Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures

Annalisa Oboe, Shaul Bassi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415591911
• eBook ISBN: 9781136811722
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Modern ideas of freedom and human rights have been repeatedly contested and are hotly debated at the beginning of the third millennium in response to new theories, needs, and challenges in contemporary life.

This volume offers culturally diverse contributions to the debate on freedom from the literatures and arts of the postcolonial world, exploring experiences that evoke, desire, imagine, and perform freedom across five continents and two centuries of history.

Experiences of Freedom opens with an introductory philosophical essay by Achille Mbembe and is divided into four sections that consider:

• resisting history and colonialism

• the right to move and to belong

• the right to (believe in) free futures

• imaginative freedom and critical engagement.

Each section contains a piece of creative writing directly connected to these topics from authors Chris Abani, Anita Desai, Caryl Phillips, and Alexis Wright, followed by a selection of critical essays.

Contributors: Chris Abani, Rochelle Almeida, Gil Anidjar, Jogamaya Bayer, Elena Bernardini, Anne Collett, Carmen Concilio, Paola Della Valle, Roberto Derobertis, Anita Desai, Lorna Down, Francesca Giommi, Gareth Griffiths, Dave Gunning, John C. Hawley, Peter H. Marsden, Russell McDougall, Achille Mbembe, Cinzia Mozzato, Kevin Newmark, Berndt Ostendorf, Mai Palmberg, Owen Percy, Kirsten Holst Petersen, Caryl Phillips, Annel Pieterse, Christiane Schlote, Nermeen Shaikh, Patrick Williams, Alexis Wright, and Robert J. C. Young.

1 Where to Point the Spears?

ALEXIS WRIGHT

Where to point the spears? Let me warn you that I do not for one moment believe that the Indigenous people of Australia are standing around right now, wondering where to aim their spears. The art of the hunt—the skill of locating the target, aiming and firing spears metaphorically speaking—was the core activity of our political strategy against the broad scale attack on Indigenous rights by Australian governments throughout the last decades of the twentieth century.

There is much that Indigenous people have lost to the continuous attack on the rights of our culture to exist, our dignity, and our wellbeing, by governments still guided by the principles of colonialism. However, we have not lost sight of the spirit of the hunt that has grown within us, and is an essential part of our identity—of who we are. Our knowledge of hunting and gathering is at the forefront of our incredible survival, because these skills are an intrinsic part of our culture of stories and the means by which, even in the modern world, we can nourish our minds. Even though our voices have been stifled by the dominating media, which have intimidated our free speech on issues that affect us by belittling our ability of self-determination and questioning the right of our culture to exist, there are many of us who are very fortunate indeed to still be able to practice the wondrous art of hunting and gathering traditional bush tucker, and to learn, or be the learned of our own universities in the vast lands and seas of the ancestral domain of Indigenous nations across the continent, where the knowledge of our culture has been stored for countless millennia.

It is more victory to us that a very high percentage of a half million Aboriginal people in Australia have been able to hold on to a spiritual and emotional attachment to their land, environment, and people through understanding the ancient knowledge of our culture, and have still retained the spirit to hunt. I believe that this is true even if the pressures of the ongoing process of colonization over two centuries have created difficulties—or the impossibility for many Indigenous people to continue to have a very close, physical relationship to their land—and, as a consequence, have produced disharmony in the relationship of the stories of landscape of the heart, soul, and mind to traditional land. This strong feature of our humanity has occupied a good deal of my concentration in my writing: this meaning of hunting and gathering in the home within, what is happening in the land of the mind.

This is the country of our oldest love and of our strong passion for the ancient, where the stories of all times nourish and create the contours of this terrain, which at the same time closely connects the sacredness of attachment to traditional land. It is in landscapes that the principles of culture are contained, maintained, renewed, replenished, and transferred through a constant process of retracing and recital of stories. This is also about the art of the story, to shed new light and understanding, and resembles the hunter or gatherer moving through a legacy of stories that are interlocking all that can be or must be remembered, to keep whole the country of the mind. The catch is great for those who have their internal and external worlds securely connected, but, for others, the catch is small.

