestic trees on each side of the river instead of the sparse and ghostly personified trees in Lawson’s story (“a few she-oaks which are sighing”). All these elements, the horizon, the river and the trees orienting the viewer’s gaze towards the top right-hand corner of the picture suggest a sense of both serenity and opportunity.
1. All quotations from Lawson’s, Bail’s and Moorhouse’s “Drover’s Wife” short stories are from Carmel Bird’s Australian Short Stories. 2. John Thieme actually describes the drover’s wife as an “Eve in a postlapsarian Eden,” (70) fighting a serpent which is obviously meant to represent the Biblical evil creature. The tale thus reverses Christian gender representations by giving the female character a heroic status while the masculine Adam-like figure is nowhere to be found (71). 75 “The Drover’s Wife”: Celebrating or Demystifying Bush Mythology?
In Lawson’s short story, the reader is never given such a sense of a hopeful or simply dynamic horizon. The main plot is reduced to a very cramped space, the kitchen on the side of the main house where the drover’s wife and her children have found refuge after a snake slipped under the house. Together with the dog and the eldest boy, the mother stares at the wall separating them from the rest of the house, waiting for the snake to reappear. She finally kills it with a stick with the help of the dog. The other references to the bush are given in a series of memories that come to the mind of the drover’s wife as she is waiting for the snake. All the episodes are narrated in a mode that is both comical and graphic; they read like vignettes that could easily be drawn to illustrate Australian values such as stoicism, resourcefulness and courage with one slight unexpected distortion of the national type: the bushman or drover is now replaced by a female figure, the “drover’s wife,” who happens to share the exact same characteristics. All the purple patches of Australian frontier folklore are present: fire fighting, floods, mad bullocks and evil swagmen. But there is one passage which is more original, shed- ding a personal light on bush life. It is an outdoor scene, and there are very few such scenes in the whole text, except for the heroic memories mentioned above. As such it cannot but arrest the reader’s attention and gaze in a peculiar and eerie way: All days are much the same to her; but on Sunday afternoon she dresses herself, tidies the children, smartens up baby, and goes for a lonely walk along the bush-track, pushing an old perambulator in front of her. She does this every Sunday. She takes as much care to make herself and the children look smart as she would if she were going to do the block in the city. There is nothing to see, however, and not a soul to meet. You might walk for twenty miles along this track without being able to fix a point in your mind, unless you are a bushman. This is because of the everlasting, maddening sameness of the stunted trees – that monotony which makes a man long to break away and travel as far as trains can go, and sail as far as ship can sail – and further. (200) The emphasis on sameness, the idea of a ritual and the lack of perspective, whether literally or symbolically, are noticeable in this excerpt, all the more so as, lyricism and lavish details about the pristine beauty of the bush were commonly found in Bulletin poems and ballads. In his highly popular poems “Clancy of the Overflow” or “The Man from Snowy River,” Banjo Paterson evoked endless vistas, wild rides in the bush, but in Lawson’s “Drover’s wife” there is no such sense of freedom, vastness or openness. The only suggested vanishing point is an elsewhere, an unidentified place far from the bush where “a man [might] travel as far as trains can go, and sail as far as ship can sail – and further.” Lawson’s representation of the bush does not celebrate the place as endowed with sublime grandeur, or as a perfect measuring-stick for the heroic qualities of the drover. He depicts the bush as a place of trial where man learns humility and courage when faced with adversity. There he is suddenly made aware of his insignificance, what -Aus tralian historian Manning Clark famously called his “only glory on earth,” as if all pros- pects were blocked both literally and visually speaking, with no horizon or vanishing point, but also, figuratively, with no real possibility of success or glory, except as a form of resignation and stoicism when faced with “defeat and failure”: Here nature was so hostile, so brutish that men in time believed that God had cursed both man and the country itself, and hence its barrenness, its sterility, its unsuitability for the arts of civilized human beings, [...] [I]n Australia the spirit of the place makes a man 76
aware of his insignificance, of his impotence in the presence of such harsh environment [...] Australians knew from of old that the only glory men know on earth is how they respond to defeat and failure. (Clark 20) One particularly intriguing characteristic of the tale is the narrator’s apparent lack of concern or feeling for the plight of the drover’s wife. But far from diminishing the gran- deur of the female heroic figure, it reinforces her courage and stoicism all the more. It also enhances the dramatic tension and emotional intensity of the text. Narrative focalisation features another point of interest. The reader is invited to look at the scene through other eyes than the perception of the drover’s wife, which im- plicitly suggests she does not show any emotions. The successive episodes are seen ei- ther through the children’s eyes, or the dog’s, or even the cat’s. Such unexpected vantage points add a very personal touch to the tale, making it lighter but also more poignant, paradoxically. This technique is used in the most trying moments, when the mother starts breaking down before being finally reinvigorated through a change of perspective either witnessed by one of her pets or initiated by it. One such instance of both comic relief and inspiration is the scene where she “[sits] down to have ‘a good cry’” and then bursts out laughing when she realises the cat is now crying as well (201). The last scene of the short story featuring mother and child is also worth analysing as far as composition and focalisation are concerned. The snake has been killed and the loyal eldest son can now relax and comfort his mother: She lifts the mangled reptile on the point of her stick, carries it to the fire, and throws it in; then piles on the wood and watches the snake burn. The boy and the dog watch too. She lays her hand on the dog’s head, and all the fierce, angry light dies out of his yellow eyes. The younger children are quieted, and presently go to sleep. The dirty-legged boy stands for a moment in his shirt, watching the fire. Presently he looks up at her, sees the tears in her eyes, and, throwing his arms around her neck exclaims: “Mother, I won’t never go drovin’ blarst me if I do!” And she hugs him to her worn-out breast and kisses him; and they sit thus together while the sickly daylight breaks over the bush. (202) This short passage features an interesting shift in focalisation. The mother’s gaze is not mentioned, as is the case in the rest of the text, but the children’s and dog’s eyes are referred to. For us readers, it implies that we are invited to look through their frightened and slightly more impressionable eyes. But progressively, the dog, the children and even the eldest boy, are quietened and stop looking at the fire consuming the hellish creature – the snake. The story could end with the boy’s solemn promise to his mother. But in the very last paragraph, it is as if the narrator retreated from the scene and offered the reader a more distanced vision with the reference to the bush. As there is no mention of a window or a door through which the bush could be seen, it is not clear whether the reader is supposed to visualise the inside and the outside of the kitchen simultaneously, or whether there is an opening behind the mother and her son through which the “sickly daylight” is breaking in. Be it as it may, the paragraph reads like the description of a painting which cannot but evoke holy representations of the Madonna and child: “And she hugs him to her worn-out breast and kisses him; and they sit thus together while the sickly daylight breaks over the bush” (202). The presence of natural daylight in Madonna and Child scenes was a topos in Renaissance paintings with a window in the background opening onto a serene landscape. The only jarring note here is the quality 77 “The Drover’s Wife”: Celebrating or Demystifying Bush Mythology? of the light, a “sickly light” instead of a holy halo, as if in setting the first stone to the myth-making around drovers and their wives, Lawson could not help suggesting such an allegory of courage, self-sacrifice and stoicism in the bush was all the more extraor- dinary and praiseworthy as it might not be ultimately illuminated by any holy light but only shrouded by a very human “sickly light.” And yet there is a definite aura around the figure of the drover’s wife as she is -tur ned into an almost sacred allegory of bush courage. In Drysdale’s painting produced in 1945, the figure is still imposing and prominent but its aura has become more eerie, almost problematic. This is the first of a series of attempts to both celebrate and- de mystify the national icon. What’s more, just as in Lawson’s initial short story, the repre- sentation of the bush is surprisingly elusive and ambivalent, offering no real horizon either to the protagonists featured on the canvas or to the beholder. And this is such a difficult relationship with the land that Drysdale’s reinterpretation of the drover’s wife figure and the nondescript bush really illustrate. Instead of offering the viewer an idealised and optimistic vision of the Australian pioneer experience of displacement in the manner of the Heidelberg School, he foregrounds a sense of unbelonging and trompe-l’oeil effects.
Drysdale’s Surrealist Revision In Drysdale’s painting, there is an obvious reference to Lawson’ short story with the ex- plicit use of the same title but the “drover’s wife” has lost the holy aura of a Madonna. In addition, the perspective that is offered by the painter is very mysterious and proble- matic as not only does it deprive the drover’s wife of her attributes as a national icon, but it also eventually places the viewer in an untenable position as will be demonstrated in a moment. Lawson’s drover’s wife, a typical bushwoman, is strong, brave, undaunted and re- sourceful. In the original short story, her physical strength is symbolized by the stick; with it, she manages to master the bush and one of its most evil creatures – the snake. In the painting, on the other hand, the stick has been replaced by a cumbersome bag or suitcase, thus giving her a more mundane appearance. Instead of suggesting her mastery of the bush or her stoic acceptance of the harsh life it entails, it tends to em- phasize her lack of any connection to the land except as a passing stranger, soon to move further on, were it not for her almost unnatural motionlessness and passiveness. Her massive body does not so much suggest strength as a form of indolence, not to say lethargy. Instead of looking cunning or clever in any way, her eyes seem to gaze into space with a resigned expression. Another puzzling choice is the slight low-angle perspective which gives even more weight to the drovers’ wife’s bulk. She seems to be towering above the viewer. This gives the impression of a larger-than-life figure, a symbol rather than a realistic description of a rough and rugged bushwoman. One explanation for such a blatant distortion of the original drover’s wife attributes might have to do with the context in which the painting was produced. One should bear in mind the painter had accepted a commission by the Sydney Morning Herald to document the dramatic drought that devastated western New South Wales in 1944. As a result the allegorical dimension of the figure is still present but in a much more disillusioned key which has more to do with the mock-heroic mode than national myth-making. 78
There is one last intriguing point though, an apparent contradiction in terms of composition, which is less easily accounted for. When one looks at the figure of the drover in the background, the low-angle perspective affecting the female figure seems to have disappeared. Besides, the difference in size between the two figures would require more distance between them than the one we visually perceive. The woman’s shadow covers more than two thirds of the distance separating them, which would suggest he is much nearer than he actually is. Such visual contradictions give the im- pression the drover’s wife has been pasted onto the canvas, as if the painter had used a trompe l’oeil technique. The main subject of the painting thus remains elusive and mysterious. The position of the viewer is also unexpectedly rendered problematic, as he could not possibly look at the drover and his wife simultaneously: he would then have to occupy two different places. Lastly, the fact that the drover’s wife appears to gaze at some point in the direction of the viewer but higher up is slightly unsettling, as if to suggest that the real meaning of the painting is to be found elsewhere, beyond the frame, maybe in some sort of national unconscious still to be defined. There is no doubt Drysdale was influenced by surrealism and cubism in his playing with perspec- tive and an elusive symbolism. But more importantly, he managed to capture in his paintings the sense of unbelonging of the non-indigenous Australian, whether man or woman, away from the stereotyped nationalist representations of the drover and the bush which had so much contributed to the Bulletin’s success. The figure in the background whom, by way of inference, we expect to be the drover, is only a man driving a wagon drawn by two horses; he could be a drover on the move with his wife but there is no sign of his cattle, and no obvious reason why the two figures should appear so estranged from each other, separated as they are by the long distance. The resulting sense of mystery, the incongruities informing the painting are the object of Murray Bail’s adaptation of the story in 1975.
Bail’s Undermining of the Subject and Exemplarity of the Drover’s Wife Murray Bail’s story is in fact a comical reflection on the links between Lawson’s and Drysdale’s versions of the iconic drover’s wife on the one hand, and the runaway wife of a rather unimaginative and unromantic dentist living in Adelaide on the other. He claims the picture was painted after his wife Hazel left him and their two children, to elope with a passing drover. The constant juxtaposition of their very ordinary and pre- dictable family life with the archetypal figure of the drover’s wife hollows out the myth of all its heroic grandeur. From the dentist’s narrow perspective, the imposing national icon has dwindled into an insignificant, brainless and frustrated housewife. The only remaining features of the prototypical drover’s wife, her strength and large build, do not give her any heroic status but are systematically presented in a ridiculous way. When she chops wood or carries heavy things like a drover would and like Lawson’s drover’s wife did, the dentist only remembers the “sweat patches under her arms” (52). There is even a short rewriting of the snake episode but it is told as a trivial anecdote and bathos replaces the biblical undertones of Lawson’s story. When one reads the two episodes in succession, the contrast is striking: An evil pair of small, bright bead-like eyes glisten at one of these holes. The snake – a black one – comes slowly out, […] Thud, thud comes the woman’s club on the ground. 79 “The Drover’s Wife”: Celebrating or Demystifying Bush Mythology?
Alligator [the dog] pulls again. Thud, thud. Alligator gives another pull and he has the snake out – a black brute, five feet long. He shakes the snake as though he felt the original curse in common with mankind. (Lawson 202) And then of course she killed that snake down at the beach shack we took one Christmas. I happened to lift the lid of the incinerator – a black brute, its head bashed in. “It was under the house,” she explained. It was a two-roomed shack, bare floorboards. It had a primus stove, and an asbestos toilet down the back. Hazel didn’t mind. Quite the contrary; when it came time to leave she was downcast. I had to be at town for work. (Bail 52) The Biblical snake emblematic of the “original curse” has turned into a “black brute” negligently killed and dumped in the incinerator. The cleansing symbolism of the fire in Lawson’s story has been replaced by a mundane “incinerator.” The unity of place which gave the original story so much dramatic tension and heroic grandeur is also undermined here with the reference to the “asbestos toilet down the back” as if to systematically prevent any edifying interpretation on the part of the reader. There is no more horizon or vanishing point than in Lawson’s allegory but the irruption of trivial elements cluttering the stage-like setting (incinerator, asbestos toilet, etc.) keeps sugges- ting the only interpretive horizon offered to the reader is so ridiculously grotesque it is not worth investigating. As to the stoicism of either the drover or his wife, it is deflated as it is only mentio- ned in relation to Hazel and her indifference to “bush flies”: “Hazel of course accep- ted everything without a song and dance. She didn’t mind the heat, or the flies” (52). Concerning the drover, the man the dentist imagines his wife Hazel eloped with, we do not learn anything about him except that he “didn’t say much,” which perfectly matches the taciturnity historian Russel Ward identified as typical of the Australian “national character”: National character is not, as was once held, something inherited; nor is it, on the other hand, entirely a figment of the imagination of poets, publicists and other feckless dreamers. It is rather a people’s idea of itself and this stereotype, though often absurdly romanticised or exaggerated, is always connected with reality in two ways. It springs largely from a people’s past experiences, and it often modifies current events by colouring men’s ideas of how they ought “typically” to behave. According to the myth the “typical Australian” is a practical man […] he is usually taciturn rather than talkative, one who endures stoically rather than one who acts busily. (1-2) But the narrator seems to voluntarily hollow out the drover figure, all the same as he pointedly underlines his elusive nature. According to him Drysdale undermined his very identity in reducing him to a “silhouette,” a “completely black figure,” which- in troduces unwelcome ambiguity: “In Drysdale’s picture he is a silhouette. A completely black figure. He coud have been an Aboriginal; by the late forties I understand some were employed as drovers” (51). It is as if every avenue of interpretation offered by the narrator kept blurring both Drysdale’s painting and Lawson’s tale. Bearing in mind that any landscape is above all a vision and a horizon,3 it is revealing that in Bail’s version of the bush, there should be no such “landscaping” of the out- back. If anything, the bush recedes further and further away and eventually dissolves
3. French philosopher Michel Collot wrote extensively on the subject of landscape, and declared that landscape and horizon were inseparable: “No landscape without a horizon” (11). 80 into undecidability. The dentist narrator usurps the viewer’s position and thus imposes his own vision and horizon to the reader. In so doing he does not solve the dilemma of the problematic horizon we pointed out earlier on – the impossibility for the drover to stand so far on the horizon line if we are to accept the drover’s wife’s apparent closeness to us. He actually does the exact opposite by denying the horizon its realistic function: “The picture gives little away though. It is the outback – but where exactly? South Australia? It could easily be Queensland, Western Australia, the Northern Territory. We don’t know. You could never find that spot” (50). The narrator multiplies the number of possible places where to situate a vantage point from which to view the scene, and thus presents them as equally unconvincing. The bush, but also the ideal “spot” from which to see it and represent it, keep their elusiveness. Even the final tableau, which is an obvious echo of Lawson’s original ending, is deprived of any horizon. The bush has turned into a pathetic cardboard background devoid of any depth, used a prop to foreground two insignificant characters: “I recall the drover as a thin head in a khaki hat, not talkative, with dusty boots. He is indistinct. Is it him? I don’t know. Hazel – it is Hazel and the rotten landscape that dominate everything” (53). As a matter of fact, only the drover’s wife is really given prominence, as if to suggest, in a typically postmodern way, that the ultimate interpretation of any landscape, painting or short story, lies with the viewer’s or reader’s own horizon of expectations. The other interesting point to note is the emphasis on colour and cor- ruption to refer to the bush (“the rotten landscape”). Just as in Lawson’s short story and in Drysdale’s painting, there is no heroic or invigorating light, only a sickly, eerie, rotten blur. In all three works, Lawson’s, Drysdale’s and Bail’s, the bush is presented in a quite abstract, indistinct and negative way, as if to foreground the notion of heroic survival in a hostile environment which characterises so much of Australian literature. The sur- prising absence or relative invisibility of the drover points in each case to the glaring omission of what is supposed to characterise the national character, even more than courage, stoicism and resourcefulness, namely mateship. Shedding light on the drover’s female mate instead of his mates is a sure way to reverse the usual horizon of expec- tations of readers, and to make them ponder such an absence. In an ultimate parodic reinterpretation of the drover’s wife figure, Moorhouse has the national icon turn into a sheep the drover regularly has sex with, so as to relieve his natural needs. This is the last stage in a process of successive questionings of the “Drover’s Wife” as a national heroic icon. The obsessive search for national symbols has finally become a simple farce. But Lawson’s original short story also gave birth to other “drover’s wife” stories written by women writers in the 1980s and the 1990s which are sufficient proof the drover’s wife figure still has current value, if only in serving as a pretext to redefine gendered roles.4 It remains to be seen whether such a national icon could also spawn gay, indigenous, or even Chinese rewritings in the future to determine whether the figure will survive in the pantheon of national figures or progressively disappear. Judging by Nikki Gem- mell’s appeal to her as a character forceful enough to be a source of inspiration for all political female figures, and Julia Gillard in particular, the “glorious Aussie archetype” will no doubt stand her ground for quite some time, if only as a positive role model for
4. See Barbara Jefferis’ “The Drover’s Wife” (1980) and Mandy Sayer’s “The Drover’s Wife” (1996). 81 “The Drover’s Wife”: Celebrating or Demystifying Bush Mythology?
Australian women: “What a gal she is. A specifically Aussie chick. Resilient, outspoken, stoic – and respected for being as assertive as the men.”5
Christine VanDamme Grenoble Alpes University
W orks Cited anDersOn, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of . Nationalism1983. London: Verso, 2006. Bennett, Bruce. “The Short Story, 1890s to 1950.” The Cambridge History of Australian Literature. Ed. Peter Pierce. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009.156-79. Bail, Murray. “The Drover’s Wife.” Bird 49-53. BirD, Carmel, ed. Australian Short Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin C°, 1991. cOllOt, Michel. L’horizon fabuleux. Paris: Corti, 1988. clark, Manning. A Discovery of Australia. Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1976. Darian-smith, Kate, Gunner, Elizabeth, and Sarah nuttall. Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and History in South Africa and Australia. London: Routledge, 1996. DerriDa, Jacques. “La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines.” Paris: Minuit/Critique, 1972. DrysDale, Russell. The Drover’s Wife. 1945. Oil on canvas. 51.5 x 61.5 cm. The National Gallery of Australia. Gemmell, Nikki. ‘Hail, The Drover’s Wife,’ Weekend Australian Magazine, 3 Sept. 2011,
5. “They make ’em tough, those Aussie chicks. Back then and now. That deliciously steely, no-nonsense archetype holding her own against the blokes goes back a long way in Australian folklore. She’s called the Drover’s Wife and she’s rightly celebrated. Read about her in Henry Lawson’s story; gaze at all her sturdy glory in Russell Drysdale’s painting […]. What a gal she is. A specifically Aussie chick. Resilient, outspoken, stoic – and respected for being as assertive as the men” (Gemmell n.p.).
“Paradys” after the Fall: Mark Behr’s Novels and the Genre of the Plaasroman
Aesthetic and political discourses in South Africa have always been closely intertwined, during and after apartheid, the representation of the land for instance, as in plaasromans or farm novels, being thus used to reinforce racial divisions in the country. Nevertheless, anti-plaasromans also abound, as illustrated by Mark Behr’s three novels, The Smell of Apples (1993), Embrace (2000) and Kings of the Water (2009). Warping traditional depictions of the enclosed space of the farm or the garden, Behr’s tales are always, however, like plaasromans, narratives of loss. His use of spatial and temporal distortions and displacements undermines any claims to the land and highlights the unreliability of discourses on the landscape, be they in English or in Afrikaans; but simultaneously, in a post-apartheid and post-9/11 context, his novels may themselves fall prey to a not too dissimilar nostalgia, tinged in his case with autobiographical concerns.
The land and the landscape have always been of paramount importance in South Africa, during and after apartheid: the regime indeed combined a vertical, hierarchical ranking of races, as well as a horizontal, spatial division between groups of people, who were allocated a place to live according to a series of laws, all stemming from the first segregation law passed a little over a century ago, the 1913 Land Act. This Land Act figures prominently in Mark Berh’s latest novelKings of the Water whose protagonist, Mi- chiel Steyn, discovers Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa when he moves to London at twenty. Behr’s novel was published in 2009, but the main plot takes place in Septem- ber 2001, and most of the remembered events which form the subplot in 1986, during the State of Emergency and the secret war waged by South Africa in Angola, Namibia and Mozambique. Michiel, sent to the front, ends up going into exile to escape a perso- nal, sexual scandal, but also the war and the acts of torture against the local population which he witnesses in the bush. He is expelled by his father from “Paradys,” the family farm, to which he only comes back fifteen years later, for his mother’s funeral. Behr’s latest novel thus presents itself as a farm novel or plaasroman, as the novel opens with the opening of the gate which leads Michiel once more within the enclosed space of the farm, yet under very different circumstances since the end of apartheid. The farm, however, remains a symbol of the tensions which still pervade the country, and Behr thus both contributes to and rewrites the genre of the plaasroman. The farm indeed stands as an epitome first of colonization, then of apartheid, a miniature replica of the country with its enclosed, strictly delimited and tightly controlled space, and its fences marking clear divisions between white owners and black workers. In the nine- teenth century, it led to the birth of a specific literary genre, theplaasroman , particularly favoured by Afrikaans writers, and which symbolically prolonged, on the page, the very real struggle, on the ground, over the possession of the land in South Africa. This variation on the genre of the plaasroman is not new when it comes to Behr’s work: it can already be perceived in The Smell of Apples, his first novel, as well as in his second novel, Embrace, where the motif of the farm is duplicated by the enclosed wilderness of the nature reserves. The geographical displacement characteristic of the third novel seems to have replaced the greater temporal distortion which occurs in the 84 first two. The time gap between the date of publication and that of the plots is wider, and the retrospective look more profoundly marked in The Smell of Apples and Embrace (both take place in the 1970s) than in Kings of the Water which is mostly set in the same decade as that of its publication. What defines all three novels, however, is a similar sense of loss, as patterns of escape and exile – from Tanzania, from the reserves to the city, from the paradise of innocent childhood – are to be found repeatedly in each of them. This may be a way for Behr to walk in the footsteps of someone like J. M. Coet- zee, who both theorized the genre of the plaasroman and subverted its codes in several of his novels, although one might ultimately ponder the real value of narratives imbued with nostalgia in Behr’s case, in particular when it comes to their autobiographical na- ture in a post-apartheid and post-9/11 context.
