The Postcolonial Eye

White Australian Desire and the Visual Field of Race

Alison Ravenscroft

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317019688
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Informed by theories of the visual, knowledge and desire, The Postcolonial Eye is about the 'eye' and the 'I' in contemporary Australian scenes of race. Specifically, it is about seeing, where vision is taken to be subjective and shaped by desire, and about knowing one another across the cultural divide between white and Indigenous Australia. Writing against current moves to erase this divide and to obscure difference, Alison Ravenscroft stresses that modern Indigenous cultures can be profoundly, even bewilderingly, strange and at times unknowable within the terms of 'white' cultural forms. She argues for a different ethics of looking, in particular, for aesthetic practices that allow Indigenous cultural products, especially in the literary arts, to retain their strangeness in the eyes of a white subject. The specificity of her subject matter allows Ravenscroft to deal with the broad issues of postcolonial theory and race and ethnicity without generalising. This specificity is made visible in, for example, Ravenscroft's treatment of the figuring of white desire in Aboriginal fiction, film and life-stories, and in her treatment of contemporary Indigenous cultural practices. While it is located in Australian Studies, Ravenscroft's book, in its rigorous interrogation of the dynamics of race and whiteness and engagement with European and American literature and criticism, has far-reaching implications for understanding the important question of race and vision.

PART I
‘There is and can be no brute vision’

Chapter 1
The Eye and the ‘I’

Things are not what they seem and should be visualised from all directions in order to enhance clarity. But even then there’s doubt because of what’s hidden.

—Gordon Hookey in Ryan Colour Power (151)

There is a photograph of two young girls, barefoot and in shabby dresses; one girl’s head is shaven. In front of the other girl is placed, enigmatically, a small card which has a number inscribed on it – N1474. Who were these girls and what happened to them after the camera closed its eye and the photographer turned away? What was the fate of these children and also of the photographer who looked upon an image from which he excluded himself but in which he was implicated nevertheless? How to bring such a scene into writing?

In attempts to bring scenes of deprivation or suffering into legibility, material conditions often stand as condensed carriers of meaning: here, hand-me-down clothes and shaven heads, elsewhere there might be a dirty kitchen in a broken-down house. We all know narratives of deprivation and material ruin, of rubble searched for two odd shoes to make a pair before the winter comes, or for a cup not too broken to pass dirty water between dry lips. W.G. Sebald has looked to post-war German literature and its descriptions of material poverty in Germany during and after the Second World War in order to make a point about such narratives of the ruins. He refers us to a passage in Hermann Kasack’s novel Die Stadt hinter dem Strom and the description of an assortment of junk among which dispirited Germans rifle in search of the necessities of life: ‘Here a few jackets and trousers, belts with silver buckles, ties and brightly colored scarves were laid out, there a collection of shoes and boots of all kinds, often in very poor condition. Elsewhere hangers bore crumpled suits in various sizes, old-fashioned rustic smocks and jackets, along with darned stockings, socks and shirts, hats and hairnets … all jumbled together.’1 But as Sebald goes on to point out, ‘the lowered standard of living and the reduced economic conditions that are evident as the empirical foundations of the narrative in such passages do not make up a comprehensive image of the world of ruins’. Instead, he insists: ‘They are merely the setting for the paramount plan, which is to mythologize a reality that in its raw form defies description’ (Sebald 48). This is why, for Sebald, German post-war literature, this literature of the ruins, fails at its avowed task. In the end it is a literature that turns away from rather than looks at the ruins.