What I believe is kept alive, as we strive to retain a closeness to the beliefs and principles of culture, is that this knowledge of the ancient methods of storytelling is closely related to skills associated with hunting and gathering, and can be seen, for instance, in senior traditional Aboriginal men and women in countries like Central Australia. Their stories are a deeply religious unity of mind and soul, inseparable from a spiritual land, and they are able to physically locate—even in featureless desert places not frequently visited—hundreds of sacred and important sites in the ancestral estate. When I worked with some of these important senior people in Aboriginal law over a number of years, they were exploring how to extend their rights over land they had won back into their care after long battles through the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976. What they sought to do was to establish an Australian law that safeguarded Indigenous rights in the constitutions of Northern Territory and Australian governments. They live to the measure contained in the ancient stories of their traditional lands and, within this framework, they were interested in creating a story for the future that included recognition of Aboriginal law as the right direction for their people to create a future, and where responsibility also came from the long relationship with the knowledge and wisdom from the ancient world.

In the work that we did together, they always stated very clearly, and insisted, that we already have our own constitutions which are our own laws, and that we have been governing ourselves since the beginning of time. It is true that they do govern their spiritual world, which is a very important aspect of why the stories, which are also the ancient scriptures, laws, and land title deeds, are continually retold. Australian governments and their policymakers might do well to come to terms with the necessity of working with the Aboriginal government, instead of pushing against it from the outside with policies and bureaucratic initiatives that always eventually seem to come to no good. I wanted to write in a way that was somewhere near to this reality of Indigenous sovereignty of the mind, and how skilled people of this mind were in the massively difficult challenge of survival. This uncharted place in Australian literature was the exact place that I wanted to explore in a novel like Carpentaria (2006).

If you look at the Aboriginal people, or Anangu as they call themselves in the Central Australia Western Desert, their word Tjukurrpa is related to story, and given a meaning by K. Hansen and L. Hansen’s Pintupi/Luritja Dictionary (1992) to include the following:

Tjukurrpa n. Dreaming; dream time; birth dreaming; a dreaming is any mythical hero from the distant past concerning which there are stories and songs, these heroes are understood to be responsible for the creation of physical features throughout the land; dream time is the time when these heroes and the physical features came into being etc.

I have worked on the deep causes of Indigenous Injury in Central Australia in the early 1990s, and the research in communities in the region was continued by Jeff Hulcombe, a deeply respected man in this area of Australia, who has dedicated many years of his adult life to working with family communities in the Western Desert. In his 2006 final report he explains that Tjukurrpa can simply mean any story about the past or current events, but in the fullest sense of the word, the parable-like stories, or those of the dreaming, provide the spiritual, philosophic, and logical rationale of Anangu existence. Tjukurrpa is the bedrock of Anangu knowledge, the immovable foundation of Anangu being. He also makes clear that what happens through the revitalizing process of the story is its re-reading, for knowledge to be passed on, and while the land survives so does the Tjukurrpa which is inscribed into it. This is what provides the philosophical, spiritual, and moral foundation of Anangu.

A cultural story map includes everything you see of and in the land, sea, and skies as Anangu see it, or as any other Aboriginal people across the country visualize the stories that have been given to them, and also represents the production and maintenance of literature on a grand scale since ancient times. It is a literature that is not only inscribed into the land, or visibly painted on, or chiseled into rock, but it is written in the mind. This method of story keeping is the spearhead of culture, and it closely resembles the skills of our hunter and gatherer people who lived nomadically in a close spiritual relationship with the land. So, it comes as no surprise to me that everywhere I have been throughout contemporary Indigenous Australia, there has been an overwhelming desire to retrace many of our stories, particularly about people and the contemporary situation, through the written form of literature.

The original question I asked myself when I was planning to write Carpentaria was how any Aboriginal person could live with a sense of integrity in contemporary Australia. Then, I suppose I was left with two words—integrity and hope—or, perhaps, the hope of integrity. This led to the question of how integrity is defined—what makes someone feel that they have integrity, or how we can weigh the measure of personal integrity in a powerful culture in the often powerless reality of our lives. I somehow decided that I could explore these questions in imaginative storytelling by developing a model of the way ancient Indigenous beliefs are retraced and retold in the mind of the novel’s characters. If I found anything at all, it was that the heart of integrity of the unity of soul/heart/mind with land creates different responses in different characters, but even so, each character had a prevailing belief in the strength of their own integrity to encounter the very difficult tasks created by the novel. Interestingly, I do not think that any of the characters ever expressed the desire and hope of survival, but conduct themselves like islands of possibility, and I can see there is an island mentality in Australia as a country, as a region, and between boundaries, people, relationships, and even in ideas such as ownership of history.