Colonisation, Apartheid and the plaasroman At the time of colonization, it quickly became important for colonizers to establish fixed frontiers so that white people could start exploiting the land. In South Africa, this first stage in turn gave way to a mode of representation which helped reinforce the- sys tem of spatial divisions: once the wild populations and beasts had been tamed, tales of exploration were replaced by farm novels – also called plaasromans in Afrikaans, the main language in which they were written – which provide the vision of a domesticated land and landscape (Sévry 20). Representing the land as such also encouraged the settlers, and then white people in general, to take possession of a land they were shown to be able to put to good use – although it must be added that most of those representations actually came much later, for a large part in the 1930s, and mostly provided a backward glance on those times, once the economic situation had shifted to a more capitalistic system of exploitation of the land, which threatened small, generally Afrikaner, lan- downers. The genre of the plaasroman is thus immediately characterized both by a tone of nostalgia and by identity claims (Chapman 192-3). One key idea is that the farm, and within it the motif of the garden, become epi- tomes of the country and models for a controlled, strictly enclosed space, which can stand for South Africa as a whole – besides providing resources which further ensure the colonization and settlement of the land, formerly seen as a hostile territory. Plaasro- mans thus insist on fences and all types of demarcation, as exemplified in all of Behr’s three novels. Fences and gates act as frontiers on a small scale, keeping the country in shape, punctuating the landscape and the narratives at regular intervals, in an endless duplication. In Embrace, Bokkie even sets up a fence around the family garden in Mkuzi, within the property which is itself enclosed. As for Karl, he is impressed by the barbed wire fences which surround the van Rensburgs’ farm, and associates in his mind the “sprawling paddocks with cross-pole fencing” and the perfect, “shipshape” organiza- tion of Lukas’s farm (Embrace 453). The situation is not any different in Kings of the Water: the novel lays the stress on the numerous fences which already existed fifteen years before, around the farm but also within its enclosure to keep apart places like the orchard, Michiel’s mother’s own territory, or the house, and clearly separate them from the compound to which the black workers are relegated, beyond a barbed wire fence. Fifteen years later, the changes recorded at the beginning of the novel insist on the fact that such fences have merely become more numerous and impassable, as they have been electrified and redoubled, the stoep around the house being now entirely surrounded by 85 “Paradys” after the Fall: Mark Behr’s Novels and the Genre of the Plaasroman a system of locks and bars (Kings 12, 14-5, 20, 52). The spirit of the laager has indeed been replaced by an obsession with keeping things in shape and under control, thanks to a tight grid of spatial divisions and fences, and this spirit prevails even after the end of apartheid – or can be perceived in the very fear of the consequences such a lack of control might induce, as “dilapidated” fences (Embrace 587; Kings 11) are always in the novels a sign of political trouble or change. Such representations of farms and gardens in plaasromans collude with an aesthetic representation of the land which borrows from the picturesque and favours the domi- nant position of the eye (Collot 194, 204), of the narrator, of the settler or the farmer whose control over the land is shown in turn as strong and firm, the aesthetic discourse thus reinforcing the political one. That is what an episode in Embrace brings to light, as Karl, the young protagonist, and his mother Bokkie visit the Therons’ farm and their garden, an enclosed space within this enclosure. “Herder,” Bokkie exclaims (559). The adjective is left in Afrikaans in a dialogue which is otherwise reported in English, to emphasise both Bokkie’s aesthetic judgment (as herder means “beautiful”), but also how she relates it to the ideal of the farm, as it is also synonymous with “picturesque” and “pastoral.”1 The enclosed garden is the sign of the perfect control exerted by white people, and here, by Afrikaners, who have managed to set up fixed frontiers and boun- daries, and to make it possible to hold a picturesque perspective on the country and its landscape. Indeed, once the land on the frontier has been cleared, the characters can enjoy the beauty of the landscape and the view of Mount Meru from the farm, which is even painted and framed and put up on the wall for decoration: “‘And that was our view from the farmhouse,’ […] ‘Mount Meru.’ Pointing to the painting above the never-used fireplace” (Embrace 447). It is no wonder that, when Michiel and his brother Benjamin discuss the future of the farm in Kings of the Water some thirty years later, the latter should be reluctant to the idea of setting up a cooperative where the black employees would have a say. Rather, he considers turning the farm into a boarding house which would offer its lodgers stunning views of the countryside (52, 160, 166-7, 217-8). The aesthetic discourse on the landscape therefore buttresses a political discourse on the land to reinforce national imagery and nationalistic mythology. J. M. Coetzee has analysed this process at length in White Writing. The first volume of his autobiography, Boyhood, also testifies to the strength of the attraction for the land, and even more of the discourses around the land, which one constantly has to resist. This fascination can partly be explained by the proximity and often the confusion between “country” and “countryside” which, of course, exists in English but also in Afrikaans with the words “land” and “plaatteland.” It is indeed to a great extent in the countryside and on farms that a white South African identity was forged – and mostly a Boer identity, particularly so as the same word “boer” without a capital letter is used to mean farmer or peasant (Kings 216). The geographer Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch underlines that “territorial mythologies” differ from one white community to the other, the British favouring the city, the Afrikaners the country. At least, this is what Behr seems to play upon, as the descriptions of the sunset over the sea and the bay of the Cape differ slightly in the two versions which he provided of his first novel, in Afrikaans and in English ( Reuk 127-9; Smell 121-4). The description of the colours of the sky is longer in Afrikaans than in
1. The word has the same root as “-herd” or “shepherd” in English, and “’n herder roman” is the same as a plaasro- man. 86
English, and the word “bloedrooi” in Afrikaans is much more heavily connoted than the plainer “dark red” in the English version. The Afrikaans version insists more than the English one on the fight the white settlers had to put up to conquer the land, and link it with the picturesque view which their dominant position, in all meanings of the word, now allows them to enjoy. Whereas only the rather vague word “place” is used in the English version, and is later taken up by a mere pronoun, the Afrikaans version uses several nouns which are repeated and more heavily stressed, in particular as “land” and “grond” are strongly connoted, the latter combining a literal meaning with the abstract one of “reason,” suggesting therefore the legitimacy of the Afrikaner presence at the Cape. Behr’s first two novels highlight how the farm is turned into what Jean Sévry calls “a microcosm of the apartheid regime,” (20) and how the discourse on the land or on the farm and therefore the plaasroman itself become a mode of discourse on the nation, a myth which is endowed with the task of conveying a national or nationalistic ideology, and a vision of the country limited to one side of the political fence, or of the farm gate. One cannot help noticing that it is the produce of Uncle Samuel’s farm, mentioned at this stage in the novel, which gives its title to Behr’s first novel. The use of the definite article highlights the smell of the fruit, thus suggesting that those are the quintessential produce of farm work and of the South African land, and therefore an emblem of the nation, of which they take up the initials, “s” and “a.” The discourse on the land and the farm and the discourse on the nation cannot be dissociated in General Erasmus’s speech to his son Marnus: once the control over the nation has been lost in Kenya, the first place of settlement, the departure from the farm is presented as inevi- table (Smell 121-4). A similar process which fuses the two events is at work in Embrace in the stories about their life in Kenya and Tanganyika which Karl’s grandparents keep telling him at regular intervals in his life as well as in the course of the novel, such stories thus becoming a family plaasroman that is repeated and handed down from generation to generation. The definite article introducing Marnus’s father’s story inThe Smell of Apples, at the top of Sir Lowries Pass, already had the same value: “And then Dad told me the story again” (122). The story has been repeated several times, transformed into a family myth, as an echo on a smaller scale of the official History of the white nation at a larger level.
The City and the Country: Displacement, Loss and Myth Such a story, however, is first and foremost a story of loss and nostalgia. All of Behr’s novels insist on the fact that something has been initially lost: the farm in his first two novels, the mother and innocence, but also any claim to the land on the part of Michiel, in his latest. The characters in the first two novels all have or have had to leave the countryside for the city, and although in Embrace the arrival of the De Mans in Durban is initially seen as a way for them to escape poverty, it is also described as an experience of loss which tears them away from their roots in the reserve, in the wilderness, and further north, in the farm of Tanganyika for which the reserve had been a substitute. Even in The Smell of Apples, which is mostly centered on the city of Cape Town, the opposition between the city and the country is still very much perceptible and insisted upon, all the more so as once in the city, the characters are confronted with the threat of the growing “black spots” of the sprawling black townships. It is one of the first 87 “Paradys” after the Fall: Mark Behr’s Novels and the Genre of the Plaasroman things which Michiel notices again when he gets back, as if clearly marked fences no longer held: The township – the location, they’d often still called it when he left – has grown further out as well as in. The once bare strip of veld, the train track running south and the tall screen of eucalyptus no longer keep things apart. (Kings 15) It is in the city that the changes brought about by the new dispensation seem the most visible (62). And it is somehow no wonder that the Oubaas, as Michiel’s father is still called, should “believ[e] the world ends where Paradys meets the N2,” (84) a divide which keeps him reasonably safe from too close a contact with the outside world. It is no wonder either that the novel itself should entirely be based on a return to a farm in the Orange Free State (the full former name is used in the novel), near Bloemfontein, the cradle of Afrikaner identity and “the heart of the country,” as it were, to take up the title of one of Coetzee’s own plaasromans. It is indeed tempting for writers to go back to the genre of the plaasroman in such moments of tension, the farm standing as a model held like a mirror to the black Bantustans which the white authorities would like to keep watertight, as it offers a refuge from the tensions of the city where one constantly runs the risk of coming into contact with members of the other communities (Sévry 23). That is one of the reasons why Behr chose to constantly alternate the setting of all three novels between the city and the country, to highlight their opposition, and even more the myth which lies behind the characters’ preference for the latter. The final inversion of this pattern in Kings of the Water seems to suggest as much: its protagonist is turned away from the farm of his childhood and initially finds it hard to adjust to London, but he later becomes the perfect citizen of San Francisco – “one of the great cities of the world” (Kings 90) – so much so that he has not ridden a horse for fifteen years (155). Back on the farm, he now refuses to play at farming and help his brother repair the damage the hail did to the property (188). The refuge of the farm is but an illusion, as he learnt fifteen years before: it is at the dam, the heart of the heart of the farm and of the country, the place associated with the innocence of childhood at the center of “Paradys,” that he hears of his disgrace and banishment by his father (58). Behr’s anti- plaasromans thus denounce the discourse that would make of the farm a secluded place which could remain isolated from the tensions of the conflict, since that very place actually rests upon a perpetuation of such tensions and of the divisions which lie at their root: “I am the rule the game depends upon, he thought years later” (58). The alternation between images of the present farm in 2001 and Michiel’s reminiscences from fifteen years before highlight how much of a mental reconstruction the latter are: more a mindscape than a landscape, more a subjective reconstruction, therefore never a neutral picture of nature, they have indeed comfortably erased from the frame all the elements which actually helped to make the farm what it looked like: “Servants” (83; Coetzee White Writing 63-81). Likewise, Behr’s earlier novels play on a system of narrative juxtapositions which bring to light the constructed nature of such representations of the farm, which are in fact merely a form of discourse, a myth, a story, a lie. As was seen, in The Smell of Ap- ples, the words which qualify “the story” of the peregrinations of the Erasmus family in Kenya, Tanganyika and South Africa, and in particular the use of the definite article, create a proximity between the family history told by the General to his children and the national History which they learn at school in their history books. But the definite ar - 88 ticle is actually more ambiguous than initially meets the eye: it refers to something which is already known, as the story has been told before (“again,” 122) and many allusions to it are scattered throughout the novel. But the definite article also reveals that it is merely a “story,” which has achieved the status of a myth although it has been almost entirely made up, fabricated, and does not correspond to Johann Erasmus’s direct experience, as another character in Embrace later denies him any right to call himself a farmer: “[T]he Erasmus […] you met […] were cowards and left Tanganyika early, before things really started looking bad. They were business people, not farmers. Farmers always stay till the last” (207). The remark is all the more ironic as the De Mans in Embrace claim in turn that they stayed till the last and that their “story” is “the truth,” as is underlined at the beginning of a paragraph when Karl comments on one of the first of his grandmo- ther’s tales to be reported in the novel: Listening to Mumdeman was better than any occasional movie or the fairy-tales and fables that so addicted me. Movies, like fairy-tales, I told myself, were only stories. But, what Mumdeman said was all true, absolutely true. And, what was true was real. (149) The punctuation marks and the use of the tag “I told myself ” suggest, however, that this is only Karl’s attempt at self-persuasion. Even though so far no one contradicts him nor questions Mumdeman’s version of the family’s story, both will be contradicted quickly enough, as already suggested by the conclusion of the very same paragraph, a praise of Mumdeman’s gift for telling stories: “No one in the world, I was sure, could tell a story as well as Mumdeman.” Karl is brought back to the world of fairy-tales, despite his claims to the contrary. A brief analysis of how Mumdeman structures her narrative shows that what she says about life on the farm is but a family myth, a “story” which she has constructed and repeated or rehearsed several times to please her audience, as she openly does at the end of the novel when she tries to captivate her listeners before the school’s end of year’s concert: S]he began reeling off tales of her own girlhood as daughter to a pioneer farmer in East Africa. […] “All in one lifetime,” she said as a group began gathering around the De Mans in the foyer, spellbound by Mumdeman’s stories. She told what Karl had never tired of after hearing them a hundred times in a hundred different versions. (641) The narrator’s choice of words (“reeling off,” “spellbound”) recalls the films and tales Karl previously evoked, to which Mumdeman’s “tales” therefore seem uncomfortably similar, their veracity being thus called into question. What follows are indeed mostly nominal sentences. Almost all of them are structured along the same pattern, as in the first episode of the family tales narrated by the fireside. The use of the adverb “how” points out that what matters is not so much the truth of the facts being narrated as the manner in which they are presented, preferably in a favourable light. The adverb introduces a summary of Mumdeman’s narrative, a catalogue which enables the accu- mulation of adventures in which the action is presented as if it were realised in front of the audience through the use of –inG forms to reinforce the impression of a truly eventful live (“All in one lifetime”). What one finds here in fact is the same pattern as in classic adventure stories, which are but fabricated. And indeed one notices that the nar- rator drops the already ambiguous word “story” to fall back on even more problematic terms such as “tales,” fables which are altered and falsified and presented in “different versions.” The family story on the farm, the De Mans’ plaasroman in Behr’s second no- vel, is no truer than that of the Erasmuses, but the spell of its charm is harder to break 89 “Paradys” after the Fall: Mark Behr’s Novels and the Genre of the Plaasroman for the protagonist Karl who cannot, earlier in the novel, accept what his Uncle Klaas imparts to him about the lies it relies upon. The dialogue between the two characters hinges upon the notion of story-telling, which is once again closely associated with the issue of land ownership and the right to claim possession of the farm: “Our land. […] In Tanganyika they stole our land.” […] “Is that the story? That they took your father’s farms? That’s why you left?” “It’s not a story, Uncle Klaas. It’s the truth.” “Your father and mother left before their farm was taken. They ran because they were afraid their farm may be taken. […] Your parents were afraid that the people of Africa would take back what had been taken from them.” (500, emphasis added) The opposition between the “story” and the “truth,” or between the family (hi)story (as it has been so far seen and narrated by the parents) and History is reinforced here by the interplay of definite and indefinite articles. Karl understands the criticism conveyed by his uncle’s use of the word “story,” which suggests that what he has heard so far may be just one possible version of History,2 a fabrication which has been given the sheen of truth to be passed on to younger generations. This family story then becomes no diffe- rent from any other invented fable or tale,3 as the way the boy picks up the word with just the indefinite article reveals. Even though he seeks to pit against it “the truth,” the one and only valid version of the facts, the modals in the next sentence underline again that the loss of the farm was just one among many possibilities, a feeling which Bok does not quite dispel when he later recalls the events: “‘We left when we saw there was no hope. Our farm was next on the list. One and the same thing’” (595). This list, of course, never physically existed and cannot therefore be either proved or contradicted. With its many internal echoes and the allusions to Behr’s previous work, the construc- tion of the novel highlights the fabricated nature of the narrative of the loss of the farm, and therefore how much of a lie the family plaasroman is. Similarly Mumdeman’s tales of her conquest of the bush are but a delusion. The family story and the national myth, handed down from generation to generation within the family circle or at school, are but one arranged version of the facts, among other possible narratives which are left untold and unheard, just as Plaatje’s version of the Land Act4 is carefully left out of the History syllabus in Kings of the Water (95-8).
Between Rewriting and Reviving: Temporal and Spatial Displacements and the Issue of Nostalgia All three of Behr’s novels play on the juxtaposition of versions of the truth to highlight the constructed nature of any such discourse, and in particular the ideology conveyed by the plaasroman which they contribute to rewriting. All point to possible other ver- sions of the history of the country, differing visions of the land lying outside of the
2. A “story” in the sense of “a recital or account of events that have or are alleged to have happened; a series of events that are or might be narrated,” “the development or past existence of a person, thing, country, institution, etc., considered as narrated or as a subject for narration” (Oxford English Dictionary, emphasis mine). 3. A “story,” this time, in the sense of “a narrative of real or (usually) fictitious events, designed for the entertain- ment of the hearer or reader; a series of traditional or imaginary incidents forming the matter of such a narrative; a tale, an anecdote; a (short) work of fiction” (Oxford English Dictionary).. 4. The Land Act serves as a background to Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa, which Michiel reads in London, as mentioned in the introduction. 90 traditional frame of the plaasroman, and one could think that the latest, with what its greater spatial distortion allows, the protagonist having left South Africa for England, Australia and then the United States, would offer a glimpse of those alternative stories. It is indeed in Kings of the Water that longer quotations from Plaatje’s Native Life and its narrative of displaced black populations are to be found, while allusions to Alan Pa- ton, for instance, remain only scattered and marginal in Embrace. However, one quickly notes that the overall perspective remains more or less the same, the narrative choices actually accentuating a gradual unsettling feeling of nostalgia which might ultimately bring to bear on the value of Behr’s attempt at rewriting the genre of the plaasroman. Even though the protagonist himself seems repeatedly wary of such a feeling, it is ul- timately what comes to dominate a narrative frozen in the present. The Smell of Apples clearly juxtaposes two different temporal perspectives, which allow cracks to appear in the narrative, revealing the distortions of the truth by the regime. By way of contrast, Michiel’s return to Paradys in Kings of the Water triggers a stream of reminiscences which gradually shifts back to a general present tense. Initially the italics are retained to mark a temporal displacement, but soon all differentiating signs whatsoever disappear, and the narrative culminates in the seven-page confession which mingles Michiel’s expulsion from the army and his sorry affair with Karien, putting them all on the same level. The transition is often operated by nominal sentences – for instance when Michiel evokes the landscape of the farm as he sees it on his return (147-8) – creating an effect Émile Benveniste characterises as “an absolute truth […], outside of time and of a perma- nent value, acting as an authoritative argument […] used to convince, not to inform. Timeless, placeless, outside of any relationship with the enunciator-descriptor or the narrator, it is a definite assertion” (Benveniste 162-5, translation mine).5 At other times, the shift is mediated by the recurring phrase “he sees” in the present of commemoration, which freezes the character’s gaze onto a reflection of his own past self, in a Gorgon-like manner, and leaves out any figure of the other (Vernant 126). The third person used throughout the narrative does not allow for the same distancing as the alternation between the third and the first ones inEmbrace did. In Kings of the Wa- ter, the only variation is the use of “you” in the confession in the middle of the novel which seems to act as a mirroring device for the protagonist (114), as well as towards the end of the novel precisely when he asserts his belonging to the land (215). Whereas mirrors figured prominently in The Smell of Apples, again to allow for glimpses into the evils of the system behind its shining surface, echoes and mirrors in Kings of the Water seem to act as screens which freeze the gaze and the mind, countering the effort to rewrite the monolithic discourse of the regime and of the plaasroman. Incidentally, the mirror is the one object which has been kept from Michiel’s past in the otherwise fully refurbished bathroom (26). Michiel thus sees his own face in his brother’s, Peet (75), or in his partner’s, Kamil (137), as is revealed to him by his therapist, who happens to be called Glassman, in whom he sees yet again a reflection of his own relation with his for- mer lieutenant on the front, Steven Almeida (73, 102). The latter, in a dizzying pattern of duplications, is a character from his previous novel Embrace, while the last literary reference is to Pasternak whose lines open The Smell of Apples (229). It is as if, like his own character who goes back to the mirror-like surface of the farm dam as he did to
5. I am grateful to Héliane Ventura for drawing my attention to Emile Benveniste’s and Jean-Pierre Vernant’s respective works. 91 “Paradys” after the Fall: Mark Behr’s Novels and the Genre of the Plaasroman the aptly called Gorgonian fans when on his trip in the Solomons (76), the writer were going back to his own work, and in it, to its autobiographical strain – doubling it back, as it were. Whereas Behr pointed out in an interview in 2003 (Anstey) how the juxtapo- sition of homoerotic and political episodes in his previous novels served to expose how the regime deflected attention from its abuse of black South Africans, it seems that in his third novel – particularly in the confession lying at its core – the homoerotic, and more autobiographical, matter, takes centre stage, always framing and thus obscuring allusions to torture. One cannot deny that the stakes may have changed in a post-apar- theid context, but the reader is nevertheless left with a novel which uncomfortably takes up some of the hallmarks of the genre it claims to be rewriting, such as the episodes of comic relief provided by black characters (Chapman 192). Whereas Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit scattered its characters all over the world, geographically and emotionally displaced and unsettled, refusing them and the reader any easy, comforting solution in a post-9/11 context, Behr’s Kings of the Water offers as a closing image that of the farm turning into a “home,” (234) ready to provide a safe refuge to its prodigal son against yet another Other, in a passage again replete with reflections of the character in rear-view mirrors (225-6, 236). It is as if the plaasroman were coming back to provide once more some sense of bearings to displaced writers looking for some anchorage in a complex “global imaginary” (De Kock). In more ways than one, Behr may be right when he confesses that “Kings of the Water can only re-say what has already been said” (van der Vlies, 23).
Mathilde rOGez University of Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, CAS EA 801
W orks Cited
anstey, Gillian. “The Smell of Censure.” Sunday Times. 15 March 2003.
The Spatial Turn of Geography during the Edwardian Era
Edwardianism scarcely exists as a geographical idea. Victorianism and especially Modernism have been given a good deal of geo-critical attention recently, but Edwardian still stands at most for a distinctive London architecture, a twilight age in politics, or perhaps an era in leisure fashion. The reason for its neglect may stem from the relative brevity of the Edwardian period stretching roughly from the turn of the last century to the beginning of WWI. Another reason might be that the geographies of Victorianism and Modernism cover the intervening years sufficiently to obviate the need for a geo-critical study of the era. This essay, therefore, explores the era’s geographical spaces through a number of subject-matters in an attempt to show the period’s genuine geography.