Sebald was preoccupied with the Holocaust and the failure of post-war German literature to represent it. This may seem a long way from the subject of this book and yet the Holocaust’s terms are touchstones in some important Australian debates on colonisation. The term ‘holocaust’ has been used by some historians, political scientists and anthropologists to describe the Australian scene: ‘the great Australian holocaust known as colonisation’ as Deborah Bird Rose has said.2 Indigenous-signed fictional and nonfictional writings, too, do not shy from mobilising the European Holocaust’s scenes and its lexicons. In figuring the horror of Indigenous experience, Indigenous authors have sometimes alluded to genocide and to concentration camps and their associated tortures, deprivations and other perversions. In Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart the descriptions of reserves to which Aboriginal peoples were forcibly removed recall the camps with men and women and children in uniforms with heads shaved, lining up for ‘food’: ‘Cold. A thick yellow skin formed across the bowl. You tapped something solid at the bowl’s centre. It bobbed, and the yellow skin broke apart … Eyeballs floated across puddles of greasy soup’ (93). Men and women pressed into the cattle trucks of waiting trains, the forced work of the reserves, and then the fires to burn bodies: ‘See the limbs crooked and dangling in the firelight, the limbs akin to our own but lifeless?’ (172).

Leaving aside for the moment the questions that have been raised about the sense of making comparisons between disparate historical events, and indeed of the term holocaust itself, Sebald remains of interest because of his arguments against a literature of deprivation, loss and ruin that attempts to fill in the silences and gaps in historical knowledge but which all the same newly inscribes them.3 In this book I am interested in gaps in representation, too, in the places where representation might be said to fail, and crucially, I am interested in the stitches that non-Indigenous Australian readers of Indigenous textuality tend to make to cover over these gaps. In writing this book, I have been interested in what falls along and beyond the borders of seeing and knowing when non-Indigenous Australians approach Indigenous textuality. I am interested in Sebald, too, because of his own (we might say inevitable) failures to write the scene of suffering that is his object of study; the places where his methods reproduce the problems he points to, and the warning this holds for any critical practice.

To return to the image with which we began. This image4 of two girls in rough dresses and shaved head appears in the memoir of Ruth Hegarty, a Murrie woman who writes of the conditions at Cherbourg Aboriginal Reserve in Queensland, where she grew up in the 1930s after being removed from her family. Ruth Hegarty and all the other little girls ‘were treated identically’, she writes, ‘dressed identically, our hair cut identically. Our clothes and bald heads were a giveaway’ (Hegarty 4). Such an image might have come from countless memoirs, family photograph albums, and government archives in Australia, as in other settler societies. Stories of young children’s deprivations on reserves circulate now in many Indigenous life stories and fiction, accounts of being taken away from parents, of being forced by the missionaries to work in lowly paid or unpaid work far from home, of searching through rubbish dumps in efforts to scrape together the bare necessities that might make life possible. There are accounts of being ‘huddled on wagons … [with] bundles of clothes, a bowl, a cup … a broken clock tucked under someone’s arm’ and of children being accorded numbers, sometimes instead of names.5

Of such representations of deprivation, a settler reader can often say, ‘Yes, I have known such poverty’. The migrant, for instance, might say, ‘I too know what it is to be separated from family, to be without a home, to be without shoes’. A British child migrant might say, ‘I was also taken from my home and told that my parents were dead’. Many more readers know these stories not from immediate personal experience but from the experiences of people close to them. These are the stories of a settler society. To such readers, then, writing which can show the material signs of poverty bridges a gap between Indigenous and settler by showing places of correspondence, the places where one person can identify with another through shared deprivation. There is a danger, though, in this kind of reading practice because the settler reader can then ask of the Indigenous author: ‘What gives you reason to imagine that you are a special case?’ Reading practices based on identification risk collapsing differences. They risk reading these signs of poverty – a pudding-basin haircut, or bare feet, say – as signifying the same for these Indigenous girls as they might have done for this reader. Such a reading practice cannot answer the question: how do these things come to take their meaning here, in the specificities of this reality? What meanings can they hold for these girls, Edna Walker and Doreen Barber, Aboriginal girls on a reserve in the late 1930s, rather than, say, for English migrant girls in the backstreets and laneways of the industrial inner cities in Australia in the same years?6 How do objects come to carry different meanings, and what would it mean for reading and writing practices to insist on this difference?

Fig. 1.1 Edna Walker and Doreen Barber, Cherbourg 1938.

Material objects take their power and meanings in relation to the embodied subjects who bear them, who in turn press the objects into the work of carrying social values. Objects are social forms; they carry meanings between people. Sometimes they are the very thing through which a social bond is mediated – and their meanings arise relationally – their values or meanings are not absolute or immanent. The objects – here, a sack dress and shaved head – have their historical particularity, as do the subjects who bear them, and as do we as viewers.