In Carpentaria a child of the driest grasses in the world asks the old people whether they know what the word “hope” means. The elders, too busy considering the perils of time lost, finally answer that hope is found in stories. Stories that have kept us alive, regardless of whatever else might happen to us. This leads to a second question, which is how to understand the way we live with the stories of all times, given that the more contemporary stories of oppression are being created too quickly and more frequently. I wanted to understand whether and how the negative impact of these stories bombards the ancient story world. Which will prevail in the end? Will it be the lost spirits from other worlds, or the spirits that belong to this world? Can both be reconciled? I think these questions are very relevant and ought to be something to focus on when political questions about assimilation are mooted, as they have been in Australia from time to time without due consideration to the negative impact on the right of the Indigenous culture to exist. I then had to think about how to write a novel where all stories come alive, to demonstrate somehow the sovereignty of mind in the characters, a place where the “fugitive future” is being lived through the imagination—an idea that I found was explored by the Irish writers Seamus Heaney and Seamus Deane, but which in this case was being imagined from one’s own idea of ancient storytelling principles. I tried to work with this idea through the creation of Indigenous heroes, as a way of understanding through fiction the significance of the lives of the characters, and as lived with or through the ancestral land and sea spiritual creation heroes that I also created.

Some people ask: why doesn’t the novel concentrate on the terrible realities of the Indigenous world, which make up the current public face of Aboriginal Australia? While Carpentaria did not shy away from the realities of the contemporary world of Indigenous people, I was not interested in retracing and documenting the result of the damage created by the failed policies of Australian governments that continue to tie up the lives, work, and thinking of thousands of Aboriginal people in Australia. The question that might be posed is, who should take responsibility for the psychologically injured framework of our humanity? I do not accept nor take the responsibility for what has not been of our creation. I have done this in the past, but I now feel that it is not my role to document the paralyzed state of this mess. I understand the limitations of my capacity and time to be a writer, and know that I should use this time to explore questions that might contribute to our own understanding of the core of our selves. I was not bowing to an expectation that I can only look through the glare of the narrow prism of colonialism to infinity.

My novel is set around a small fictional town called Desperance in the Gulf of Carpentaria, but it could be any town, particularly of northern Australia. It is a town that most Australians can recall, or feel that they know because they have experienced this kind of town, or they already have a vision of it: the familiarity of such place already exists in the national psyche of Australia.

Desperance is a town where people are physically and physiologically separated by race, voluntarily perhaps, and they watch each other. When I was researching my book Grog War in Tennant Creek in 1997, I was told by a white man I had interviewed that he knew what Aboriginal people do all the time, because he watched them from the top of the hill. I used his statement at the beginning of that book. In Carpentaria I searched until I reached the conclusion that the novel should be narrated by the voices of the old people who are telling a story with compassion and humor to the spirits of the land, about how their people are traveling in life in today’s world. It is the old people, the elders, some of the poorest people in the world, who sit in the tall grass and watch and tell with linguistic freedom the story of old Australian families hidden behind a common name, like Smith. They have become scientify in their understanding of the importance of their words, which are being beamed away by satellite, translated into proper English and discussed on the other side of the world in the boardrooms of the multinational mining company that is plotting against them. The old people are not short of praising men of ambition who strive for newfangled ideas like reconciliation in Australia—like the town clerk L. Valance (an outsider), who strives to create the perfect world of race harmony in Desperance and rings the town bell, hoping the Holy Trinity in the storm clouds will give the poor unfortunate Aboriginal people the strength to walk to town, where they would only be there to hear criticism about them. We were certainly being positioned to the tolling bells of assimilation through the first years of the new millennium. In the Australian media we wore the same yolk given to us in 1788, as being barely human enough to be capable of “self-determination” or speaking for ourselves.

Carpentaria is about hunting and gathering, and you might recognize the metaphor in the value of gathering from the bee’s story in Jonathan Swift’s The Battle of the Books, where the Ancients say that all that they have was only achieved through “infinite labour and search, and ranging through every corner of nature … to till our hives with honey and wax,” to bring to mankind “sweetness and light.”

I have hunted endlessly and gathered from all the finest literary flowers across the world to try to understand from other writers how to write with the freedom of my own imagination. I was interested in the connections I could find in the literature of writers Indigenous to the countries described in their writing and their understanding of the complexity of time inherited from a long, ancient tradition. I looked at some of the best writers from European countries, Irish writers, the French Caribbean, South American, Indian, Asian, and African writers.