What do the discovery of the cycle of erosion, the development of the first London underground line, the coining of the term “geo-politics” and Howards End have in com- mon? They are all part of Edwardianism, a period pertaining to the reign of Edward VII (1901-1910). In 1905, William Davis discovered the evolution of physical landforms through various stages of erosion. In 1900, the Central London Railway was the world’s only public transport line to run completely underground. Emil Reich referred to “geo- politics” for the first time in his political treatise The Foundations of Modern Europe. And E.M. Forster created literary landscapes central to the Edwardian period with Howards End in 1910. These events might appear as isolated cases, they are nonetheless intrinsi- cally related to Edwardianism. More importantly, these events illustrate geographical phenomena. Davis’s cycle of erosion concerns the sequential evolution of physical landforms. The inauguration of London’s first underground line suggests trends in human geography and reflects the era’s needs for urban and suburban transportation. Reich’s lectures focus on the points of convergence between geography and politics. Finally, Forster’s novel epitomizes the rapidly changing face of England’s rural and urban milieus. These geographical pheno- mena reflect the physical, human, political and artistic changes taking place during the first decade of the twentieth century.1 In addition, they are closely linked to the idea of spatiality. The present essay attempts to consider geography from a dialectical perspective proposing a geo-critical analysis of spaces shaping the Edwardian years. The reason for this stems in part from considerable advances in geographical knowledge at the turn of the last century, but also from the renewed interest in geography which distinguished this period from the Victorian age, when politics reigned as the dominant discipline in keeping with the Empire’s historic expansion.2 Edwardianism certainly implies some temporality, which sets it apart from Victorianism and Modernism. Temporality is an
1. Due to the brevity of the essay, it was impossible to include a geo-critical discussion on the emerging question of gender in the political debate (the Suffragettes started in 1897) and in fiction, notably Forster’s Maurice (1913, published posthumously in 1971). 2. Such an approach would rather be termed “Edwardian Geographies” and focus on the historical perspective of geography during the Edwardian period. Our focus therefore is on geography and not history. 94 important factor in understanding Edwardianism as the term itself suggests a specific historical period. Yet, the time period roughly coinciding with the reign of King Edward VII abounds in geographical innovation. We, therefore, aim to show how geographies define the Edwardian years from about the end of the nineteenth century to the out- break of the WWI, transforming spatial understandings of the Earth, revolutionizing human and political ways of life and shaping literary productions. The works of two theoreticians of the Edwardian age provide the geo-critical basis for our spatial investigation, namely Georg Simmel and Andrew John Herbertson. Both theorists recognise the importance of studying geography through the lens of space, rather than observing political, economic or historical phenomena. Herbertson, for ins- tance, identifies physical landforms in an effort to define natural regions in his “The Major Natural Regions: An Essay in Systematic Geography” (1905). Simmel, on the other hand, depicts in Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben (1903) (The Metropolis and Mental Life) the synthesis of physical and human aspects, which are, according to him, dialec- tically intertwined in the spaces of modern cities. While Herbertson relies on physical spaces, Simmel analyses the impact of the concrete environment upon the psychologi- cal state of human beings. Both authors describe the changing perceptions and concep- tions of space before Bergson, Heidegger and Husserl discover the phenomenological and relational reevaluation of space.3 Comparatively little research has been done that locates Edwardianism within the geographical and spatial contexts. Most publications focus either on the Victorian age or on Modernist depictions of geography.4 Michel Collot, for instance, evokes geogra- phy’s spatial turn in Pour une géographie littéraire (For A Literary Geography): “It would be better to speak about the decline of a historical model which had prevailed since the ni- neteenth century, a model based on the idea that progress is linear and continuous” (16, translation mine). Nevertheless, he locates the emergence of spatiality in geography a bit later, with the evolution of phenomenology in the 1930s and the post-modern trend after WWII. Likewise, Bertrand Westphal situates geography’s spatial turn with the Einsteinian revolution in Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces (9). And Eric Bulson thinks about novels, maps, and modernity in terms of the “spatial imagination” (11) focusing on representations in such authors as Melville, Joyce and Pynchon. It then becomes necessary to look at spatial conceptions of Edwardianism, to see whether geography implies the idea of space, and to locate geographical signposts. In this essay, we first link physical geography to the Edwardian years in order to explore some of the revelations concerning the Earth’s material environment. Then, we shall identify how geography influences social, human and political ways of life, making it distinctively Edwardian. Finally, thinking geographically about Edwardianism implies recognition of the diverse ways in which literary texts portray these geographies. Following Forster’s command in Howard’s End “Only connect!” (159), we shall connect geography to literature. Mapping out various loci, we shall examine the way literature relies on geographies in regards to setting, character depiction and narrative through a selection of texts.
3. Bergson published the Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness) in 1927, Heidegger his Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) in 1927 as well, and Edmund Husserl the lectures Ding und Raum (Thing and Space) in 1907. 4. Among the most relevant publications of Victorian geographies, see, for instance, Robert Mighall and Simon Naylor. 95 The Spatial Turn of Geography during the Edwardian Era
The Physical Geographies of Edwardianism The aim of the first section is to build a bridge between two lines of research: physical geography and Edwardianism. Bridging these two fields of research is quite challenging as physical geography barely existed as a discipline during the Edwardian period. Com- pared to Germany, where Ritter and Humboldt left an important geographical heritage, the British relegated geography to commercial and political purposes, especially during the Victorian age of exploration and expansion. As a result, research in physical geo- graphy was neglected. Andrew Herbertson, however, justifies the need to study British landforms as “there is practically no systematic geography to bind us” (300). Taking over the geography department at the University of Oxford after Mackinder, Herbertson set new parameters to define regions on a global scale in “The Major Natural Regions: An Essay in Systematic Geography.” His regional concept centres on the spatial dimension of natural regions in an attempt to move away from the “com- mercial and political bias” (300). Attempting to answer the question “What is geogra- phy?” Herbertson proposes to look at definite natural divisions of the globe with the purpose of replacing “the purely political divisions of the world” (300). The geographi- cal distribution of natural regions of the Earth then becomes the subject-matter of his theoretical perspective, in which “the ideal boundaries are the dissociating oceans, the severing mass of mountains, or the inhospitable deserts” (309). While political borders are well-marked lines, the “characteristics of one region melt gradually into those of another” (309). Far from seeing these regions as isolated areas, the author considers ter- restrial macro-organisms as the guiding principles of regional spaces. The configuration of these spaces applies “horizontally and vertically” alike, because they are “determined by structure, the nature of the transforming processes, and the time during which they have been active” (302). Looking at configuration, climate, vegetation and density of population, the geographer is among the first to provide a spatial theory of the Earth’s natural environment that takes into account the three-dimensionality of the time-space continuum. He seeks to explore the following key question: What characteristics should be selected to distinguish one region from another? Size is not a sufficient guide, although it must not be neglected; neither is structure, nor even configuration, although this last suggests many important divisions of the Earth’s surface, which must be taken into account in any rational classification. How can we determine the different orders of natural regions? The British Isles, for instance, form part of a much larger natural area, that of North-Western Europe, while they themselves can be analyzed into a number of sub-regions. (300) Herbertson aims to redefine the geo-critical framework in that he proposes to look at the physical proportions of the terrain. He sees the environment “as part of a solid which comprises not merely the soil beneath, but the air above, with relations to other parts of the Earth” (301). The concept of the Major Natural Regions combines two as- pects: one that looks at the complexities of “land, water, air, plant, animal, and man” as one regional unit. The second aspect concerns the regions’ “special relationship as together constituting a definite characteristic portion of the Earth’s surface” (301-2). Herbertson’s “natural regions” synthesize micro- and macro regions of the Earth in an effort to describe the uniqueness of physical spaces. The importance of regarding spaces in this way becomes central in our analysis, as we attempt to illustrate the inno- vation of geographically-inspired spaces during the Edwardian years. 96
Physical geography is largely absent in contemporary research, yet its diverse aspects became manifest in scientific studies during the first decade of the twentieth century. 5 The sudden eruption of interest may in part be explained by recent discoveries in bio- logy and botany.6 Also, new revelations around the permineralization of fossils led to a better understanding of rock formations and sedimentary layers.7 Additionally, the de- terioration of the English atmosphere as a result of the Industrial Revolution triggered the systematic and scientific analysis of meteorology in order to make sense of such phenomena as smog. As a consequence, scientific fields such as meteorology, geology and geomorphology emerged during the Edwardian years. In geomorphology, American geographer William Morris Davis developed the so- called “geographical cycle” around 1900. The concept related to the evolution and modification of continental landforms in which the different stages of erosion were believed to be parts of a cyclic process. Influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, Davis looked at the analytical changes in topography to analyse patterns in the evo- lution of landscapes, patterns which nowadays are the standard. The denudation of landforms, the result of the geographical cycle, produces a featureless plain (peneplain) with few residential hills (monadnocks).8 Although Davis limited his erosion concept to humid climate conditions, his theory – also known as the “Davisian model” – has put geomorphology on the map of geophysical research on British landforms and in- fluenced Britain’s Ralph Bagnold in his scientific investigations of desert structures. Davis’s legacy has reached far beyond specific climate zones in that it revolutionized the geo-physical spatial awareness around relief erosion in America as well as in the British Isles. After all, landform denudations ignore political divisions, and are intrinsically part of the evolutionary cycle of any concrete environment. In geology, Horace Bolingbroke Woodward published in 1911 the History of Geology, the most comprehensive study of the geological history of the Earth’s crust to this date. Woodward, one of the pioneers of the British Geological Survey,9 tries to understand “the successive changes in scene and life that have diversified [the earth’s] surface in past times” (1). To him, the geological “story is written in the rocks, the minerals, and the fossils which form the outer portion, known as the earth’s crust” (1). Retracing the history of the earth’s lithosphere, the geologist captures in painstaking details “the fas- cinating subject of Earth Sculpture” (145). In addition, Woodward established around 1904 the most detailed and precise up-to-date geological map of Great Britain.
5. Franco Moretti, for instance, analyses in his Atlas of the European Novel the period from 1800 to 1900, focusing only on Victorian Britain. Nicolas Freeman investigates “representations of London between the death of Charles Dickens in 1870 and the outbreak of the First World War” (v) in Conceiving the City: London, Literature, and Art 1870-1914. Similarly, Andrew Thacker seems to move right into modernity in Moving Through Modernity when establishing a connec- tion “between space, geography and movement, in modernist writing from around 1910 to 1939” (2). 6. Additional information on botany can be found in Alexander von Humboldt’s Schriften zur Geographie der Pflanzen (Essay on the Geography of Plants). 7. Woodward in History of Geology provides an insightful outline of the history of the permineralization of fossils. 8. For more information on the geographic cycle, see:
In line with the sequence of chronostratigraphy,10 Woodward’s historic map (since then geologically out- dated) illustrates the different tectonic structures of Britain. From the Cambrian rocks in the north to the Carboniferous formations in the Midlands, where many coal beds fossilized carbon, and finally the sedimentary bagshot beds showing the London clay and chalk layers of the South Downs, various colours indicate the mi- nerals present in the lithosphere. Interestingly, the map does not represent political and administrative divisions and borders, and focuses instead on geological data. From the Isle of Skye to the London basin, the demar- cation lines merely refer to the limits of different tecto- nic rocks present on the surface areas. The spatial sense emerging in Woodward’s map is singularly geological. Finally, in meteorology, one of the youngest geogra- phical disciplines, John George Bartholomew designed After Horace B. Woodward (1904). the Atlas of Meteorology in 1899. The atlas introduces Stanford’s Geological Atlas. © Ian West, 2000. for the first time the use of coloured contour layers (Permission granted) to systematically chart meteorological data according to the physical landforms. Under the patronage of the Royal Geographical Society, Bartholomew records precipitation data from a large number of territories across the globe in what appears to be the most complete analysis of rainfall occurrences. Similar to Woodward, Bartholomew creates maps solely based on scientific meteorological data, ignoring political or historical facts. Not only does the meteorologist account for precipitation levels, but he also maps temperature, pressure, humidity, and winds in the atmosphere.11 These advances in physical geography – whether in geomorphology, geology or me- teorology – show a renewed sense of spaces distinctively Edwardian in that these spaces no longer referred to the politically-inspired Victorian age. The spatial newness lies in its geographical, three-dimensional aspects, aspects, which are likewise present in some noteworthy facets of human geographies.
The Human Geographies of Edwardianism The very principles of human geography originate in the Edwardian period. Long be- fore Vidal de la Blache published his Principles of Human Geography from 1910 onwards, Andrew Herbertson examined the effects of natural conditions on mankind. In Man and His Work: An Introduction to Human Geography (1899), the geographer analyses the in- teractions between the physical environment and human societies throughout a number of regions across the world:
10. Chronostratigraphy refers to the study of geological time and “a set of terms which are applied to bodies of rock which are laid down during these time intervals” (Whittow 85). 11. The meteorological phenomenon of “smog” manifested itself as one of the main causes of poor urban air quality in the latter part of the Victorian era. In an effort to combat air pollution, the British government published the Alkali Act in 1906. Reputedly coined in reference to the air pollution in London, and first attested in a paper read by Dr. H.A. des Voeux, treasurer of the Coal Smoke Abatement Society, the term “smog” appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association on 26 August 1905. 98
The world is the home of man. All that we learn of the physical features of the Earth, its climates, plants, and animals, is of practical importance because these things have made the human race what it is – here adventurous and progressive, there indolent and backward. Almost every problem in politics or history, if examined, carefully, would be found to depend at last on simple geographical conditions, and it is important that we should learn to look at geography in this living way. (1) Herbertson studies the weight of the physical surroundings on mankind, outlining some of the complexities with regard to the condition and occupation of the human race. Based on travellers’ narratives, he investigates the interaction of existing societies with such geographical spaces as tundras, temperate and tropical forests, steppes and savannas, hot deserts and mountains. The link between geography and humans becomes particularly visible in Georg Simmel’s Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben (The Metropolis and Mental Life). Simmel contri- butes to geocriticism in discussing the concrete and social structures of the metropo- lis. According to him, the metropolis affects mental life in such a way as to provoke people’s responses to external forces. Sensual stimuli increase within the urban spaces when compared to rural settings, because the space of the metropolis creates a unique milieu: The most significant essence of the metropolis lies in this functional magnitude beyond its physical boundaries: and this effectiveness reacts upon the latter and give to it life, weight, relevance and responsibility. A person does not end with the limits of his physical body or with the district to which his physical activity is immediately confined, but embraces, rather, the totality of meaningful effects which emanates from him temporally and spatially. In the same way the city exists only in the totality of the effects which transcend their immediate sphere. (33-4, translation mine) The essence of the metropolis changes personal relationships; individuals develop a blasé attitude beyond mere physical spaces, become indifferent to themselves as well as to the area in which they live. This results in a reduced number of human interactions, a restriction leading paradoxically to a larger degree of personal freedom in compari- son to the countryside. The metropolis frees the individual symbolically speaking from boundaries, and “the individual gains a freedom of movement” (27). The urban setting is full of “the wonders and comforts of space-conquering technique,” (40) carrying po- pulations “in a stream” (40). The city’s material infrastructure, notably underground tra- vel, provides the opportunity for spatial flows, as populations and goods move quickly and efficiently through the urban tissue. Simmel’s essay on the metropolis and mental life manifests itself as a spatial exa- mination of geographical phenomena. First, the German philosopher examines the individual’s position within the immediate surroundings. Then, he takes into account the tensions existing between country, city and suburbia. Finally, he stresses the im- portance of movement of commodities, people and ideas alike, as the flow transcends traditional boundaries of space. The geographical consideration of these spaces affects the mental dimension of humans, an aspect of his study which emerges as pertinent in our discussion of Erskine Childer and E. M. Forster. Before looking at the literary productions of these authors, let us first reflect on the human aspects of the changing British metropolis. Human occupations of Edwardian Britain resulted in a number of unparalleled phe- nomena: the rise of the suburbs, the creation of administrative boroughs, the expansion 99 The Spatial Turn of Geography during the Edwardian Era of railway and underground travel. Dramatic population growth as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution and the Empire’s role explain go a long way in explaining these phenomena. In particular, the Greater London Area saw a spectacular swelling of its population, which doubled between 1880 and 1911. The London County Council’s graph beneath shows the city’s demographic evolution:
London Statistics 1915-20. © London County Council. (Permission: Maps Section, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford)
The graph to the left compares the populations of Greater London, the County of London and the Central Area. While populations start to decline in the County and Central Areas of London from 1901 onwards, the Greater London area saw an important increase pushing its total number beyond 7 millions. The graph to the right sets Greater London and the County of London side by side with New York, Paris, Berlin and Vienna. Both London regions appear as the world’s most populous during the Edwardian period, reflecting a trend to live in large metropolitan areas, a trend pre- vailing well into the twenty-first century. Moreover, the graph symbolizes the growing spatial importance of the Greater London area: the corresponding upward line repre- senting London’s population growth occupies a much larger space when compared to the Central Area. The unprecedented population growth transformed settlement patterns around the country, resulting in a suburban expansion second to none. Barker observes in 100
Edwardian London: “More important than any single Edwardian development was the suburban explosion” (81). In particular, London spread westward, eastward and north- ward, where “in the Finchley-Hendon area alone the number of houses rose by 14,000” (81). Developments to the east of London, for example, saw the construction of the Millbank Estate in 1907 and the Boundary Street Estate in Shoreditch to accommo- date the increasing demands of working-class populations. The numbers from the 1911 Census by the L.C.C. show a sharp decline of the City population from 1901 to 1911. During the same period, the western suburbs of Fulham and Hammersmith, for in- stance, increased by 12% and 8% respectively, Hampstead’s residents by 4%, and the south-London area of Lewisham by 26%.12 Although suburban growth clearly starts during the last decade of the Victorian age, population levels of the city’s outer parts peak during the Edwardian years. Cleaner fresh air and a large number of green spaces acted as decisive factors in encouraging people to leave the inner core of London, and to settle in its outskirts. The result is a renewed sense of human spaces, which synthesize urban and suburban places, creating unheard-of spatial distributions of the population. Unprecedented spatial displacements and flows of people are another con- sequence of these changes. These flows are made possible by transport systems literally erupting allover London. The Victorian era undoubtedly saw the proliferation of railway tracks around the country, linking the remotest rural areas to urban centres. The Edwardian era, on the other hand, witnessed an unseen intensification of underground railway lines, notably in London. In 1902, for example, the Underground Electric Railways Company of London (UERL) was established to provide electrification of the District line, and to complete three tube lines by 1906: Baker Street and Waterloo Railway, Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway, Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway. It was, however, the Central London Railway – inaugurated by the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII, on 27 June 1900 – which became renowned as the key Edwardian transport achievement. The Central London Railway was the world’s first metropolitan line to run completely underground in tunnels between Shepard’s Bush in the west and the Bank of England in the City. The Line was later extended to Wood Lane in 1908, and in 1912 to Liverpool Street in the east. The success of the line was instantaneous, with almost 15 million passengers by the end of its inaugural year alone.13 The Central line exemplifies the strong demand for public transportation making the underground an Edwardian showcase. Moreover, the line connected various urban spaces through spaces created under ground. As a result, transportation in London reveals a sense of three-dimensionality, as populations incessantly move in underground tunnels between the centres and the suburbs. Edwardian suburban growth necessitated further restructuring and streamlining of urban areas, in particular those of Greater London. The London Government Act of 1899, therefore, foresaw the creation of 28 metropolitan boroughs as sub-divisions of the county of London. The 13 March 1900 House of Commons sitting report listed the newly created boroughs:
12. For more information see: London County Council. London Statistics 1915-20. 13. See:
Copy presented, of Drafts of Orders in Council for the establishment of each of the undermentioned Metropolitan Boroughs, and incorporating the Council thereof, and for other purposes connected therewith: – Battersea, Bermondsey, Bethnal Green, Deptford, Fulham, Greenwich, Hackney, Hammersmith, Hampstead, Islington, Lambeth, Lewisham, Poplar, St. Marylebone, Shoreditch, Southwark, Stoke Newington, Wandsworth, and Woolwich [by Act]; to lie upon the Table. (HC Deb 13 March 1900 vol 80 c724) With the Act, the former parliamentary boroughs of 1832 were dissolved in an attempt to replace vestries and district boards as part of local governments and to correct boun- dary anomalies across Greater London. The administrative alignment modernized the organization of the British metropolis, leading to an improved urban efficiency and management. New administrative spaces were created. One last emblematic Edwardian phenomenon, leisure railway travel, brings this sec- tion on human geography to a conclusion. While sport and leisure activities developed towards the end of the Victorian period, the Edwardian years saw the emergence of long- distance recreational travel during a period often referred to as the Golden Age of Rail Travel.14 In Victorian and Edwardian Railway Travel, David Turner presents the railway as “one of the main modes of long distance travel” (1). Although Turner contrasts the preferred methods of travel during the two eras, he seems to disregard two singular Edwardian occurrences. The first concerns a development in recreational railway travel from London outwards to such notorious destinations as Edinburgh, Brighton, Bath and Cornwall. Populations living in the noisy, polluted and crowded City yearned for the tranquil, green and natural spaces of the countryside. The urban conditions neces- sitated the creation of spaces providing an alternative to the intensification of external and internal sensual stimuli provoked by the metropolis, a phenomenon Simmel refers to as “the intensification of nervous stimulation” (9). Faster railways made long-dis- tance travel even more palpable. The journey from London to Edinburgh, for example, took just over six hours at the beginning of the twentieth century. The second pheno- menon in leisure rail travel refers to a movement in the opposite direction: from the suburbs to the city centre. As a consequence of suburban growth, people living on the outskirts were now eager to reach the entertainment areas of Central London. These trends were facilitated by the new standards created in long-distance and underground railways. Moreover, they reflect the popularity of railway travel across a large spectrum of social classes with its processes of checking and reading timetables, buying tickets, taking a seat and waiting for trains. A genuine leisure railway culture resulted, and with it leisure travel. Some of the main stations in London like St Pancras and Victoria grew into truly modern transportation hubs.15 The long-distance recreational travel increased the sense of spatial expansion as new populations discovered regions previously inac- cessible to them. Focusing on human and physical aspects, the essay’s two initial sections analysed the changing face of geographical spaces, which also influenced the emergence of geogra - phy as an interdisciplinary field, giving rise to the study of what came to be known as “geo-politics.”