This is in part why literatures like those Sebald points to from the post-war German scene fail: they attempt to materialise deprivation and suffering through a catalogue of sad and peculiar objects, failing to bring these objects into proximity with the men and women who once touched them. In such stories of deprivation, too, there tends to be an emphasis on those objects that are extant rather than what has been lost – a kind of positivism that necessarily fails to speak of loss, of what is missing. Thinking back to descriptions of the Holocaust for instance, the emphasis tends to be, say, on the shaven heads, or the hair itself, detached and arranged in obscene piles. There are either images of hair, or teeth, gathered in their anonymity, or images of the people to whom these kinds of things should still belong but who can never reclaim them. As Agamben asks: where is the rest of this hair’s body? Hair and shorn head cannot be brought together again. Between what there is to be seen and what is absent is a horrifying distance, horrifying, we might say, precisely because it is unrepresentable. It is not a distance that can be given a measure in metres, or days; it is a space beyond the normal coordinates of space and time. It seems, then, that the truth of images might lie in what fails to appear as much as what is in view.

In the image of two young Murrie girls with which we began, its truth does not inhere in the material objects that are visible to my eyes. There is no thing that can stand as the minimal point of my considerations. This is partly because of the difference in what these things might have meant to these girls and what meanings I can give them, but it is also because of what falls from my view. I cannot see the pleasures these girls’ lives hold – it is the memoirs of these years that will show me some of these – and I cannot see the power and force that, again if I turn to Indigenous writing, I am told might be there running like an electric current – the Dreaming that, we are told, is like an engine, it pushes (Stanner). Nor, looking at this image, do I see the girls as carriers of Indigenous Law, although Indigenous-signed fiction will bring me back to this image and make me wonder.

To turn again to Sebald and to his descriptions of the literature of that other time and place of destruction, Germany in the 1940s. This literature maintains its silence, he suggests, by recourse to either abstraction on one hand or imagination on the other – both fail to speak. He asks what it means, for instance, to represent the bombings in terms of numbers, attempting to abstract the sum of countless individual experiences. What can we discover in the fact that by the end of the war 7.5 million people were homeless, and that there were 31.1 cubic metres of rubble for every person in Cologne, and 42.8 cubic metres for every inhabitant of Dresden? ‘The destruction, on a scale without historical precedent, entered the annals of the nation, as it set about rebuilding itself, only in the form of vague generalizations’ (Sebald 4). The numbering of the homeless does not bring into our sights the intimacy and interiority of even a single home; quantifying rubble does not disclose any bodies which the rubble covers. We could say that the quantification itself stitches over what has been suffered or lost.

Sebald instead turns to rather different sources for information about the effects on bodies of the firebombs. He starts with the diary of Friedrich Reck, who died in Dachau. Reck’s entry for August 20, 1943, describes refugees at a railway station in Upper Bavaria. Among these refugees is a young mother who, in her rush to board a train, drops her cardboard suitcase, which spills open on the platform, revealing among its contents the incinerated body of her child, miniaturised by the intense heat of the firebombs. The case falls onto the platform, ‘bursts open and spills its contents. Toys, a manicure case, singed underwear. And last of all, a roasted corpse of a child, shrunk like a mummy, which its half-deranged mother has been carrying about with her, the relic of a past that was still intact a few days ago’ (29). Against this, the numbering of dead or the reckoning of rubble show themselves as strange and concerted evasions of the human subject, methods that miss flesh and bone. Perhaps we can say more: that they make flesh and bone merely objects, separated once again from the subjects to whom they belonged.

But Sebald finds literature that relies on the imagination fails, too. Neither a reckoning nor an imaginative act, he argues, could bring the reader close to the subjective effects of these years. How then to write? Sebald argues that German literature had to wait for the publication of a different kind of writing, some of which carries Jewish signatures. It is a trilogy of novels by Hubert Fichte, who lost his Jewish father in the war, and the autobiographical essay style of Jean Améry, who was tortured and interred in Auschwitz, that first hold Sebald’s attention.