I still search. For example, I recently had the great pleasure of meeting in India the highly respected Hindi poet and long time promoter of culture Ashok Vajpeyi. Ashok describes the value of literature as being necessary for its intellectual toughness, moral responsibility, and self-questioning, because it is through literature that we can once again meet ourselves in what he described as “the other reality, the other republic of imagination.” I am interested in this idea of the reality of imagination, or the terrain of the other home place that creates possibilities as well as barriers, and why it is necessary to find a way of tracking, tracing, and backtracking to create literature that might be able to give readers a chance to meet people who are or who might start journeying more frequently to this other home, out of necessity perhaps, and who are even becoming their own imagination. I am reminded of the work of Ngangkari, or traditional healers of Central Australia, who say that they travel the land at night, journeying far away, to visit relatives and sick people, and to school the minds of children whom they have chosen to follow them in the art of traditional healing.

I like the idea of exploring ideas that can build new links or branches from our own traditions. The Sarod and Indian classical music master Ustad Amjad Ali Khan, one of the most charismatic performers of Indian ragas, has described his urge to create new ragas as still being traditional, but using the platform of his creativity for new explorations, and not seeing tradition as a limiting force. Ali Khan’s music contains the same “genes” as the parent music. On the other hand, when I listen to the literature of the traditional Indian classical music called Jugal-gaan, now called a “duel of difference,” that musicians like Ali Khan and Ravi Shankar have performed in their raga music, I feel the symmetrical perfection of blending a musical story told through the imagination. This was the kind of seamlessness I wanted to create by blending time, voice, rhythm, and style of culture, as I describe the story world of Carpentaria, trying to replicate a helix of divided strands forever moving, entwining all stories together, just like a lyrebird is capable of singing several songs at once.

While writing this novel, I hoped to come to some understanding of how we have continued to live with antiquity as a state of mind. I am able to feel the spiritual antiquity of our culture in a river with an ancient story in our traditional country, and I feel the power of this story, and similar stories from our land. The thought of being close to something so ancient and still alive, and living in the essence of our people, leaves a more enduring image of unfathomable survival and beauty, than of myself as being simply a human presence, just as fleeting as my ancestors had once lived.

I began to think about what it means to be a spiritual ancestor. What might this ancestor look like, and how its stories, the stories that the old people tell and are the framework of Aboriginal Law, can be true, or do become truth. I remember once an old man telling me a story about a crashed, abandoned car left in the dry grass next to the road. He said it was like that because the young men who owned the car had refused to give him a lift home when he had asked them to, and they had been taught a lesson. This story might require detailed examination of the clash between the modern and the ancient worlds, but the moral lesson from the ancestor who destroyed the car was that it was irresponsible to refuse an elder a lift home.

People who do not know me, or my work, often ask me whether I feel restrained by writing about the world of Indigenous people. I think what is meant by the question is that the Indigenous world is a sad and sorry place. This is a reality, and it can be a reality that makes a jail for the mind. It does. However, there is also a lot of encouragement and hard work happening in the Indigenous world of Australia. It can be like being in a bog of sadness and unworthy action to rectify the causes of so much sorrow. It can be a place where the mind is so submerged it cannot lift itself up and look past the wall it has built around its small enclosure. This can be a narrow-minded world that is maintained that way in order to protect itself, and where there is no heart to embrace differences cropping up on the narrow horizon. Yet, here also lives the hunter of the old world of wonder and imagination, who drew his strength from questioning how the fish were traveling. Now, instead, he stays in his coop created for him by the largess of indifference to whether he survives or not, while guarding this wall that should not exist, even across the invisible boundary of your neighbor. I think this way of colonized thinking is a death trap that ensures that there is no real joy coming from the imagination, and those who cannot imagine their own future have let their future die.

I actually feel liberated because I have tried to write from the difficult questions I am asking of the world I inhabit. I think I have been able to find a place in my imagination where I can live and work with characters like Mozzie Fishman, Norm Phantom, Angel Day, and Elias Smith. Let them live and point to something in ourselves that we might either like or disli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Trying Freedom
• Fragile Freedom
• 1. Where to Point the Spears?
• PART One. Resisting History and Colonialism
• PART Two. The Right to Move and to Belong
• PART Three. The Right to (Believe in) Free Futures
• PART Four. Imaginative Freedom and Critical Engagement
• Index