14. The Golden Age of Rail Travel is believed to have started with the Orient Express’s inaugural journey from Paris to Constantinople in 1883. 15. It is quite interesting to note that St Pancras International has regained its status of an international transporta- tion hub since the inauguration of the Eurostar services in 2007. 102
Edwardian Geo-Politics Geo-politics relies on physical and human dimensions of geography in order to make sense of political decisions within a renewed context of international relations at the beginning of the twentieth century. In Europe, in particular, relations between the great powers were changing in the years leading up to WWI, a period dominated by rivalries among powerful nations. Competition often stemmed from territorial disputes in which physical size and the location of national borders influenced international relations, particularly between France and Germany. During these years of political tension, the term “geo-politics” appeared for the first time in a scientific context with Emil Reich’s Foundations of Modern Europe: Twelve Lectures Delivered in the University of London (1904). Reich’s set of lectures used “geo-politics” as a concept to link geography to politics: “History, in Europe, and still more outside Europe, is written largely, if not wholly, in characters of that geography, or, as we prefer to call it, geo-politics” (Reich 8). The Austro-Hungarian born historian saw geography as “the concrete cause” (8) in shaping political decisions, and privileges physical geography over politics. According to Reich, physical geography replaced racial distinctions on the European continent as the main source of conflictual relations: “It is high time that people studying history give up the untenable idea of ‘race.’ In Europe, at any rate, history is not made by ‘races’” (223). Instead, according to Reich, the concrete dimensions of the great powers’ territories had begun to shape policy-making: “At present day the forty-six sovereign states of Europe have each of them a continuous, so to speak, self-contained territory. This fact is of the utmost importance in international policy” (219). Reich saw the physical parameters of the European powers emerging as decisive variables in redesigning the political landscape in the wake of WWI. Geo-political tensions before the outbreak of the war become strikingly apparent in Erskine Childer’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903), one of the earliest espionage novels in English literature. The story is mainly set around Germany’s East Frisian Islands, situa- ted on its Northwestern coastline between The Netherlands and the Jutland Peninsula of Schleswig-Holstein. The area consists of constantly shifting tidal waters, referred to as the “Wadden Sea.” Contemporary critics, notably David Seed, see the novel as “a tale of detection where the land itself becomes the source of the mystery” (118). More than just a source of mysteries, the Wadden area becomes central to the story as the distinctive relief shapes the narrative. Narrated in the first-person by the Foreign Office employee Charles Carruthers (Childer used a fictive name for the sake of caution),The Riddle of the Sands describes his sailing venture with Arthur Davies, a former college acquaintance, onboard their Dulcibello. Their trip takes them to the site of a rumoured secret treasure recovery project on Memmert Island, a small island in the Western part of East Frisia. Far from being a simple travel account, the tale rapidly evolves into what I choose to call “topographical espionage.” This idea refers to a double spying pheno- menon: the protagonists’ secretive discovery of the sand banks spaces in the Wadden Sea, on the one hand, and their spying on Germany’s covert clandestine political inten- tions organized around East Frisia’s tidal waters on the other. The protagonists’ yachting cruise along the Frisian coast gradually surfaces as an ex- ploration of local topographies. When confronted with the Sea’s shifting sands and tidal waters, Carruthers struggles to understand the seemingly obscure landforms: “What’s all this?” he wonders, when “running [his] finger over some dotted patches which -co 103 The Spatial Turn of Geography during the Edwardian Era vered much of the chart” (Childers 55). The dotted patches on his map represent the “bald spaces” of sand which appear at low tide, as his friend explains: “‘All sand,’ said Davies, enthusiastically. ‘You can’t think what a splendid sailing-ground it is. You can ex- plore for days without seeing a soul. These are the channels, you see; they’re very badly charted’” (55). Inscribed since 2014 in the UNESCO World Heritage list, the region’s intertidal zone consists of a string of sandy islands to the North and a space of strong tidal fluctuations in between the mainland and the Sea. The skill required to sail in such zones resides in detecting the navigational channels in order to avoid damages to the vessel. The chart presented below of the Juist, Memmert and Norderney islands maps the dotted patches of the booms along which navigation is possible.
Erskine Childers. Chart B-Juist, Memmert, Norderney. (Permission requested from Adelaide University. )
The booms represent the navigational spaces on Childer’s map; they furthermore refer to the real spaces of the terrain, the so-called “channels.” The channels are the synthesis of concrete and representational spaces in the novel. Davis and Carruthers are quick in identifying these channels: “I use the general word ‘channel,’ but in fact they differ widely in character, and are called in German by various names: Balje, Gat, Loch, Diep, Rinne” (140). Before long, Davies distinguishes between two distinctive types: “For my purpose I need only divide them into two sorts – those which have water in them at all states of the tide, and those which have not, which dry off, that is, either wholly or partly at low-tide” (140). The two sailors’ understanding of the water- 104
carrying channels turns out to be primordial because the fluctuations between ebb and flow provoke constantly shifting sands in the bays and estuaries along the Wadden coast with more or less strong watersheds. Watersheds are created by shifting sands which form high ridges between channels. Waters are shallow over the ridge and deeper away from the watershed. The riddle of the sands stands for the deciphering of the enigma around the na- vigational channels to the side of the higher sand ridges when sailing over the banks: “[W]hen the ebb has run out and the flood begins, the channel is fed by two currents flowing to the centre and meeting in the middle” (143-4). Davies’s observation of the watershed during periods of ebb and flow explains the Wadden Sea’s underwater topo- graphy. Aided by Davies’s maritime knowledge, Charles Carruthers then uncovers the usage of navigational channels by the local population, as the Frisians employ these waterways connecting the outer islands to the mainland coast. Furthermore, these chan- nels appear to end in so-called siels, the German word for “sluice.” When Carruthers locates seven corkscrew streams running to seven different sluices on the map, a mys- tery unfolds: “But it arrested my attention now because it looked more prominent than I should have expected. Charts are apt to ignore the geography of the mainland, except in so far as it offers sea-marks to mariners. [...] On the ordnance map it was marked with a dark blue line, was labelled ‘Benser Tief’” (328). The German tief corresponds to a na- vigational canal created by a sluice (for their deep waters) and constitutes the prolonga- tion of the maritime route inland. A total of seven siel-towns dot the Frisian coast, and form the “sevenfold system.” Each of the seven port towns provides a sluice so that navigation is guaranteed in “passing from the interior to the islands” (329). In addition, the towns have direct railway links to Bremen and Hamburg, located further inland. The two amateur yachters’ unravelling of the seven siels already represents no mean topographical feat in itself as their “geography was clear now” (273). Nonetheless, their private undercover work on East Frisia’s unique topography produces a non-negligible side effect: the suspicion of sinister German activities. The young yachters’ suspicion is aroused when Davies is almost wrecked in rough waters by a ship driven by the double agent Dollmann at the beginning of the novel. The incident initially leads the sailor to ask his college friend to join him, as Davies has suspected covert German activities for a long time. Their suspicion is confirmed when both Davies and Carruthers now uncover the mastermind behind the plot: “[H]e’s an Englishman in German service. He must be in German service, for he had evidently been in those waters a long time, and knew every inch of them” (104). The fact that “that chap was a spy” (97) does not deter Carruthers and Davies from starting their own espionage on the secret German operation. The result is a double espionage, as Herr Dollmann (his first name is never given in the novel) spies on the English, and the protagonists track down the Germans. The singular topography of the Wadden Sea lies at the centre of the German plot, a plot discovered by Davies and Carruthers when secretly listening to Böhme. The latter classifies the seven sluices from A to G in order to organise the invasion of the English shores “from the seven shallow outlets” (355). Through the sluices and then the channels, the Germans are able to invade England using the most sophisticated topographical features of the “daring scheme, under which every advantage, moral, material, and geographical, possessed by Germany, is utilized to the utmost, and every disadvantage of our own turned to account against 105 The Spatial Turn of Geography during the Edwardian Era us” (374). The geo-political dimension becomes evident when multitudes of seagoing lighters carrying full loads of soldiers in seven ordered fleets from seven shallow outlets and, under the escort of the German Imperial Navy, intend to cross the Sea to invade the eastern shore of England. The Riddle of the Sands synthesizes private and national espionage into a topography of constantly shifting sands, an area far from being a stable space, and repeatedly being displaced as the narrative unfolds. The geographical space of East Frisia embodies the real protagonist in the novel and acts, to use Simmel’s words, as the “outer and inner stimuli” (9). The dialogue of both “impressions” stimulates the protagonists in solving the riddle. The novel furthermore highlights what Klaus Dodds describes as “the power of agents and organizations to write over space, to occupy space, to organize space, and to create places invested with particular visions and projects” (5). Childer’s story is believed to have influenced Winston Churchill’s national and international geo-politics, and played a substantial role in the establishment of the Secret Service Bureau in 1909.16 The narrative sets a pattern for future spy thrillers as well, in that the novel combines the sub-genres of adventure novel and invasion story to create a modern spy mystery. Lastly, the Riddle corresponds to a literature located in geography as the geographical spaces shape storyline and characters alike.
Fiction Inspired by Geography Our final example concerns geographically inspired fiction for which Forster, one of the most prolific Edwardian novelists, is a good example.17 The author portrays the changing face of England’s spaces in an unprecedented fashion. From the Salisbury plains in The Longest Journey (1907), the counties of Hertfordshire and Shropshire in Howards End (1910), Cambridge and Somerset in Maurice (1913) to the Downs in A Room With a View (1908),18 Forster depicts a typical English countryside. The depictions of these landscapes are not entirely rural though. They are the result of mutual inter- actions between the city and the country. A prime example of the author’s dialectical relationship of city and country remains Howards End. As the title suggests, Howards End (1910) focuses on one specific place, notably Howards End. The fictive place in Hertfordshire figures as the theatrical scene where the lives of two families collide. The bourgeois Wilcoxes made their fortunes profiting from the Empire’s trade relations. The German Schlegels represent the intellectual opposite through their embracing of liberal ideas. Matters become complicated when Helen Schlegel falls in love with Paul Wilcox, and when his mother, Mrs. Wilcox, dies leaving the estate to Margarete Schlegel. Mrs. Wilcox’s attempt to bar her son’s right of inheritance provokes Paul’s outrage. Her decision though stems from Margarete’s love for the place, namely Howards End. While most contemporary critics focus on the contrasting families – David Bradshaw, for instance, writes: “All of Forster’s novels are
16. Additional information can be found in Ned Halley’s “Afterword” to Childers’s cited edi- tion, 385-95. 17. Due to the relative brevity of the article, the analysis will be focused on Forster. Other important Edwardian literary productions include Walter Besant’s The Fascination of London and F. M. Ford’s The Soul of London (1905), Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907). 18. Our study takes under consideration the second part of the novel as the first is mainly set in Tuscany. 106
structured around contrasts, [...] and they also entrain for his idiosyncratic sphere of antitheses: North versus South; suburbia versus the country; the country versus the city [...]” (4) – the novel gravitates around Howards End. Howards End is not just another literary setting; it symbolizes a geographical locus that connects much more than two families: The station for Howards End was at Hilton, one of the large villages that are strung so frequently along the North Road, and that owe their size to the traffic of coaching and pre-coaching days. Being near London, it had not shared in the rural decay, and its long High Street had budded out right and left into residential estates. [...] Beyond these tumuli habitations thickened, and the train came to a standstill in a tangle that was almost a town. The station, like the scenery, like Helen’s letters, struck an indeterminate note. Into which country will it lead, England or Suburbia? (123) The opposition between the urban and the rural disappears at Howards End, since the place bridges the gap between the city and the country. The speed with which the train connects Hilton with the city shortens the distance between the country and London as “the train sped northward, under innumerable tunnels” (12). The high-speed connec- tion enhances the synergy between the capital and Howards End in what appears to be a novelty for Hilton: “It was new, it had island platforms and a subway” (13). Forster establishes a connection not only between the city and the country, but also between the various parts of London itself through character depiction. Leonard Bast, coming from the lower-middle class, serves as an example here: “Leonard hurried through her [London] tinted corridors, very much part of the picture. His was a gray life” (104). In contrast to the Schlegels, who reside in the posh and upscale Wickham Place of central London, Leonard lives in the poor southern fringes of the town: “The habit was analogous to a debauch, an outlet, though the worst of outlets” (104). Through a rather complicated turn of events, Leonard loses his job as a clerk. Helen, flying to his help, has an affair with Leonard and becomes pregnant. A love relationship connecting not only different social classes but also metropolitan spaces is the consequence. The narration intertwines urban and suburban spaces through character portrayal, making them dependent on one another. Suburbia, however, is not reduced to London alone, as the rhetorical question in the above passage suggests. Howards End is the countryside which virtually becomes suburban. Even if Howards End “is one of those converted farms,” (115), “the neighbourhood’s getting suburban. Either be in London or out of it, I say” (115). Insisting on the place’s residential allure, Paul Wilcox imagines Howards End to be London. Howards End thus connects with London, and London re-connects with Hertfordshire in what evolves as a metaphorical (sub)urban space. These literary spaces reflect Edwardian trends, in that London epitomizes the rapidly changing metropolis around the turn of the last century. The “precious soil of London” (Forster 6) soon emerges as the author’s favoured landscape: “To speak against London is no longer fashionable. The earth as an artistic cult has had its day, and the literature of the near future will probably ignore the country and seek inspiration from the town” (92). Certainly “London fascinates” (92) as “London was beginning to illuminate her- self against the night. Electric lights sizzled and jagged in the main thoroughfares, gas lamps in the side-streets glimmered a canary gold or green” (104). Impressions such as the electric light and the gas lamps recall Simmel’s “psychological conditions which the metropolis creates” (9). Forster’s novel underlines these psychological conditions, em- 107 The Spatial Turn of Geography during the Edwardian Era phasizing the ways in which the London metropolis enhances consciousness, something which is not possible in a rural context. In Howards End, Forster dialectically combines the antitheses of city and country, of the urban and the suburban, to elevate settings into the realm of geographically- inspired spaces. The synthesis of both, Howards End and London, creates a spatial aura representative of Edwardianism as human geographies (the suburban expansion, railway travel, population growth) merge with the physical landforms of Hertfordshire, Shropshire and London, foreshadowing modernist trends, in which the city will become the literary locality, notably in Virginia Woolf’s oeuvre. Forster writes that Howards End is “enlarging the space” (160). More than just enlarging the sense of space, geographies turn spatial during the Edwardian years. The relative brevity of the era should, therefore, be no excuse for an absence of awareness of the geo-critical spaces it invents, transforms and displaces. After all, geo-morpho- logical features, meteorological phenomena, human developments, geo-political impli- cations and literary depictions mirror renewed conceptions and perceptions of spaces. These Edwardian spaces laid the foundations for pioneering apprehensions of geogra- phy, which subsequently influenced later Modernist understandings of an ever-chan- ging geographical world. Hence, geography’s spatial turn during the Edwardian era ful- filled a pertinent function in guaranteeing the link between the Victorian and Modernist periods.
Andreas pichler Aix Marseille University
W orks Cited
BaGnOlD, Ralph Alger. “Journeys in the Libyan Desert, 1929 and 1930.” The Geographical Journal 78.1 (1931): 13-39. Barker, Felix. Edwardian London. London: Laurence King, 1995. BraDshaw, David. The Cambridge Companion to E. M. Forster. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. BrOOker, Peter, and Andrew thacker, eds. Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces. Oxon: Routledge, 2005. BulsOn, Eric. Novels, Maps, Modernity: The Spatial Imagination, 1850-2000. London: Routledge, 2006. chilDers, Erskine. The Riddle of the Sands. 1903. London: Collector’s Library, 2008. cOllOt, Michel. Pour une géographie littéraire. Paris: Editions Corti, 2014. DODDs, Klaus. Geopolitics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014. Dünne, Jorg, and Stephan Günzel. Raumtheorie: Grundlagentexte aus Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006. fOrster, Edward Morgan. Howards End. 1910. London: Penguin, 2000. —. The Longest Journey. 1907. London: Penguin, 2007. —. A Room With a View. 1908. London: Penguin, 2011. —. Maurice. 1971. London: Penguin, 2005. freeman, Nicholas. Conceiving the City: London, Literature, and Art 1870-1914. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. herBertsOn, Andrew John. “The Major Natural Regions: An Essay in Systematic Geography.” The Geographical Journal 25.3 (March 1905): 300-10. —. Man and His Work: An Introduction to Human Geography. London: Adam & Charles Black, 1899. humBOlDt, Alexander von. Schriften zur Geographie der Pflanzen. 1805. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987. kemp, Sandra, Charlotte mitchell, and David trOtter, eds. The Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. lOnDOn cOunty cOuncil. London Statistics 1915-20. Vol. 26. London County Hall, Spring Gardens: 1921. 108
mackinDer, Halford J. “The Geographical Pivot of History.” The Geographical Journal 23.4 (April 1904): 421-37. miGhall, Robert. A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. mOretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900. London: Verso, 1998. naylOr, Simon. Regionalizing Science: Placing Knowledge in Victorian England. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010. reich, Emil. Foundations of Modern Europe: Twelve Lectures Delivered in the University of London, 1904. London: George Bell & Sons, 1904. saunDers, Max. “Ford, the City, Impressionism and Modernism.” Ford Madox Ford and the City. Ed. Sarah Haslam. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. 67-80. seeD, David. “Spy fiction.”The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Ed. Martin Priestman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 115-34. simmel, Georg. Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben. 1903. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006. thacker, Andrew. Moving through Modernity. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003. turner, David. Victorian and Edwardian Railway Travel. London: Shire, 2013. westphal, Bertrand. Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces. Trans. Robert T. Tally, Jr. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Trans. of La Géocritique: Réel, Fiction, Espace. Paris: Minuit, 2007. whittOw, John B. Dictionary of Physical Geography. London: Penguin, 2000. wOODwarD, Horace B. History of Geology. London: Watts, 1911.
Websites
List of Illustrations Figure 1: Geological Map of Great Britain by Horace B. Woodward. London: Stanford, 1912. Figure 2: Population of the “Central Area,” the County of London, and Greater London, 1801-1921, London County Council 1921. Figure 3: Chart of Juist, Memmert and part of Norderney. Erskine Childers. The Riddle of the Sands. London: Collector’s Library, 2008. 262-3. The Novel in Post-Colonial Literatures: Re-Mapping the Genre
This essay looks into some of the ways in which post-colonial writers have addressed the Euro-centric canon of the British novel. Although most of them became familiar with it in the course of their school education, they have often de-centered the canon in order to propose a new cartography of the genre, thus endowing it with new impetus. After highlighting the role of intertextuality and hybridisation in post-colonial texts, our attention will return to generic hybridity. This will lead us to wonder whether the post-colonial novel can itself be viewed as a new literary canon.
That the origins of the novel are to be found in Europe has now been accepted as self-evident. Marthe Robert’s illuminating study in Origins of the Novel (1976), or Ian Watt’s enlightening analysis in The Rise of the Novel (1957) are among the basic critical texts on the subject. If it is widely accepted that the English novelistic genre is rooted in the picaresque tradition and that it continually expanded throughout the eighteenth century, one cannot but acknowledge that its expansion also corresponds, in a way, to the development of British imperialistic longings,1 a fact which Edward Said explains at length in Orientalism.2 Although it was instrumental in passing on Victorian and impe- rialistic values, the novelistic genre has also clearly been a space devoted to expressing freedom. “As a yet ill-defined genre, likely to induce multiple changes ranging from the adventure novel to the romance, from the epistolary novel to the Bildungsroman, this flexible form can mostly be defined by the fact that it rejects any rule and constraint: it is a place of complete freedom for the novelist,” writes Florence Bancaud-Maënen (Bancaud-Maënen 19-20, translation mine).3 Yet, although the genre was radically questioned and challenged after WWII, not only did it endure, but it also emerged as more powerful, and has come to enjoy a true revival in recent years. The contribution of post-colonial literatures played no small role in this4 as, for instance, illustrated by the stormy relationship that V.S. Naipaul main- tained with the novelistic genre, at times decrying it before finally designing it anew, curbing the genre to his own purposes and claiming it as one of his favourite means of expression.5 And yet, here lies a paradox: most post-colonial writers, nourished by the literary (and novelistic) British canon6 during their formative years in the British colonies (or
1. “Yet, the eighteenth century holds a crucial place in the history of the novel. This genre hallows the fact that ancient forms were abandoned – forms such as the heroic epic genre, the genres of the sermon, of the pastoral, of eulogy or of the exemplary story, and it marks the coming of age of prose writings” (Bancaud-Maënen 9, translation mine). See also Cervantes & Dachez. 2. See Said in Orientalism.This has also been highlighted in Clavaron 3. 3. See also Cervantes & Dachez 139-44: “Concerning this issue, if that period truly marks the emergence of the novel, […] it would be a mistake to believe that novel-writers followed well-established rules. This genre in the making was in fact in the process of evolving and it was constantly seeking a new definition, a situation which gave the writers the opportunity to carry out different literary experiments.” (Translation mine) 4. See Grieve & Cachin 7 and 48. 5. See Labaune-Demeule, V.S. Naipaul 123-52. 6. Nirmala Menon, quoting from the Oxford English Dictionary, reminds us of the definition of what a literary canon is: “The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines the noun ‘canon’ as a body of literary works traditionally regarded 110
former British colonies) often used the literary canon and the novel as a means of expressing their own contestation and even rebellion.7 To do this, they relied on sev- eral specific methods, which this paper proposes to examine with the aim of showing that by revisiting the novelistic genre post-colonial literatures have also de-centered the canon and have proposed a new cartography of the genre, re-mapping it and giving it a new impetus.