In Detlev’s Imitations, the second novel in Fichte’s trilogy, one of the protagonists undertakes research into the Hamburg air raid. The narrative has him looking at documents held in the library of the Eppendorf Medical School. Extracts of genuine historical documents are then incorporated into the novel, appearing as discontinuous notes in a fragmentary, dense and psychically chaotic narrative. These documents include reports by a coroner on autopsies he performed on bodies burned in the fires in German cities, cold summaries of bodily effects that erupt into the otherwise interior, almost autobiographical style of writing.

Can we say that the horror of a reader’s encounter with this material in Detlev’s Imitations lies in the separation of subjectivity from body? For in these autopsies, bodies are again acted upon as if they were merely things – in this sense the whole body is made as thing-like as its extracted parts, as hair or teeth. The coroner, Siegfried Graff, endeavours to keep bodies separate from that which animated them – he misses the human subject and appears engrossed in his calculations: the size and weight of the body mass, the effects of heat on tissue and bone. He seems to hope that if only he could weigh, measure and catalogue these remains, he will have made something whole; from his accumulation of facts he will come into new knowledge. His is a kind of doctoring that will stitch up the bodies again when parts have been removed for examination.

But against this, Fichte’s writing installs the human subject as incalculable, and insists that accounts of any subjective experience are necessarily fragmentary. Fichte’s writing puts the fragments into proximity with each other rather than attempting to contrive wholeness, in his writing the fragments remain rather than being stitched together. Fichte’s aesthetic suggests that neither the wholly imaginative writing expected in a conventional novel nor the documentary form of an autopsy report could tell the truth of the ‘raw form that defies description’, but once such disparate forms are brought into proximity, they together produce a most disturbing effect. Unlike the coroner, this novelist seems not to be afraid of the fragments that make up the story he has to tell; he brings together fragments gathered from disparate sources – memory, fiction, the archive – but lets the gaps between the fragments remain rather than stitching them in order to make an apparent whole. The fragmentation, gaps and silences are the story.

But how to write of trauma? As Jean Améry asked: how could he show readers the experience of torture without bringing them to the torture chamber to be subjected to its crimes? Améry waited 20 years to write about his body being twisted, and he reminds us of the origins of the word ‘torture’. ‘Torture’, Améry jokes: ‘from the Latin torque, to twist. What visual instruction in etymology!’ Améry’s response to these dilemmas of representation was to write of torture obliquely, installing a formal distance between the subject of the writing and the scene of reading. He employs a form of understatement that makes his writing (just) bearable to a reader and perhaps to himself, too. His joke about etymology suggests that in the end he could not sustain the critical distance at which he so carefully aims. Sebald puts it so well when he says that Améry’s joke sounds as if his voice itself is about to crack under the pressure of maintaining this distance between reality and its representation and between this reality and his reader: ‘The phrase with which this curiously objective passage concludes, provocatively deviating almost into the ridiculous, shows that the composure, the impassibilité allowing Améry to recapitulate such extreme experiences has here reached breaking point. Améry resorts to irony where otherwise his voice would be bound to falter’ (151–2).

Sebald is interested in Améry’s writing for the ways its autobiographical style enables the appearance of an embodied subjectivity. This is writing that is neither imaginative nor a kind of empiricism that refuses the body. For me, as a reader of Améry, I am also interested in the way his writing suggests that the body under torture is another body, a body that is strange to oneself. The subject loses his bearings as it were. As Sebald reminds us, the body is dislocated. This is what some Indigenous writing will show us: the torture of dislocation. There is another important aspect of Améry’s writing, too: Améry points out that the Holocaust was driven by the Nazis’ desire to make themselves: it was an act of self-formation – and no less obscene for that. When Améry looked into the face of his torturer, it wasn’t hatred he saw but the face of a man in a desperate a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Scenes of Race
• Part I ‘There is and can be no brute vision’
• Part II When the Other Disappears From My Line of Sight
• Part III The Image of My Own Desire
• Part IV Whiteness and its Veils
• Bibliography
• Index