Post-Colonial Literatures and the British Literary Canon: The Role of Intertextuality and Hybridisation As several critics have pointed out, most post-colonial writers (particularly those belon- ging to the first generation of writers) were educated in the British colonial education system, notably by religious mission schools. The British literary canon offered them spiritual and literary knowledge (depending on various local contexts), and led them to master a language which had often initially been viewed as the language of the colonizer – “the language of the Master” in K. Ramchand’s words. So, many of the first post-colonial texts aimed at denoucing the European canon – by speaking out against “Western models which had been imported, and which they try to repudiate, to revise, or both at the same time, in order to invent a new literay norm” (Claveron 71, translation mine). Among the most frequently used stylistic devices, irony, satire, or the grotesque have often been highlighted. This can, for instance, be illustrated in some of V.S. Naipaul’s first short stories published in Miguel Street. In “His Chosen Calling,” Naipaul introduces a character – Elias – who thinks that Cambridge is some- body’s name (“Mr. Cambridge”).8 Naipaul also uses the same device by highlighting the cultural and social gap separating Britain and the Caribbean in A House for Mr Biswas, when Mohun Biswas wants to acquire some professional training in the field of jour- nalism, or even later in Half A Life where Naipaul denounces, in a very satirical way, how literature was taught in colonial India, the great romantic poet Wordsworth being reduced to a mere meaningless initial – W. Moreover, the British canon has often been challenged in post-colonial novels by a particular use of the English language, often peppered with dialects and local idiosyn- crasies: many writers, like Sam Selvon, for instance, or Edwidge Danticat, who belongs to another generation of writers, have used dialect in their novels; others have relied on the use of more local sub-genres, like that of the calypso, as Naipaul did in Miguel Street. Other writers, such as Edward Kamau Brathwaite in “Nation language,” have mixed up African rhythms and words in their texts not really to give them more local colour, but to convey the truth of experience.9 So the English language, enriched with contextual
as the most important, significant and worthy of study, those works esp. Western literature considered to the established as being of the highest quality and most enduring value. […] The OED also records the changes in and expansion of the meaning of the word ‘canon’ brought about by intellectual debates, specifically those of feminist and postmodernist disciplines. Thus, a 1992 supplement to the definition of ‘canon’ is: ‘A body of work considered to be established as the most important or significant in a particular field’Oxford ( English Dictionary Online).” (Menon 218-31) 7. The title of Bill Ascroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin’s now very famous book, The Empire Writes Back bears testimony to that. See also Clavaron 69: “Post-colonial literatures, which are multicultural by essence, are part of an antagonistic framework addressing the European or Western canon, which they repudiate while appropriating it.” (Translation mine) 8. See “His Chosen Calling” in naipaul’s Miguel Street 25-32. 9. “One may […] think of Kamau Brathwaite’s History of the Voice (1979) and his reminder that ‘the hurricane does not roar in pentameter,’ noting the iappropriateness of Western forms to Caribbean self-expression […]” (Schabio 49). 111 The Novel in Post-Colonial Literatures: Re-Mapping the Genre and local features, could resonate with the numerous sounds of diverse cultures. If that has been particularly true of poetry, the same thing can be said of post-colonial novels. While some of Walcott’s poems, like “Sainte Lucie,” in which lists of names resonate as prayer-like evocations and linguistic celebrations of Caribbean places, post-colonial novels also introduce local elements which contribute to asserting their own individual identity. For Walcott, as for many writers, these local names which are inlaid in texts like jewels do not only aim at documenting some form of local existence. They also testify to the writers’ desire to claim, through the synchronic use of the language, the past dia- chronic use of a language which has helped the new generations to create, or recreate, the opacity of a negated cultural past. The language thus appropriated regenerates and sows new, hybrid seeds in a mixed and shared cultural land(scape) again, which imperia- lism had eroded and erased through colonisation. For some writers, choosing certain lo- cal words helps them root their discourse in the local culture. The discrepancy between the meanings of a word used by a particular character then becomes highly significant. For instance, when Antoinette Cosway, in Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea, calls the summer house “the ajoupa,” (52) she refers to what she deems to be the exact reality of the islands. Her choice of the local idiom highlights the fact that Antoinette cannot be dissociated from her local background. On the contrary, when her English husband keeps using the English expression,10 he emphasizes his Englishman’s (or foreigner’s) vision of the place, insisting on their already divergent points of view. This technique is also very frequently used in anglophone Indian novels, for instance, which propose a glossary of Indian words to help the readers find their way through the maze of often unknown local terms. However, the British literary canon in general, and the British novel in particular, have also often served as a bedrock for post-colonial literatures to build on in the form of palimpsests.11 The most significant illustration of this can also be found in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, where the revision of the madwoman’s portrait drawn in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is analysed in a new light. Rhys’s novel truly invalidates the simplistic, stereotypical and prejudiced Victorian vision according to which White Caribbean women were lunatics. In Rhys’s novel, the revision becomes particularly meaningful because of the innovative introduction of multiple narrative voices which blur identification and contrast with Jane’s narrative. Revision does not only consist in portraying the main character in a new light, nor does it only rely on the introduction of a subversive temporal pattern, Rhys’s posterior novel being actually written as a prequel to Brontë’s. Revision is expressed through a much subtler narrative pattern and the use of stylistic devices which recall Brontë’s style, but for a different purpose – to invalidate Brontë’s Victorian vision while paying homage to her style.12 Similarly, a more recent novel by David Dabydeen, A Harlot’s Progress (1999) revisits Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders while building upon the eponymous series of engravings by William Hogarth. Again perception has been displaced – and even doubly so – as nar- ration is placed in the hands of Mr. Pringle who writes down old Mungo’s confessions,
10. “Every evening we saw the sun go down from the thatched shelter she called the ajoupa, I [sic] the summer house.” A footnote in the Norton Edition of Wide Sargasso Sea tells us that ajoupa is “a Carib word referring to an Ame- rindian-type hut with wattle-and-daub walls and a thatched roof.” (Footnote 6, Rhys 52) 11. See Genette’s Palimpsestes. 12. See for instance Delourme 262. 112
while the latter also expresses his own point of view directly to the reader. The reader thus follows Mungo’s story as well as Moll’s. The character’s age and his trials and tribu- lations echo Moll Flanders’s, but they also introduce a new point of view – that of the young boy servant to be seen in the engravings of Hogarth who has now become an old man. Vision has then been displaced, “de-centered” if compared to the one introduced in both the literary and visual eighteenth-century works of art mentioned. In a different although very efficient way, Derek Walcott’s production also feeds on the novelistic literary canon. Although Walcott priviledges poetry as a form of expres- sion, he also uses the literary canon as the bedrock of creation, for instance when he models his castaway character on Defoe’s hero Robinson Crusoe. For Walcott, intertex- tuality takes the form of rewriting from similar material in a different genre. For him then intertextuality becomes another sign of cultural métissage which is almost as deeply ingrained in him and as vital to him as the mixed blood flowing in his veins. 13 Such generic and literary métissage, or hybridity, explains why the character of Ro- binson Crusoe and that of the new American Adam – which are further illustrations of the author’s multiple cultural allegiances – can be combined. In Walcott’s poetry, Crusoe, the main character in what Walcott deems to be the first Caribbean novel, can be associated with the image of the man moulded out of clay, the first Adam the poet represents in his own New World of Caribbean creation. So this leads us to observe that the way in which the British cultural or literary canon has been used over time in post-colonial literatures has changed greatly and that the British canon has not only been questioned by post-colonial writers, but that it has been used as some form of substrate from which post-colonial differences could be voiced, mostly through a process of hybridisation: it has generated literary hybridisation, which has also fostered a new hybridity of genres.
Post-colonial Texts, or the Hybridity of Genres The hybridisation process of the novelistic genre within the context of post-colonial li- teratures relies on several factors and varies in nature and intensity. As suggested above, many stylistic devices or literary genres can be mixed or fused within the novelistic genre. Post-colonial novels are indeed characterized by their hybridity and the use of devices like magic realism,14 which is probably one of the hallmarks of post-colonial hybridity. Indeed, although “the word ‘hybridity’ has its origins in biology and botany,” in the twentieth century it “extended beyond the biological and racial framework to embrace linguistic and cultural areas” (Guignery 2). Still later, in response to Homi Bhabha’s influential thought, “postcolonial theory adopted the idea of hybridity to designate the transcultural forms that resulted from linguistic, political or ethnic intermixing, and to challenge the existing hierarchies, polarities, binarisms and symmetries […]. Hybridity stands in opposition to the myth of purity and racial and cultural authenticity, of fixed
13. One can recall his famous poem entitled “A Far Cry from Africa,” in which he expresses his despair at having to choose between the two cultures which he is part of (see Walcott 18). 14. “The magical realism of the Latin Americans influences Indian-language writers in India today. The rich, folk- tale quality of a novel like Sandro of Chegem, by the Muslim Russian Fazil Iskander, finds its parallels in the work – for instance – of the Nigerian, Amos Tutuola, or even Cervantes. It is possible, I think, to begin to theorize common factors between writers from these societies – poor countries, or deprived minorities in powerful countries – and to say that much of what is new in world literature comes from this group.” (Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands 68-9) On hybridity, see also Brah & Coombes, Kraidy, or Prabhu. 113 The Novel in Post-Colonial Literatures: Re-Mapping the Genre and essentialist identity, embraces blending, combining, syncretism and encourages the composite, the impure, the heterogeneous and the eclectic” (Guignery 3). This is illus- trated by Rushdie’s narratives, which frequently mix tales typical of Eastern cultures with other genres, including the novel, in what often results in very jubilant composi- tion. The mixing of highly elaborate literary passages with more oral ones, or with the fantastic or magic is characteristic of Rushdie’s writing. Indeed, for Rushdie hybridity is the mirror of the disjunctions and fractures produced by displacement and uproot- edness. Hybridity also offers a conjoint expression of different cultural points of view anchored in different traditions that the post-colonial writer’s stereotypical vision can express (Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands 19). Thus, in Midnight’s Children, Saleem Sinai is described as the embodiment of a multitude of people from different generations, dis- playing a multitude of experiences. Being the narrator of the novel, he becomes their unique but universal voice: And there are so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumours, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you’ll have to swallow that lot as well. Consumed multitudes are jostling and shoving inside me […]. (Rushdie, Midnight’s Children 9) Midnight’s Children, which stands half-way between the genre of the Eastern tale based on the Eastern oral tradition on the one hand, and the Western novelistic literary tradi- tion on the other hand, relies on magic realism and hybridity as elements which make stylistic devices melt and fuse in a literary crucible thanks to imagination and fantasy (Grant 33). For Rushdie, if “Indian tradition has always been, and still is, a mixed tra- dition, […] the nature of Indian tradition has always been multiplicity and plurality and mingling” (Rushdie qtd. in Goonetilleke 45). At the same time, he has also said that he wasreatly influenced by many European writers.15 This therefore translates in his books through the mingling of forms and genres. Yet the hybridisation of genres can follow different paths in other circumstances. Thus, in her novel Mistress, Anita Nair relies on the traditional devices of the Western realistic novel when dealing with the ordinary life of the Shyam/Radha couple threa- tened by adultery, or when Radha’s uncle Koman intervenes in their life. But onto this rather trivial plot of a love triangle, Nair superimposes a double narrative technique typical of the Indian and Keralese artistic traditions: the genres of the tale of origins and of the Indian epic act as basic elements in all the sections devoted to Koman’s quest for origins, since he is a remarkable kathakali performer. Then, narrative hybridity is created by the intertwined use of both genres and their stylistic devices. The narrative is also constructed around the traditional architecture of kathakali performances, around the navarasas, the nine basic emotions expressed in kathakali. Each one is described in a different chapter, each chapter following the traditional order in which these emotions are performed on stage in kathakali dances. Each chapter also obeys the traditional
15. “He continued to tap the same rich vein and became aware of his true position as a writer. In one way, he allied himself to the non-realist, alternative tradition in Western fiction – Cervantes, Rabelais, Sterne, Swift, Melville, Gogol, Joyce, Günter Grass, Borges, Garcia Maquez. He said: ‘In almost every country and in almost every literature there has been, every so often, an outburst of this large-scale fantasized, satiric, anti-epic tradition, whether it was Rabelais or Gogol or Boccacio… That simply was the literature I liked to read. So it seemed to me that it was also the literature that I would like to write.’” (Goonetilleke 17) 114
structure to be found in kathakali, with sloka and padams.16 Hybridisation is not only thematic, but also profoundly structural. Hybridisation can also be found in the form of the mixing of different narrative genres within the frame of the novel. Thus, Fred D’Aguiar’s novel The Longest Memory does not obey one unique narrative and generic design although narrative unity is achie- ved through the use of first-person narration throughout. This apparent unity conceals a multitude of narrative I-s expressing themselves in different chapters, thus enabling these I-s to voice their own form of subjectivity. Therefore this technique generates a strong impression of polyphony, the characters’ spoken discourses being mixed with their thoughts, and each first-person narrative voice quickly following another one (even conflating into the other one). This polyphony is strengthened by the useof various literary genres in different chapters: poetry expresses Chapel’s point of view since he is a young utopian poet, while newspaper editorials from The Virginian act like testimonies from the past, transmitting the values of the slave society. Diary entries also convey the racist values of the former manager (Sanders Senior) through his writing. Although these devices showcase the subjectivity of the characters, they also highlight the disruptions between the characters’ values, just as they finally allow the reader to constantly re-evaluate slavery and its context. The resurgence of different genres and voices perceptible through the hybridisation of narration is an efficient means of oppo- sing the cultural erasure that hegemonic cultures imposed on allegedly weaker cultures. Here again we find one of the major aims of post-colonial literatures – denouncing past horrors and condemnable values and attitudes. In other post-colonial novels, the hybridisation of genres can also be linked to the use of autofiction and the introduction of particular relationships between the text and images – either photographs or paintings. Visual arts and genres can therefore affect the novelistic genre and lead to more generic hybridity. Thus, in The Enigma of Arrival, V.S. Naipaul explains that he found inspiration to write the novel from seeing reproductions of paintings by De Chirico in a small book. What is essential to him is to show how the main character’s relationships to the pictures evolve and how his various narrative drafts are gradually expanded upon and transformed into the final novel which, at first sight, has little in common with De Chirico’s paintings. De Chirico’s “Enigma of Arrival” is a source of inspiration in terms of plot but also because it introduces a new metaphysical perception and requires a constant repositioning of the viewer, a technique that Naipaul reproduces for the reader, who has to understand the performative and anamorphotic value of the narrative (cf. Labaune-Demeule, V.S. Naipaul). Though it is couched in different terms, Jamaica Kincaid’s novel The Autobiography of My Mother comes close to that experience. Here, the hybridisation process is less perceptible and is more double-sided. First, the genre of the autobiography fuses with that of the novel, which is not surprising in itself since post-colonial writers often priviledge this genre as a way of exploring the primeval self.17 In her quest for origins and self-knowledge, the young Caribbean girl named Xuela tells us of her life, which
16. In addition to P. Zarilli’s seminal analysis, see Labaune-Demeule “Anita Nair’s Aesthetics of Hybridity: Mistress as Narrative Kathakali.” 17. “Autobiography is a form that allows the individual to tease out his or her genealogical complexity and as a result to better understand him or herself. Race and ethnicity are always a point of focus in coming to terms with the notion of identity, and in this region where people’s racial and ethnic makeup is typically multi-layered, they become especially crucial.” (Pouchet-Paquet qtd. in Adams 11) 115 The Novel in Post-Colonial Literatures: Re-Mapping the Genre seems to run parallel to her mother’s own life – a mother whose name had been given to the young girl, and who had died in childbirth. By weaving together young Xuela’s first-person narrative of her own life, and what she can learn about her mother’s life as well as the life of other people living close to her, young Xuela manages to create her- self, to get some form of personal identity, while she recreates her own past and learns about her mother’s life. Such a purpose can be achieved only through the genre of the autobiography, a genre which proved essential to J. Kincaid herself:18 [T]here is no reason for me to be a writer without autobiography […] For me [writing] was really an act of saving my life, so it had to be autobiographical. I am someone who had to make sense out of my past. (Kincaid qtd. in Ferguson 10) However, autobiography does not encourage distancing, unlike the novel which facili- tates the objectification of the self and, beyond that, the objectification of reality itself. The somewhat hybrid genre of autofiction enables writers to stand half-way between subjectivity and objectivity while using auto- or homo-diegetic narration. Autofiction, as defined by Serge Doubrovsky, gives a writer the opportunity to get more distance from facts and self than autobiography. As Claude Burgelin also explains being able to place one’s past and personal history at a distance enables one to reappropriate one’s past (54). Both the time scheme of experience and the time scheme of discourse can be fused together. This is exactly what happens with Jamaica Kincaid’s novel, as is ex- plicitly metaphorised by the photograph that can be observed on the book cover. The photograph, which is totally fragmented at the beginning of the narrative, is gradually re-composed as Xuela’s identity quest reaches its final aim. The portrait of the unknown mother can be gradually reconstituted as young Xuela’s quest progresses to more self- knowledge. The mother’s recomposed portrait finally proposes to the reader a portrait of Xuela herself. At the end of the narrative, all the pieces in the jigsaw puzzle of the photograph have fallen into place, and Xuela realizes that she has finally found the meaning of her life: This account of my life has been an account of my mother’s life as much as it has been an account of mine, and even so, again, it is an account of the life of the children I did not have, as it is their account of me. (Kincaid 227) Autofiction, therefore, helps writers to blur the limits between the I-narrator and the multiple – though partial – representations of the I-character that the narrative reflects back to her/him. Autofiction becomes the place where hydridisation occurs, affecting a genre and a voice. This, in fact, echoes what C. Burgelin means when he calls autofiction a “bastardized genre, which relies on mixing and compromise” (5).19 The paradox to be found in Jamaica Kincaid’s title, The Autobiography of My Mother, then becomes transpa- rent to the reader: the autobiography of Xuela, which is an autodiegetic narrative, is also her mother’s autobiography, just as it is the autobiographies of all those Xuelas who shared the same fate as hers. The autobiography, which is a genre in which narrated and narrating I-s20 fuse, gradually becomes an autofiction, that hybrid genre that was genera-
18. Pouchet-Paquet qtd. in Adams 11. 19. C. Burgelin adds that the notion of autofiction, though ill-defined, can be extended to suit different aims, that the frontiers it shares with the autobiographical novel are blurred, and that autofiction is, today, submitted to a similar bastardisation process as that which had characterised the novel in the past, being also based on a similar process of métissage (6-8). 20. This is used to refer to Gérard Genette’s twofold concept of the narrated I and the narrating I. 116
ted by the métissage of the novelistic and autobiographical genres. The photograph is the representation of a both unique and multiple-faced woman, in a form of virtual reality described in the autofiction.I is also a double-sided she (both mother and daughter), and a they, representing all these women with similar fates. So, faced with such deep changes within the canonical British novel, one can wonder whether post-colonial writers are not redefining the boundaries of the novel.
Re-Mapping the Genre: The Post-Colonial Novel as a New Literary Canon?21 Because it is a flexible and adaptable genre, the novel has undergone profound changes over time. It appears to be a privileged space of hybridisation. The first sign of displa- cement or dis-location of the canonical genre can be seen in the shifting of the genre from the metropolitan centres to the colonial and post-colonial margins. By taking hold of this typically metropolitan genre, post-colonial writers have de-centered it, rejecting the Eurocentrism that characterized it at first in order to transform it from within, by giving the genre some of their own characteristics by intertwining and mixing local devices and specificities in its original patterns. If the first post-colonial novels often strongly contested a Eurocentric and colonialist vision of the world, post-colonial wri- ters have later insisted on the need to make the genre more dynamic again as it had become a deeply contested form even in Europe after WWII. It has now become the means to convey more, sometimes hard-won, freedom, as Pascale Casanova writes in La République des Lettres.22 The term arrachement (uprooting) used by Casanova obviously recalls the concept of root-like identity developed by Deleuze and Guattari as well as by E. Glissant in the Caribbean.23 However, the malleable nature of the novelistic form also evokes the more significant image of the rhizome, thus describing how post-colo - nial literatures are transforming the novelistic genre by following a horizontal pattern this time. The rhizome can indeed be viewed as the physical expression of a desire to de-territorialize, as opposed to the root concept, evoking a plant that is firmly set in the ground. In an analogous way, post-colonial literatures strive to de-territorialize the novel to “de-Europeanise” it, as it were, by giving it multiple features. And the rhizome is also the a place, and as such, post-colonial literature truly wants its expression of a desire to re-territorialize subject to re-territorialize the novelistic genre: In a book as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialisation and destratification. […] A first type of book is the root-book. […] This is the classical book, asnoble, signifying and subjective organic interiority (the strata of the book). […] A rhizome
21. This has recently emerged as a major preoccupation: “In the field of post-colonial studies questions of sub- version, parody, and mimesis have predominated over other aspects of aesthetic form. It is high time to attempt to explore wider dimensions of a postcolonial aesthetics, a main aspect of which being specificities of genric evolution or emergence.” (Goebel & Schabio 1) 22. “Post-colonial literature will gradually invent itself, while slowly uprooting itself from its ‘political duty’: first obliged to serve, through language, ‘national’ (that is, political or state-level) purposes, writers are gradually creating the conditions of their own literary freedom through the invention of specific literary languages.” (Casanova 70, translation mine) 23. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari explain that one can conceive of books as pertaining to two major categories: that of the root-like book and that of the rhizome-like book. The former reflects the organic interiority of the classical book, whereas the latter illustrates a more modern conception of books (11-2). The two categories reflect a fundamental dif- ference in systems of spatial representation between mere imitation, or mimesis which they compare to “decalcomania,” and symbolic mapping (9-20). 117 The Novel in Post-Colonial Literatures: Re-Mapping the Genre
as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. […] The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers. (Deleuze & Guattari 3-7) Deleuze and Guattari add that a rhizome includes segmentarity lines which territoria- lize and organize it, but that it also includes deterritorialising lines through which it can expand or spread (16). The principles that constitute a rhizome – the principle of connection and heterogeneity, the principle of multiplicity, the principle of a-signifying rupture, among others – are truly representative of what can be observed in the evo- lution of the post-colonial novel as a sub-genre. Yet Deleuze and Guattari have also developed another crucial concept – that of cartography, or mapping, which they asso- ciate with the rhizome image, since they consider that the principle of cartography also characterises the rhizome, and that as such the concept radically differs from mimesis, which they liken to a decalcomania. For Deleuze and Guattari, a map is a way of spa- tially materialising the rhizome; it helps connect different fields together, opens itself to the world, and can adapt to many different situations (20). G. Huggan also establishes a link between mapping and postcolonial literatures, and further explains: The map no longer features as a visual paradigm for the ontological anxiety arising from frustrated attempts to define a national culture, but rather as a locus of productive dissimilarity where the provisional connections of cartography suggest an ongoing perceptual transformation which in turn stresses the transitional nature of post- colonial discourse. This transformation has been placed within the context of a shift from an earlier “colonial space” to a later, “post-colonial” fiction which emphasizes the provisionality of all cultures and which celebrates the particular diversity of formerly colonized cultures […]. Thus […] the reassessment of cartography in many of their most recent literary texts indicates a shift of emphasis away from the desire for homogeneity towards an acceptance of diversity reflected in the interpretation of the map, not as a means of spatial containment or systematic organization, but as a medium of spatial perception which allows for the reformulation of links both within and between cultures. (356) Consequently, the post-colonial novel, as a sub-genre, appears very much today like a map which spreads and grows, tracing moving paths to appropriate new territories. V.S. Naipaul’s novel The Enigma of Arrival (1987) purposefully sets for itself the aim of drawing such a cartography or literary map – a vivid and shifting cartography of the almost elusive psychological state of the autodiegetic narrator-writer who stages himself as writing an autofiction which is nevertheless explicitly introduced by the author as a novel.24 This narrative can be viewed as a real and performative exercise in geographical and psychological cartography. Geographical mapping first, because the reader follows directly in the steps of the character who explores his new Wiltshire landscape, remembering the slightest topographical references of the character’s own ramblings in the Wiltshire downs, following in detail all of the protagonist’s mistakes and hesitations, his misunderstanding of certain scenes as well as his erroneous inter- pretations of the landscape or the revelations of which he becomes aware, the reader finally reaching the same understanding of the landscape as the character-narrator.
24. Naipaul’s novel is subtitled “A novel in five sections.” W. Goebel points out the uncertain generic nature of The Enigma of Arrival which he views as a form of heterobiography: “The Enigma of Arrival is perhaps Naipaul’s most complex autobiographical text. […] Naipaul’s entire world seems to open up into an egocentric kaleidoscope of lost possibilities and fractured existences, which could be called a heterobiography. The term alludes to the heterogeneity of texts and genres in his autobiographical fictions […].” (113, 115) 118
This long process leads to a new cartography of the place, to the drawing of a verbal map which comes to replace, probably in more efficient a way, what a traditional map would have offered. The narrative covers the periods of initiation and of appropria- tion of the new place. This process also involves the reader because, thanks to the performative aspect of the narrative, reader and narrator are always looking for new paths together following the narrative map of the novel. Like a rhizome, The Enigma of Arrival is a performative novel, a novel on the move, with offshoots reaching out for new horizons, new meanings. The rhizome and the map also allow for a new form of communication which conflicts with what the previous canonical systems had established. While canonical novels openly introduced the presence and authority of the narrator’s persona (whether auto-, homo-, or hetero-diegetic), the post-colonial novel tends to do away with classi- cal narrative positions, for instance by imposing silence as a means of communication between the instances at play in a novel – from implied author to reader. This, therefore, entails the displacement of canonical norms, the displacement of discourse, since dis- course is the very essence of the novel. By conferring a privileged position on silence, an implied author can displace one of the most characteristic devices of the canonical novel, both as a theme and as a radical means of questioning discourse. This is how Edwidge Danticat establishes a form of invisible cohesion between several, apparently disconnected short stories in her novel The Dew-Breaker. The short stories should not be conceived of as separate entities. It is their silent juxtaposition that gives meaning to the whole narrative. Speaking of “a poetics of fragmentation,” Mary Callagher notes: The Dew Breaker spans nine chapters, each shaped as an individual story, most of which were published as separate short stories and subsequently rewritten slightly for inclusion in the book. […] The structure raises many questions, but rather than asking how successful the book is as a novel; and to what extent it remains a collection of stand-alone units that create a sense more of dicontinuity than of consequential development of character or plot, readers find themselves searching for secret passages connecting the eponymous plot and the individual stories, even if the author might not seem to have provided enough keys to identfy the links. This hermeneutic shortfall opens up the meaning of the individual stories, the suspicion of a hidden continuity lending each story additional, if uncertain, depth. Moreover, the fragmentation of the book’s structure itself enacts the brokenness of the lives portrayed and performs the concealment, displacement, and disconnection that the book also configures thematically. (148) Mary Gallagher also analyses Danticat’s writing in terms of the poetics of fragmenta- tion and of resonance that is being created in the silent dialogue established between the short stories (Gallagher 157). We could even speak here of a poetics of silence, through which Danticat really suggests a particular interpretation, or a deciphering of the rhizome or, to take up Mary Gallagher’s own terms, a poetics according to which “[the novel] incites and rewards a reading open to the multiple, layered, if not concea- led, relations that it establishes on the levels of genre, language, narrative, text, theme, and plot” (Gallagher 160). Contrasting roots with itineraries, or routes is another way of addressing the root vs. rhizome dichotomy, since the word route opens new, dynamic perspectives, as many cri- tics have argued, from Edward Kamau Brathwaite to Edouard Glissant, and from Paul Gilroy to James Clifford. If post-colonial theory as a whole has famously engaged with 119 The Novel in Post-Colonial Literatures: Re-Mapping the Genre issues of globalisation, diaspora or the concept of transnation, it has also paid conside- rable attention to the current status of the post-colonial text.25 Some question the paradoxical situation of post-colonial literatures, the initial aim of which was to repudiate, or problematize, the Western literary canon. Today, post- colonial literatures seem to be ready to integrate the canon, to make it evolve and to leave it in the hands of Western publishers whose influence over their books seems crucial.26 Therefore, some post-colonial critics are skeptical about the evolution of the post-colonial novel. Others, like Nirmala Menon, question the very nature of what can be considered as the current post-colonial canon (Menon 218-31). This supposes a displacement of the very notion of the canon, insofar as post-colonial literature it- self – although its initial aim was to undermine inherited norms – has now, in its turn, become canonized.27 According to Nirmala Menon, the only way of restoring vigour and direction to this new post-colonial canon would be to rely on its linguistic impetus, and take into consideration not only those novels written in English, but also the novels written in vernacular languages since “post-colonial spaces are vast and multilingual, and no single language – whether English or French – can by itself be representative of the diversity of experiences and literay forms that emerge from these places” (Menon 224). The critic also perceives in the systematic selection of books written in English, some traces of a form of imperialism which contradict the traditional position of post- colonialism, and which could finally be viewed as the creation of a post-colonial hy - percanon.28 For Menon, being able to introduce readers to different literatures written in languages other than English would expose them to other forms and models, even if this requires translating these works into English.29 But what Nirmala Menon really highlights is the rhizomatic expansion of the canon when stating that “[t]he canon should expand outwardly, not converge inwardly” (Menon 229). So, it is by including new forms, by relying on cultural and linguistic borrowings from various cultures – whether they generate some form of hybridisation or not – by respecting diversity, that the post-colonial novel will impose itself in the face of a European canon which no longer represents the diversity of our times.30 Is the European canon going to be
25. See for instance sections 1 and 2 in Wilson et al. The essays authored by Bill Ashcroft (“Transnation”), Simon Gikandi (“Between Roots and Routes: Cosmopolitanism and the Claims of Locality”), and Patrick Williams (“Outlines of a Better World”) are of utmost interest. 26. Yves Clavaron developed this point in respect to post-colonial francophone literatures (80). 27. “Whether we agree on the existence or irrelevance of canons, whether ‘post-colonial canon’ is a self-contradic- tory term or not, the field as currently formulated is dominated by select writers and literay works to the exclusion of other writers, works and languages.” (Menon 220) 28. “In post-colonial literature, acknowledging only writers writing in English as part of a post-colonial literary corpus smacks of an imperial influence, not a post-colonial stance. Damrosch also points to the existence of a shadow canon in post-colonial studies […] By circumscribing its orbits to a few, select authors in a single language, post-colonial studies create what David Damrosch calls a ‘hypercanon’ within that field.” (Menon 225) 29. “Reading diverse narratives from different languages will also open up the discourse on theoretical concepts. There will be narratives that address issues that have not yet been confronted in existing theoretical models, or which can be articulated differently. Reading conflicting narratives will render these models more complex and tease out some of the difficult issues when dealing with representations of different cultures.” (Menon 228) 30. This paper has only just skimmed the surface of the issue, and a longer essay would be necessary to develop many aspects. Just to show how complex this is, it can be said that the evolution of the post-colonial novel has to be gauged against “two main patterns for generic evolution/devolution: the earlier formalist one and Bakhtin’s, that is a more devolutionary one and an evolutionary popular one. According to the first, new genres are born more or less spon- taneously by the craft of the gifted author/artist who can assemble intertexts and remould them effectively, which then in the course of productive reception become automatized and popularized […]. Bakhtin, on the other hand, highlights the formation process and emphasizes the influence of popular and communal forms, e.g. of speech genres and orality in 120
overtaken by the post-colonial hyper-canon of anglophone post-colonial novels, then? This would no doubt be an ironical twist, which the post-colonial novel would probably soon exploit ironically. As a conclusion, we can say that the European canonical novel has long been, and sometimes still is, an important stepping stone for post-colonial novelistic creation since it is still used at times as a literary bedrock that allows intertextuality and palimpsests. However, the post-colonial novel has learnt to transform this Western canon, twisting and adapting it to its own needs and requirements and bending it in specific ways by blending it with more local devices, by relying on non-European characteristics (magic realism, the inclusion of linguistic specificities and a variety of languages, the hybridisa- tion process of diverse genres and forms, etc.) in its own literary crucible. Speaking of setting up a new cartography of the post-colonial novel, or of re-map- ping it, does not mean scanning the genre to propose a new typology of sub-genres. This would amount to something close to what Deleuze and Guattari call decalcomania. On the contrary, the approach underlying today’s post-colonial novel has become a new suject of interest. Being able to propose a cartography of the post-colonial novel enables us to conceive of the genre not as a fixed, outmoded and threatened category, but as a rhizome whose offshoots spread towards an ever-expanding space, a genre which gives the reader the possibility to open and decipher an ever-changing map, ta- king into account each reader’s subjectivity in a continually moving, active, performative movement which grants them new perspectives on the contemporary world. Such pers- pectives are very different from those introduced by the European canon which, in the past, served as an almost unique model imposed from the center. The genre has now been de-centered to reflect and express the multiplicity of the world.
Florence laBaune-Demeule University Jean Moulin – Lyon 3
W orks Cited
aDams, Michelene. “Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother: Allegory and Self-Writing as Counter-Discourse.” Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 4.1 (Spring 2006): 1-15. ashcrOft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen tiffin. The Empire Writes Back. Theory and Practice in Post- Colonial Literatures. 1989. London; New York: Routledge, 1994. BancauD-maënen, Florence. Le roman de formation au XVIIIe siècle en Europe. Paris: Nathan, 1998. Brah, Avtar, and Annie e. cOOmBes. Hybridity and its Discontents. Politics, Science, Culture. London: Routledge, 2000. BurGelin, Claude, ed. Autofictions. Lyon: P.U. de Lyon, 2010. casanOva, Pascale. La république mondiale des Lettres. Paris: PUF, 1999. cervantes, Xavier, and Hélène Dachez. Le XVIIIe siècle anglais. Toulouse: PU du Mirail, 2002. clavarOn, Yves. Poétique du roman post-colonial. Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’U de Saint-Etienne, 2011. D’aGuiar, Fred, The Longest Memory. 1994. London: Vintage, 1995. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Translator Brian Massumi. London; New York: Continuum, 2003. Trans. of Mille Plateaux. Paris: Minuit, 1988. DelOurme, Chantal. “La mémoire fécondée. Réflexions sur l’intertextualité: Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea.” Etudes anglaises 42.3 (1989) 257-69.
general, on the evolution of the new. […] It goes without saying that there are many modes of the productive reception of forms between these two prototypical models of generic evolution and devolution.” (Goebel & Schabio 3) 121 The Novel in Post-Colonial Literatures: Re-Mapping the Genre ferGusOn, Moira. “A Lot of Memory: An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid.” The Kenyon Review, 16.1 (1994): 163-88. GallaGher, Mary. “Concealment, Displacement and Disconnection: Danticat’s The Dew Breaker.” Edwidge Danticat. A Reader’s Guide. Ed. Martin Munro. Charlottesville; London: U of Virginia P, 2010. 147-60. Genette, Gérard. Palimpsestes. La littérature au second degré. Paris: Seuil, 1982. GOOnetilleke, D. C. R. A. Modern Novelists. Salman Rushdie. London: Macmillan, 1998. GuiGnery, Vanessa. “Hybridity, Why it Still Matters.” Hybridity. Forms and Figures in Literature and the Visual Arts. Ed. Vanessa Guignery, Catherine Pesso-Miquel and François Specq. Newcastle-upon- Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. GOeBel, Walter, and Saskia schaBiO. “Introduction.” Locating Postcolonial Narrative Genres. Ed. Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio. New York; London: Routledge, 2013. 1-10. GOeBel, Walter. “V. S. Naipaul’s Heterobiographical Fictions or Postcolonial Melancholia Reinterpreted.” Goebel and Schabio 108-23. Grant, Damian. Salman Rushdie romancier. Translator Madeleine Descargues. Villeneuve d’Asq: PU du Septentrion, 2014. Trans. of Salman Rushdie. Northcote House: British Council, 2012. Grieve, Ann, and Marie-Françoise cachin. Le roman britannique depuis 1945. Paris: Nathan, 1996. huGGan, Graham. “Decolonizing the Map.” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. 1995. London; New York: Routledge, 2011. 355-8. kincaiD, Jamaica. The Autobiography of My Mother. 1996. New York; London: Plume Books/ Penguin, 1997. kraiDy, Marwan M. Hybridity or the Cultural Logic of Globalisation. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2005. laBaune-Demeule, Florence. V.S. Naipaul. L’énigme de l’arrivée. L’éducation d’un point de vue Lyon: Editions universitaires de Lyon III, 2007. —. “‘Parfois, nous pouvons être étrangers à nous-mêmes’. V.S. Naipaul et le roman: L’altérité/ altération d’un genre. Les romans tardifs et la tradition.” Labaune-Demeule 123-52. —. “Anita Nair’s Aesthetics of Hybridity: Mistress as Narrative Kathakali.” Guignery, Pesso-Miquel and Specq 223-36. menOn, Nirmala. “Rerouting the Post-Colonial Canon through Linguistic Remapping. Why Remap?” Wilson, Sandru and Lawson Welsh 218-31. naipaul, V.S. A House for Mr Biswas. 1961. Hardmonsworth: Penguin, 1969. —. The Enigma of Arrival. A Novel. London: Penguin, 1987. —. Half a Life. Basingstoke; Oxford: Picador/Pan Macmillan, 2001. —. Miguel Street and The Mystic Masseur. 1957. Basingstoke; Oxford: Picador, Pan Macmillan, 2002. nair, Anita. Mistress. London: Black Amber, Arcadia, 2007. pOuchet-paquet, Sandra. Caribbean Autobiography: Cultural Identity and Self-Representation. Madison, U. of Wisconsin P, 2002. praBhu, Anjali. Hybridity. Limits, Transformations, Prospects. Albany: State U of New York P, 2007. ramchanD, Kenneth. The West Indian Novel and its Background. 1970. London: Heinemann, 1983. rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. 1966. New York; London: Norton, 1999. rOBert, Marthes. Roman des origines, et origines du roman. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. rushDie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands, Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991. London: Granta Books, 1991. —. Midnight’s Children. 1981. London: Vintage, 1995. saiD, Edward. Orientalism. 1978. London: Penguin Classics, 2003. schaBiO, Saskia. “ ‘…At the Edge of Writing and Speech…’ Shifting Genre, Relocating the Aesthetic.” Goebel and Schabio 44-57. walcOtt, Derek. Collected Poems 1948-1984. 1986. London: Faber & Faber, 1992. watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. 1957. London: Pimlico, Random House, 2000. wilsOn, Janet, Cristina sanDru, and Sarah lawsOn welsh, eds. Rerouting the Post-Colonial. New Directions for the New Millenium. Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2010. zarilli, Phillip. Kathakali, Dance-Drama. Where Gods and Demons Come to Play. 2000. London: Routledge, 2002.
“Common Place: Common-Place” A Presentation of Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of the Compounding of Places – Part 1
At the end of Poétique de la Relation, a list of “binarities” constitutes what Glissant’s philo- sophy of Relation sets out to reshuffle. Among them, the pair “Lieu commun: lieu-com - mun” is what will be analysed here. Beyond enabling us to survey a vast area of Glissant’s œuvre, it will also lead to the analysis of one of Glissant’s most operative metaphors: the “com- mon-place,” advancing toward the configuration of an alternative, ever compounding reality.
To Start With: The Common At the end of the original Poétique de la Relation, we reach a small archipelago of “Com- monplace notes” (“Notes en lieux communs”) (227-36), on the far side of which ap- pears what Glissant calls a “litany,” a list of “binarities, whether or not they can be transcended” (Wing 224).1 These binarities constitute what his poetics of Relation – throughout his œuvre, philosophical and political – sets out to reshuffle. Among them, the pair “Lieu commun: lieu-commun” (236) is what will be analysed here. Indeed, the construction of this phrase enables us not just to survey a vast area of Glissant’s œuvre, but to progress tentatively with it, as it unfolds, following its metaphorical ground in its multifarious processes of displacement. The poetics of the “common-place” mani- fested in the pair “Lieu commun: lieu-commun” opens an access not only to Glissant’s work, but also to our own creative collaboration with it, by which we get to see the role we have, too, in the configuration of a truly common world. Following the pace set by Glissant’s elliptic aphorism, in an essay also composed of two distinct and related parts, we will first, here, approach the “common place” that grounds Glissant’s œuvre, and which has inspired its characteristic gesture of relation. We will see, in turns, to what extent Glissant’s appreciation of Martinique as a place that is common, common ground, far from the clichés of exoticism, has shaped his philo- sophy, his poetics and his aesthetics – three domains which his writing sets to work all together. In such conjunction, old partitions start atrembling and enclosed fields open and spread: “a new region of the world” takes shape. The forged compound “common- place” announces it in its formation as a word. Combining what is already here (what is common, places and commonplaces), with this transgressive hyphen at its heart, it points to what does not exist. We will no more find “lieux-communs” or “common- places” in dictionaries, than we will ever be able to pinpoint any actual place correspon- ding to it on the maps of the world. Later, another piece of this presentation of Édouard Glissant’s poetics of the com- pounding of places will track the diverse unsettlements that lead to the configuration of such a “place in progress” (as we speak of a “work in progress”). We will then expand (on) the colon around which the binarity “Lieu commun: lieu-commun” is construc- ted and see how it diagrammatizes the procedure of Glissant’s poetics. It will take us
1. In this essay, I will quote Betsy Wing’s brave translation of Poetics of Relation (1997) whenever my reading of Glissant can agree with it. Wing will then be referred to in the parentheses following the quotations I make of her text. But when my interpretation of the Glissantian original text in French diverges from Wing’s English translation, I will provide my own formulation of Glissant’s original French. The French title of the original volume will then signal it. 124
beyond what can be easily recognized and visibly apprehended, the “common place” that comes first. We will then have to try and follow the course of this obscure hyphen which Glissant has inserted within his compound, by which what is evoked is always made anew. This is the reason why I chose to coin this compound word, which Betsy Wing’s translation presents unhyphenated. In my reading of Glissant, and hence in my trans- lation, the “common place” in two words will specifically refer to place as common in different ways (shared, ordinary, repeated here and there …); “commonplace” in one word will correspond to its dictionary definitions of common and trite, “trivial, hac- kneyed,’’ as stated in the OED. The neologism “common-place,” besides its sticking as closely as possible to Glissant’s French, preserves the obscurity of the coinage, and presents itself as creation that consists in taking into account what already exists, and combining it so as to produce something utterly new and unexpected. This is precisely what the “common-place,” as poetics and philosophy is all about, as this essay will show. Place is the frame, the motif and the structure of Édouard Glissant’s language. In Philosophie de la Relation, he calls place his “source reality” (47), thus paradigmatically merging the metaphorical and the actual, the referred-to and the referring-to, the phrase and the act. Glissant’s “place of birth and continuity” (101) is the island of Martinique. It is a common place, a very common place: not just a touristy exotic spot, but the or- dinary living place of a people struggling against economic deprivation and a double – intellectual and agricultural – a-culturation (Poetics of Relation 148-53). The people living on the island of Martinique not only claim and develop links with populations living on the other islands of the Caribbean archipelago, and even farther, with those living in the countries on the edge of the Caribbean sea, but they also constitute an incredible mixture of peoples from all over the world. So many, brought there by brutal force, found themselves alive, there, in an incredible all-entanglement of their diversities. And they mixed, then, per force but also with love: they were changed and still change in these exchanges (154). This produced both the Caribbean people as they are and, as Garraway rightly writes, a foundation myth modelizing “present and future trends of global (post)modernity, in which peoples and cultures are brought together and engage in relations of increasing proximity and exchange” (Garraway 164). Through the gathe- ring and mixing of a good number of the peoples of the earth, the Caribbean people, unspectacularly, displays its constitutive commonness. In other words, the Caribbean people manifests its creation, as a people, through an ordinary life lived all together, in common, in an ordinary place of the world. But to some it also sometimes appears “common” in another sense. The Oxford English Dictionary defines such commonness as: “[o]ccasionally contemptuous: Of inferior quality or value, mean; vulgar, as persons; Undistinguished.” Because of their black skin, some were decidedly considered too “common” to have any value, apart from, at best, a commercial one. They were dee- med “common” to the point of being made even more common still, brought down, diminished, beaten down, sold, and reduced to the abominable condition of slaves. And then, in this infinitely low condition, they were shipped to those faraway specks of islands, in the invisible, hardly reachable confines of the Western world. Places so far and so small – so “common” then – that the refinements of the Enlightenment, the fashions, lifestyles and all those practices produced during the process which Chaunu 125 “Common Place: Common-Place” calls the “Northernization” of the eighteenth century (50) could not reach them. This also contributes to their “commonness” and complements it. Édouard Glissant painstakingly considers each of the diverse aspects of the com- monplace characteristics of his birthplace, his common place indeed, in order to start from there and launch the politically imaginative configuration of that other place – the “common-place.” One with the place, of which he and his poetics partake, just as they, reciprocally, do, Glissant writes himself as one of the common people, the “undistin- guished,” the lower class. This is what we can gather from the description of his first home – a house so small, so unobtrusive and so dilapidated that he can hardly find it when he physically comes back to it many years later, and looks for it with one of his sons: Where is this primordial home, our islet, whose earthen walls and branch structure had, over the years, made room for rusted sheet steel in such a way that in the end it looked less like a hut than a lumber-room? (Philosophie de la Relation 17)2 And all this leaves out yet other aspects of what is common / banal / trivial / conside- red with contempt by some and shared by many, on these tiny islands at the far end of the western world. Glissant calls the latter “dust of the earth” (Philosophie de la Relation 48), by which he transcribes both their geographical presence, objectively apprehended in relation to the rest of the universe, and the subjectivity of their very disappointed discoverers. The other aspects of what is seen as common about Glissant’s birthplace, the island of Martinique, concern its culture, folklorized, caricaturized, packaged for holidays; and its language, Creole French, which is alive, ever changing, hybridizing, popular – joyously impure. The commonplace, with its multiple mixed meanings, so manifest in diverse aspects of the life in Martinique which Glissant chooses to pay homage to, is the stuff of which Glissant’s œuvre is built: it is what it is about and what shapes it, what gives it its orien- tation and moving force. It comes from the very place and goes toward the making of that other place beyond it – the common-place. As the neologism makes clear, espe- cially in French where the word “lieu” has pride of place and its attached commonness comes next, in its wake, the common comes from the place. It grows from it, as it were. It is drawn from it. Place functions as a model for a practice of the common – or should I say the commoning?3 – a practice which necessarily is an elaboration, a work in pro- gress, a collaboration in trust: I lay hope in the language of landscapes. The rims of our forests dissolve into the cultivated grounds that reach into the sands. Here is an abridged thumb-index notebook. (Traité du Tout-Monde 232)
2. Philosophie de la Relation has not been translated into English yet, so all the translations of the quotes from this book are mine. 3. The gerund serves to express the voluntary act of collaboration. We see here already Glissant’s “common-place” trans-rooting (Oakley 16) into other practices of the common over the world. Commoning refers to current practices diversely unifying people(s) unsatisfied with the actual world order (Dardot and Laval 455). They tend to preserve the common resources of the planet – water, air, landscapes, ideas, science, the Internet, but also education and civic action – and develop innovative social practices to configure new – that is human, political, ecological – ways of relating to the world (104-5). In the words of David Bollier, commoning “asks us to consider a different paradigm of social and moral order,” (104) before implementing it. This is what Glissant’s poetics does, as one of the many different instances currently at work in the world. 126
As we can read here, the common place of Glissant’s Martinique immediately presents itself as a language. As both “language” (“parole” in the French original) and “thumb- index notebook” indicate, the common place is of the order of language, but it is neither an accomplished language, a text, nor does it have force of law, the way a dic- tionary does. It presents itself to Glissant and to us as a gathering of well-tried words, bound together in their diversity, preserved and made ready for new uses: the landscape constitutes a “thumb-index notebook,” already forming a bridge and bridging in its being “abridged.” Besides, in the naming itself as well as in what the name unfolds, this “thumb-index notebook” is full of compound words, compounds like the very place they evoke, where “The rims of our forests dissolve into the cultivated grounds that reach into the sands,” in one long and slow unbroken breath, or sight, or stride. Forests-cultivated grounds-sands, together and in common, in their very manifestation together, but also in their distinct succession, compose the place by always taking it beyond itself. Such a composition of the place by de-composition, atomization even, dis-places it, always, and renders impossible its apprehension as, in any way, a possible form of “monoity.” 4 The layout of this place constitutes the mould in which Glissant casts all his alloys: his words, sentences, and books. Published by the French publisher Gallimard, each of Glissant’s books has a label attached to it, identifying it as a “Novel,” as “Poetry,” “Drama,” or as an “Essay,” in abeyance with the commonly-accepted, preconceived generic categories that put works in a neat literary fold. But Glissant’s books cross generic boundaries and combine affi- liations. Thus each of his books is the locus of their commoning. In this respect they emulate the example set by the landscape – or rather, unset by it. Glissant’s writing fol- lows the movement towards the other beyond itself which is incipient in the landscape, ever reaching forward and unfolding in its apposition of various specific places. This, for one, has determined that striking figure of speech, apposition, by which, Oakley shows, Glissant thinks difference, against (meaning both counter to and taking into account) the Western tradition represented by Heidegger (2). At another level, such a vision of his landscape has informed the surprising combination of dramatic dialogue, essayistic prose, poems, fragments of diaries, quotations from novels, to be found in each item of the series of the allegedly prose works the publisher identified as “Po- etics,” Philosophy,” or again “Aesthetics.” In Glissant’s work, generic hybridization does not produce yet another volume to be displayed in the “New Literatures” section. The adjective gathering the works under such an epithet says more about their late conside- ration by Western or Westernized readers, than about their actual newness. Glissant’s daring and baffling transgenerization inaugurates a new literature, a new state of litera- ture where “state” should not be confused with stasis:5
4. The noun and the notion of “monoity” appear in Une nouvelle région du monde (88) as the reduction of what has been made diverse, luxuriant, unpredictable, untamable … into essential purity. As this reduction to the single unit that the root of the Glissantian coinage indicates (reduction, unit and root being quite inauspicious to Glissantian philoso- phy), “monoity” is what, finite and complete, can be seized and possessed. 5. “Transgenerization” is part of the “transrhetorics” which Glissant’s writing practices. Both play a fundamental part in developing the common, transnational, space which its various languages already bear. Through such “trans- rhetorics” (Traité du Tout-Monde 112), “Transhistory extends” (113), too, and leaves no gaps between eras and areas, no occurrence untold, outside history, a “nonhistory” (Caribbean Discourse 62-3). Even though a number of other words exist to name an existing practice, the new compound, “transgenerization”, coined after Glissant’s own extant coinages, clearly manifests in its construction the process of creation which he relies on to set up the principle of this New Region of the World he envisages on bases of commoning. A continuous crossing of boundaries of all kinds, which, at the same 127 “Common Place: Common-Place”
In this new state of literature, maybe the old and so fecund division into literary genres no longer rules. What is the novel and what is poetry? (Traité du Tout-Monde 121) Partaking of poetry, the novel, the essay, and drama, Glissant’s writing is also always and simultaneously philosophical, aesthetic and poetic. He claims: “The poetics of Rela- tion is thus a philosophy, and conversely: poetry and philosophy mutually protect each other against false finalities” Philosophie( de la Relation 87). We shall soon expand on how the Glissantian Relation operates, analysing the aesthetics which shapes the “common- place,” the philosophy it conveys and the poetics which carries it forward. But before we come to that, both the field of poetics and the scope of aesthetics, in Glissant’s work, will have to be surveyed. First of all, the frame within which his philosophy develops must be considered. Everything in Glissant always starts with the place and its inhabitants. Hence the political – in the broad sense of the conscious and purposeful organization of interac- tions with what surrounds us – lies at the basis of all his enterprise. We have seen, for instance, how the landscape is made to set the example for compounding. The apposing trait and the transgeneric writing which the ordinary lay-out of the ground has inspired, terrain combining with terrain to create a commonplace common place run counter to another state of affairs imposed from elsewhere: Whereas the Western nation is first of all an “opposite,” for colonized peoples identity will be primarily “opposed to” — that is, a limitation from the beginning. Decolonization will have done its real work when it goes beyond this limit. (Wing 17) In order to go beyond the limit that posits one thing as “opposed to” another, it is ne- cessary to step outside the great system of thought which “governs occidental philoso- phies,” (Traité du Tout-Monde 179) and which develops by feeding on the confrontation it sets up between Being and being. In Une nouvelle région du monde, Glissant writes: So, it is from the point of view of this naïve way of thinking that I would like to question the notions that the occidental philosophies have sanctioned under the name of Being and being (l’Être et l’Étant), where Being appears as absolute, unreachable, transcendent and sublime […]. (178) Glissant also attempts to strip l’Étant of its initial capital – what the English translation has always already done with a lower-case “being” in order to stress its difference from “Being” – as he wishes to resist mimicking both the masterful, all-commanding Being, and a thought that has started to settle and gel into a dogma. Besides, being (l’étant) does not fall from the sky, as it were. It is decidedly non ontological. So Glissant conceives this decapitalized being – hence lessened, made commonplace – in relation to Western philosophy, which his own marginal philosophy is going to question. The Glissantian being (étant) is convoked and configured from the Western philosophy which consti- tutes its ground. It thus proves its organic force, and its capacity to move forward and beyond, along the lines which the landscape draws. Consequently, it certainly does not aim at erasing Being: it reckons with it, counts on it to proceed on solid ground, and then transgress it. The Glissantian being is a process of commoning in all senses of time, insists on them and overpasses them, these coinages opening on the prefix “trans”, stage, as word formations, this arch-Glissantian gesture of construction of the imaginary of something new by taking in as much of the old as possible and going as far ahead beyond it as possible. The coinage as coinage appears as a form of this “errant root” (Philosophie de la Relation 36), by which Glissant images the hyphen between common and place: both signs present something new composed out of historically-settled elements. 128
the word, which is also manifest in the philosopher’s “disinclination to cite or annotate his sources” (Oakley 6). Gradually wrought from a long tradition of thought, which it absorbs and repeats and displaces, Glissant’s philosophy of being is “truly common and therefore exempt from copyright” (6). But in the French original, being (l’étant) calls for the combined action of both the intellect and the sense of hearing for the compoun- ding power of the concept to be understood. Étant is perfectly homophonous with both étang, a pond, a diminutive sea; and also étend(s), the conjugated form of the verb étendre: maybe an imperative, or a present in the indicative mood, bespeaking stretching, spreading out, extension. The homophony secretes homonymies rich in meaning as regards Glissant’s philosophy. Inseparable from the lay-out of his native ground, which gives it its orientation, as we have seen, Glissant’s philosophy stretches the domain of the philosophical by enriching it with procedures and considerations sometimes dee- med exterior to it. The process of extension, as this intellectual play on sounds and images suggests, is dependent on poetics. The perfect equilibrium which the compound title of his 2009 opus: Philosophie de la Relation. Poésie en étendue (Philosophy of Relation. Poetry in Extension) displays, stages the setting up of bridges, the creation of passages, the es- tablishment of correspondences, which is the purport of all his œuvre. “Philosophy” and “Poetry” answer each other symmetrically on either side of the punctuation mark, which places “Relation” and “in extension” in a similar relationship, each defining the other, redrawing the contours, extending them. Baroque motifs are paradigmatic of Glissant’s poetics of extension-and-combina- tion. Indeed, Baroque art reached the confines of the world, the Caribbean archipelago and its continental outskirts, where its motifs mixed with indigenous art forms. The works of art on the surface of which they proliferate, provide, in both hemispheres, an art form which runs counter to a classicism that deemed itself pure, rational and so, universal. In the essay “Concerning a Baroque Abroad in the World,” Glissant delights in evoking “Latin American religious art, so close to Flemish or Iberian baroque but so closely intermingled with autochthonous tones” (Wing 78). Baroque art could well be viewed historically as the first artistic instance of creolization. Glissant sees it as an “art of extension”6 (Poétique de la Relation 92) that has come to question a certain idea of Nature then prevailing in the West, and according to which all was “harmonious, homogeneous, and knowable in depth” (91). As soon as the questioning of Being and being (l’Être et l’étant) is laid down as the ground for Glissant’s entire enterprise – a questioning which could have passed for solely philosophical is reconfigured. It runs from philosophical matter into poetical texture (and vice versa) via the homophony between étant and étend which initiates a cor- respondence between being and extension. Bold and humorous as it is, this play on sounds could not be more serious at the same time. Indeed the way Glissant’s work proceeds – its manner and its orientation – is revealed here: this aural repetition pro- pagates the extension that comes into the configuration of the common-place. It also makes us experience the intellectual notion of the relativity of all conventions, through the slight confusion and the accompanying vertigo which the sound echo, appealing
6. Wing chose to translate Glissant’s “art de l’extension” by “the art of expansion” (Wing 78). Because “expansion” is used to refer to conquest and imperialism in all of Glissant’s texts, it seems utterly misplaced in this context. Likewise, translating Glissant’s “connaissable en profondeur” by “thoroughly knowable” upsets the fine balance between depth and superficial extension achieved in the original, and the decisive change of direction it initiates. 129 “Common Place: Common-Place” to the senses, induces. The immediately perceptible links that stretch (between) Being and being as well as being and extending are also activated through the living, sensitive body of the reader. A relationship is manifested in this way of telling which stresses extension and connection, involves action. All is a question of Relation with Glissant’s Poetics / aesthetics / philosophy. And here again, the French “Relation” (sometimes capitalized, sometimes not, unpredictably so) conjoins the three significations of “link,” “relationship” and “narrative” in its meaning. Polysemy destabilizes the word, sends se- mantic tremors through it that upset congealed significations and pushes them beyond their conventional limits, extending or stretching them further. The Glissantian Relation (what relays by instituting the relative through a relating process) sets into motion the “real work” of decolonization (Wing 17), one that aims to go beyond the limits set by a dialectical system of thought. Glissant’s œuvre, in its rhetoric, in its poetical choices, pays homage to what was and what is, imagining what may be yet: it relays, intransitively. His writing makes us feel and experience the relationships that each of its elements develops with any other and, through those, the change that affects any thing coming into contact with another. An important passage from the essay “Poetics,” reprinted in Poetics of Relation, presents Relation. It retraces the process which, in the same gesture and along the same lines, repeats, prolongs, and goes beyond: We have already said that Relation informs not simply what is relayed but also the relative and the related. Its always approximate truth is given in a narrative. For, though the world is not a book, it is nonetheless true that the silence of the world would, in turn, make us deaf. Relation, driving humanities chaotically onward, needs words to publish itself, to continue. But because what it relates, in reality, proceeds from no absolute, it proves to be the totality of relatives, put in touch and told. (Wing 27-8) Relation – relayed – relative – related: a root burgeons and spreads. It moves onward by repeating itself, tracing a relation, extended on the surface of the page as of the world it evokes. Such roots propagating on the surface are rhizomes. Glissant’s œuvre moves like a rhizome. Its poetical character is not only secreted by its language, which is just beautiful and remains dazzlingly exact even as it proliferates and irradiates, as we have only begun to see. Neither is it merely due to its rhetoric, however finely wrought it proves to be, or apparent in the way the texts are variously laid out on the pages. Its poetical character comes forth in the fact that Glissant’s writing actually creates what it writes about. It does not just reflect it, it leaves it to our senses and our emotions to give it actual life, while at the same time not grounding or settling anything in any definite place because it activates the process of Relation through the imaginative links the latter makes pos- sible.7 Unexpectedly, from the faraway margins of the allegedly civilized world, Glissant thereby actualizes and reinvigorates the great poetic tradition, the high classicism of ancient Greece expressed in the verb poiein through the telling of a poetry that makes, does, produces – and what it creates is “the world as yet not created,” as one of the titles of his books proclaims: Le Monde Incréé. Poétrie. The second part of this twofold title redoubles the content of the first, and expresses its formation in its writing.Poétrie
7. Oakley notes how, “from the perspective of Glissant, Heidegger’s rhetoric neutralizes the semantic content, which is inescapably anchored to a uniform syntax” (3). Her article painstakingly shows how, in contrast, “tropes in Glissant are rarely incidental” (14) and stage the ideas conveyed semantically. Language is thereby not reduced to a com- municational function but it is employed dramatically, as it constantly and variously draws the reader’s attention not only to the written statement but also to its writing. 130
is a blend-word, what the French call a mot-valise, which, translated literally, would be: a “suitcase word.” It compounds poésie and patrie (poetry and fatherland), and thus, by literary means, creates a new type of place the foundation of which is poetical. Alto- gether, the blending, the adventurous journey which the valise signals, the word creation through the obvious relation to a word quite common in English elicit a practice: the very practice of Glissantian Relation. It is in such a practice that poetics reveals itself: “Poetics, whatever their fields of application, are thus practices,” Glissant states in his essay on aesthetics, Une nouvelle région du monde (182). Glissant’s texts take us travelling. But at no time can the journeys on which they take us be mistaken with holidaying. At no moment do we reach the locus of a vacation abroad, or enjoy lazily a restful sojourn on transparent Caribbean seas. Beautiful as their language is – it partakes of the beauty of the world to which it returns – it is also a difficult language. The pages of his first book most specifically identified as dealing with aesthetics, Une nouvelle région du monde. Esthétique I, are particularly exacting. There is hardly any marked chapter division to let us situate ourselves confidently. Some sen- tences are very long. One of them, for example, starts with the gently ironic encoura- gement “paddle hard!” (16) and goes on for thirty-one lines. It constitutes the end of a paragraph that runs over more than four pages – it is the second paragraph of the book – leading to a section called “Obscure Languages” (19). And the language is obscure, indeed, obscure with a vengeance, coming as it does from a people supposedly depri- ved of culture, mixing Creole and classical French, technical terms from various crafts, glissantianisms and unmarked quotes. This sentence (but it is just one among many like it) produces an intricate entanglement, just as it moves on and on from one place to another – from Tierra del Fuego to Norway, Siberia, Brazil, Brittany and Martinique, all in four lines – juxtaposing them, establishing a dizzying proximity which obliges us to take a step back from everything we assumed we knew about the world … And all the while, along with these changes exerted on the actual geography of the world, on top of them, considerations on art, aesthetics and chaos, self-references and cross-references to Glissant’s conceptual world through clusters of words that echo one another but not quite, make all solid and definitive ground tremble and turn this sentence into a maze. And yet the reader is not lost, or drowned, as so many slaves once were. It is just diffi - cult for us to find our bearings and our balance, to accept and trust the opacity created by the stylistic and thematic entanglement. We know we must get to the full stop. The sentence drags us on, all its commas signalling like the markers on a trail: if they do not give us rest, they nevertheless give us confidence by providing orientation. They also go on pointing to somewhere else, over there, always farther. So not only does the sentence bewilder us, but it pulls us forward. It exerts a force of traction which redefines beauty and displaces it. Beauty, according to Glissant, cannot be left untouched, lying inert, objectified by fixed criteria of the order of Being. Because it is of the world, and from the world, beauty partakes of obscure entanglements and is recognizable through them. Any language tending to manifest beauty must find a way to display and constitute in itself the forces, combined, of traction, attraction and tractation. This is its aesthetic condition. Is beauty at the same time the reflection, the sign in the work of art, and the intuition in us, the premonition, of the tractation of a difference that ascertained itself as it opened to the probable and of the attraction of a difference which will go beyond its own limits 131 “Common Place: Common-Place”
by offering itself thus, the traction turns into attraction, this is the great circus of the world, of Being, we have divined it and repeated it […]. (Une nouvelle région du monde 45-6)8 The beauty of the world inspires in Glissant the force of his aesthetics. Relayed by the poetics which the world, this world, presents to us, aesthetics will reveal how relative all things are. In the above quotation, an aesthetic effect is produced by the poetical figure of the polyptoton traction / attraction / tractation as it combines with the structural repetition of the phrase which it pulls forward within a sentence in which the syntax is rendered adventurous by both the insertion of a number of assertions within an interrogative frame and the juxtaposition, as if in passing, of successive main clauses without any subordination. Such an aesthetics disrupts the old order of the world, its commanding grammar and clear classical rhetoric. Con-fusion and opacity spread as the process of relation operates and advances the cause of emotion. This aesthetic effect has a strong political bias to it. With the old order of the world reflected in its comman- ding grammar, the grounds of geography start trembling too and, under the influence of such poetical plate tectonics, territories are brought closer, and start being con-fused. Then, « the Archipelago conjoins any Switzerland » (Traité du Tout-Monde 237). We have now brought to the surface the orientation of Glissant’s œuvre. We have traced its foundational movement of Relation that comes with relaying to all the frag- mentary relativeness of the multifarious existences on Earth, to which homage is paid by its being related in a work of art. Place that, Glissant insists on it, shapes the written form which it is given in his volumes on poetics and aesthetics, surprisingly frees itself from geographic determinism. It does so by the myriad repetitions which extend its range and make it proliferate – from the ordinarily lived place to the common locus of history to a philosophical paradigm and eventually to a poetics from which the principle of another way of conceiving the world is formulated. We will henceforward have to take into consideration how place spreads in an organicist writing that keeps on dis-placing it, propelling it from common place to common-place. This will lead us to track the strange meanderings of an elusive hyphen which does not draw the contours of the New Region of the World it institutes, but insinuates neverending motion and transgression at its heart.
Pascale GuiBert University of Besançon
W orks Cited
BOllier, David. Think like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2014. chaunu, Pierre. La civilisation de l’Europe des Lumières. 1971. Paris: Artaud, 1993. DarDOt, Pierre, and Christian laval. Commun. Essai sur la Révolution au XXIè siècle. Paris: La Découverte, 2014. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure. Paris: Minuit, 1975. —. Mille plateaux. Capitalisme et schizophrénie. Paris: Minuit, 1980. DerriDa, Jacques. “La difference.” Tel Quel, Théorie d’ensemble. Paris: Seuil, 1968. 43-68.
8. I chose to keep the ambiguity and preserve the repeated structure of the sentence by opting against translating more clearly than with “of ” the phrase “d’une différence.” In Glissant’s French, the partitive article can and must convey the reverse movements of derivation and agglutination. 132
—. “Différance.” Margins of Philosophy. Transl. and ed. Alan Bass. 1982. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1984. 1-27. Garraway, Doris L. “Toward a Creole Myth of Origin: Narrative, Foundations and Eschatology in Patrick Chamoiseau’s L’esclave Vieil Homme et le Molosse.” Callaloo 29.1 (Winter 2006): 151-67. Glissant, Édouard. Poétique de la Relation. Poétique III. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1990. —. Poetics of Relation. Transl. and ed. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1997. —. Traité du Tout-Monde. Poétique IV. 1997. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 2013. —. Le monde incréé. Poétrie. Paris: NRF, Gallimard, 2000. —. Une nouvelle région du monde. Esthétique I. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 2006. —. Philosophie de la Relation. Poésie en étendue. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 2009. Oakley, Seanna Sumalee. “Commonplaces: Rhetorical Figures of Difference in Heidegger and Glissant.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 41.1 (2008):1-21. saiD, Edward W. Orientalism. 1978. London: Penguin, 2003. Reviews
“Through the long corridor of distance”: Space and Self in Contemporary New Zealand Women’s Autobiographies. By Valérie Baisnée. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, Cross/Cultures 175, 2014. 156 p. ISBN: 978-9-04203-868-4. €42.00, $54.00.
Reviewed by Patricia neville
“Writing about one’s past involves both invention and exorcisms: finding what was lost and would have been permanently lost otherwise; and freeing oneself of the bur- den of it, when it is a burden.” Charles Brasch, Journals, 1968. In her introduction to her study of autobiographies of New Zealand women, Valérie Baisnée reminds us that Charles Brasch, founder and editor of Landfall, New Zealand’s pre-eminent literary quarterly, encouraged autobiographical writing with his “Beginnings” series in the mid 1960s. He invited a variety of New Zealand writers to reflect on their roots, having long regarded autobiography as a major form of imagi- native writing, as the quotation from his Journals entry shows. Janet Frame and Ruth Dallas both contributed accounts of their “Beginnings,” and subsequently went on to write full-length autobiographies. Autobiography has frequently been used by margina- lised and minority voices as a way of making themselves heard in dominant cultures, and Baisnée’s study considers the work of Frame, Dallas and other New Zealand women writers who contributed in varying ways to the same genre: Sylvia Ashton- Warner, Lauris Edmond, Ruth Parks, Fiona Kidman and Barbara Anderson — with brief mentions also of Keri Hulme, Marilyn Duckworth, Robin Hyde and Patricia Grace — women who make their voices heard in a male-dominated New Zealand so- ciety, and one isolated by its geography and the vast ocean. Baisnée has chosen to focus on the work of women of different generations, all writing in the 1970s, a time of increased cultural awareness in New Zealand and of the rise of feminist movements around the English-speaking world, but whose auto- biographies cover a much broader period of time. Some of these women were always involved with the literary world, writing prose and poetry for publication from an early age; others, notably Lauris Edmond, felt themselves primarily wives and mothers, cele- brating motherhood while regretting the loss of self-definition, concealing their writing until much later in life, conscious of their restricted freedom and lacking “a room of one’s own.” Among these women there are varying concepts of truth and memory, Janet Frame famously referring to autobiography as “found fiction,” refusing to be bound by the conventions of the genre, and refusing to conform to the female stereo- type; Lauris Edmond, by contrast, seeing her writing as an escape from the domestic sphere. Baisnée is attuned to the use of poetic expression in these autobiographies, and notes that all these women wrote poetry as well as prose – Ruth Dallas includes her own poems in hers. In her comment on Frame’s “weakness for metaphors” (43), Baisnée appears to be attributing the criticism to Charles Brasch, although the phrase comes from Owen Leeming’s lukewarm review of Scented Gardens for the Blind (Landfall 68, Dec. 1963). Frame comments on this criticism in the letter to Brasch which Baisnée 134
quotes, revealing, as Baisnée argues, Frame’s “investment in tropes without which the communication of her experience would be impossible.” Baisnée is keenly aware of the importance of metaphor in autobiographical writing, organising her study into chapters based on a variety of characteristic tropes: “Thresholds,” “Homes,” “Displaced Bodies, Disembodied Texts,” “Landscapes,” and “Itineraries.” She also identifies the blurring of the border between fiction and truth, and the selectivity of memory distorted by time or trauma. The male-dominated literary scene – Landfall editor and poet Charles Brasch, pub- lisher and poet Dennis Glover, poets Allen Curnow and James Baxter, novelist and short story-writer Frank Sargeson – whether benignly patronising or dismissive of women writers, expected New Zealand authors to write about the New Zealand lands- cape. Baisnée demonstrates that landscape and a sense of geographical place was equally important to these women writers, illustrating her argument with particular reference to Fiona Kidman and Ruth Dallas. Kidman’s attachment was to the Kerikeri of her child- hood, Dallas uses her poetry to connect with her surroundings and in Curved Horizon recounts her relationship with the landscape, and Janet Frame felt a sense of belonging in the “land of the mythmakers.” There is an English dialect expression, “hefted to the land,” drawn from the language of migrating Norsemen and Saxons who settled in England, which expresses a sense of connection with the soil beneath one’s feet, a spi- ritual association, a rootedness, through which migrants form a relationship with a new homeland and establish a new identity – an ancient expression for an ancient concept. Baisnée adopts Bachelard’s “topophilia” to convey a similar range of meaning, for New Zealanders’ emerging sense of identification with the land, but more eloquently ex - pressed in Baisnée’s quotation of a line from a poem by Ruth Dallas: “But now I know it is I who exist in the land.” Baisnée draws on the transcultural work of philosophers, linguists and geographers in her discussion of “space” and “place” as concepts in relation to mobility and migra- tion. Feelings of displacement expressed by Janet Frame, Marilyn Duckworth, Sylvia Ashton-Warner, and Robin Hyde, for example, of being rejected or under-valued by one’s own country, led some of these women writers to find temporary or permanent homes elsewhere: in the USA or in Britain if they had the means and freedom to travel, or in Australia. For women, home is often a prison as much as a sanctuary, trapped by both the weight of social expectation and by love of family. Baisnée has provided a valuable analysis and comparison of the variety of ways in which New Zealand women writers have used autobiography as a means of imaginative escape into another world, though her book is ill-served by inaccuracies in the index. Baisnée examines ways New Zealand women have found of making their voices heard, reclaiming ownership of their own stories through poetic imagination. She is aware that these writers cannot tell everything – “parts of our stories can never reach consciousnesses” – but that in their autobiographies they have written an imaginative truth. 135 Reviews
Surviving in My World: Growing Up Dalit in Bengal. By Manohar Mouli Biswas. Trans. and ed. by Angana Dutta and Jaydeep Sarangi. Kolkata: Samya, 2015. xxxii +125 p. ISBN (pb): 978-93-81345-09-2. Rs 350.
Reviewed by John thieme
In recent years dalit writing has come to be an increasingly important part of the Indian literary mosaic and a movement that began in Maharashtra under the influence of Dr Ambedkar is now flourishing in Bengal, both in Bangladesh and West Bengal, though its wider readership remains reliant on translation. Manohar Mouli Biswas’s Amar Bhubane Ami Benche Thaki (2013) is described in the Foreword of this edition as “one of the earliest” Bengali dalit autobiographies and “probably the first to be trans- lated into English.” Its translation, by Angana Dutta and Jaydeep Sarangi, Surviving in My World, represents a significant milestone on the road to making Bengali dalit writ- ing more widely available and in so doing raising awareness of caste discrimination in Bengal. In Latin America testimonio has played a vital role in the process of raising awareness of the predicament of the socially excluded and Surviving in My World offers a simi- lar kind of testimonial witness, with its directness of style chronicling the “realities” of growing up in a namashudra (casteless Hindu) community in the Khulna district of Bangladesh (then East Pakistan). Biswas’s chronicle of his early years is circumstantial. For the most part his syntax relies on main clauses (“Thakurda never wore shoes. He never had shoes”; “The nama community did not have the dowry system”; “We are a people of mud and water”) and this makes the narrative seem like an unmediated account of the everyday hardships and struggles, along with the pragmatism and resil- ience of growing up dalit in such a community. The story is devoid of sentimentality and, in so far as it represents a protest against the discrimination suffered by dalits, it does so primarily through recording contingent detail in a matter-of-fact manner. An introductory note by the translators identifies the particular problems of rendering the idiolect of Biswas’s temporally distant and localized world into English. The present reviewer is ill-equipped to judge how far they have succeeded in recapturing its distinc- tiveness, but they certainly provide a linguistically persuasive account of a now-remote community. One of the strategies they use to achieve this is the retention of words embodying concepts that are ultimately untranslatable into another language, and they supplement this with notes on the Bengali calendar, a list of kinship terms and a more general glossary. The predominantly literal mode of the autobiography makes images, when they do appear, all the more striking, particularly since they emerge as a natural outcrop of the shared mentality of the namashudra community. This is the case with a trope that appears more than once – that of the water hyacinth: This was a community that remained neglected away from the watch of the nation’s administration. The people born in nature, lived in their own way and even died in their own way. The name of this history of life and death is prisnika – growing up like the water hyacinth and dying like it, uncared for. In his introductory Author’s Note, Biswas explains that prisnika, an “uncommon” Bengali word meaning “water hyacinth,” was his initial title for the autobiography, but 136
he changed this, because for him the plant is associated with neglect and pain, and he feels he has transcended such feelings through personal endeavour. Educational suc- cess has moved him into Kolkata’s lower middle classes and in his adult career he has been a leading activist in the Bangla Dalit Sahitya Sanstha (Bengali Dalit Literature Association), publishing ten works of creative writing along with several jointly edited works on dalit issues. In the autobiography, though, he confines himself to his early years, only offering a glimpse of his later life in the last of his ten chapters. The sug- gestion is that chronicling the poverty, discrimination and hardship of dalit life is more important than writing a Western narrative of individual success such as one finds in American rags-to-riches tales. Autobiography in this incarnation – and it is typical of dalit life writing – is a communal, not a personal genre. Biswas speaks as the voice of his community. Consequently it may seem inappropriate, when, towards the end of his account, he steps outside the circumscribed world he is depicting to as it were validate narrative ele- ments through the use of literary analogies: his first sight of a train is linked with Apu and Durga’s similar experience in Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s Pather Panchali, and he compares his jetha (father’s elder brother) to the dalit carpenter Velutha in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Hitherto his world has been presented with an autono- mous integrity that is devoid of such intertexts, but from the outset it has been a donnée that another world beckons: educational achievement can be a passport to success in society at large and the trajectory of his own career is a striking example of such ad- vancement. To make this a major part of the autobiography would, though, be to move outside the assumptions that are central to the text. His own progress up the social ladder is an exception to the rule and restricting his narrative to his early years enables him to maintain a communal focus. Nonetheless the appetites of those who may want to know more about what has happened to him subsequently are satisfied in the present volume by a fairly full inter- view, in which Biswas talks about his adult life in conversation with the two translators and Mohini Gurav. Some of his comments in the interview are devoted to listing the people, activities and publications of the Bengali Dalit Literature Association. This runs the risk of seeming like so much roll calling, but Biswas makes the point that oral tes- timony is quickly forgotten, so his inventories serve the purpose of providing a more permanent record of the projects, participants and events that have played their part in the struggle of Bengali dalits to emancipate themselves from the religion-sanctio- ned caste hierarchies and exclusions enshrined in the Rig Veda and perpetuated by the Manusmriti (laws of Manu). Other aspects of the interview are altogether more readable, not least passages in which Biswas talks about his experience in a post-Partition refugee camp in India, where the treatment of migrants was still determined by hierarchical caste classification. The interview is also notable for Biswas’s assertion that the Hindu-Muslim schism that had such devastating consequences for the northern wings of the sub-continent at the time of Partition had previously been an irrelevance in his own community, which, placed as it was among the lowest of the Hindu low, co-existed harmoniously with its Muslim neighbours. Overall the various sections that frame the actual autobiography – Author’s Note, Introduction, Preface and the interview – serve to contextualize and broaden the cir- 137 Reviews cumstantial detail that characterizes Biswas’s memoir. In the Author’s Note, he draws analogies between the Dalit Panther movement founded in Mumbai in 1972 and the African American struggle for civil liberties. The parallels can be loose – he ranges from Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation to the Black Panther movement in the 1960s – but the net effect is to extend the political sub-text that is always implicit in his account of the particularities of his experience of his growing up dalit in Bengal, so that, in addition to making a very specific contribution to the his own group’s continuing- en deavour to achieve social justice, they have a resonance that will echo with dispossessed peoples in many other parts of the globe.
139 Reviews
Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead. By Nicholas Birns. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2015. 252 p. ISBN: 978-1-74332-436-3. $ 30 AU.
Reviewed by Jean-François vernay
In 2007, editors Nicholas Birns and Rebecca McNeer contributed to the internation- al visibility of Australian literature with a comprehensive array of works illustrative of the growth of a flourishing Antipodean literature, entitledA Companion to Australian Literature since 1900, and released by American publisher Camden House. With his new monograph, Birns paradoxically takes the globalisation of Australian Studies one step further by having it published by Sydney University Press. Birns, an American scholar, resists the nationalist sentiment which is more often than not attached to Australian literary history. He does so by discussing the writings of Australian authors (with the exception of New Zealand / Canadian contemporary novelist Eleanor Catton) within the wider international context, and in terms of the history of ideas he synthesized in Theory After Theory: An Intellectual History of Literary Theory from 1950 to the Early 21st Century (Broadview, 2010). Otherwise put, shadows of literary theory and cultural studies pervasively hover over this monograph. Though Contemporary Australian Literature has the same format as John McLaren’s Australian Literature: An Historical Introduction (1989), its approach is radically different. Similar to Geordie Williamson’s The Burning Library: Our Great Novelists Lost and Found (2012) which is quite frequently referred to, Birns’ monograph is organised around a cluster of internationally high-profile Australian novelists such as Christina Stead, Elizabeth Harrower, Thomas Keneally, Patrick White, John Coetzee, Peter Carey, and Hannah Kent, whom Birns copiously discusses while drawing analogies with the fate and content of other Australian books and writers. The subtitle of this transnational project, A World Not Yet Dead, is an allusion to the much discussed demise of Australian literature and the rarefaction of its teaching. Taken in a global context, this waning would perhaps be associated with the worldwide crisis sweeping through the beleaguered humanities, but locally, such flagging interest was bound to be interpreted as a sure sign that Australian literature needed to be re- surrected1 and Australia’s national literary heritage saved in the face of student dollar- focused academic policies embracing the latest trends.2 Ironically enough, Australian literary historiography was born in the eyes of an ex- ternal observer, if one is to date it back to 1856 with the publication in the Journal of Australasia of an essay entitled “The Fiction Fields of Australia” written by German- born journalist Frederick Sinnett. This begs the question whether external commenta- tors would have a ringside view of Australian fiction or not. Perhaps not, if we are to believe Nicholas Birns, for whom “despite the Internet, to work in Australian literary
1. See the plea by Michael Heyward in “Classics going to waste,” The Age (22 January 2012), URL:
studies outside Australia is still to be at a decided logistical and informational disadvan- tage” (viii). Another question which may be worthwhile raising is whether this outside gaze is a specifically American one. By trying to resist ill-fitting labels, Birns is adamant that his academic monograph is no “‘American take on Australian Literature.’ One can be an Australianist literary scholar from anywhere in the world. The national adjective applies to the body of literature or to a national horizon of reading, not necessarily to the criti- cal apparatus used to study it. This book is definitely from a non-Australian perspective, but only incidentally from a specifically American one” (23). To some extent, Birns may be right in the sense that his themed collection of essays is reminiscent of many traits traditionally ascribed to Australian literary historiography: a rounded survey of literary development; the selection – and therefore tacit suppression or non-inclusion – of spe- cific authors reflecting the literary historian’s idiosyncrasies; comparisons with writers from other backgrounds; cogent arguments within a coherent historical framework; the lumping of diverse literary personalities and their sometimes eclectic works into conve- nient categories, to which Birns adds his own: modernity vs. late modernity; home vs. abroad, récit vs. total fiction, winners vs. losers (within the purview of neoliberalism), to name a few. The author’s concern “with the economic philosophy of neoliberalism” (ix) brings him to audaciously analyse some books in terms of page count, brevity and bulkiness. His personal approach, which occasionally segues into memoir (in chapters 1 and 6), is attuned with a long-standing academic tradition in literary studies which tends to favour against-the-grain interpretations of literature. Perhaps the section that stands out as the most iconoclastic is the one discussing affects in literature, a term Birns interprets somewhat creatively when he associates idealism to rancour and concern. Pedagogically, I believe a good critical book to be like a classroom lesson in which you would find: something old, something new, something fun and something to -re member. There is no denying that the first two and last elements can be ticked off from the checklist: though Birns – like most literary historians – is going over grounds that have already been covered, he manages to think outside the box by applying tenets of neoliberalism to Australian literary studies and one learns much from this book, not least from its valuable discussions of the American reception of Australian fiction. Fun is perhaps not to be expected as this book was certainly not devised for a non-academic audience. Overall, I feel that Birns’ Contemporary Australian Literature has carried out its duty with panache, giving readers a refreshed perspective on a field for which he has taken up the cudgels since the early 1980s. 141 Reviews
Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions. By Gillian Whitlock. Oxford: OUP, 2015. 242 p. ISBN (pb): 978-0-19-956062-2. £18.99.
Reviewed by Kerry-Jane Wallart
This recent delivery in the “Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures” series edi- ted by Elleke Boehmer constitutes an insightful delving into the narrative agencies of colonial and postcolonial texts at large. It does so by scrutinizing a limited but reve- latory range of cases from the late 18th century to nowadays; while it does not fully overlook the second 19th century the present monograph recognizes the effects of the long 18th-century sentimentality in contemporary concerns about Human Rights, from post-apartheid South Africa to Western countries facing repeated refugee crises, or to an Australia (possibly) coming to terms with the Stolen Generations. Whitlock proble- matizes the writing of selfhood and convincingly argues that while “autobiography” is not an appropriate concept for the (post)colonial context, constructing personhood and the expression of the “I” remains central. As a result, defining and circumscribing the notion of a “life narrative” extends far beyond the sort of generic categories and divisions that are, as Ashcroft et al. recall in The Empire Writes Back (1989), probably linked to Western practices only. The volume falls into two parts, one colonial, the other postcolonial, upon the grounds that “there is an affinity between the production and reception of life- nar rative in colonial modernity and in the ‘age of testimony’ now” (16). Such a division never cancels or diminishes the author’s immense skill in juxtaposing texts, be they theoretical, fictional or autobiographical, and weaving them together at the same time. Whitlock construes a trajectory and carefully recalls previous analyses while constantly resisting the temptation of systematic argumentation; the “transactions” in the subtitle, which heed the troubled relation between writer and reader in such matters, also illus- trates metatheoretically, as it were, the progress she makes into her own research topic. Her method is admirable and enlightening throughout. Her scope is both acute and vertiginously wide, her detailed textual analyses being structured around an impressive theoretical apparatus. Engaging in a revisiting of such figures as Equiano, Bennelong, Saartje Baartman, Mary Prince and Kah-ge-ga-gah-Bowh, the first part of the volume (“Colonial Testimonial, 1789-1852”) exposes the difficulties and ambiguities surrounding the writ- ings of the “volatile” (76) colonized subject. The author travels easily between writers who are now considered part of the “Black Atlantic” (Equiano, Mary Prince) on the one hand, and on the other hand, Australia, South Africa and Canada. All five chapters retrace the links between the rise of an empathic era of sensibility, and an individualis- tic surge resulting in the prominence of the witnessing position. Drawing on Baucom among others, she presents a “melancholic witness” caught between coercion and rele- gation, between story-telling and (self-)censure. A second and longer part (“The Passages of Testimony”) scrutinizes the contem- porary period and reconfigures the notion of testimony according to various contexts that are both contrasted and compared in the most appropriate way. The first chapter, centered around the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, connects no- vels and narratives by Jacob Dlamini, J. M. Coetzee, Antjie Krog and Nelson Mandela. 142
The author shows how texts might both originate from the specificities of a perspec- tive and be ghosted by precedence and the communality of the experience of apar- theid; she concludes that the “exhaustion of the western humanist language of recog- nition is played out” (101). In the following two chapters Whitlock goes on skilfully to unpack the echoes of the 18th-century “humanitarian revolution” and aptly uses the conclusions in Sarah Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) – among which one might quote her reflections on the “economy of affect” and her theorization of “fear.” “Rape Warfare and Humanitarian Storytelling” tackles the silence often surrounding victims of rape in the Congo as well as the subjectivities and distortions which run ga- lore around the figure of Dian Fossey, who died close-by, and whose testimony shows marks of gendered violence, semantically and otherwise. “Thresholds of Testimony” is a chapter about the “conscience industry” (Carter, qtd. 151) afflicting Australia around its national treatment of the Aborigines at the beginning of the 20th century and centers around Sally Morgan’s 1987 My Place. Whitlock sees that text as the locus for catharsis but also the reactivation of pre-existent codes of witness bearing. The last chapter, concerned with “The Ends of Testimony,” is a case-in-point of the volume’s criss-crossing method, as it confronts three papers by Robert Young, Simon Gikandi and Peter Hulme about refugees, those “speechless emissaries” (178). Whitlock turns to Edwige Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying and the remediation of testimony that it represents, before addressing the question of the “Not-so-silent Hero” (189) with Dave Eggers’ What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng. By way of conclusion (a text pessimistically as well as overly humbly entitled “Salvage”), Whitlock “suggests an interlocking of pasts, presents, and futures across postcolonial life narra- tive” (201) and considers the texts gleaned throughout the volume as so many attempts at redeeming human experience against legal loss and literary silence. Postcolonial Life Narratives makes a truly eye-opening read and will, I believe, prove useful much beyond the circle of scholars who are interested in questions of postco- lonial autobiographies and testimonies, as it interrogates, in line with Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak,” the way in which reception cannot be dissociated from issues of agency, legitimacy, self-fashioning and personal voice. Contributors
Virginie Bernard is presently completing a PhD in English studies at Aix Marseille University. Her research focuses on the history and anthropology of the south-west of Western Austra- lia and the Noongars, the Aboriginal Australians of that area. She is interested in issues of colonisation, land rights, tradition and modernity. Her ethnographic fieldwork (16 months in total) has combined participant observation, interviews and archival research.
Carine davias is currently writing a PhD on the literature of Australian South Sea Islanders with Paul-Valéry University in France and James Cook University (JCU) in Townsville, Aus- tralia. In 2013, she presented a paper on “Time, Memory and Identity in Australian South Sea Islander Literature” at a TransOceanik seminar organised by the Cairns Institute. She contributed an article entitled “Cultural Heritage and Identity in the Literature of Australian South Sea Islanders and Other Media” to Etropic, JCU’s online journal.
Catherine delmas is a professor of English literature at Grenoble Alpes University and a member of Ilcea4. Her fields of interest focus on orientalist and (anti)imperialist discourse, aesthetics, representation and ethics, modernism and postmodernism. She has published various articles about Joseph Conrad, T. E. Lawrence, Kipling, E. M. Forster, Lawrence Dur- rell, Michael Ondaatje or J. M. Coetzee in various periodicals. Her book, Ecritures du désert: voyageurs et romanciers anglophones XIXe-XXe siècles (Writing the Desert in the 19th and 20th centuries: from Burton to Ondaatje) was published at the University of Provence in 2005. She recently co-edited Vestiges du Proche-Orient et de la Méditerranée with Daniel Lançon (Geuthner, 2015).
Angela GiovananGeli is a senior lecturer in International Studies at the University of Techno- logy Sydney (UTS). Her research interests include Intercultural Learning, Internationalisa- tion in Higher Education as well as issues in French and European Culture.
Pascale GuiBert is a professor of English literature at the University of Besançon. Her re- search is on poetry and landscape, from Wordsworth to contemporary migrant poets. Inte- rested in the poetics of thought, she investigates the relation between the representation of landscape and philosophy. She is the author of numerous articles on Wordsworth, Heaney and Eamonn Wall, and edited the collective volume Reflective Landscapes of the Anglophone Countries (Rodopi, 2011).
Florence laBaune-demeule is a professor of English Studies and Postcolonial Literature at University Jean Moulin – Lyon 3. She has published essays on writers of Caribbean origin such as V. S. Naipaul, E. Danticat, J. Kincaid, D. Walcott, F. D’Aguiar and Jean Rhys, as well as on writers of Indian origin (A. Desai, A. Nair, A. Roy). She is the author of a monograph entitled V. S. Naipaul: L’énigme de l’arrivée. L’éducation d’un point de vue (Editions de l’Université Jean Moulin, 2007). She has edited five volumes of essays, the most recent being Authority and Displacement in the English-Speaking World (2 vol., Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015).
Andreas Pichler lectures in the departments of English and Applied Languages at Aix Mar- seille University. Initially educated as a geologist, he holds a PhD in literature entitled “The Fogging of Spaces” analysing geographically gendered spaces in twentieth-century literature. His recent publications include “Geography and Literature: The Bloomsbury Group” (The London Reader 1, 2013), “De la météorologie dans Maurice d’E. M. Forster” (forthcoming in E-rea,) “Deduction and Geography in Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet” (Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens 81, Spring 2015)
Elizabeth rechniewski is Honorary Senior Lecturer in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sydney. In the context of a broader field of research into nationalism 144
and colonialism, she has co-authored with Matthew Graves (Aix-Marseille University) several articles on speculative geographers of Australia, including Thomas J. Maslen, James Vetch and Edward Wakefield. Recent publications include a co-edited issue ofPortal “Geographies of Identity” (12/1 2015) and “Speculative Geographers: Imagining the Australian Continent in the 1830s” in Visualising Australia: Images, Icons, Imagination, WVT, 2014.
Mathilde roGez is a lecturer at the University of Toulouse (CAS EA 801). She has worked on Southern African writers like Coetzee, Plaatje, Vera, Mda or van Heerden, and has recently co-edited a special issue of ELA on South African literature since 1994 with Richard Samin. She is the Commonwealth editor for the journal Miranda < http://www.miranda-ejournal. fr/sdx2/miranda/index.xsp > and is currently co-editing two books on contemporary South African theatre and on cities in South Africa.
Kim snePvanGers is a University of New South Wales (UNSW) Teaching Fellow, Professional Experience Project (PEP) Coordinator, and Program Director Art Education at UNSW Australia: Art & Design. As the recipient of a 2016 UNSW Strategic Educational Fellowship Grant titled: New Approaches to the Development of Professional Identity through Independent Criti- cal Reflection her research interweaves creative and professional leadership contexts. She has extensive research experience in developing transitional educative spaces between academic, creative and professional practice.
Giuseppe sofo is a researcher in anglophone and francophone postcolonial literatures. He has translated Caribbean and European literature from English, French and German into Italian. He is also a writer of fiction. He holds an MA in Comparative Literature and Postcolonial Cultures from the Università di Bologna and one in Anglophone Studies from the Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris. He is currently enrolled in a Comparative Literature Ph.D pro- gramme at Avignon University and Università di Roma La Sapienza.
Patricia neville is a recently retired English teacher engaged in researching a doctoral thesis with the Open University in the U.K., focussing on the novels of Janet Frame. Earlier this year she made a month-long research visit to the Hocken Archives Collection of the Uni- versity of Otago, Dunedin. She contributed to the Janet Frame Colloquium, Janet Frame: Ten Years On, in London in November 2013, and has written a review of Janet Frame: In Her Own Words for the New Zealand Studies Network website.
John thieme is a Senior Fellow at the University of East Anglia and previously held chairs at the University of Hull and London South Bank University. His books include Derek Walcott (Manchester UP, 1999), Post-Colonial Con-Texts (Continuum, 2001), Post-Colonial Studies: The Essential Glossary (Hodder Education, 2003) and R.K. Narayan (Manchester UP, 2007). He edited The Journal of Commonwealth Literature from 1992 to 2011 and is General Editor of the Manchester University Press Contemporary World Writers Series.
Christine vandamme is a Senior Lecturer at Grenoble Alpes University, where she teaches British literature in the premodernist and modernist periods as well as postcolonial literature and more particularly Australian literature. Her field of specialty is the representation of space in literature, its narratological and aesthetic aspects as well as its ideological, politi- cal and ethical implications. She has published extensively on Joseph Conrad and Malcolm Lowry and more recently, on Patrick White and David Malouf and their representation of the Bush and the desert respectively.
Jean-François vernay’s first monograph,Water from the Moon: Illusion and Reality in the Works of Australian Novelist Christopher Koch (Cambria Press), came out in 2007. The translations of his latest books will be released in 2016 as A Brief Take on the Australian Novel (Wakefield Press) and The Seduction of Fiction: A Plea for Putting Emotions Back into Literary Interpretation as part of the Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism Series. 145 Contributors
Kerry-Jane wallart is a Senior Lecturer at Paris-Sorbonne. She has authored a number of chapters and articles on Caribbean literature, and more specifically on the works of Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris, Fred d’Aguiar, E. K. Brathwaite and Claude McKay. Her research extends geographically into Africa (Athol Fugard, Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri) and theoretically into generic reflections (the importance of performance in written texts, the proliferation of poetic forms in the novel, the reinvention of the short story form, the postcolonial reshuf- fling of generic distinctions in general).